Baron Wulfraed

Heads will roll... 😱

No surprise, since half the movie is the angel leading Stewart's character through events in his life, and how things turn out if he isn't there for them. It's an inverted heroquest. Instead of having someone who wasn't in the original scene recreate the event, the movie has one who had originally been present not "create" the original event.

The 'taurs have a classical background. The only long-necked avian of the time occurs in "Leda and the Swan", and even that is purported to be Zeus in disguise (the morals of the greek gods, or at least of Zeus, are non-existant: Leda, Ganymede, Callisto, and a few others).

https://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/sruniverse.html

Better hope the campaign never reaches the "East Isles".. From the Guide: I'm having extreme problems visualizing an armored flamingo... Maybe they've developed spiked helmets so the can swing their heads at opponents.

Remember: Don't drink the water! Hmm, could a nymph possess the one who drinks the water sustaining it?

I'd think you'd need to keep the branch alive... That may mean grafting it onto a smaller potted plant (at that size, the branch is likely a twig 🙄 ) and hauling the whole thing around -- maybe a bonsai plant with a twig grafted onto it. Judge the health of the dryad by the health of the branch?

Lovely -- though I'd think the castle should be mirror-reflected. If being assaulted by organized troops (think Roman Legion), all with shields on left arm, the position of that trapezoidal tower would have defending archers shooting at the attackers shields. A mirror-reflection would have the tower positioned on the sword arm side of the attackers.

Radiation sickness => I'd toss in as some sort of Disease, with a very difficult "cure" rate; need to work out degree of exposure. Children conceived after a survivor "recovers" might have a Chaos mutation, although increasing end-of-year child mortality rate may be sufficient -- mutations may be stillborn or miscarried. Alpha particles (helium nucleus) are stopped by paper, so one would have to essentially eat or be injected with an alpha emitter (Plutonium?) to really be affected by alpha particles -- external exposure might, over a long period of time, trigger skin cancers. Beta particles (electrons) can be blocked by thin metal sheets (but may generate gamma radiation in so doing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle ). Distance in air depends upon energy level. Gamma/X-ray is the most penetrating, and most likely to cause DNA damage.

It may have a rigorous background, but to me it (math) doesn't quite fall into the "start with an hypothesis, consolidate evidence to validate or disprove hypothesis and formulate a theory if validated, use theory can provide predictions for which experiments can be proposed". It's more of a background tool used by physics (with some applicability to chemistry, biology -- physics encompassing things like mechanical engineering, orbital mechanics, et al.). Statistics, OTOH... That allows for hypothesis->theory development.

One of the tricky parts is /which/ edition can one locate 😱 Original black pamphlet set, with supplemental detail volumes. Hardcover all-in-one of original 3 booklet set. MegaTraveller. Traveller: the New Error Era (I wasn't thrilled at that one -- where "Virus" could infect ships computers just from receiving a message; what? you don't have system isolation between communication gear and life support?). Marc Miller's Traveller (which jumped back some 500-1000 years with reduced tech levels). Think there was a GURPS variant somewhere in the series (I do not have GURPS -- but do have copies of the other four generations).

Which, in a way, was none of the three (not Holy, not Roman, and not even a proper Empire) I'd invoke Traveller again -- this time the world system creation rules, which probably has government systems running from planets at the city-state level (my books are a bit difficult to get to at the moment), through balkanization, and up... which combine with tech level to produce a wide ranging set of systems.

There is also the matter that they'd be laying out two PDF formats, with different pagination (unless the layout has reserved spaces for images in advance). Two formats means twice the work put into the PDFs, and can you hear the uproar if buyers of the "B/W" PDF are then charged again to get the "colorized" PDF -- if they don't charge for the later colorized version then they are losing money on the product.

Which nearly fits the Traveller character generation -- but PCs will be ready for gameplay as typically 40 years old and retired from their service. And Scouts don't really retire -- they go on "detached duty", eligible to be called back to service (especially those who received usage of a basic four-place scout ship [which can just be operated by one person filling all duty roles on the ship], with free maintenance at scout bases in return for copying the pilot's logbook). If a Free Trader, of sufficient ranking (as I recall), they may gain ownership of a basic trade ship (and also the "mortgage" depending on age of said ship). Don't expect a "Millenium Falcon" here*1 -- we are talking a Jump-1/1G ship of 200 displacement tons (where a displacement ton is the volume of one ton of liquid hydrogen), and half of the displacement is probably fuel/engines/crew quarters. It has no ability to enter atmosphere (unlike the typical 100 displacement ton field agent scout ship)*2*3. Hmmm, getting a trade ship with a mortgage needing to be paid might be a source of some adventures -- trying to open a trade route profitable enough to make payments from the income. Tricky to do for a ship that can only do a 1 parsec jump (typically one week on maneuver drive to get far enough out of gravity well to safely enter jump, one week in jump-space, one week on maneuver drive to get to the candidate planet, and one week in trade. And without atmospheric ability, said planet needs to have space stations/docks. NOTES: Back around 1981 I had a coworker report that his gaming group tried to design something like the Millenium Falcon using "black book" Traveller rules. The conclusion was that the ONLY way the Falcon could make enough money to keep it running required it be a smuggling ship. It didn't have enough true cargo space for typical trade goods, it required small, high-value, objects for trade (imagine an armed "cigarette boat" transporting diamonds) I have never liked the concept of "bis" computer models for scout ships, with their Atari 2600 concept of swapping cartridges for major ship operations: Plug in "NAV" cartridge to plot a route, plug in "PILOT" cartridge to maneuver the ship (it is not explained how the route from NAV gets to PILOT, except if the 1bis can have two cartridges loaded at a time); Need to use the weapon(s) -- plug in GUN cartridge (after removing NAV, assuming route is captured by PILOT)... Computers without dynamic programming hail back to the Apollo missions -- where the program memory was ropes of wires either passing though a magnetic ring, or passing around the outside of the ring [don't recall which is 0 and which is 1; essentially the program was sewn into the memory) That describes some 90% of old Pirate movies -- "Captain Blood", anything with Captain Morgan, "Dr. Syn"/"the Scarecrow"/"Captain Clegg" -- (or even less old -- Jack Sparrow, anyone)?

I know I have a bad habit of making references to MLP:FiM, and this time it will be to a fan-fic: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/426477/the-potion-shop Cross your "Eurmal the Scientist" with Arca from that story, and toss in some Coyote-style mishaps. I wonder which was more uncomfortable -- tug-of-war with the goat, or transforming into a mare to lure away a stallion (thereby causing the entity doing some rebuilding for Asgard to lose a bet on completion time) and having to stay in mare form for a year -- finally showing up to present eight-legged Sleipnir to Odin.

While I haven't searched for the book summarizing that hypothesis -- I'm pretty certain it was one of Isaac Asimov's collected essays on science and math, but that book is in a cubic-foot carton (6"x1'x2') in a stack of over 120 cubic-feet of such boxes, in my rental storage locker [to put that in perspective, the average bookcase has a shelf of 2.5'x1'x10" -- a fraction over 2 cubic feet, so I'm looking at 60 SHELVES, at 5 shelves per bookcase, that requires 12 bookcases beyond the 17 I already have at home] -- an updated hypothesis came just before 2006, and I found that one in the book "Discarded Science" (don't be misled by that title -- the author uses this hypothesis as an example of how a hypothesis should be... as the authors of the paper even provided candidate tests which could be performed to verify the hypothesis/theory). It is mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-energy_star but the link to the actual paper is a $$ archival site. As paraphrased in "Discarded Science" the authors of the paper consider black hole theory to be flawed in that a number of points are incompatible with quantum theory Information is lost when matter falls into a black hole (related) The singularity leads to infinities -- since the singularity is decreed to be a point, it has no volume, so has infinite density (mass / 0.0 => Inf) That time becomes infinitely slow as one nears the event horizon, as seen from an outside view (so an infalling light emitter becomes frozen at the event horizon -- a violation of quantum principles The prime scientists were actually working on superconducting crystals -- and to their surprise found that electron spins seemed to show time slowing down. They then analyzed star collapse using quantum theory. The result was not a black hole but a "quantum energy shell" -- the inside being an "energy rich vacuum" showing an anti-gravity effect; similar to that associated with dark-energy. NO SINGULARITY. Outside the shell it shows similar gravitation effects as a black hole. The repulsive force inside could shove some some matter/energy back out (so no "information loss"). Most of the outflow would be positrons and gamma rays.Strangely -- there is a surplus of positrons near the center of the galaxy, the home of Sagittarius A*, posited to be a super massive black hole. Could it be a dark energy star? The gamma rays emitted would have a resemblance to those from gamma-ray bursts. The hypothesis also implies that infalling matter should cause dark-energy stars to emit infrared radiation -- which would be detectable with proper instrumentation. (Thereby a test to validate the hypothesis.)

Outside of the event horizon... Submarine implosion does not apply. Implosion requires pressure pushing inwards on all sides. The gravitational gradient (acceleration due to gravity) of a black hole, instead, is PULLING on the body at different rates. One's feet may be in a 6G realm while just 5 feet away one's head is under 1G (IOW: one's head is accelerating toward the event horizon at 32 ft/s/s, but one's feet are accelerating at 196 ft/s/s -- and things just get worse the closer one is) -- the body gets stretched until it tears apart. And one of those theoretical models does have matter "coming out" of black holes -- though it tends to require micro black holes to be noticeable. It relies upon the creation/destruction of virtual particle pairs near an event horizon. Normal particle pairs (matter/anti-matter) materialize and then almost immediately recombine. Near a micro black hole however, it is possible that one half of a particle pair is captured, while the other escapes. At that point the escaping particle becomes "real", and the energy used to create it is essentially sucked out of the black hole. Micro black holes "evaporate". There are some even stranger ideas floating around (though I think dark energy/dark matter may have killed one off). In the 70s someone calculated that the known matter in the universe, if it were all in a black hole, would result in an event horizon equivalent to the known "size" of the universe. Then, if one took the volume enclosed by that event horizon and distributed the matter throughout it (no infinitely small singularity), the /density/ of that volume would match the observed density of the universe. By this hypothesis -- the universe is inside a black hole, which could be formed from matter coming in from a different universe containing our universe-mass black hole (and that universe might be inside its own black hole, inside another universe). This hypothesis goes back to the days when the measured value of the Hubble constant was on the cusp between expand-forever, steady-state, and collapse (big bang in reverse) -- the universe would collapse into a black hole, which "balloons out" into a universe size event horizon, and a density of the known universe; from inside this universe collapse it would seem to be a big bang forming a new universe.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Twilight's entrance exam to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns is supposed to test how she responds to an "impossible" task -- "hatching a dragon egg". Instead, she undergoes a magic surge, hatches the egg (and turns her parents into potted plants -- they get better). The dragon becomes sort of a younger brother following her around (and learns to cook, take notes, etc.). Twilight is (in my estimation) between 10 and 15 years at the time of the exam (and looks on the low end of that range). The show starts with her essentially at college graduation level from the school, and the series lasted 10 years (though those 10 years translate to an ambiguous amount in-story -- anything from four years up)... Hence my "spend the next 15 years" -- 6-10 for (pre-series) school period, and 5-10 for actual series time.

Duplicate posting

Spirit Combat Damage is on the fourth panel of the GM Screen. Regular damage bonus is on the second panel of the GM Screen, along with Strike Rank Modifier(s). Might be worth considering at least the PDF version.

You change your name to Twilight Sparkle and spend the next 15 years turning a baby dragon into a servant. 🦄🐲😱

If you can pay it off with a sack of flies, it's a frog. If it demands an arm and a leg, it's shark (or a lawyer)

I am now envious... I'd never been situated where I could find a Wing Chun school and now, as a greymuzzle undergoing chemo sessions, am too old to start. I have, over time, collected about 12 books on the style, and I think I have a few DVDs stored away.

Minor correction... Defense can be applied against pretty much ANY attack skill. Since you are referencing a section specific to Grappling, "this skill" is a stand-in for "grappling" "Initial attack" has to be read against the following grapple actions... ... The initial grapple means you NOW have a grip/grasp on part of the opponent. Subsequent rounds require successful grapple to keep that hold (the opponent can not use defense as you already have a hold on them -- "defense" is, in this sense, a "dodge the grapple") and to allow you to ATTEMPT some other action. Failing the subsequent grapple implies the opponent has twisted out of your grip (or, in the case of having grappled a shield, maybe slipped his arm out of the shield straps). The Grapple roll is to retain the grip, the resistance roll is to do something with that grip A : Grapple to get the initial grip on the target -- target may use Defense and/or Parry the grapple B : Grapple to MAINTAIN the hold in the new melee round -- target is presumed to be tugging you around trying to break free C : Resistance roll to do something with the hold you have (twist arm behind target's back)

Strangely, it is in the Oriental styles (at least as seen in many over-blown movies) where I could see skills carrying over... But I'm talking a similarity between a 2H spear and a long staff! Both are often seen being used in sweeping moves, at a bit of a distance -- not close in "poke, poke, poke". Sure, the spear may take off a head, while the staff may at best break the neck -- but the attack is really the same move.