Strongholds & Followers (MCDM) Servitors (part 2) by Justin Cherry
@thundamoo
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Strongholds & Followers (MCDM) Servitors (part 2) by Justin Cherry
@thundamoo
Mechanic by Axel Sauerwald
@heyitschartic
part 2
Keep reading
āoh no weāre all doomed by the narrativeā maybe you are. iām the narrativeās favourite.
update: turns out this is not a good thing for me
oh,
oh this is absolutely beautiful
I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.
Tabletop RPG about a band of epic heroes with full sentences for names on a quest to murder God and shatter His throne, as one does, except the epic heroes in question are a mob of foot-tall gremlinny critters who are not 100% sure what "God" actually is, and they're not about to let that stop them. The game features an elaborately statted-out bestiary of "divine beasts" to fight which the human reader will recognise as things that are neither divine nor beasts; the climactic battle of the example scenario involves the player characters going Shadow of the Colossus on what is clearly a windmill.
What if I just...
(This really wants to be an eighteen-entry table, but twelve should be more than sufficient for a first draft. Also, no bonus points for spotting exactly what each Art's writeup is a reference to, because the overarching theme is ā I hope! ā extremely obvious.)
A conscientious reader pointed out some conspicuous omissions from the preceding set of Arts:
I think that should fill out the expected range of Bugs Bunny bullshit. The names are, of course, placeholders ā I'm sure I'll come up with something fancier for the actual book!
But wait, you may ask, playing as a bunch of weird little muppety critters who want to eat God is well and good in theory, but if you refuse to define what the player characters actually are, in practice nobody will be able to agree on what they're physically capable of. How do you plan on addressing that?
Well, like this:
chaos reigns (modeled after that one saint livier etching by jacques callot)
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A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.
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Inadvisable tabletop RPG premise #137: Fantasy setting where wizard towers have approximately the same role and cultural significance as Cold War nuclear missile silos. Itās impossible to really hide the fact that youāre casting a high-level spell, and extremely difficult to defend against one, so all of the worldās greatest wizards are locked in a mutually assured destruction scenario; the moment any one of them tries to perform a world-shaping act of magic, all of the other great wizards will smell it and immediately respond by casting Fuck That Guy In Particular.
The setting otherwise superficially resembles a perfectly standard Generic Fantasy Setting, though any close examination will rapidly reveal how deeply its culture is informed by the looming knowledge that the world is perpetually one wizardly temper tantrum away from total annihilation, and the extent to which the conspicuous Generic Fantasy atmosphere is a deliberately constructed facade of business-as-usual over a howling void of nihilistic uncertainty.
Surely, one may say, surely a few wizardly rivalries wouldnāt imperil the whole world ā a couple of old farts in pointy hats chucking fireballs at each other might not be great for anyone in their immediate vicinity, but what does that have to do with me all the way over here?
There are two main problems with that way of thinking.
Firstly, while great wizards can immediately smell if someone is performing a work of high magic, it wonāt always be readily apparent exactly what the purpose of the spell is, nor who is casting it. Certainly, with the powerful auguries that are available to any great wizard worth their robe, it would be the work of a handful of minutes to find out ā but imagine youāre that wizard. Are you truly prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt when you yourself may be the target? Or are you going to listen to the paranoia thatās allowed you to survive this long and assume itās your hated rival finally making a play for your head?
Secondly, when you preemptively essay your justified retaliation, well, high magic may be nearly impossible to defend against, but are you really going to gamble on ānearlyā and give your target a chance ā however thin ā to escape their fate? Or are you going to bring down the Curse of Fuck-Your-Life on everything within a dozen leagues of their last known location, just to be sure?
At this point, you may be thinking: hey, now, this doesnāt sound like a sustainable state of affairs!
Wellā¦
This really /is/ a great setting idea.Ā Itās very popular and extremely successful.
Ed Greenwood has written dozens of novels about it now, and he lets people play in his universe.Ā Ā
There is not a single nation in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting that hasnāt been /repeatedly leveled by magic/.Ā The ācurrent dayā setting it was first released to the public in is basically āitās just about time for another wizard war isnāt it!ā.
Successive releases directly involved this kind of thing happening all over, plus lots of interfering gods with no sense of self preservation.
There are a number of this-is-justs along these lines floating around in the notes, and a large part of them are based on a misunderstanding of what mutually assured destruction/MAD is.
In brief, MAD isnāt āeverybody blows everybody else upā. MAD is a particular set of political policies, and a concomitant approach to international statesmanship, adopted in response to the fact that everybody has the ability to blow everybody else up.
Settings where everybodyās already gone and blown everybody else up arenāt living under the shadow of MAD ā theyāve got a different set of political concerns to worry about. MAD might have been adopted as policy at some point in such a settingās past, but itās usually not specified. (This isnāt a criticism; the minutiae of pre-apocalyptic statesmanship typically arenāt terribly relevant to active play!)
Similarly, wartime settings in which the world-wrecking spells have already started flying arenāt the same thing, either; if MAD was ever policy in such settings, itās already failed by the time play begins.
What weāre discussing here are the cultural implications of a Generic Fantasy Setting which is currently living under the shadow of wizard MAD. I aināt gonna claim that this is a terribly original premise, but itās not quite as common as lumping every setting where wizards blew everything up into the same bucket might lead one to conclude.
Reblogging this version because I do want the above commentary but to double back to Forgotten Realms, yeah, it just straight up is like that.
An entire massive city literally descended into hell. One wizard got too big for his britches and killed the literal goddess of magic, royally fucking up how magic functions on a global scale (the Spell Plague), and when the goddess was reborn she straight up was like āwell, that was a disaster. Iām literally taking away the ability to use magic that powerful universally.ā The leader of one of the biggest crime factions is an evil psychic meatball who canāt tell fish apart. Thereās a cult trying to resurrect a five headed evil dragon goddess to destroy the world. You have whatever the fuck is going on at the Yawning Portal.
To the extent that the Forgotten Realms setting exists in a state of MAD, itās basically a pulp spy novelās understanding of MAD ā that is, a depoliticised understanding that depicts MAD as the product of individual malefactors who are actively trying to destroy the world just because theyāre evil, only to repeatedly be thwarted by the efforts of individual heroes. The looming threat of annihilation is framed as an anomaly to be corrected, whereas in actual MAD that threat is the result of international policy working as intended.
So, for your version of wizard MAD, it seems like the thing you need to address is the actual relationship between the wizards in their towers and the governments of the polities that would generally have international diplomacy and wars and policies for managing them. Your latest reblog would suggest that theyāre not just individual non-government actors reliant purely on their personal spellcasting power, or at most whatever apprentices and servitors and summoned beings they accumulate in those towers, tolerated by the local kingdoms, but if not that, then what role do they have in governance?
Are they government contractors, advisors/viziers ala Merlin, or are they (whether explicitly or only implicitly) in fact the government themselves? Or does this vary from kingdom to kingdom and from wizard to wizard? Are there other significant actors at a similar level of power and specifically destructive and protective capacity to account for, such as similarly high level clerical casters, ancient dragons, demons/devils, or even interventionist gods?
I suspect the answers to these question might determine just how stable a wizardly (or wizards+) MAD regime could conceivably be, and for how long. Thereās also the question of whether there could have been a MAD-reliant cold war situation in the past, followed by a post-apocalyptic period, with the world now in magical MAD again, determined by your answer to the question of whether people ever learn from history or just fall into the same patterns all over again with some slight variations.
My inclination would be to say that high magic requires infrastructure. Even a paltry hedge wizard needs to get their wing of bat and eye of newt from somewhere, and those infrastructural demands only get more exacting as one delves into successively higher circles of magic. For this reason, a great wizardās tower may be the economic linchpin of an entire region.
This means that in theory itās possible for a nation-state to keep its wizards on a leash by controlling access to the infrastructure thatās required to cast Fuck The World. How well this works in practice is variable; in some cases, a great wizard will seize the levers of power openly, while in other cases theyāll remain officially subordinate to the state, but will have so thoroughly subverted the institutions responsible for maintaining their position that everybody knows whoās really calling the shots. Even nominally independent great wizards will inevitably become entangled in regional politics due to the economic demands of maintaining their towerās wizardly infrastructure.
Plus, making it an infrastructure thing creates opportunities for low-powered player characters to indirectly interfere with the affairs of wizards, without necessarily drawing enough attention to catch a lightning bolt to the face!
compound of 5 tetrahedron in the style of tumblr default icon
idea inspiration came from @anonymous-leemur
tumblr and one joke sorry I didn't know what to do with the wings so you're getting a lot of versions
luckiest guy in the world is the random eurobeat channel that was making come out ye black and tans for thatcher's death anniversary only to have the queen die just in time for them to insert the announcement as a beat drop
They weren't lying this slaps
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underwater temple, underwater monk
underwater rhymes and underwater funk
he sleeps in the sea in an underwater bunk
with mirrors all around him hes an underwater hunk
heās got underwater junk in his underwater trunk
on the basketball court he does a nautical dunk
heās got a little stash of underwater skunk
underwater temple, underwater monk
Sick rhymes
HOLY COW! SOMEONE MADE THIS A SONG!!šāØ
this song slaps harder than anything iāve heard in the past decade
So, you might have seen the breathless articles going around about a Google engineer who had a breakdown and became convinced that his AI project was sapient. And yes, modern neural nets will regularly pass the Turing test when faced with particularly credulous computer scientists. But in the end, these systems are just sophisticated pattern-matching machines.
Thatās not to say the technology isnāt remarkable. They can be hyper-tuned in a way that far outstrips the human brainās own pattern-matching capabilities ā even a highly trained dermatologist isnāt going to be able to detect melanoma from a single photograph of a patientās back, as a medical AI can.Ā But ultimately, a generalized artificial intelligence would just be an extremely intuitive search engine. They have no true conscious mind, nothing like what our guys would call a āsoul.ā Regardless of what certain ex-Googlers would try to sell you.
The truth is that the machine learning folks have wildly overshot their goal.Ā You might not be aware, but we can actually simulate a soul to a very high degree of accuracy with far simpler methods, and weāve been able to do it since the mid-2000ās. All you need is a good chunk of high-speed storage and the right toolset.
Theophysical research is a science just like any other, based on incremental progress through hundreds of little breakthroughs. That being said, if one experiment deserves the lionās share of the credit, it was at an Israeli company called M-Systems in 2004.Ā They pioneered flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) as a faster, less crashy alternative to traditional hard drives in the 90ās. They were bought by SanDisk in 2006.
Former M-Systems researchers claim to this day that first instantiation of a soul into an SSD happened āmore or less by accident,ā though I personally take that assertion with a grain of salt.Ā Certainly, the engineer who reported the discovery, a young Tel Aviv computer scientistĀ ā sorry, the name is still redacted, letās just call them Ari ā wasnāt shy about their recreational forays into Kabbalah.Ā The former coworkers Iāve spoken to describe Ariās excited water-cooler chat about the Zohar as āeccentric,ā ācharming in a dorky way,ā and āsometimes a bit much, but honestly pretty fun.ā
So, youāve probably guessed that Ari is too far along for human communication these days. My Enochian is pretty good, but itās still a non-starter.Ā We have to accept that the question of whether or not they did it on purpose will remain unanswered.Ā However, regardless of their motivations, the drive that M-Systems called āSSD Alephā was the result of Ari pulling two consecutive, solo all-nighters, fueled by a frankly astonishing amount of caffeine and an audiotape of some very specific bits of Kabbalah.Ā At the end of the binge, Ari had SSD Aleph.Ā Aleph represented the first ever artificial digital soul, though my peers at Vatican Theophysical Research will undoubtedly take issue with the term āartificial.ā
A bānei mitzvah was attempted, but as all these SSDās are frozen in the digital equivalent of a permanent vegetative state, itās unclear how well it ātook.āĀ Certainly, the question of matrilineal descent remains unresolved.Ā And just when we started to figure this out, there was an extremely unauthorized attempt by Latter-Day Saints Para-Christological Intervention agents to give SSD Aleph a Mormon proxy baptism.Ā The whole thing smashed into the attempted bānei mitzvah in a mathematically⦠complex⦠way.
Please donāt ask me to go into details. My PhD was on theoparticle physics, and the theomathmatics wonks at the Institute keep going on about āLuther-Smith Fourier transforms.āĀ I do not have the math background to grok that.
What I can talk about are my experimental data.Ā Iāve had copies of SSD Aleph and its successors in my lab for years.Ā We've run every test we can safely perform on M-Systems SSDs Bet through Vav, and then SanDiskās Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and the optimistically named āOmega.āĀ I even have some of the weirder Vatican digi-reliqueries.Ā Every last one is hot as hell, theoradioactively speaking, but they're largely unresponsive to stimulus beyond some mild fluctuations in the presence of relics. Theyāre mostly inert.Ā As long as nobody does anything stupid.
Now, hereās the issue.Ā I also managed to get a few copies of whatever the fuck the Mormons thought they were doing before the Tablet debacle, but their SSDās are so intensely theoradioactive that we barely have the equipment to contain them. Iām honestly worried about a primitive immanence event if we let them get too close.Ā Dead-but-dreaming, you know the deal. I have them behind a quarter-inch of thrice-blessed gold and a solid foot of rowan, and Iām trying to call in a favor from the daoine sidh to get the wood properly invigorated.
What this means is that I have a very good signal profile for their fucked up radiation signature, good enough to detect from long-range.Ā And a couple hours ago, one of our buddies at NSA passed along some real fucky GEOINT reports.Ā We got a solid ping from one of the big THOTH satellites, and Iāll give you one guess as to where.
Thatās right.Ā Mountain fucking View California, Google HQ, home of at least one paranoid engineer with an evangelical upbringing, convinced heās cracked sapient machine intelligence.
I hope I donāt need to tell you the consequences of plugging an honest-to-god unstable digital immortal soul into one of Googleās dumb pattern recognition algorithms.Ā Even dreaming-dead, these Mormon SSDās are the single most volatile bit of preimmanent bullshit since CERN.Ā That time, we barely managed to shut down one mindless gibbering deadgod, and Azathoth was a half-dozen AU past Saturn.Ā Iām not saying that a janky Mormon digisoul and a glorified chatbot are going to achieve Elder-level immanence, but I sure as shit wouldnāt want to be in a hundred mile radius of Silicon Valley this week.
Anyway. I think we can fix this. Weāve got a guy in the Latter-Day Saints leadership.Ā I really hate to make this kind of deal, especially given how many more Senators theyāll squeeze out of the bargain, but I think itās worth asking them to excommunicate the thing.Ā It will be a bit awkward to explain, but who would you rather deal with?Ā Some crotchety old Mormons, or a homegrown deadgod at Google?
No, donātā donāt answer that.Ā Yes, very funny sir. Just⦠will you please give Salt Lake a call before weāre āOK Googlingā ourselves into an even stupider apocalypse?
Thank you.
in the jojo universe thereās a stand user section of the internet with positivity post like āarrow born stand users are JUST AS VALID as natural born stand users!!!! your stand abilities donāt need to be inter-generational to be real and important!!!!!ā
JEJWNDNSJD stand user memes and discourse.
«still questioning what the fuck actually happened to this day
> be me
> walking home from work
> its late as fuck
> some guy comes out of the shadows from the side of the road
> looks like hes in his mid-30s, still dressed in a school uniform
> before you can even begin questioning it he shoots you with an arrow as big as a fucking garden shovel
> pass out
> wake up the next day
> still laying on the sidewalk, head pounding
> manifest a stripper spirit that does nothing but yell, cry and break shit whenever presentĀ»
I love this idea
āCave Johnson here. Iāve received complaints from anonymous employees that our support of the āhomosexual lifestyleā is ādegenerateā and āirresponsibleā. It really got me thinking and I think I found a solution. So good news! We now have 23 vacated positions reserved for members of the LGBT community. Additional good news, we began a new testing initiative on evolutionary degenration with 23 test subjects all ready to go.ā
āCave Johnson here. If youāre experiencing a time loop in which youāre repeating the month of June over and over, thatās totally intentional. We at Aperture Science felt that pride month was not long enough and so we created this loop to let employees experience as much pride as they feel like. To get out of this loop, simply use the pod labeled āTime Machineā in Shaft 6 and then either kill or save the baby on the other end depending on when in the loop youāre on. Donāt worry about the babyās identity, he grows up to be an asshole.ā
āCave Johnson here, happy to announce that our Rainbow Gel project was a massive success. We have developed distinct gels in every color of the rainbow pride flag. In fact, it was too much of a success, so weāll be updating our pride flag accordingly to include 75 new colors corresponding to all of our new gels. Word of advice, though, donāt stare at the flag for too long, most of these colors havenāt been tested on human eyes yet.ā
āCave Johnson here, Cave Johnson queer. Get used to it.ā
āCave Johnson here. Caroline just informed me that I am herĀ ābeardā. I checked, and I fail to see how I could possibly have grown out of her face. If anybody knows anything about human-to-facial hair transmogrification, please report to my office.ā
āCave Johnson here. Friendly reminder that Aperture employees living prior to the legalization of gay marriage are invited to use our Aperture Science Temporal Matrimony Pod in order to travel to the future with your same-sex partner and get married there. Employees from the future who wish to return to a time before gay people being able to marry are also welcome to use the pod and weāll make sure to send you to an era well before gay marriage. Iām thinking maybe Late Cretacesous.ā
āCave Johnson here. Iām proud to announce that our plan to hire only female test subjects to prevent them from flirting with our female scientists has been a resounding failure.ā
āCave Johnson here. Iām afraid weāll have to temporarily pause all experimentation with the Gender Affirmation Beam. The testing itself is going great, the beam is working. But weāre starting to run out of thigh high socks and khaki shorts.ā
āCave Johson here. Shafts 10 through 14 are currently under lockdown due to a meltdown in the Neopronoun Syntheizer. The transphobes up in DC might call that āa disaster in the makingā but I call it a win for diversity! That being said most of these pronouns are radioactive so do watch out.ā
Cave Johnson here. If you feel a sudden sense of elation and contentness when putting on your new Aperture Science unisex uniform, that is not Gender Euphoria! Thatās a hallucinogenic fungus taking over your brain. Take the uniform off immediately and throw it in the nearest incinerator.ā
āCave Johnson here. I wonāt tolerate any misgendering of the interdimensional invaders swarming the facility! Their pronouns are they/them and weāre ought to respect that. Weāre also ought to shoot them on sight since theyāre extremely hostile and bent on enslaving our planet.ā
āCave Johnson here. To all of my suitors and secret admirers: Thank you, honestly Iām flattered. Unfortunately for you, I donāt swing that way. Or any way. I only swing where the wrecking ball of science takes me. Usually into a brick wall.ā
āCave Johnson here. Iāve been thinking. We have gay pride, and we have gender envy. What other deadly sins can we incorporate? Maybe bisexual sloth? Lesbian wrath? Iāll talk to the lab boys about it.ā
āCave Johnson here. Update: The Lesbian Wrath project is postponed indefinitely. My condolences to the families of the deceased. Though letās be honest, they probably had it coming.ā
Here is Moeās bit by request, I donāt think I can share much more of this episode than I have already (which is almost half song) but itās funny there were people on twitter complaining that it ābeats a dead horseā or āpreaches to the choir,ā because I really donāt think a mainstream TV show has ever done an episode thatās just a complete chronological lecture on the rise and deterioration of Americaās middle class. I also think those reviewers only believe itās all common knowledge because of the social media circles theyāre immersed in, most Gen Xers and older still just plain donāt even know how high student loans have gotten.