That paladin just cast moonbeam. Again.

I'm at the recycled memes store. I'm at the bad dnd takes store. I'm at the recycled memes and bad dnd takes store! Sometimes comics and other stuff.

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I think it’s too late for a Warcraft crossover, have you heard of the intense racism both in the writing and fandom for Warcraft?

I hadn't heard that about the writing for warcraft, unfortunately if you play (I wouldn't recommend it) it's hard not to notice it. In the past 10 years it feels like that kind of thing has infested everything targeted at young men. Gaming, sports, even fitness.

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Dungeons & Dragons’ next major product announcement leaks--and it's WORLD OF WARCRAFT

One of Dungeons & Dragons’ partners has seemingly accidentally leaked a major announcement ahead of a Gen Con panel planned for next week. R

Now this is what dnd fans have been clamouring for. The perfect dnd expansion for your seniors' home group.

And strangely comforting it leaked because of roll20. Roll20 isn't just out to get you, it's out to get everyone.

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ok, you're winning me over silly atla comic about sokka teaching boomerang skills

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wtf did i just read but also, should I try to subject my players to this

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Dndbeyond previewed the origin feats from the upcoming arcana unleashed book. Mostly bad with one exception.

Won't get you out of a grapple but still pretty handy no-action teleporting. Resistance from an origin feat is also pretty solid. oh yeah we also saw arcane archer fighter, overdependent on int to work, but playable if your stats are abundant. And conjurer wizard, strong but boring with con save proficiency and variable resistance at level 3 being most of the story.

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I know we're never going back to the glory of the Roberts era transformers comics, but gdi we deserve better than this.

Johnson's first 24 issues at least had something going, then Kirkman takes over and takes things right into a ditch.

No more matrix no more autobots no more faceplate Just some of the worst being different in place of being interesting or original, and it is depressing. Mind you, the series probably has enough sales momentum that a shift to mediocrity won't slow it down.

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Looks like we also got to see the new mystic arts monk, suggesting wotc is pumping out previews of the subclasses used i their new letsplay i assume someone, somewhere, might be watching. The book is on sale early at Gencon so it'll be out in the wild soon enough.

Mystic arts monk is.... ok? Disappointing, but like, it doesn't take much to be good by monk subclass standards. Level 3 they get 1/3 sorcerer spellcasting using wisdom. Arcane trickster and eldritch knight also get other features of some use at this level, but mystic arts monk gets nothing because it remains a class wotc hates. Not having anything else at this level just reeks of incomplete work. Level 6 they can replace one attack with a cantrip which is unironically a better damage increase then most monk subclasses get, not to mention resource free. They can also exchange spellslots for ki and vice versa to some extent which isn't bad. Level 10 after using stunning strike, pass or fail, the target has disadvantage on its next saving throw vs one of your spells which isn't as good as it sounds because you're a 1/3 caster, but hey maybe you can land something good, occasionally. At 17 they can replace 2 of their flurry of blows with a spell, which would have been really great at level 10, but it comes in at 17. The good news is noone will force you to play monk. Going back to vestige warlock briefly (if I knew how to use this website I'd attach this to that post but here we are) there was some online bellyaching about the loss of the level 10 playtest feature. It was a ~5 hour 30 foot aura of resist necrotic/radiant/fire and immune to charm/fear that and the warlock could cheat death in the emanation. That's a good feature, but it also made your vestige too big a target, and for me, the subclass is fine without it.

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We got a preview of the final release of vestige warlock, and it's great? It's better than the playtest, I didn't even know they were allowed to do that (it almost always goes the other way).

Pretty standard pet mechanics, effectively letting you use your bonus action to contribute another eldritch blast worth of damage. Fire is notably more resisted than the other two types, but you can change the nature of your vestige on a long rest. Bonus action powers are useful, though not game changers. Using your spell hit for a pet attackis great for a warlock, not like, say, beast master ranger, but leave it to wizards of the coast to shank rangers at every turn. The pet damage also works well for a pact of the blade warlock who can get bonus action damage without spending a feat for it.

Kind of surprised this made it in, but it's an excellent feature. This much choice is rare, and you can get some great non warlock spells from this. Life has a lot of healing magic you normally couldn't access, but war offers spiritual weapon for low level, followed up by spirit guardians, and even steel wind strike and hold monster. Hard to beat those.

Useful but not dramatic power gain. Resistance is a bit dicey, as you're likely to find that if you're benefiting from that resistance the enemy might resist your vestige attack. Still good though.

Again, useful, but not great. In playtest this level offered a limited use resistance aura.

Now this is the good stuff. In the playtest it was a spell, but now it gives all the benefit, without concentration. High level summon scaling up to 9th level in power without expending a base class resource, huge value. On a technical level, the effect ends early if your pet runs out of temp hp, so you cannot heal it to maintain the transformation, and have to make the most of it before it gets too damaged.

Looks like the best pound for pound official warlock subclass, and highly competitive even against partnered content.

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15 years ago, now.

[derrickwildsun-deactivated20250]

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

[sci-fantasy]

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)

[ivy-michaels]

Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

This is true of all censorship.

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Reminds me of something I saw from an interview with the great Mel Brooks about 5 years back (was circulated this weekend because he turned 100)

We would have nothing if people didn't find ways to go around bosses.

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The most perfect distillation of bluesky ever.

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