Here he is actively flaming/trolling in Main Community and Agora. He even states he's willingly losing sleep because he likes arguing so much. Just because the person you're disagreeing with is being salty doesn't mean you have a free ticket to stoop to that level. It's not moderator-worthy conduct.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/282908
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/291136
Yea @imaqtpie, Yea @annegreen, Yea @Seraph089.
From account history they have good engagement.
Nay @Apytele, Nay @sweetholymosiah.
Limited engagement. Can't really comment on them yet.
Nay @goat, Nay @difficult_bit_1339.
Actively enshittening Agora and flame warring since its inception. @goat is evidently some manner of troll and "controversy" isn't a selling point for moderation. This is an alt for his burggit account; he's butted heads with admins over there because not allowing gore isn't "free".
Why would you vote for it to be unrestricted? They've only unprivated due to the threats. Stick to Lemmy.
Ah. Are you aware of Mage: the Ascension and Mage: the Awakening? Both World of Darkness books; mechanically crunchy with a strong focus on magic as a solution to all situations. Looking at established systems that have already done something similar can help with ideas.
For a slightly different spin, I just picked up the Black Sword Hack yesterday. In terms of combat items, there are actual listed combat items but it's all fluff really; every weapon is d6 damage. Maybe that would be another thing that interests you: weapons are abstracted to the point of players being able to buy/find "a weapon" which gives you a basic action.
Ubuntu 23.04 for my laptop. I experiment with other distros from time to time when I grow bored but getting back to Ubuntu is like putting on my favourite pair of jeans.
I tend to focus on products which go against certain "maxims" of play; having alternatives to some of the more strict rules inherited from Gygax offers insight into the philosophy behind certain rules and whether such rules are actually fun at the table.
The Black Hack is my go-to book for this purpose: distances are relative, consumables are abstracted to the usage die, experience is based on stories told and not treasure dragged back to town, and all of the dice rolling can be made by players if the GM so chooses. Such a free system allows for easier hacking; You don't need to compare relative power of classes when determining how much XP your homebrew needs in order to level up.
For supplements and splatbooks, I particularly like Wonder & Wickedness and Marvels & Malisons as magic supplements. It's easy as hell to slap together a sorcerer class from these two books and staple it onto the Black Hack. My favourite setting books are Ultraviolet Grasslands and Hot Springs Island; both offer perfect sandbox adventures for the Black Hack. Both offer some manner of departure from the traditional tropes of TSR adventures. I have had to modify some aspects of the latter, such as the
spoiler
miscarriage statuette, which I revised as a fertility amulet.; if worn one way up you're guaranteed fertility, the other way you're guaranteed not to fall pregnant.
There are a stupid number of blogs and zines that I could namedrop, but the one I find myself agreeing with the most is The Alexandrian.
I wouldn't call this purely a production error, though it could be mitigated with a modicum of forethought by the production company. A nuisance of mine when listening to audiobooks is mispronunciation of terms or names, which is particularly common in fantasy books with fantasy names.
Two examples that readily come to mind are:
Roy Dotrice's reading of A Song of Ice and Fire, especially "Puh-Tyre" Baelish.
Red Dusk and the Morrow as read by Peter Owen. Generally a great narration, but there are a handful of German phrases and expressions which are pronounced in a very jaunty anglicised way, like "un-zeer dootshe Jenosen" instead of "unsere deutsche Genossen."
Some of my favourite systems are light on combat rules or feature combat as some kind of fail state. If you're leveling a shotgun at an ancient void-dweller that may or may not be immune to conventional weaponry, you've messed up somewhere. Maybe the better plan is to douse the floorboards in lamp oil, smash a lit lantern, and run.
Would I play a game with no combat items? Absolutely. I'd love a game that invests as much pagespace into intrigue or stealth systems as some D&D-like systems invest into combat.
I just go for completed series nowadays. It's just not worth the time ranting and actively waiting for the completion of certain series. I've made a conscious decision not to start on Rothfuss's trilogy until he finishes the final book.
I also find that recently I go for books with more mature themes; not gore- and sex-fests where everyone is morally grey for the sake of it, but stuff like Robin Hobb's books which explore feminism through a fantasy lens, or stories with characters who confront their flaws rather than being some ideal version of a character archetype.
In The White Ship we get our first glimpse of some of the geography of the Dreamlands. More interestingly we first see mention of godlike creatures other than the maddening Great Old Ones and Outer Gods. The eidolon Lathi rules over Thalarion, a city of Daemons and mad things which once were men.
The bearded man aboard the ship also mentions gods which are "greater than men, and they have conquered." The voyagers of the White Ship are guided to fantastical cities by a heavenly blue bird which seems to have suddenly appeared. It leads the voyagers to locations of increasing beauty and splendor, and each time the voyagers seek greater places. Ultimately, the bird leads the ship to its doom: a monstrous cataract where the waters of the world fall to abysmal nothingness. The watchman of this story closes his eyes and braces for the fall, only to wake at his old lighthouse.
Peering into the waters, he sees the remnant of a white ship, shattered on the rocks. Again this leads us to wonder: are Lovecraft's Dreamlands some mirror of our living world, or perhaps a physical space somehow connected to our world? Is there perhaps a more mundane explanation; are the dreamers simply dreaming of that which they may have perceived and then forgotten in the waking world? Could this inability to disassociate dream from reality merely be some form or madness?
The first two stories of the Dream Cycle offer a more personal horror than the mind-bending cosmic horror which we’ve come to expect from Lovecraft. Both short stories feature some manner of watchman who is forcefully drawn from his duty by some form of fainting or narcolepsy. The end result is the same: an avoidable disaster brought about by the watchman deserting his post, and some form of revelation leading the watchman to wonder whether they are still dreaming.
I decided to look further into this and the idea of dereliction of duty was a common worry of Lovecraft at this point in time. The first World War began in 1914; the US joined the war in 1917, a year before Lovecraft wrote Polaris. Before the US joined the war Lovecraft often expressed dissatisfaction at the lack of an American response. Lovecraft was an Anglophile to an obsessive degree and viewed the UK and particularly England as America’s ancestral fatherland which was currently under threat. In Polaris we see a similar struggle in the waking man believing he is the watchman of his dreams, and that he must wake from this “dream” in order to save his land from catastrophe.
Lovecraft attempted to join the war effort in various capacities but he was prone to fainting fits, similar to the watchman in Polaris. He also attempted to join the National Guard of Rhode Island, though this was thwarted by his mother. We see this mirrored in the two stories as both watchmen find themselves incapable of waking from their dreams in order to prevent disaster.
That's a bad faith interpretation of my comment. Note that I did not link to every single instance of him being against defederation, as the issue isn't him stating an opinion. The problem is the sarcastic and aggressive way in which he chooses to interact with other users; sarcastically calling for defederation from lemmy.world because he saw a racist meme, and stating that he's up at 3am losing sleep because he loves arguing with idiots.
If you are being flamed, you report. Stooping to their level makes you no better.