Your Dumbest Theory

[Erol of Backford]

15 minutes ago, metcalph said:

I do feel that the dwarves make Zeppelins out of Lead... 

I'm still not aligned with the old article showing dwarven concrete battle cruisers but led-zeppelins I might be ok with.

[mfbrandi]

41 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

I’m still not aligned with the old article showing dwarven concrete battle cruisers

Not concrete, but pykrete = 14% wood pulp + 86% ice, by weight. Doesn’t that just reek of dwarfish “practicality”?

Pykrete navy versus firebergs. I don’t need to tell you what to call the subsequent opera.

Edited August 17 by mfbrandi
spelling

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I would think that [Jar-eel is] much less likely to be affected by such mind-altering spells [as Lie] … than your typical human. Especially given her role as converter to the faith.

Perhaps cult leaders, wannabe deities, and proselytizers are themselves more inclined to believe the große Lüge than they believe the people are. The jaded cynic doesn’t lead the charge; it is a job for the person who would believe even their own propaganda. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” CHA as weakness of mind.

[scott-martin]

Sorry to let this thread go without the love it deserves but you are all doing great work.

@Brian Duguid recently reminded me of the unique appearance of "ronike" as a classifier in one of the archaic dynastic charts . . . it functions like "tilnta" or any of the elemental inheritances but the exemplar here is male, hence the "-e" gender suffix. (The husbands of Vadela are likite, promalte and a highly irregular wavmore; her father was a rare tilnte.)

I think the roniki were the scions of Urtiam, the old law. But maybe there are other opinions.

Vadela's mother was a class of entity called a "vamala." Maybe this is the opposite of a ronike, generically female although it might be otherwise unattested in the surviving lineages so we just don't know.

BONUS ROUND: Luathans are just purple vadelists or rather, vadelists are just the elemental people of the western corner and the purple ones are special in some horrible way.

Edited August 26 by scott-martin

[Eff]

10 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Sorry to let this thread go without the love it deserves but you are all doing great work.

@Brian Duguid recently reminded me of the unique appearance of "ronike" as a classifier in one of the archaic dynastic charts . . . it functions like "tilnta" or any of the elemental inheritances but the exemplar here is male, hence the "-e" gender suffix. (The husbands of Vadela are likite, promalte and a highly irregular wavmore; her father was a rare tilnte.)

I think the roniki were the scions of Urtiam, the old law. But maybe there are other opinions.

Vadela's mother was a class of entity called a "vamala." Maybe this is the opposite of a ronike, generically female although it might be otherwise unattested in the surviving lineages so we just don't know.

BONUS ROUND: Luathans are just purple vadelists or rather, vadelists are just the elemental people of the western corner and the purple ones are special in some horrible way.

Dye indigo is blue, but pigment indigo is purple. There could be something there with how royal purple and royal blue (and tekhelet blue) have very similar dye sources. 

Knowing Staffordian linguistics, "ronike" puts me in mind of Ronance, which suggests perhaps a connection with the later Viymorni famous traveling spells, or perhaps the concept of "space" (a Darkness connection indirectly!) or "distance". 

[scott-martin]

3 minutes ago, Eff said:

space

Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female; Time is a man, Space is a woman, and her masculine portion is Death. Such is the mighty difference between allegoric fable and spiritual mystery.

[Eff]

The Mostali word to describe the status of the world machine being broken is "koyaanisqatsi".

[scott-martin]

22 minutes ago, Eff said:

koyaanisqatsi

Welcome my dwarves
to The Machine

(best viewed with earthsense /OFF . . . we cannot guarantee a satisfactory earthsense experience at this time)

[mfbrandi]

23 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

[Moral virtues do not exist: they are allegories and dissimulations.] Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female; Time is a man, Space is a woman, and her masculine portion is Death. Such is the mighty difference between allegoric fable and spiritual mystery.

Good to have you back, but now you have me imagining a celebrity boxing match between Blake and Kant, and the loose and baggy bit of my brain — by far the largest part — is going:

• Time → Death → Devil → Demon
• Father of Demons = Mother of Space

… because we never wanted to slide a cigarette paper between time and space, and Atropos assures me that the only unconditionally good thing is a sharp pair of shears.

[Eff]

The Three Laws of Horalics:

1. A horal may not harm a citizen, or through inaction allow a citizen to come to harm. 

2. A horal must follow orders given by citizens except where they conflict with the previous law. 

3. A horal must preserve its own existence except where doing so would conflict with the previous laws. 

4. A horal must keep things "mindful and sexy" except where doing so would conflict with the previous laws. 

A zeroth law has been hypothesized but everyone who discussed it was shipped off to the Vadeli Isles.

Edited August 26 by Eff

[mfbrandi]

One-Shot Scenario, Tendance Groucho: the PCs are a bunch of Marx clones (raging against the machine) who decide it is a smart idea — it really, really isn’t — to hijack dwarfish underground transport.° It ends in carnage, of course. Unlike in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the hijackers are music hall entertainers well past their best-before dates. Extra marks for wisecracks, leftist politics, and Nouvelle Vaguery as the body count rises.

I thank/blame @Erol of Backford for this terrible idea. 😉

 

––––––––––––––––————————————–––
° Try to imagine a clay mostali hostage negotiator.

[jajagappa]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

BONUS ROUND: Luathans are just purple vadelists or rather, vadelists are just the elemental people of the western corner and the purple ones are special in some horrible way.

We know the Vadeli are transgressive. One of the greatest offenses is violation of caste law, and that includes inter-caste relationships. Here we have Blue Vadeli and Red Vadeli interbreeding to produce something new and monstrous, the giant Luathans, who are both magically adept and skilled as warriors. But through this transgression, they disavow Vadel and return to the Law, sanctioned by Yelm's last breath and the vengeance of Rausa.

[Erol of Backford]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Unlike in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the hijackers are music hall entertainers well past their best-before dates.

If  Walter Matthau is in it I'll need to take a look. Maybe the dwarves hire the 3 Bean Circus to distract some chaos that turned one of their underground transports headed east into a combo Terror Train and Murder on the Orient Express?

[Joerg]

22 hours ago, scott-martin said:

BONUS ROUND: Luathans are just purple vadelists or rather, vadelists are just the elemental people of the western corner and the purple ones are special in some horrible way.

The Luathans have castes themselves, according to Anaxial's Roster.

The entire Malkioni birth caste system would be logical only if there was a huge queen all the males mate with to produce similar caste-appropriate spawn. Now the question is when Bagog stopped birthing Logicians...

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

The entire Malkioni birth caste system would be logical only if there was a huge queen all the males mate with to produce similar caste-appropriate spawn. Now the question is when Bagog stopped birthing Logicians...

I wouldn’t get hung up on males — if you are practically perfect and have perfected fission, you don’t need them. Why do krarshtkids have triangular mouths? They are trying to tell us something … or they are mocking us.

Spoiler

Did the Alien “queen” need males? Wasn’t the suggestion that the “grub” stage grabbed genetic material from the host as it fed? I imagine a reproductive stage rather than a reproductive caste, but I am not up on fan theories or franchise canon.

Alternatively, the birth-caste Malkioni were a biological control, but they got out of hand, and now we are waiting for Mira Sorvino to save us. Only superficially human — they have funny shoes — who were they created to destroy?

For some reason — termites are cock-a-roaches, you say (in Chico’s voice) — this all puts me in mind of Kafka. Is poor old Gregor’s transformation into a vermin one source of “be careful, you might turn into a broo”? Still, I seem to remember that it got his sister out of the house. Gives a twist to the old “Thed is only interested in males” cringe. Just needs a rewrite from Tiptree.

No eusocial scorpions — that I know of — but I now learn that there are parasitic eusocial shrimps. How cool is that?

Spoiler

Tapping as a metaphor for eating the sponge you live in (or the other way about)? No, probably not.

[scott-martin]

31 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

parasitic eusocial shrimps

Who are the dwerulans really?
 

[Eff]

One of the lesser costs of joining the Black Horse Troop and binding yourself to Ethilrist's oaths is that you start whinnying unpredictably instead of yawning. 

Ethilrist, I have been told, exerts iron self-control in refraining from woofing and barking in public.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Nozbat said:

London Underground

14 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

chaotic!

Krarsht mystics — entranced, eyes rolled back — draw variations in coloured sand:

… all the while chanting fragments of RFCs which have fallen backwards in time and directly into their much-tunnelled brains:

• The world is a jungle in general, and the networking game contributes many animals. At nearly every layer of a network architecture there are several potential protocols that could be used. For example, at a high level, there is TELNET and SUPDUP for remote login. Somewhere below that there is a reliable byte stream protocol, which might be CHAOS

When — if! — you can snap them out of it, they cannot explain any of it.

Have you ever heard a krarshtkid laugh? Whisper “botnet” to one. Just like Muttley.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Eff said:

Ethilrist, I have been told, exerts iron self-control in refraining from woofing and barking in public.

Well, that is what Ethilrist told me, too, but as he was humping my leg at the time, I took it with a pinch of salt. And I will never get those stains out of the carpet.

[Nozbat]

33 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

he was humping my leg at the time

You really have to seriously consider neutering for creatures that do that.. its kinder all round and as an added bonus ..stops the stains on the carpet too

[radmonger]

Lanbril doesn't have the Sanctify spell because his gangs never use shrines or sites. Those would only be a weak spots the authorities could detect and raid. And only the largest of cities, with an organised hierarchical criminal organisation, support full temples.

Elsewhere, Initiate and Rune Lord members of Lanbril gangs get magic by infiltrating the holy places of other cults and taking opposition roles within cult rituals. This is typically done without the knowledge of the temple's regular congregation and priesthood. The magic gained is the opposite of the magic that would otherwise be learnt. The most common examples are Dismiss, instead of Summon, Elemental, and Divination Block instead of Divination.

This is genuinely difficult and dangerous, but the life expectancy of a gang member is not measured in decades. 

 

[mfbrandi]

16 hours ago, Joerg said:

The Cannibal Cult is … a mob of people who got infected by … a distortion of the Covenant.

What if they eat only vegans? By surviving on vegetable matter alone, do the vegans mark themselves out as among the eaten, as no more than herd beasts? Conventional Waha butchers point to the CC and argue this as part of their defence of their way of life. Thus the unconventional CC plays a role in shoring up the ideology of conventional Wahaism.

• Only lackwits refrain from eating peacefully cut meat, and if you don’t eat yours, child, the Cannibal Cult will come for you. It is Waha’s way!

Spoiler

I don’t claim it is a good argument. I am no Waha apologist.

[Alex]

The price of cheese is either...

• ... about half that of fresh meat, or
• around ten times as much.

I think that has to have us covered either way!

[mfbrandi]

On 9/8/2024 at 3:13 PM, Alex said:

I think that has to have us covered either way!

I believe the banks in Imther operate like Credito Emiliano.

[jajagappa]

On 9/9/2024 at 2:21 PM, mfbrandi said:

I believe the banks in Imther operate like Credito Emiliano.

Yes, obviously. 😉