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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • ‘Power Kill’ by John Tynes

    It’s a meta RPG. Basically, after you wrap your session of D&D, where the players raided a dungeon, killed all the kobolds and hauled up some loot, you start your session of Power Kill.

    The players, as their new Power Kill identities, are gathered together in a group therapy session. There the DM, as the counsellor, walks them through the horrific series of crimes that resulted in their being institutionalized; how they - apparently in a delusional fugue state - entered an apartment building and moved from room to room slaughtering the occupants and looting any valuables they could find before leaving and attempting to sell most of their haul at a nearby pawn shop.

    But don’t worry… We’re here to make you better.

    Note: This also works with a tonne of other games; VtM, Cyberpunk Red, any superhero game, Call of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies… It’s completely system agnostic, but provides wildly different experiences depending on what you bolt it onto.









  • Even better than that is Siteground’s absolutely abysmal support system.

    In order to access support they force you to type your question into their chatbot first. This is not optional. It’s the only way to get support.

    Fools that we are, we actually tried the solution the chatbot offered. This resulted in a good amount of time wasted looking for settings that didn’t exist, because the solution was total bullshit. They claim they’ve customized this thing to give helpful outputs, but it’s clearly just ChatGPT with a custom prompt.

    When we finally spoke to an agent I pointed this out and they responded with the stock “You should always double check the output of AI” line.

    DOUBLE CHECK WITH WHOM, YOU MOUTH BREATHING MORON? THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL FUCKING SUPPORT CHANNEL. YOU LITERALLY DIDN’T GIVE ME ACCESS TO ANY OTHER KIND OF SUPPORT UNTIL I USED THE CHATBOT FIRST, SO WHERE IN THE ACTUAL FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DOUBLE CHECK THE OUTPUT?

    Is it with a customer service agent? Is that what you’re saying?! That I should ignore whatever it tells me, wait until I can talk to a representative and then do whatever they say instead? Because if that’s the case, WHY IN THE FUCK ARE YOU FORCING EVERYONE TO TALK TO THE BOT FIRST??!!!

    Absolutely fucking asinine idiocy. Anyway, don’t use Siteground, they fucking suck.





  • The game does a really good job of backfilling information as you need it. Hover your mouse over any highlighted word and it’ll give you a short wiki entry. It’s a very approachable version of the setting.

    The big stuff to grok right out of the gate is really just this:

    • The Imperium of man is explicitly fascist. They’re not the good guys, but no one else is either. There are good people within this world, but there’s no “Hero” faction. Everything you see extolling the virtues of humanity in the setting is just imperial propaganda and hagiography, and you’ll pretty quickly start to see that play out within the game.
    • You’ve pretty much nailed how Rogue Traders work. They basically act as the frontier of the Imperium, to the point of being allowed to colonise whole worlds, which they then own. Each Rogue Trader family is basically a noble house.
    • The Adeptus Mechanicus understand the how, but not so much the why. So, they know how to repair a generator, but they believe that the process involves channeling the “motive force” through the wires. Most of what they do is carefully practiced methodology wrapped up in ritual. This isn’t true across the board however; at the higher levels of the mechanicus you do get people who actually know how to do real science. They’re just very rare. It’s mostly the guys who are like 10,000 years old.
    • As mentioned by others, the big foundational thing is the Horus Heresy. Half of the space marine legions turned to the worship of the gods of Chaos, and tried to overthrow the emperor. It’s kind of both super important, and actually pretty irrelevant. Like, there are something like 40 fiction books detailing every moment of the heresy, but it’s impact on the setting now mostly just boils down to “This is why the emperor is a corpse on life support and why there are evil space marines.”
    • Because of the warp, a realm where the line between imagined and real ceases to exist, there’s a lot of “Well I guess this might as well be magic” in the setting. Gods are real. Demons are real. People with the ability to wield magical powers are real; they might be called sorcerers and witches, or they might be called “psykers” depending on who you talk to, but it’s all the same stuff; pulling power from the warp to alter reality. This “magic” underpins a lot of the setting. People with warp abilities are necessary for long range communication and FTL travel.

    If you’re familiar with Dune or Foundation you’ll notice that the setting borrows liberally from both properties, which give you some solid points of reference to draw from.