Sudanna

https://www.youtube....h?v=t0Wrixd097c Highlights of this session: Skype dropping the call several times. Long periods of silence as the MC thinks of stuff to say. "Um," "You know," "Quite," Forgetting rules But hopefully those will get better. The first session is something I'm explicitly not supposed to prepare for, so there will definitely be less (or less obvious) aaaaaaaa what next aaaaaa from me in the future.

First session success! Not too bad for something we came up with on the fly. Here's to schedule the next one: http://whenisgood.net/awaqr2t And one thing I forgot to bring up: I will be recording these sessions. I won't put them on the internet or post them in this thread or anything like that, unless you're all okay with that. You may indicate whether or not you're okay with that however you like. It's just so I've got more than memory to go on. Just an FYI, don't confess to any felonies during the session.

Game starts in less than an hour. Everyone be ready!

Alrighty then. It looks like our players will be Lilith, Goldengirl, Tan, and Sarachim. Sorry Nikki, but your schedule is a clear bottleneck. Sorry, Acta, but you didn't schedule. Sorry, Dantius, but you didn't read it was a Skype campaign. First session of Apocalypse World will be on WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER FOURTH, 6:00 PM EST. That's in three days. We'll be doing character creation and the basics of worldbuilding, and will probably get to the start of gameplay. I expect it to last three or four hours. We'll be using the CR chat roleplaying room for rolling. Players, please send me your Skype information by PM ASAP.

4/6 Responses received. Actaeon and Sarachim, please make use of the whenisgood.

well, that's more than enough people. heeeeere's a whenisgood. be sure to indicate your time zone. i will send you all the materials. http://whenisgood.net/2xtqisd if anyone else is interested, please still say so in the thread and respond to the whenisgood. if there are, miraculously, too many people available at once(this won't happen), i will descend into rank favoritism.

The Ivory Skull is typically a silver color, isn't it?

yup

You do meet plenty of plain old Shaper ghosts, though. A few of the Sucia researchers end up as ghosts, don't they? There's the one guy on Dhonal's Isle in his own crypt that you can talk into giving you a stat boost. Probably more, that's just off the top of my head,.

I finished The Broken Kingdoms a little while ago. It's the second book in a series, by N.K. Jemisin. It's not good. I liked the first one well enough. It more or less revolves around the gods of that world, and it goes to great lengths to portray them as incomprehensible embodiments of primal forces, which is totally my jam. It does a good job at doing that. It's a pretty okay romance, too. The second one has a great many more gods as secondary or tertiary characters, and they're all kind of lame, so it never manages to have the atmosphere of the first one. The protagonist is okay, but only okay, and the rest of the main cast is also lame. The ~new~ romance isn't terrible, but also isn't nearly as good. And the book is about twice as long as it ever needed to be. 2/3 of the events taking place could be entirely skipped over. It took me months to finish this book, because I would read like thirty pages, realize that nothing had happened and that I didn't care about anything in the book, and not go back to it for a long time. The greater portion of the book is demoralizingly mundane and boring, going nowhere. And the rest of it is frankly mediocre. Not a good time. However, I am now reading The Wake, which is brilliant. I love it already.

Serfs have leverage. You need serfs to grow your food, and it's hard to grow new serfs. Serviles do not have leverage, because they are replaceable. Also, a large part of the motivation for Russia freeing its serfs was that it was widely expected to empower the nation economically and militarily, because that had been happening in the rest of Europe and everyone could clearly see it. The Shapers do not seem to be aware of the benefits of transitioning from a feudal(ish? Shaper government is unclear.) society to a capitalist one.

i think perhaps you overestimate the utility of nonviolent protest in an autocratic society. winning hearts and minds counts for nothing unless they're shaper hearts and minds, and winning over shapers by sheer aura of goodness is a nonstarter. nonviolent resistance by, what, peasants and serviles? the half-dozen surviving drayks? they have no leverage. shapers would begin murdering them all at the first hint of disobedience, let alone allowing anything resembling a "grassroots campaign" to form. campaigning for what? to be elected to congress? shapers don't do that. they would be killed without a second thought. and then the shapers would get back to ruling the world. which is not to say the rebels aren't unconscionably excessively violent. a nonviolent rebellion was never in the cards, but there were options other than "genocidal reptilian overlords". shapers are honestly preferable to genocidal reptilian overlords.

The idea that people are capable of thinking and acting at various levels of rationality isn't "debunked". I'm not even sure what you could mean by that. A clearer picture of the obstacles and common failures to behaving rationally is not a debunking of the concept of rational thought.

sigh

I would love to take part.

It sounds like you're just leaving way too much on the brush? As you take the brush out of the bottle, press the it against the inside lip of the bottle, squeezing out much of the excess. There's no right answer for base coat or top coat, people do all kinds of different things, I guess it depends on your particular materials. If you're really unable to apply it in smooth, neat, even strokes, there's probably no way for you to get it to look smooth, neat, or even.

Ah, but I have unequivocally won the comments. The poll is correct.

Avernum as a whole is not anywhere near Empire, Shaper, or even Pact power.

I think it would be a mistake to not call Erika the most powerful person in any Spiderweb game.

The usefulness of an item usually isn't terribly well-reflected in it's price. The stats on the second item are probably more desirable, though.

Fine with me.

1) Dantius' Aimhack campaign is in fact still going to happen, once one or two more people have availability changes. You could join us there, and then maybe we don't need those other people. 2) I've been toying with the idea of starting a World of Darkness or Shadowrun campaign for a long time, or trying to start a smaller Engine Heart or Paranoia game. It's the sort of idea I'll surely never ever carry out and wouldn't go well if I tried. Kind of had voice/video chat in mind, though. . . 3) Sorry, I can't really help. 4) That depends on what exactly you mean by bad. It's less insulated. It's much faster. I like those. Aside: When I first saw that Offworld article, it [censored]ing INFURIATED me for using "Dungeons and Dragons" as a name for any roleplaying tabletop game.

Maybe you should play the game first. One could just as easily draw the conclusion that the power and competence of the Empire is habitually overstated and it's successful purely due to a lack of real competitors. When a real competitor - Rentar-Ihrno - shows up, the Empire is unable to deal with it. The plagues exist for months. They overrun Empire cities and fortifications. The Empire is unable to gather an army to address that crisis. They quarantine the entire continent and fix nothing, and it's not because they don't want to. The Empress herself physically moves to the quarantine border! You can't just say that that doesn't count. It's reflective of the Empire's ability to mobilize and deploy its armed forces. Environmental sabotage wouldn't accomplish anything, though. Shapers, unlike the Empire, don't rely on a healthy ecosystem to produce armies. The Empire could do it, just to be dicks, and it might hurt the civilian population of the Shaper lands, but it wouldn't do anything to the ability of the Shapers to make war. It's irrelevant. A Shaper-engineered plague on Empire lands, on the other hand, could be as effective as we are willing to imagine it being. Doesn't even have to be a dramatic flesh-eating virus or something. A new variety of locust could create devastating famine. The Empire doesn't have the ability to create that kind of weapon, and the Shapers are naturally resistant to logistical damage anyways. What? In what world is the side on the offensive the side that is more likely to be destroyed? That's nonsense. If the Pact has the initiative, prepares, strikes first, then they are going to be much more effective with any strategy than if they're the ones on the defensive. How you think it could be otherwise, I don't know. It doesn't matter, regardless. The Pact is the clear underdog in everything, and would be destroyed. And yet the Shapers can combat the Unbound. The Unbound are an effective weapon, yes, but they do not necessarily win the war. The Shapers fight and can defeat the Rebels. It's an honest struggle between the two. Their relative power is at least roughly comparable. I don't think you understand how Shaping works or what the Unbound are. You guys are seriously overestimating the ability of any side to systematically wipe out any other side's high-value targets by teleporting assassins at them. As far as I can remember, teleportation is only ever used that way once, to kill Emperor Hawthorne in A1. And that's Erika doing that, explicitly the most powerful mage in the world, and it's a major production she can only do once. Teleporting ninja assassins is simply not something that anyone has. The Empire cannot teleport dudes with impunity. The degree to which they can do it at all when there isn't a fixed installation at both ends is highly questionable. Teleporting assasins are not of strategic relevance. You will note that the Empire doesn't do anything like this when they're fighting Avernum. I think the Empire's teleportation ability in general is being greatly overstated here. They teleport troops to Avernum, but the number of troops they can do this with is very explicitly very limited and very explicitly contains an abnormally high concentration of the Empire's wizards. The teleportation of troops to Avernum is a logistical necessity for the Empire, not a great advantage in strategic or tactical movement. They cannot get to Avernum any other way. They don't go on to teleport straight to the Castle. There's a bottleneck front north of Dharmon, for chrissakes! If the Empire was seriously able to teleport with impunity, it would have been doing so.

I did this too: https://c312441.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/files.calref/29/f2f0a6d8_IPIP-NEO-Narrative-Report.htm