Eldritch Mlems

This map pack features 120 total map tiles that are split into two themes - Forgotten Caves and Ancient Temple. There are transition tiles included to connect both themes.

Each map is aligned to the center of the x-axis, y-axis, or both, which you can use to mix and match the maps. The tunnels match in size and placement, allowing for easy connection!

Download the first 5 tiles for free here.

Considering the last few posts are about stealth and detection I might as well kick this off:

I skip and short circuit stealth/detection as much as possible.

None of my players have built a stealth based characters - probably also because of the complexity with detection and the seemingly bad action econ when dealing with "actually getting Hidden".

I have two main problems with it:

• comparison explosion? Whenever you have to resolve who sees who (esp at init) you have to at worst compare a roll for each character on one side to all the perception DCs of the other side and this gets really slow for me [^1]
• tracking who currently sees who / at what detection levels they currently are to others

Any tips and tricks very much welcome:)

[^1]: Both me and PCs track chars digitally (pathbuilder) and it is definitely slow to gather this information quickly on a laptop. A sheet of paper with highlighted bonuses/DCs for both the party and NPCs would go a long way for this but our play table is rather small and already pretty packed :/

A good-hearted farmboy falls in love with a vampire or someone from a family of necromancers and decides to become a famous necromancer to impress their family.

I like the idea of a good natured idiot who goes around helping people by raising animals for farm work, maybe not even aware that some people think his work unholy. Allways having stories about the misses back home that reach from cute and mundane to bat shit crazy. "'Twas the first time I looked into their eyes, that I felt absolutely hypnothised " "we met when I was digging out a well and that cutey came and said they could use the help of someone who can use a shovel "

comic by Paxiti

As I have been browsing RPG communities on Lemmy, Facebook, and Reddit, I have noticed some of the slang that I used to hear is not present much in these discussions. Now I know over time, slang and lingo do change, and I want to know more about your experiences in it. One of the terms I used to hear was "fish-malk", referring to players that take on a character to be goofy, silly, and "random". They were usually useless and made playing the game for the rest of the players rather difficult. So what lingo or slang terms are you using in your groups, or terms you just don't hear anymore?

The kittens are now a week old, and for this post I'll focus on mom's mini me. She's a tortie calico and evidently has the personality to show for it. She started opening her eyes yesterday and started... Breathing heavily at us. We wondered if she had a respiratory issue, but she's totally fine when we aren't around so... She's hissing at us.

She popped out of mom and was latched and feeding within minutes. When the cat cam alerts us to movement, it's usually her flopping around trying to walk. We haven't weighed them, but she's a bit bigger than her siblings. She's gonna be a handful and hopefully we can find someone who can handle her.

Edit to add: we have confirmed the colors! We have one tortico, one void, one tuxedo, and one who appears gray but might maybe be a muted calico.

Herewith, I proceed to dump my camera roll from my latest meanderings on you all. (Many of these pictures are birds. This one, the keen eyed among you may have already noted, is probably not a bird.)

I am willing to wager that some of you reading this have pet this very cat at some point in your travels. This is the orange longhair, who is apparently appropriately if uncreatively named "Orangey," that's always hanging around bumming head scritches and bits of people's hot dogs in front of Yokum's general store at the foot of Seneca Rocks in West Virginia. Today he was not having it, though; he was parked on one of the tables on the front deck and absolutely would not be moved.

He's looking a bit cleaner and healthier than in previous years. There's a donation jar on the counter inside, the proceeds of which purportedly and theoretically go towards the upkeep of the trio of local stray cats. One of the times I pass by there I'm going to remember to show up with a cat brush, but today was not that time. There's also a white kitty and a calico kitty often seen hanging around there, but they don't want anything to do with anyone (presumably not having figured out the benefits of scamming treats off of tourists) and are usually only seen just vanishing around a corner or lurking in the dark far under the porch.

Bonus cat picture:

Noki and Bandit overseeing my bathroom activities

[...]can a sex shop be a third place, either in the original nine-part definition of the term or in its simplified evolution?

Carol Queen,  Good Vibrations staff sexologist and curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum, hesitates to call Good Vibrations—a San Francisco-based sex shop—a “third space.”

“If there’s only three spaces—which of course there aren’t, there are more than three—but if there are only three kinds of space, I think it’s actually really problematic to think about third space as an economic entity,” she tells me. “I don’t wanna live in a culture where I have only one other alternative to go out and relate to my life, and it has to be going into, you know, shoe stores.”

But for some stores, providing an IRL space for their community actually comes at the cost of their bottom line. Take Toronto-based co-op Come As You Are; whose Kensington Market location is actively losing money. Worker-owner Jack Lamon describes the balancing act of financial stability and meaningful work.

“When our lease ran out and our landlord wanted us out, we went online only and for the first time realized, ‘Oh, this is actually a really profitable business if we have no physical space,’” Lamon says. “But it’s meaningless. It’s so hollow and meaningless. So because we actually did have a little bit of cash, you know, we could have actually paid that out to ourselves, or invested in or whatever, but we were like, ‘No, let’s reopen the shop.’”

Come As You Are has hosted in-person workshops on sexual education, healthcare and more; but having a space where people can just exist sometimes makes the most impact, particularly for underserved communities.

Are you?! - Gus Gus

Oh well, may your day be better with toe beans!