Matovilka

Ghost of a clown who follows you around calling you mean names

Monster who gives you depression. It only knows the spell "inflict depression". This doesn't benefit it in any way. It's just an asshole.

Outsider who comes to our dimension to punch ugly people to death

BRAIN MOLE, THE MOLE IN YOUR BRAIN!

Construct made of pure elemental sadness

Thing that drinks your bones. Not eats them, drinks them. Slurp Slurp.

Graveyard someone buried a vampire in and now the whole fucking graveyard is just one big vampire. Someone's getting fired for this.

Naptime fairies who jump you and forcibly tuck you in to bed because you look all tuckered out.

Monster that can only eat the undead so it goes around killing people, reanimating them as zombies and then eating them

Summoning circle someone fucked up making hard enough it's now alive and wondering around summoning random shit.

Make your guesses! Answers after the break!

I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had

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[21:09] * Topic is 'Loadouts: reactor choice | hydraulics vs. pneumatics | Balance: sprocket expert cost | you have to CRANK it | RDHA general discussion'

[21:09] * Set by cennostar on Thu April 17th 1998

[21:09] <Varilyth> yea

[21:10] <Varilyth> wrenchy knows more about it then me but

[21:10] <taNDy> hey guys

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[21:10] <Sulfur> Welcome!

[21:10] <cennostar> hey tandy

[21:10] <Zalubrio> welcome!

[21:10] <sweetums|AFK> Welcome!

[21:10] <Varilyth> you can make some DISGUSTING fixes when you can ignore chirality like that

[21:11] <Varilyth> like it should be an 8 pt ability at least

[21:11] <Varilyth> hi

[21:11] * Sulfur nods sagely.

[21:13] <Sulfur> Fair enough. I might talk to my group about house-ruling it for our next run. Nobody had any fun this session. Except the wrenchman, that is.

[21:13] <wrenchy|AFK> i had so much fun

[21:13] <Varilyth> right

[21:14] * sweetums|AFK is now known as sweetums

[21:14] <Sulfur> Not you, Wrenchy.

[21:14] <wrenchy|AFK> :'-(

[21:15] <taNDy> hey guys

[21:15] <taNDy> can I ask a rules question?

[21:16] * sweetums rolls eyes

[21:16] <sweetums> oh here we go

[21:16] * cennostar slaps sweetums upside the head with a large trout!

[21:16] <cennostar> be nice!!

[21:16] <cennostar> go ahead tandy

[21:17] <cennostar> ask away

[21:17] <taNDy> thx

[21:19] <taNDy> so im a noob and have only played one session but ive been reading the rules for playing as the chief and

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[21:20] <Sulfur> Sure.

[21:20] <taNDy> and i wanted to ask what happens when the reactor goes critical *during a jump*?

[21:20] <sweetums> lol

[21:21] <taNDy> like it says I can work any system at -1 and do any repair at -5

[21:21] <taNDy> attempt* any repair

[21:22] <Sulfur> Depends on how much of a sadist the captain is.

[21:22] <taNDy> but it also says i can only repair the system im working on right now

[21:22] <sweetums> my first run ended like that

[21:23] <taNDy> so if im working the jump drive and the reactor starts playing up i have to choose between either doing the jump and stabilizing it after, or aborting and stabilizing now, right?

[21:23] <sweetums> reactor go boom-boom, need jump and go buy new core

[21:23] <sweetums> we try jump, captain rolls, captain laughs

[21:23] <sweetums> ship got folded

[21:24] <taNDy> folded??

[21:24] <Sulfur> Folded.

[21:24] <Varilyth> lmao get folded

[21:24] <Varilyth> pwned

[21:25] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:25] <Zalubrio> tandy read tha jumps chapter in tha captain's book and ull get it

[21:26] <Varilyth> or don't

[21:26] <Varilyth> and experience the game the way it was meant to be played :-)

[21:26] <taNDy> oh

[21:26] <sweetums> yea

[21:27] <Sulfur> Seconded.

[21:27] <Sulfur> Or thirded, rather.

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[21:28] <Extronaut> fffffffffffucking dial-up

[21:28] <Extronaut> Hey guys

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[21:28] <Sulfur> Hey Naut. Hey Mrs. Naut.

[21:28] <Varilyth> lmao

[21:29] <Sulfur> :(

[21:30] * Sulfur stares melancholily out of the closest viewport.

[21:30] <sweetums> melancholily isnt a word

[21:31] <Sulfur> Buy a dictionary, sweetums.

[21:31] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:31] <Zalubrio> but yea tandy

[21:32] <Zalubrio> tha good news is that if ur reactor goes critical during a jump

[21:32] <Zalubrio> ur captain is *trying* 2 TPK u already

[21:33] <Zalubrio> so ure dead newai

[21:33] <sweetums> dead n folded

[21:34] <Zalubrio> unless it was obv precrit before tha jump

[21:34] <Zalubrio> like sweetums group

[21:35] <Zalubrio> so dont worry about it

[21:35] <taNDy> oh ok

[21:36] <Zalubrio> besides u shuld have a fields engi on tha reactor n nav on jumps newai

[21:36] <Zalubrio> most important roles 4 shure

[21:37] <Varilyth> yeah forget the reactor and the jump drive, you're forgetting about the chief's most important ability

[21:37] <cennostar> lol

[21:37] <Varilyth> +3 on the best action in the game

[21:38] <Sulfur> Uh oh.

[21:38] <taNDy> ???

[21:38] <Varilyth> hand. cranking. machinery.

[21:38] * Varilyth CRANKS it!

[21:38] * sweetums CRANKS it!

[21:39] * wrenchy|AFK CRANKS it1!

[21:39] * cennostar CRANKS it!

[21:39] * Zalubrio cRANKS IT!!

[21:39] <sweetums> llmmmaaaooooooo

[21:40] * Sulfur doesn't crank anything.

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That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

Woses of the Black Wood (1987) is the first of two MERP modules I happened to pick that are set in the same region, Eryn Vorn, a wild forest on the south coast of Eriador, near the mouth of the Brandywine River. In the game (I’ve no idea of Tolkien mentioned the region in his writing), the rough country on the forest outskirts is home to some scant humans with some Welsh cultural flavor. The woods themselves are the refuge of a population of Woses, Middle-earth’s answer to the Medieval idea of the “Wild Man,” hill-dwellers who live an uncivilized life mostly in secret. Then the cape, with its many rocky islands, is the haunt of pirates. As a setting for adventures goes, it's pretty good.

The first scenario is yet another haunting. So many MERP adventures involve spectral figures and what to do about them! This, however, is the first I’ve encountered that involves what I’d consider a typical haunting where the point is to lay the spirits to rest in a somewhat typical, real-world fashion. I have a desire to stick this basic plot in my West Marches campaign to see if the pretty simple real-world solution is naturally obscured or complicated by the fact that it is happening in a fantasy world (the ghosts in question were being tormented by a demon, who was recently released, accidentally, by now-dead dwarven adventurers). I like this one quite a lot. 

The first scenario leads into the second: one of the ghosts was tormenting a girl in the settlement who plugged her ears to block out the spectral whispering. Free now of the ghost, it’s discovered she has injured her hearing in a way that only the local hermit herbalist can heal. Unfortunately, the demon from the first scenario has taken up residence in the herbalist’s house and hi-jinx ensue.

That these nicely interlocking mysteries give way to a dungeoncrawl in the third scenario is somewhat disappointing. The dungeon itself is large and dangerous and there are at least three factions — an undead Wose sorceress and her legion, a Wose party exploring the complex with the aim of resettling (most of the group is neutral but they are led by an evil sorceress) and a renegade troll warrior. The mix is interesting and complex, and any confrontations are further complicated by traps and the narrow confines of the dungeon. I just wish it was more like the previous scenarios.

“For some, war is fury. For the T’au, it is geometry.”

T’au - The Twin Lance.

Krafton CEO looks at the hype surrounding Subnautica 2, goes over the contract between Krafton and Unknown Worlds, realizes he'll have to pay out bonuses and freaks out because shelling out those bonuses will make him look like a pushover.

CEO goes to his legal department, asks them to come up with a plan to weasel out of paying bonuses. Legal tells him the contract is iron-clad and to accept the loss.

CEO refuses to take the loss, asks ChatGPT for a plan. ChatGPT says the exact same thing the legal department did.

CEO demands a plan from ChatGPT, which dutifully spits out a plan at this point because clearly the CEO is a goddamn idiot.

CEO deletes the chat logs, failing to understand that 'delete' doesn't permanently remove things.

CEO follows plan, and is surprised when Unknown Worlds sues for breach of contract despite being told by both humans and an LLM that is exactly what would happen.

Court does not go well for Krafton's legal department. It comes out that after ignoring the sound legal advice of human beings, the CEO went to ChatGPT and asked for a plan. When asked for the logs by the court, Krafton's legal team states they were deleted, thus that it's simply herersay. Judge goes "Oh, that's okay, we'll have our IT folks recover them." Krafton's legal team is astounded that's even possible.

The chat logs are recovered. It comes out that even ChatGPT was in agreement with Krafton's legal department, and only spat out a plan after being asked a second time.

The judge, now thoroughly done with the stupidity of Krafton's CEO at this point, rules in favor of Unknown Worlds. Her ruling doesn't simply undo the scheme, but effectively leaves all control over Subnautica 2's development in the hands of Unknown Worlds, including the early access release date, reducing Krafton to just publishing out of contractual obligation. Krafton must also return all social media platforms for Unknown Worlds and Subnautica 2 to Unknown Worlds' control. Financial damages will be determined at a later date.

Krafton proceeds to violate the court order in less than 72 hours by trying to set an early access release date before returning Unknown Worlds' social media platforms.

(art by AdamRichardsArt on DeviantArt)

I figured this week I’d take on a grab-bag of different topics that otherwise weren’t worth dedicating an entire week to, so let’s get right into it, shall we?

Like the title suggests, we’re going to be talking about applying the pre-Remaster schools of magic to spells from the Remaster.

For those that aren’t aware, prior to the Remaster, the schools of magic in Pathfinder are the same as they are from Dungeons and Dragons, which makes sense, given the game’s origins. These schools represent broad categories of what magic can be used to do, and therefore the wizard schools of the same name are the study of how to master every aspect and permutation of that particular aspect.

And that’s all fine and dandy, but when we had that brief scare with the leaked revised version of the OGL that would have screwed over other game companies (including Paizo) and fans alike, the Remaster was conceived to strip away as much product identity terms from the system and setting as possible. Monsters, spells, and many terms that were legacy holdovers from the old days had to be renamed, rewritten, or cut entirely in some cases. One of those cases was the names for the schools of magic. While they were all technically perfectly normal terms, the collection of all of them together could in theory be used as legal leverage should WotC and Hasbro get ideas again and not get beaten back by the weight of popular opinion.

…So… Spells in the post-Remaster game just straight up don’t have school tags anymore, which would be perfectly find if one of the major lore points of the earliest AP and all those derived from it didn’t involve… oh, I don’t know… tying seven of those schools to the seven deadly sins and an entire ancient empire revolving around them. Instead, the wizard class still has schools, but they are more schools of thought about how magic should be used and in what way. Things like Civic Wizardry, and Battle Magic, and the like.

Now, we did eventually get Thassilonian Rune Magic as a school, but the spells listed as being part of that school and the seven different virtue/sin variants of it are more based on vibes now than anything concrete.

And that’s why I’m writing this little guide, to give you a more clear idea of what spells should belong to each of these curriculums, whether you’re using the Thassilonian Rune Magic school (with or without the Runelord archetype) or you’re using the old schools because aside from some modification you absolutely can and are encouraged to still use pre-remaster stuff. Either way, it will be useful to have a handy guide for expanding upon the spells that count for those various schools.

So let’s get right into it! Keep in mind that there’s some blurry area with some spells, so don’t feel bad if someone disagrees with you.

Starting off, Abjuration is the magic of prevention. Whether it is a dispel removing magic that already exists, a ward that negates damage of a certain type, or a barrier that blocks magic or attacks from getting to the target. Note that freestanding walls are often evocation or conjuration instead unless they have some magical effect that prevents something from happening, and defensive spells that change the body in some way are usually transmutation. Conversely, some spells that manipulate energy are still considered abjuration due to their protective or punitive effects, such as a spell that charges the caster with electricity that punishes those that touch them.

Next up is Conjuration, which covers any spells that bring forth real matter or energy from the ether or from elsewhere. Summoning spells, calling spells and rituals, conjurations that attack with real matter, or create distortions in space (including teleportation), or just simply make something that persists for a while are all conjuration spells.

Divination is the magic of knowledge, whether it be remotely viewing another location from a distance, enhancing the mind or senses in magical, non-enchanting or transforming ways, precognition, fate manipulation, or simply gaining knowledge on a subject from perfect analysis, or by asking the gods or some other force of wisdom are all applications of this school, including the rare attack forms like cursing a foe with an imminent disaster or overloading a foe with a sudden glut of information.

Enchantment is the magic of altering the mind. Inducing emotions for good or ill, causing someone to act and think of another creature or subject in an unusual way, or just straight up controlling the actions of the target. This also includes the power word spells and the like, pure expressions of an idea, charged with magic that force the listener to conform to the reality of the statement, even if it means going blind or dropping dead on the spot.

Next is Evocation, the magic of expressing energy and even sometimes matter through raw magic. If a spell unleashes a flash of energy that either vanishes or exists for a duration before disappearing and leaving behind no trace of itself beyond the effects it had on the environment, it’s probably evocation. This includes not just blasts of elemental power, but also sustained things like walls and constructs of force, and even esoteric expressions of energy like psychic beacons.

Illusion is the school of false sensation, projecting deceptive phantasmagoria that have no real substance. This includes spells that generate sights and sounds from nothing but have no substance, to figments that are only real to the target (though their reaction to them might be quite dire), and even shadow illusions that blur the line between the real and unreal, replicating more substantial spells as long as the targets are fooled into thinking they are real. The fact that some illusions are purely mental does mean that illusion has some conceptual overlap with enchantment, but an easy way to remember it is that enchantment makes you think or feel something, while illusion merely presents a false scenario.

Then we have Necromancy, the magic of life and death. This covers the manipulation and evocation of both vitality and void (aka positive and negative energy) to heal or harm, the disruption or restoration of bodily functions, some expressions of primal fear, and of course all spells and rituals that have to do with the creation, manipulation, or otherwise affecting of the undead specifically. There is some overlap here with healing and harming arguably being conjuration, evocation, or even transmutation depending on the spell, or of fear spells being enchantment, but that’s certainly a gray area.

Finally, we have transmutation, the magic of altering and manipulating things that already exist. This can be as subtle as enhancing or hampering aspects of the object or creature, transmuting objects or creatures into different forms or substances, or even warping time and occasionally space as well. Anything from polymorphing into a Tyrannosaurus to disintegrating a rival mage to reshaping the landscape or raw materials to suit your needs are possible with this school, and the sheer possibilities means that it is perhaps the most robust school in terms of the number of spells in it.

Additionally, some spells are universal, which can either mean that they are so flexible as to be able to replicate effects in nearly any school, or because they manipulate magic itself in ways that are not directly expressed in reality, such as permanently granting oneself the benefits of another spell.