The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

I guess you’ll use the bot to update all the Lost Tales links. Yeah, that’s obviously Janitor work.

HG, Archivist’s Apprentice

...then you can still contribute, learning from your past failure. I'm not good with judging gameplay, but a couple things that I can see so far are:
- "Charge Spaces" don't seem like a thing that meshes well with PPC missions.
- I can't read the Sue-description cards.
- I think maybe there should be some mechanics for agent tech and Sue powers, because otherwise, it's really generic.

Also, I had a great idea for a campaign/episode/whatever idea for Shiny Newbie. What if at one point, you play as an author whose fanfic got sporked and who joined the Board (keeping the reason a secret) in order to look for answers?

-Twistey

She seems like she really needs a hug. (Well, more than that, but a hug is the best I can give.)

Anyway, these are very interesting descriptions. Again, we all need to write something together with these characters. We'd probably need to plan first about how serious we're going to be, considering your characters for this are much more serious than mine or hS's, but that could probably be taken care of quickly.

-Twistey

I literally finished that sentence in my head the exact same way you did before I clicked that post, not realizing that you actually said that until I read the full post. Great job! X'D

-Twistey

And heeeere we go again!

Fandom News



The Poke / Twitter

Go on, then - who remembers DM of the Rings? Well, in yet more proof of the old adage that 'all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again', Brennan Mulligan on Twitter has reinvented the concept behind it (apparently without knowing about the original).

"The confusing parts of Lord of the Rings start to make a lot more sense when you realize it's actually just a transcribed #DnD campaign. THREAD."

Old News



BeyondCurie

On Tuesday in 1975, Chien Shiung Wu became the first woman president of the American Physical Society, partly for her work in disproving the law of conservation of parity in 1957. This assumed law was an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, which, in very simplified form, said that the laws of physics didn't know their left from their right. (If any actual physicists can explain parity and why its non-conservation is interesting, I'd love to hear it, because I... can't!)

New News



Gizmodo

A nifty bit of paleontological detective work has thrown out a surprising result about Denisova cave, the Siberian cave which lends its name to one of modern humanity's closest relatives. We found out a few months back that one of the bone fragments in the cave was from a hybrid - a girl who lived 90,000 years ago, whose father was Denisovan, but whose mother was Neanderthal.

Well, recent research has shown that not only did the two species meet and interbreed - they also shared the cave for something on the order of a hundred thousand years. They may not have actually lived there at the same time, but both species - our nearest cousins - were in and out for the entire time.

(I'm torn on whether Underground Hominin City-Cave is a better setting for a comic, a game, or a roleplaying campaign...)

PPC News



The Department of Redundancy Department is into the third day of its general strike, with the picket line outside Admiral Pansy's office remaining unbroken. Interviewed by the Multiverse Monitor, Agent Rosalind said that 'this intolerable behaviour is completely intolerable', and stated 'our first demand is that our demands are met'.

Reactions from the rest of HQ are a bit of a mixed bag. Agent Tiranel of Technical Errors claims to be 'sure it's far more intolerable where we are' (which her partner immediately corrected to 'less tolerable'; an attempt by Saphie Ellings of the DBP Troll Division to promote 'fewer tolerable' was met with fury). Members of the DIA have been overheard muttering that 'we should get to arrest them all', or possibly 'we should get them all a rest' - sources weren't clear. The only firm response has been from the Janitorial Division, which swept in en masse to prevent the DRD from writing slogans on the corridor walls.

Clerical News



DeviantArt

The Quest requires them to get past the mountain! But what's the best way to cross?

INT: Roll to cast a flying spell.
CHA: Roll to - sigh - seduce someone into showing the way.
WIS: Roll to plot the most sensible route.
CON: Roll to just keep on keeping on.

hS

Though I'm not sure how useful it'd be in this particular case - I restructured the site while I moved it, so you'd need to know exactly where everything came from and went to.

Heh, my offline editing is all done through plain old Notepad, which makes Javascript a bit of a nightmare. I might look into ++ and see if it will work here...

As for moving your sites: the only concern I'd mention is that if someday, Neocities is going to go the way of all its predecessors. The more sites the PPC has running over there, the more we'll need to rescue when it falls...

hS

Since I didn’t publish a mission yet, and thus never made the mistake of publishing an unbetaed version, I’m not sure how to proceed from here,

Since this thread is already halfway down the page, you may be justified in starting a new thread to (now officially) post your first mission. Alternatively, you may post the link to the final version in a response to your original post and hope that it still gets some attention.

If you don’t have a specific site or blog or journal where you want to publish your missions, you’ll just publish the GDoc. Before doing so, you should either set access rights to read-only for everybody but yourself, or you may "publish to the web", which will create a reformatted copy of the GDoc, removing the page breaks, so that it looks somewhat like this. (Don’t worry, your editable version will still exist, too.) Either way, the URL to the final document will be slightly different from the link in your original post. And then, there is all the wiki editing to do.

HG

I have it on DVD, it was amazing, even if as you say the science is a bit old now. (Also, the Walking With Monsters prequel has given me a lifelong vendetta against arthropods, so there's that. ^_^)

I've not seen any of the three you list, though I do remember a few rants about Dinosaur Revolution. Interesting that all three were done about the same time! I suspect a lot of the work they put into their models fed into the live Dinosaurs in the Wild experience, which was AMAZING and hits the same modern-dino notes. (I vividly remember a field full of Dakotaraptor threat-displaying their tails and wings against an oblivious Alamosaurus.) Sadly, DitW has shut down now, but if it ever tours near to you, I heartily recommend it.

As the person with an actual terrestrial-stalking Quetzalcoatlus agent, I think I'm most intrigued by Flying Monsters; I might see if I can figure out a way to watch it in 3D...

hS

Also: aaaaaaaAAAAAA? ;a;

...ow? I know that the ultimate price is a thing wizards are called on to pay, some times, but... ow. Kaitlyn writes it well, I'm tearing up even on re-reading.

(And I might be working on October's vacation and gathering report in Young Wizards metaphor. Stay tuned.)

I've considered it before, but this seems like a perfect time to actually do it. {= ) This seems fairly simple to use and therefore difficult to mess up. I'll probably set up a Flower account for it to run on, like one of the janitors. They're fun.

Re. the rest: Great! I've been converted to the joy of offline editing with Notepad++ myself, so it's good to hear that works well. Maybe this is a good time to actually move the Lost Tales, and maybe even Neshomeh's Archive, too. Especially if I get a FittoniaBot (or something) to help out with the tedious part. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Though given how many times links to my stuff have changed, I'm sure half of them are wrong anyway. ^_~

Neocities is actually really comfortable to use! The dashboard is set up pretty much like a Windows folder, and you can either edit files in there (their editor has a green-on-black mode, which feels very 80s-movie-hacker), or upload them from your computer. Uploads will automatically overwrite previous versions, and it all happens fast. Webs was taking most of a minute to move to a sub-folder; Neocities is just as fast as the computer.

Bottom line: I've finally started testing changes on an offline version, because it's now really easy to put them onto the live site afterwards.

The green... I know, I know. :-/ But. It's currently Huinesoron Green, aka <font color="Huinesoron">, and that amuses me too much to change just yet.

I probably will at some point, though, 'cause it is pretty bright. The colour is CSS, so at least it'll be quick to switch.

hS

I have an idea for it in my head (I think you pretty much spelt it out, actually), but they take a fair amount of energy to actually craft. I do intend to create it, though. :)

... I swear, if that idea makes Agent Kaitlyn drag Agent hS off to the Natural History Museum, you will be making an extremely baffled cameo.

hS

I actually always intended to have a table of contents; I just... didn't get round to it. I've fixed it now, and added the all-important last page (or at least, last that non-wizards can see...).

As for the layout - broken how? It's deliberately designed to pare itself down to a single column, which works perfectly on my phone. The top and bottom bars get slightly messed up, but the main body works pretty much as intended.

hS

But we very much prefer you to get one. More about editing the wiki here, under "Helping Out". Creating a wiki account also gives you a user page (User:YourUsername) where you may tell something about yourself, so that we can look you up if we don’t remember what you told us already.

Aaaand I forgot one selfish thing. It would be nice to credit your beta readers near the disclaimer or in an author’s note at the end of the story. Actually, you should have added this early, to have it beta read too (seeing my name misspelled in a beta credit isn’t fun, and that actually happened).

HG

...baka.

The Eberron Artificer had a certain charm none of the UA versions have, mostly because it meshed well with the setting. I also enjoyed its extreme versatility, and the amazing synergy of the warforged (effectively a playable magic item) and the Artificer (the magic item god). I played a warforged fighter, and I tag-teamed with the Artificer in the party to great effect. I once wrestled a dragon.

It really do be like that sometimes, though. =]

Content Warning: SELF-HARM, BLOOD, TORTURE REFS

---

Sander Truman: There are those that think that a full plate harness makes the wearer slower than an arthritic snail carrying very heavy shopping. This is not so, and Sander is only too happy to teach them the error of their ways. It's still very tough, though, which suits him just fine. The armour itself is made in a style recognizable to an observer from our world as Italian white armour, but with some notable differences. His helmet looks more like an English-style three-barred lobster-tail helmet; its open face trades protection for visibility, a far more valuable asset for an unmounted adventurer in the Grass Sea. The gorget of his armour is rather thicker than normal, perhaps to protect against vampires. The pauldrons are unique in that they are asymmetrical: the left pauldron is large and having a raised ridge to aid face protection, while the right is more of a rerebrace, composed as it is of close-fitting separate bands that let the wearer's right arm be more mobile. The cuirass, or combined breast- and backplate, closes at the side in a modern style rather than at the back, as is more common in cheaper harnesses made for the rank and file of, say, large cavalry organizations. The fauld and tassets hang over a mail skirt, as does the culet or bum-plate. It's not vital, I just like the term bum-plate. The cuisses and greaves are single pieces of thick steel, with the knees covered by articulated banded poleyns that connect greave to cuisse; a thing of note about the poleyns is that each one's outermost plate has had something snapped off it and the subsequent mark filed down. Finally, since he is unmounted, he doesn't wear sabatons, instead opting for thick chocolate-brown leather boots with mail sewn into them that come up to about mid-calf. Oddly for something as obviously expensive as a tailored plate harness, it's almost entirely free from decoration, with what little there is only visible in the right light due to its having been diligently and painstakingly filed off. Those who know Sander's history with the Outer Orders know why it was filed off, and what that decoration was in the first place; they're keeping schtum about it and so should you. In contrast to the burnished but plain steel armour, Forgiveness is a work of art. It's a two-handed greatsword made of what someone from our world would immediately recognize as Damascus steel, the flowing patterns within the metal obviously not hailing from the armouries of Meadowkeep, even those of master weaponsmiths who would otherwise have outfitted someone of Sander's rank within the Outer Orders. The most obvious indication of it being foreign to the Grass Sea, however, is its shape: it is a flammenschwert, its blade wavy almost to the point of looking like a giant, straight-bladed breadknife. The crossguard is wide and thick, and the sword features a pronounced ricasso with parrying hooks as seen in the picture linked. Only Sander knows why this beautiful instrument of killing is called Forgiveness, and he's not telling.

Faceclaim: David Threlfall in Midwinter of the Spirit (right)

Cassandra Jane: Where Sander is decked out in the armour of the Outer Orders and, by extension, of Balazebal the Last, Cassandra Jane wears the traditional garb of the Free Peoples. She wears a flannel short-sleeved tunic, mid-grey in colour and decorated with a pattern similar to our world's tartan; the pattern is in lighter greys and blacks, and a reasonable reference may be found here. It's pinned at the left breast with an ornate bronze brooch in the shape of a horseshoe, long the unofficial symbol of the Free Peoples. It's useful for letting the other bands recognise each other in the Grass Sea, otherwise there'd probably be a lot more infighting and accidental skirmishes. Over her tunic, she sports a heavily adapted and decorated buff coat, liberated as a trophy from a cavalry commander of an Outer Order. The once plain tan leather has been dyed pitch-black and decorated with shimmering hagflints - round flints with holes worn in them by the passage of time or some other strange force, each one a little portal to the Feywild - that are sewn into the sleeves and along the front like brass buttons on a Royal Order officer's smart red coat. She wears it open most of the time. Like so many woman warriors of the Free Peoples, Cassandra favours a baggy trouser; hers are a dark grey, the colour of a storm cloud. Her dark brown leather sword belts are worn at the waist, each featuring just one sword each, which is very unusual. Normally, warriors of the Free Peoples carry a few different daggers as well; a sword won't do against every opponent, particularly the plate mail of a Knight of the Last King. Her power, though, is not just with swords, but magic as well. Thus she uses twin blades named Oath and Promise that look like our world's smallswords, their dextrous nature and fine points making them ideal for channeling her magic. Her flowing movements and precise carving of runes into the air form spells that burn and blast and shatter, and it is these that have kept her band safe from the predations of the Outer Orders for years. The final part of note is her elaborate facepaint, done on the eve of battle to help her channel her power and her warrior spirit. It's picked out in an ash grey and is a quite complex design, giving her a hawklike appearance.

Faceclaim: Lee-Anne Liebenberg in Doomsday (here)

Young Cassie: Cassie is a devout priestess and worshipper of Olwyn, the queen of the dawn and enemy of death. While the Ever-King holds all faiths other than the worship of himself to be the utmost heresy, he reserves a special hatred for gods like Olwyn; Balazebal's power is derived from death, from the Black Veil that cuts this world away from others, and gods of healing from any pantheon are absolute anathema to the Veil. Thus was Young Cassie's underground sect arrested by the Outer Orders and taken to the White Rooms to be brutalized for a decade. Being in there honed her connection to Olwyn out of desperation, as she healed herself and the only family she'd ever known over and over again. Once out in the world again, the only way she could channel the power of her goddess was through her own suffering, so entangled were the two things in her head. Despite Olwyn herself trying to heal this poor girl, keeping her in the bloom of youth for eighty years now, Young Cassie cannot heal her mind; she merely heals others, and uses her blood and pain to do it. She wears a simple, sleeveless, unembroidered tunic dress that reaches to her knees. It's a pale grey in colour and seems far too thin and short to properly keep the cold out during the winter months. One peculiar note is that the dress is also backless; she removed the panel because it was just getting in the way of her scourging. Her lash is a homemade thing, a black leather handle attached to a sheaf of long pig-iron chains; it never leaves her hands, even when she's asleep, and yet still has no name. The heavy chains themselves are bad enough, but some enterprising soul sought to attach heavy iron cubes filled with lead to the ends. It's these that cause the real damage, and when she works herself into a frenzy of self-mortification, these cause the wounds that take her longest to heal. A day or two at most, despite the flying blood that flecks her gown and leaves the sides speckled with rust-coloured spots. She wears little else than this backless dress; only a baggy burlap hood with crude eye-holes hacked into the fabric. The hood is undyed brown cloth, but still manages to be red at the edges. Draw your own conclusions.

Faceclaim: Danielle Harris in Hatchet III (TW: blood)

Dr. Cassiopeia: The Doc's not just a wizard, she's a historian; a student of ancient lore with both a long memory and a gift for copying the contents of spellbooks while nobody's looking. As such, she wears the robes of a scholar of magic. These robes are reminiscent of our world's panling lanshan, the traditional robes of the Chinese imperial scholar-bureaucrat. The good Doctor's robes are a voluminous affair, with wide, hanging sleeves that trail two feet down. The whole affair gives her the appearance of some kind of sailing ship, especially when she's in a hurry. The robes themselves are a dark grey, with the collar, cuffs, and edges trimmed in a pale blue to represent her study of higher-order arcana. The robe's sleeves are delicately embroidered in pale blue with a pattern of elaborate spirals and knots, each one representing a different spell she has mastered. The knotwork reaches up to her shoulders. Her robe is fastened by a wide and very long broadcloth belt knotted about the waist; it's the same shade of blue as the robe's trim, and the trailing tails of the belt are pinned in place by a silver horseshoe brooch. Completing the look is her long dark hair pinned back in a fashionable style with small wire-rimmed spectacles on her face. Underneath her robe she wears a long-sleeved shift dress of black velvet; upon her feet she wears black button boots of soft, stitched leather, a far cry from the hobnailed boots of her compatriots among the Free Peoples. Eladrin always were ones for the touch of class...

Faceclaim: Embeth Davidtz in Matilda (You knew who this was gonna be from the film title. Also bung some pointy ears on.)

The Witch of the Heath: First things first: the Witch is a firbolg. She's eleven feet tall. She's not exactly overburdened with clothing options. Still, she cuts quite a shambolic figure even by those low, low standards. Her pile of thick, curly hair spills down to the hollow of her back and has the same dark green colour as an old oak leaf. Her clothes are patched and mended and smell like dirt and growing things, which is probably to be expected considering her occupation as a druid. She wears an enormous grey cloak, held on with a clasp made not of metal but living wood, complete with leaves and berries sprouting from it. The thing is simple homespun cloth in sufficient quantity to act as a tent for anyone of conventional human size. It also features a hood, though when she wears it she looks like a pile of boulders with a load of vines hanging off them. Underneath, she wears a simple dark brown smock dress that's absolutely festooned with pockets, patches, and pouches of interesting stuff. It's worrying just how much stuff she has on her person at any given time, from old bits of string to interesting mushrooms to spell components to waterskins the size of a lamb that smell suspiciously of really, really strong booze. In similar vein, she carries around an enormous backpack full of... well, full of the things that won't fit in any of her pockets or pouches. On her feet are enormous gumboots that look like they'd be able to survive a direct hit from a ballista, and on her front is a heavy-looking leather apron with several arrows stuck in the front pocket. Finally, there's her staff Long Walk, which (as covered in the intro post for the party) is a huge slab of bog-oak from the marshy up-country of the Reaches. Fourteen feet long before we even get to the enormous granite hagstone lashed to the top with thick sisal rope, it's covered in so many charms, fetishes, and totems of magical power that it practically constitutes a flail, or possibly a shop. Given the size of the portal into the Feywild she's carrying around on the top of her staff, some might consider it overkill to have even more sources of power. Those people have never had to organize a fighting retreat from an entire Outer Order of heavy cavalry intent on butchering everyone in your band. A lot of blood was spilled that day.

Faceclaim: Jessie Cave in Various Harry Potter Films I'm Not Sure Where This Still's From Probably Half-Blood Prince (Except, y'know, a firbolg.)

CJ: CJ's outfit was already described in their intro post, with their mix of greys, blacks, and reds. They did name their sword, though. It's a rapier, a proper cup-hilted design but with the long blade in the style of our world's espada ropera, the Renaissance progenitor of what we call a rapier. The hilt appears at first glance to be wrapped in red-painted eelskin, but upon closer inspection the wrap doesn't look like it came from any kind of animal found in the Grass Sea. And there's some capital-W Weird Stuff in the Grass Sea. Much like Cassandra Jane's blades, CJ uses it to help cast their spells; unlike Cassandra Jane, however, they aren't using it to draw signs in the air. Instead, it's there as part of the presentation, part of the show needed to make the magic happen and channel the madness inside their soul into something tangible, or at the very least productive. A lot of people wonder why the people in the League of the Weald, especially people like Sander who normally suffer fools like CJ about as gladly as they would a dose of galloping syphilis, but those people haven't seen CJ backed into a corner. Their pact tome appears in the form of a long scroll that seems to go on far longer than the size of the case would imply, it rolls out, and then all bets are off. The many-angled magic of the warlock's patron is unpredictable, yes, but they've managed to rip apart an entire squadron of heavily-armoured knights in one single gibbering moment of squamous horror. Sander knows a thing or two about needing time to come to terms with a new reality, and sees them with compassion as well as exasperation at their cringe-inducing antics outside of battle. This is evidenced by Sander being the only person aside from CJ who knows that their rapier is named Volunteer, and who knows why.

Faceclaim: Fairuza Balk in The Craft. (Presumably addressing her memories, her patron, or both.)

---

So, that's the costume porn for this set. I tried to have a themed colour scheme - grey - mixed with an additional colour representing their relationship to my own mental health. Sander, my protective streak, gets white. Cassandra Jane, my love of wordplay, gets silver. Young Cassie, my self-destructive tendencies, gets rust-orange. Dr. Cassiopeia, my trivia memory, gets blue. The Witch of the Heath, my desire for growth, gets brown. CJ, my dramallama tendencies, gets black.

I hope these are of interest and use to anyone who reads them.

Link here: https://pyx-2.pretendyoure.xyz/zy/game.jsp#game=25

Password is: Brrr!

Because yeah, the temperature here in Chicago is currently -12 with a wind chill that makes it feel like -40, give or take. Half the city is shut down, and my layers have layers.

Just a reminder, in-game chat does not work, but please consider hanging out with us in the PPC Discord's dedicated CAHQ subchannel. It's fun!

~Neshomeh

I haven't encountered any issues on my end just clicking around; it looks pretty good to me. I will agree with Thoth though that the images you have for the Young Wizards shorts should probably come with text as well; it took some guesswork on my part to figure out whose was whose.

(...Also, did you ever do a magic circle for Mirror, Mirror? I can't remember...)

Mars was good and made me smile, as did the dinosaurs one. I'd love to see Huinesoron go to a museum with lots of fossils (and weird out anyone within earshot exclaiming over them). :P