#campaign: the devil's gambit

[amulet-of-the-drunkard]

Dunno Memes out of Context

[thesevenseraphs]

Building a Viable Future in Destiny 2

TL;DR

Destiny 2 is too large to efficiently update and maintain.

The size and complexity of the game are also contributing to more bugs and less innovation.

Instead of building a Destiny 3 and leaving D2 behind, each year, we are going to cycle older, less actively played content out of the live game and into what we’re calling the Destiny Content Vault (DCV).

This will allow us to add to and support D2 for years, including the three new annual expansions we announced today, starting with Beyond Light this fall.

The DCV will include all content from Destiny 1 and anything that cycles out from Destiny 2.

We will bring back (or “unvault”) activity and destination content from the DCV each year.

Unvaulting starts in D2 Year 4, with the Cosmodrome coming back, as well as its three strikes and the return of the Vault of Glass raid.

The primary D2 content leaving the game and going into the DCV this fall are the destinations – Mars, Io, Titan, Mercury and Leviathan – and their supported activities.

There will be new ways to earn the Exotics originally linked to content that has entered the DCV.

When Beyond Light ships, the Director will have the following destinations:

Europa (new)

Cosmodrome (unvaulted) 

Moon 

Tangled Shore 

Dreaming City 

European Dead Zone 

Nessus

This approach allows us respond to player feedback more rapidly, enable more innovation, and will keep Destiny 2 and your characters thriving for years to come

.More details to come soon and throughout the year.

Building a Viable Future in Destiny 2

Earlier today, we laid out a vision for Destiny's future, built right inside of Destiny 2. A future where we maintain your characters, accounts, and continuity with our game systems and build on each of them for years. This fall ushers in a new era in Destiny's journey, launching off a trilogy of expansions where your Guardians will explore the true nature of Light and Dark:

Put plainly, we are investing in Destiny 2 for years to come. But to continue your Guardian’s journey and deliver on this roadmap, we need to make some changes to our ever-growing world so it can flourish.  

THE LIMITS OF GROWTH

Over the past couple months, we’ve mentioned the problems that come with maintaining a game the size of Destiny 2; and we’ve said that it cannot grow infinitely. After three years of non-stop growth, the scope and complexity of Destiny 2 has ballooned to unprecedented scale.

As of this writing, Destiny 2 features nine destinations, 40 story missions, 54 adventures, 42 Lost Sectors, 17 strikes, 31 PvP maps, 12 one-off special activities (like Menagerie or Zero Hour), seven raids, six Gambit arenas, three dungeons, many, many quests, patrols, public events, and of course, thousands of associated rewards. All of that, plus hundreds of game systems which layer on top of that content.

This unrelenting growth has resulted in a game that requires players to download up to 115GB to play, as well as huge patches tied to frequent updates. And those numbers are rising rapidly, as we’ve been adding approximately 25GB of content each year to Destiny 2 since launch. Those sizes not only stress hard drive capacity but also push the limits of patching capability. It also makes the time to generate a stable update for the game after all content is finalized, tested, and ready to go balloon to literal days instead of hours.

Worse still, that 115GB includes a lot of content that isn't relevant anymore – and can't remain relevant – as we evolve the world and introduce new experiences that will take center stage instead. For example: Warmind’s campaign represents only 0.3% of all time played in Season of the Worthy and yet the Warmind Expansion accounts for 5% of our total install size. This dramatic imbalance between player engagement and overall cost to maintain is found in a lot of our legacy content.

IMPACT ON THE LIVE GAME

Maintaining that much content in perpetuity slows down our ability to update the game with fresh experiences, reduces our ability to innovate, and delays our reaction to community feedback. The test surface alone is massive, to say nothing about how it impacts our designers, artists, and engineers trying to make cool new stuff every day under the weight of the crushing complexity of our scale.

Unfortunately it also means that we sometimes ship content that doesn’t meet the quality bar we’ve set for ourselves and that our players have come to expect. Recent examples are the issues with Felwinter’s Lie quest or when we had to perform our first-ever rollback of player progress due to a bug.

Our ambition is for Destiny 2 to be the best Action MMO in the world and that means being far more agile and nimble than we are today. But the simple fact is that our game's size and complexity prevents us from improving Destiny as fast as we – and you – would like.

THE “DESTINY CONTENT VAULT”

With Destiny 1, we solved the “ever expanding, exponential complexity” problem by making a sequel in Destiny 2. We left behind all of Destiny 1’s content and many of the features players grew to love. We believe now that it was a mistake to create a situation that fractured the community, reset player progress, and set the player experience back in ways that took us a full year to recover from and repair. It’s a mistake we don’t want to repeat by making a Destiny 3. We don't believe a sequel is the right direction for the game and for the past two years we have been investing all of our development effort into new content, gameplay, and new engine features that directly support a single evolving world in Destiny 2.

To create a sustainable ecosystem where the world can continue to evolve in exciting ways, and where we can update the game more quickly, we're going to adopt a new content model that we're calling the

Destiny Content Vault (DCV)

. Each year, usually at the expansion boundaries, we will cycle some destination and activity content out of the game (and into the DCV) to make room for new experiences.

The first cycle of Destiny 2 content going into the DCV begins this fall, with the appearance of the Pyramid ships in Season of Arrivals and the Beyond Light expansion, which we revealed today. Those events will usher in dramatic changes to the Destiny universe, affecting characters, destinations, and Guardians for years to come.

To set a new maintainable foundation for the game this fall and to create room for Beyond Light and the future roadmap, the first Destiny 2 deposit into the DCV will be larger than those to come in the future.

CURATING THE VAULT

Content that goes into the Destiny Content Vault may return in the future, altered (if necessary) to fit the new state of the universe. Furthermore, we consider all Destiny 1 and 2 destinations and activities part of the new DCV and we’re going to be pulling from that archive – revisiting some of the most interesting places in Destiny’s history – from now onwards. It’s why the original Destiny 1 Raid – the Vault of Glass – will be returning to Destiny 2 in Year 4.

Going forward, our explicit goal will be to try to keep the scope and scale of Destiny 2 at a relatively consistent size in order to increase our agility and to be able to properly support and maintain the game. Over the course of each year, the game’s content scope will grow as we add new destinations and activities in our expansions and Seasons. As we approach the next expansion, another cycle of content will go into the DCV to make way for a new influx of destinations and activities.

We will always do our best to give early notice of what's being cycled into the DCV, to help you and your friends plan around how you want to complete your collections and build up your account before the new Destiny year starts. The vast majority of content we choose to vault will also be from destinations and activities that have been free for all players for several months prior to their departure. For example: the Curse of Osiris campaign, which has been free since Shadowkeep launched in October 2019, and part of the Destiny 2 experience since December 2017, will go in the DCV later this year.

YEAR 4 DESTINY CONTENT VAULT PREVIEW

Here is an early preview of some of what’s going into the Destiny Content Vault (DCV) and what’s returning in Year 4.

RETURNING FROM THE DCV

On September 22, 2020:

Cosmodrome as a selectable, explorable destination (but not yet at full Destiny 1 parity on 9/22).

Note: We’re looking to leverage Cosmodrome’s initial return to expand the new Guardian origin story to the world of Destiny. Veteran players will be able to experience that story as well.

Cosmodrome’s Will of Crota strike will also be added to the strikes playlist for all players.

During Season 13:

Cosmodrome will be fleshed out to roughly Destiny 1 Year 1 parity.

Cosmodrome’s The Devil’s Lair and Fallen S.A.B.E.R. strikes return.

During Year 4:

Destiny 1’s first raid, Vault of Glass, returns.

HEADING TO THE DCV

On September 22, 2020:

Io, Titan, Mercury, Mars, and Leviathan will be cycled out and no longer be accessible.

This includes all PvE activities (including campaigns) on those destinations.

OTHER KEY YEAR 4 DETAILS:  

There will be three raids playable this fall, including a new one set in the Deep Stone Crypt on Europa as part of the Beyond Light expansion.

There will be new ways to earn Exotics originally tied to destinations and activity content that have entered the Destiny Content Vault.

Available strikes will be based on a pool of possible strikes from active destinations. When a destination goes into the DCV, so too will its strikes.

The PvP Map playlist will remain a curated ‘best of’ mixture of maps from Destiny 1 and 2.

Gambit and Gambit Prime are being merged into a single mode, with their original armor visuals available to earn from the Drifter.

To be clear, the DCV does not apply to any weapons and armor in a player's inventory or vault. The DCV is about activities and destinations. We know you will have a lot of questions about how this will work. We will share more updates about our content plans throughout the summer. This includes a detailed overview of everything changing via patch notes, extensive DPS articles that will help break down what’s changing and when, as well as lots of opportunities for you to ask us questions along the way.

A NEW BEGINNING

This fall, we will begin delivering on the future of Destiny by making way for new adventures, locales, and stories dreamed up by our creative team, and forging the truly evolving world that it was always meant to be. These changes allow us the freedom to finally weave an overall experience for the Destiny universe that can truly live, starting with Beyond Light. We can now fit puzzle pieces we haven’t been able to pick up since the beginning of the original Destiny – including the true nature of the Darkness and Light and how such power will change you as a Guardian. We can now bring some of the greatest experiences in Destiny to the forefront of the current game alongside new ones to come.

The past six years, we’ve seen the Destiny universe grow and our community along with it. We want our quality of service to grow in kind, to be able to react to community feedback quicker, to innovate more often, and to continue to tell new stories with your characters. We’re excited to continue that journey with you.

– Destiny 2 Dev Team

[zippdementia]

Part 96 Alignment May Vary: A Farewell to Friends

If you’re reading this post after having read all 95 other posts, bless your heart. This is truly the final post, the last one in the Alignment May Vary series. If you are just stumbling upon this randomly, you may want to go back to at least the previous post “The End of All Things” as this is a direct continuation of the final battle described there. Also, many previous posts are linked there to help give at least some context to the encounter. You may even want to go back to the beginning and read the whole epic story. It’s the internet’s most massive and complete campaign journal!

This ends with the final lines of our campaign. I will not say farewell then, so I will say it now. The goal of this journal was to bring some small measure of the enjoyment and wonder we felt making this story and playing this game for four years to you. I hope it achieved that, and thank you for reading.

The Destruction of All Things

Meteors, the debris of a hundred destroyed worlds, or maybe worlds that had yet to be destroyed in this timeline, rained down upon the Maakengorge tower, breaking it into dust, revealing the infinity of space behind it. Imoaza tried to pull a barrier around them, made of the weave, but the weave did not obey her here. It did not even exist here. Nazragul had cut its strings. Imoaza fell under a maelstrom of heat and rock. Milosh survived a little longer, smashing the rocks with Haggemoth’s forge hammer, Haggemoth’s greatest weapon. If he could only get a clear shot on Nazragul, he thought he might be able to unleash Primus’ power on him and end this now. But Nazragul himself was engulfed in flame and Milosh drew close only to be burned and fall away into ash.

Carrick was the last to struggle on. Imoaza’s fly spell died with her, and yet momentum continued to carry him towards Nazragul. He raised his blade, knowing he would only have time for a single decisive strike. Then from the flames a skeletal hand shot out and gripped his wrist, holding him. Nazragul leaned forward, his face a grinning skull.

“I win,” he said and held Carrick as the meteor swarm crashed through them both, sending Carrick to join his companions in death.

Darkness surrounds the players. Wonderfully, they think they have lost this fight. But in reality, they have won. They brought Nazragul down to the point where he had to use his most devastating attack in a desperate gambit to destroy them forever. It ripped apart his body, as well, but he can regenerate. The players cannot. Or so he thinks.

In fact, this would have been the end of the party, except for a particular deity they helped some time ago. Now, that deity appears to them on the border of life and death. Asmodeus, lord of the Devils, and his new queen, Alyss, come to the players in purgatory. When the call comes from darkness as to who would claim the souls of the players, it is Asmodeus who answers. And then, having laid his claim, Asmodeus grants their souls new life, a return to their bodies, each of them at a single hit point.

“This is my boon, my one and only repayment for the service you rendered me. You returned me to my body and my realm, now I do the same unto you,” Asmodeus says.

“Save my daughter. Bring her soul peace,” Alyss says.

And then they go back.

A Decision Made

The players return to a world destroyed, a universe ending, a time that could come to pass, but hasn’t yet. A space between time. And in this space Nazragul sits. The body of Abenthy that he wore is destroyed. What squats on the last remaining piece of ground in that floating nothingness is a shadow, a whirling of darkness. 

And now, in front of it, stand Carrick, Imoaza, and Milosh.

“N-nooo....” the dark shape mutters. “Y-y-you are a-a-ll... d-dead...” it can manage no more. But its power is growing by the second, its body repairing, rebuilding.

There is no time to waste.

“One of us must be the shield, the sacrifice,” Carrick says. “We must take on the soul of Primus.” He holds up the Surveyor’s stone, containing the spark that can link Primus to one of them.

“It’s me,” Milosh says. “I’ve already lived a life. This is all borrowed time. It is what I was meant to do.”

“But I have lived a life as well,” Carrick begins to protest.

“No,” Milosh says, the half-orc shaking his head somberly. “You never got to live your own life. The Surveyor took it over from you when you were still young. It needs to be me.”

Except, it doesn’t, Imoaza realizes. It doesn’t need to be any of them. She is peering at the weave, magic made tangible to her special abilities. And in that weave she sees a line that has not always been there. It is like a silver thread, allowing for a different path. She recognizes the lifeforce in that thread as having belonged to Ruz. Ruz, who used her wish spell to save everyone at the Maakengorge, who has become part of the weave itself in order to work that magic. Now, the last remnants of that powerful wish are there for Imoaza to use. She grips it, and instantly she can see everything, the way the weave ties together not just magic, but the whole universe. She pulls on those threads carefully, for they are delicate and she could easily do more damage than good. She pulls, and three souls emerge from the darkness that is the thing in front of them, the thing Nazragul became, the Three who rule as One.

Nazragul is the first soul and this soul Imoaza chooses to be their shield. This will forever erase him and Primus from existence, which will also destroy Chaos. But even after this, Imoaza has a little of Ruz’s power left to use. She can, she realize, bring one of the other two souls back to life: either Karina or Abenthy. They are fading fast though and the decision must be made.

Abenthy and Karina stand now before the group, and I ask their players (who now play Milosh and Imoaza respectively) to give them voice, to have a conversation between them about what choice they should make. And so the players roleplay the moment as Karina and Abenthy get to see each other one last time. 

“I am sorry,” Karina said, seeing Abenthy again, seeing his grim mission lifted from him. “I am sorry I could not save you.”

“It was never your fault,” Abenthy says back. He kneels and places his sword on the ground then, turns to Imoaza. “It is time. Rebalance the scales.”

This moment is too much for all of us at the table, and the tears start again. Also, Imoaza cannot decide which of them to save. The player ends up having to roll a die to decide for her, it is too heavy a burden to take full responsibility for.

And the die decides it is to be Karina.

And so, in the final moments they have before the souls retwine and the body of the Three in One rises again, the deed is finished. Milosh opens his chest panel and the power of the Inevitability of Justice emerges from him to engulf and destroy forever the souls of Nazragul and Abenthy, as well as Primus and Chaos. Karina is reborn into her body and lands next to them, naked. Carrick wraps his cloak around her.

Then, as the final wave of power leaves Milosh, the space time that they are in collapses. They are rushed back to the world they left behind.

They return to a world saved.

The portal opens, the mountain collapses. The four emerge in a sea of white snow, wondering if their actions doomed their friends outside, who may have been buried when the mountain was destroyed. But then the ships of the Githyanki land around them, and there is a great cheer, for the armies were loaded onto the ships, and their friends saved. The last Surveyor approaches Carrick and Milosh and tells them they are both free now. Everyone is free, free of the creators, Primus and Chaos, to form their own future. All bonds are broken, except those kept in the name of honor and of love. The Surveyor then lays down in a patch of snow and closes his eyes for the last time, telling them all to seek their destiny wherever they feel it is best found.

And so the companions do. Each player makes a choice as to what their character does next, and we get some wrap ups on some of the NPCs, as well.

Carrick speaks to Roger Krisp, saying he would like to join the Green Company to keep a promise he made to Aldric. Roger gives him the Anope and lets anyone who wishes to follow him do so. For Krisp, he has spent decades trying to return from Hell back to Faerun and he takes his second in commands, the adventurers who long ago trialed the Tomb of Horrors (and died doing so) and buys a new ship: the Mankey Bastard Mk II (AKA the Mankier Bastard). He returns to sailing the seas.

Carrick swears his services to Aldric’s daughter, Sasha, and says that he will be off to sail the galaxies with the Green Company to do good throughout the universe.

Imoaza has responsibilities here on Faerun. She approaches the Yuan Ti, who are unsure of what to do next. They ask her who they will be conquering next.

“No one,” she tells them, knowing this is a moment that will define the rest of her people’s existence. “We will find a new way, a better way. The way of the dragon. The way of peace.” And Hecate is the first to bow and swear fealty to her mother, now the mother of all Yuan Ti, Imoaza. 

For Karina, this return to life is full of emotion. Verrick and her embrace. Verrick’s bonds that made him a Death Knight are broken, and he is able to resume a life with her. Karina also greets many old companions whom she has not seen in generations. Roger Krisp, Daymos, and Jade. Jade in particular Karina is overwhelmed to see, as she felt responsible for her loss to Nazragul in the first place.

Milosh’s chest plate is gone, his full body finally restored to him as a last act of Primus. He is given many choices now. Carrick says he could have a place among the Green Company, or if not, he would be happy to find his home planet of Eberron and drop him off there to resume his old life. Breathgiver the shaman offers him the Blackstaff, saying he could stay and rule Waterdeep, help rebuild Baldur's Gate, Ottoman’s docks, and the other cities which were destroyed by the Tarassque. Milosh thanks everyone and says he will decide in the morning.

But in the morning he is gone, and no one is quite sure where he left to.

Epilouge: A Farewell to Friends

This scene takes place 16 years after the final battle. The player characters are asked to come to Karina’s academy on the old island of Thudd, now called Oasis. It used to be a school for adventurers, trying to train people to eventually face a darker world, in case Nazragul’s plan came to fruition. Now it is a school of knowledge and philosophy and healing magics.

Karina was old before the final batle, and though restored to her body, she still only had scant years left. She is now passing, and everyone has been called to honor her in her final hours and say goodbye.

Of the companions, we follow Carrick, who arrives with the Green Company in the Anope. He wears shining emerald armor under a green cloak. Under one arm, he holds a small, wrapped package. 

He finds some new additions to the school grounds. There is a hall named for Shando, one for Daymos, and one for Lee. And in the central plaza is a bronze statue of Abenthy, not as the final terrible thing he became, but as Karina remembers him at their first meeting, and their last. A noble paladin. On the plaque at the statue’s feet is inscribed the words: “Justice is Inevitable. Friendship Does not Die.”

“Swords are easy,” a familiar voice said behind Carrick. “Capturing the look in someone’s eyes? Now that’s hard.”

Carrick turned to see a smiling half-orc standing beside him, wearing a simple tunic.

“Milosh!” Carrick said and embraced his old companion. “Where have you been all these years?” he asked, once he had let him go.

“Learning the trade of blacksmith,” Milosh said. “It seemed an honest profession, and Karina agreed to let me stay on and keep my secret.”

“I would have thought you’d be ruling Waterdeep, or Baldur’s Gate, or out adventuring even. There is still always a place for you among the Green Company.”

“You are still riding with the company?”

“Mostly. I leave most of the running of it to Sasha. She has the knack for leadership. I have focused on teaching. I have created a new order of Paladins, based around the tenets of an old friend of mine who taught me some dear lessons when he was alive. The School of Remus.”

Milosh smiled and nodded. “There is much to be learned from old friends. Your offer is a kind one, but the night we defeated Nazragul, the Surveyor told us to seek our destiny where we felt it was most likely to be found. I realized then that I had spent more years than most people get to live fulfilling other people’s destinies, solving other people’s problems. I thought maybe it was time for me, for the first time in two lifetimes, to live a life for myself. I settled here with a wife and we have a child. I am living every day filled with a contentment that I thought was not mine to have.”

Carrick clasped his shoulder and smiled. “I have watched you go through pain and loss. It is good to see you gain something. Good to see you happy.”

“Have you seen Imoaza yet?” Milosh asked. Carrick shook his head. Milosh’s own smile softened, became a little sad. “I’ll take you to her.”

Together they walked into the main hall, the hall of Heroes, where a line of tapestries depicted famous events in the history of Faerun. Before one tapestry, which showed humans breaking free of Yuan Ti slavery in the days of yore, stood an old Yuan Ti Pureblood, her hair white, her skin wrinkled, one hand holding a quarterstaff to support her weight. On one shoulder fluttered a greying ball of fuzz, that chirped softly: “chi chu!”

“There’s a tapestry of us three,” the old Yuan Ti said. “In our final battle at the Jarlsberg. I think they went a little dramatic with me, though.”

“Imoaza?” Carrick asked. The Yuan Ti turned and nodded her greeting. She had always been reserved, Imoaza, and time had not changed that. But it also looked like she had aged seventy years in the fifteen since last they met.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Imoaza said. “All three of us cheated time when we left the Abyss and ended up back on Faerun. You two paid for it with your lives. This is now my price. I am not yet gone from this earth. Time has just caught up with me, at last.”

Carrick found his eyes watering. He wiped at them as discretely as possible, but Imoaza, who had always had the sharpest eyes of them all, of course noticed. “It is alright,” she said gently. “I have accomplished what I set out to do. My people will go on. They are not powerful, but they are stronger, and better. They walk the path of balance and of nature. We are farmers, gatherers, druids. Peace suits the Yuan Ti. We take to it as seriously and studiously as we took to war.”

Carrick nodded, then said, “I have something for you.” He held out the small package. “I made a special stop at an old favorite of yours on the way back to Faerun.”

Imoaza unwrapped the package to reveal a host of sweet pastries, beautiful in their presentation, the smell of cinnamon and baked sugars rising into the air. Imoaza giggled like a little girl. “Air pastries!” she exclaimed, and reached into the bag, tearing off a piece of one of the gooey rolls, leaving strands of maple training in its wake, then popped it into her mouth and chewed, her grin growing wider.

“I’m sad they did not make a tapestry for that place,” she said.

A door at the end of the hall opened then, and an attendant of the school hailed them.

“It is time,” the attendant said.

The players enter through the door to find themselves in a grand room with pillars open to the outside, looking out upon a fabulous view of falling waterfalls and green trees, maybe one of the greatest signs of change that Karina ever brought to the world, her successful changing of the Desert of Thud into the Oasis. There is a bed here as well and on it lies Karina, her white hair braided, a cool breeze blowing through the room caressing her brow.

Many people are gathered here to say goodbye.

Daymos and Jade are there, and with them Reeves the Quasit. The brother and sister hold hands, and both are crying. Karina had witnessed both of their deaths, but also their rebirths.

Hazelwood, Ruz’s daughter and the inheritor of the power of Esheballa, has come on behalf of the Changelings whom Kaerina once sheltered when no one else would. 

Milosh and his family stand in the back of the room, his half-elf wife and child both holding his hands, hands which once were literally guns, now which create instead of destroying. 

The Green Company is in attendance along with Carrick. Aside from Carrick, they did not know Karina personally, but they have learned of her deeds and come now to be her honor guard as she passes. 

Imoaza is the only from the Yuan Ti here to say goodbye. Hecate was left to run the Yuan Ti kingdom in her absence. Imoaza uses her weave vision to see that Karina’s life is fading but she also sees the way that life has touched so many others. 

Captain Krisp comes, with the full crew of the Mankier Bastard, his new ship. He tells Karina he will name a new brand of his cereal in her honor. “Karina Krisps?” he mumbles, liking the ring of it. 

Immerstal the Red is present. Knick Knack comes in his fire form all the way from the Planet of Fire. A Red Wizard arrives, holding a framed portrait of Lhu Ee. Senator Nakir, once Karina’s Apprentice, arrives from Waterdeep, with Blackstaff Breathgiver. Traki's brother is here, as are many other elves, for Karina was a great ally to them. 

There are monks here, too, from Abenthy's old monastery, as well as the sister's of Celaenos, come to honor the one who saved Abenthy’s soul and to record this moment in time. 

Giants and kobolds and orcs and hobgoblins all arrive, those who repented after the final battle with Abenthy.

Most surprisingly, there are dwarves here: the distant descendants of Haggemoth’s line, who have heard of how their ancestor's soul was finally saved and their family line restored to honor. They are here to give thanks to those who helped that come to pass, which includes Karina.

And finally, there is Verrick, kneeling at Karina’s bedside, holding her hand. He does not know how long he might wander the earth without his love, and he cries to think of life without her. But he is also happy, for the life she lived and the time they were able to share. And he believes they will be reunited one day, even if only to rejoin the weave that souls are built from, and be knit together into a new story, a new life.

Karina looks around her, at all these varied people, all the lives she has touched. She squeezes Verrick’s hand. Then she closes her eyes, and smiles, and Karina who had once thought she would always be alone passes, surrounded by friends.

[raywritesthings]

Bird in a Storm 15/17

My Writing Fandom: Arrow Characters: Laurel Lance, Oliver Queen, John Diggle, Quentin Lance, Captain Stein, Lucas Hilton, Frank Pike, Moira Queen, Thea Queen, Roy Harper Pairing: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen Summary: The confrontation between the Hood and SWAT on the roof of the Winick Building goes differently, altering the course of Laurel’s career, relationships and efforts to save her city forever, the shockwaves of such an altered path making themselves felt throughout her family and friends. *Can be read on my AO3, link is in bio*

Laurel was still having trouble processing what had happened at the memorial.

On some level, she knew Tommy’s dislike of the Hood wouldn’t mean good things if he ever found out Oliver’s identity, but to hear the words that had come out of his mouth that day had been another thing entirely. Where had that boy with the devil-may-care smile gone? Had she done this to him?

Laurel wasn’t naive enough to assume she was the only reason for Tommy’s new outlook and attitude. Her friend had always had an anger under the surface for what had happened to his mother, what his father hadn’t been able to be for him. There wasn’t anything she could have done to change those things, and so she had let it be. But maybe that had been wrong. She and Oliver had failed to be there for him, no matter their reasons for it, and now he apparently didn’t want or need their help. Who did they have to blame for it but themselves?

She was tackling Oliver’s salmon ladder today. The nice thing about his setup down here was that there was plenty of new things for her to learn that weren’t in the classes she had taken in self-defense, from Ted or with Anita. She was going to keep learning whatever she could get access to, because if she couldn’t help her friend then she would do everything she could to be ready to help others.

Oliver and Diggle sparred down below on the mats. After giving her a demonstration and watching her get up onto the first rung by herself, Oliver had left her to it. She liked that about them. One good thing about the distance they had had the last few months and her suiting up on her own was that he’d already realized she could handle things. For her part, Laurel knew that if she couldn’t, he and John were ready and willing to help out.

Laurel breathed in and out once on the top rung, her legs swinging back and forth in a slow, controlled manner, before she prepared to head back down. A beep from the computers distracted her, even more so when Oliver called out a halt to Digg and headed over.

She exchanged a look with the other man before hurrying to get back down, almost missing the last rung with the bar. She grabbed her water and towel and walked over. 

“Something about Athena turn up?”

“No,” Oliver said with a frown. She could tell it was bothering him, the lack of information on this woman who had replaced them both as Tommy’s confidant. “It’s the worm I sent into the SCPD’s computer system.”

Laurel felt both eyebrows raise. “You infiltrated the police’s computers?”

“Not the first time we’ve hacked them,” Diggle informed her.

“In my defense, this time was on your father’s orders,” Oliver added. “He’s worried about corruption and asked me to look into things.”

She was torn between laughing or screaming. “Okay, so my father, who had me surrounded by a SWAT team for asking you to help me on a case… wants you to help him on a case.”

Oliver blinked. “Uh… yup.”

“I can’t believe him!” Okay, maybe the anger was winning out. “He is such a hypocrite!” Even if she was at peace with how her life turned out, it wasn’t like it had been fun to get shot with a rubber bullet and lose her job, all for the exact thing her father was doing right now. It wasn’t like she wanted those things to happen to him, too, just some acknowledgement that maybe she hadn’t been wrong to do it. That there was a need in this city for vigilantes.

That he might not be angry if he ever found out what she was doing now.

“Trouble is, looks like he’s right,” said Diggle, who had taken possession of the mouse and was clicking through some of the data this data worm of Oliver’s had been collecting. “Look at this stuff from Nudocerdo’s time. Missing or deleted files on police misconduct, no records of disciplinary action, which means they either didn’t discipline anybody or they don’t want people to know if an officer’s been disciplined.”

“Lucky for us, it looks like Nudocerdo’s personal devices were connected up to the police systems at some point before he was fired. The worm got into them, too. Let’s take a look at his campaign finances.”

Laurel stopped pacing in order to come stand at Oliver’s side. He rubbed a hand up and down her back once in a show of comfort which she appreciated, especially since she was sweaty so it couldn’t have been very pleasant.

“You seeing what I see?” John asked a minute later.

“Yep,” Oliver answered grimly. “Tempest.”

“And what is Tempest exactly?” Laurel asked.

Oliver blanched, and Diggle sighed and looked down. “We should’ve told you this…”

“Told me what?”

“The reason Oliver agreed to interrogating his mother as the Hood,” Digg stated. “It was cause we found out she’d recovered the Queen’s Gambit wreckage, and it proved the boat wasn’t destroyed in the storm. It was sabotaged.”

Laurel felt her mouth drop open. “Sara wouldn’t have died out there?”

“Not if the boat hadn’t been targeted, no,” Oliver said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She stepped back, trying to reconcile this was the anger and grief and the slow sense of a new normal she had been building for herself. Her sister had been murdered. Not intentionally — in fact, she probably hadn’t even been a thought in the perpetrator’s mind. But she could have come home. They could have had it out, the betrayal and all it had done. So much could have been different; maybe her whole life. Sara would have had a life.

“Laurel?” Oliver was hanging back, clearly unsure what he should do given the subject.

“It’s fine,” she said out loud, even if it wasn’t. But they were here to work. She could deal with her feelings in her own time. “What’s this got to do with Tempest?”

“It was the name of the shell company she used to pay to have the boat moved and stored somewhere. It’s been destroyed since,” John added before she could ask. “And it looks like Tempest also made regular contributions to Nudocerdo while he was Commissioner.”

“So he wasn’t just bad at his job, he was dirty,” Laurel concluded. “What about the other cops? The detectives, captains? How many of them can we tell are on the take?”

“I’ll have to comb through the files the worm grabbed. It’s gonna takes while,” Oliver said with a grimace. “I don’t think I can patrol tonight.”

He had gone out the last couple with her as she had been showing him her own method. Looking for crime as it happened rather than setting out for a predetermined target. Laurel couldn’t tell if he liked the imprecise nature of it or not, but she didn’t think he was saying this to get out of it.

“Maybe we could see if Felicity wants back in now that we know Tempest is still involved,” Diggle suggested.

“It’s not about Walter, so I don’t see why it would interest her,” Oliver replied. “And I’d rather not risk her feeling pressured.”

He’d been touchy about the amount of people who knew his identity and what they might do with it since the memorial. Laurel couldn’t blame him. It had to feel like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“It’s okay, I can do a solo one tonight.”

She started to walk over to her bag where she’d stored the black, gray and dark blue clothing she typically fought in, though Oliver called out to her.

“Laurel, are you gonna be okay?”

She looked back at him. “Yeah, Ollie. Just as soon as we figure out what Tempest really is and what they’re up to.”

Just how Mrs. Queen was mixed up with them? Was she Tempest or was she under their thumb? Laurel couldn’t get a read on Oliver or what he might be thinking about his mother. Did they need to question her again? And if they did, should Oliver really be the one in charge of it? She didn’t doubt he wanted the answers as much as she or John, but this was his mother. It would be hard for anything to think objectively in that situation.

She went into the back to change and headed out for the streets. Oliver had indeed upgraded her motorcycle, which had been quicker for him to do than the suit he claimed he was getting her custom made from a few different sources in order to avoid it being tracked. In some ways, she felt a little miffed that her version of things was being deemed inadequate, but Laurel knew that was pride over practicality. This was dangerous work, and it was better to have the best quality tools and materials available. 

And it wasn’t as if the stuff she had put together on her own was going totally to waste. She had kept the bike she had bought for cheap for her day job, which made getting to work quicker and also opened up the possibility for her to make deliveries. Pam had been delighted by the suggestion; a couple of her older customers couldn’t always find someone to drive them to the store, and this way new seeds, pots or plants could be delivered straight to them.

She refocused on the present as she came across a mugging, quickly driving off the attacker with the roar of her bike and her collapsible staff.

“Where were you trying to get to?” She asked the boy who had been held up. He was pale with dark blonde hair kept fairly long, sort of a bohemian-type.

“My apartment. It’s just up that way,” he said with a nod. “But thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Laurel kept up her patrol, sending a couple men running from a car parked on the street they’d been trying to jack. She was finding that with her swift approach on the bike, it tended to increase her intimidation factor. That or her reputation was growing. Maybe it was a little of both, and that thought made her grin. She had gotten her own police sketch, after all, she’d been amused to find out when John told her. That made her pretty official.

It also made her her dad’s problem to target. Assuming he was even doing that thing anymore. Dirty cops or no, this sort of thing he was doing with the Hood was so beyond what she ever would’ve thought him capable of.

Or what if it wasn’t? What if it was just another ruse, an attempt to lure Ollie into a trap? That sounded more like her father. He would never ask a vigilante for help; he’d deal with the dirty cops situation on his own. What had even caused him to realize it? Maybe he’d been making it up, only for Oliver’s computer virus to lend credence to it.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp whistle. Laurel glared at the mirror before catching sight of the red hoodie in its reflection. Her annoyance disappeared as she pulled the bike around and followed Roy Harper into an alley.

“Nice ride,” he commented. “Pretty sure it’s out of your price range.”

“Yes, well the Hood and I have come to an agreement of sorts.”

Roy’s eyes widened. “You’re not just working for him now.”

“We’re working together. I thought you’d be happy about this,” she remarked. “The more the Hood and I work together, the better chance I have of bringing you in on things.”

“Yeah, I mean, I do want in,” Roy agreed, scuffing his shoe on the ground. “But people need you here, you know? Stopping the small stuff. The things he doesn’t always notice.”

Laurel hesitated. She had heard more than once from people in the Glades that while they may have no objections to what the Hood did, that it wasn’t really reaching them where they lived. They weren’t exactly wrong, but there was so much about the situation they couldn’t know, that she and Oliver and John didn’t even fully know yet.

“I think he’s noticing more all the time,” she finally answered, which was the truth. Whatever her own indignation towards her father, Laurel couldn’t have imagined the Oliver of two months ago let alone last year getting involved with systemic corruption in their city’s police force. “But don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. And I did ask him about you. He’s thinking about it.”

“Thanks,” Roy said. “Guess I should get out of here before anyone spots me with you.” He pulled his hood down further over his eyes and slipped back out into the main street. Laurel sat back on the bike seat to wait a while before heading back out there herself.

Roy’s words remained on her mind, however. What did she look like to the people who had noticed her in the Glades, zipping around on her top-of-the-line bike? Some kind of sellout? As much as she appreciated Oliver giving her access to better equipment and gear, she didn’t want people to think she was losing sight of what she had set out to do.

“That’s really what people think about me?”

She jumped, one arm already pulling back to deliver a punch before her mind caught up to the familiar voice. Laurel blinked at Oliver in surprise. “I thought you weren’t coming out tonight.”

“I ended up showing John what to look for in the files. He said he could handle it.” Oliver walked closer to her. “He also thought I should see how you were really feeling about everything.”

Laurel sighed, leaning forward on the handlebars. “What do you want me to say? I already knew my sister was dead. Now I know someone was indirectly responsible. Are you ever going to ask your mother who?”

He looked down, the hood he wore hiding his eyes. “I should. I just… something has been off about her ever since I came home. And especially since we got the news about Walter. I guess I’ve been afraid to find out what that is. I already know my father wasn’t who I thought he was. If my mother…”

Laurel reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. In a way, she understood. After losing her mother all those years ago, she had been desperate to keep the peace with her father and probably put up with more warning signs than it was worth instead of forcing them both to acknowledge his problems. “Our parents are going to disappoint us at times. Sometimes in a bigger way than most people go through.” She doubted many people had to deal with their father using them as bait for a SWAT operation gone wrong, after all. “But it doesn’t mean the things you know about them suddenly stop mattering. Whatever else, your father loved you. Your mother loves you. And if you still want her in your life, I think you can make that happen. But ignoring the problem isn’t how to do it.”

He nodded with a sigh. “Soon as I help your father, I’ll take care of it.”

“You don’t have to do it alone.”

His lips pulled up in a half-smile. “Maybe not, but it isn’t exactly a part of your mission.”

“My ‘mission’, if we’re calling it that, is to help people. And you fall under that category,” she reminded him with a prod to his shoulder. “You’ve been doing things my way the last couple of nights. It’s only fair I return the favor. And that starts with my dad’s thing.” If he thought she was sitting on the sidelines while her dad got involved in all this, he had another thing coming.

Oliver was silent for a moment, which had her narrowing her eyes. “What?”

“Your father… he’s hoping by resolving this issue, it will mean the city won’t need people like you or me. That things can go back to normal.” He frowned. “But seeing how widespread the corruption is, everything with Tommy and my mother, I don’t know how it can.”

“And normal isn’t exactly a good thing,” Laurel pointed out.

They both looked up at the sound of a scream from what sounded a few blocks away. A depressingly normal sound in the Glades.

“No, it isn’t,” Oliver agreed grimly. He raised his bow and fired a grapple arrow. Laurel gunned the engine of her bike, and they each took off toward the sound.

Whatever came next in their personal lives, acting in the face of injustice had become their new normal. And as far as Laurel was concerned, that was definitely a good thing.

---

Quentin started in his chair early that morning when a phone in his desk drawer started buzzing. It was the vigilante phone, which meant he really shouldn’t answer it inside. He quickly stood, doing his best to avoid Hilton’s questioning look as he headed out of the bullpen and out into the back alley. He was lucky enough to find it free of anyone on their smoke break. Finally, he answered the call.

“Yeah?”

“I have the information you requested, Detective,” the archer’s modulated voice spoke. “When and where can I deliver it to you?”

He had a feeling the vigilante wouldn’t react well to an immediate request, considering how light it was outside. Harder to hide in the shadows when they weren’t nearly so deep. “Uh… tonight. Down by the docks. Eleven?”

“I’ll be there.” With that, the line disconnected.

Quentin let out a breath. Tonight. He would know just which members of the force he was part of were dirty and which weren’t. He could take the information to Pike — at least, he hoped his gut was right that Pike was one of the good ones — and they could start cleaning house and getting this city back on track the right way.

He went back to his apartment to sleep off the night shift, showered and got some food in him. Then it was all down to waiting, which felt like an eternity rather than the few hours he knew it logically was.

Quentin took his own car rather than one of the squad cars, seeing as it would attract less attention. He kept his badge tucked away for that reason as well as he made his way down to the docks. He found a stack of crates to wait by that kept him mostly shielded from the lane trucks traveled up and down picking up or dropping off shipments. Not that there was much of that going on just now, but better to be safe than sorry.

Quentin kept checking his watch. He’d shown up early, sure, but it was already five past and no sign of him. What exactly was going on here?

“Seems your friend isn’t showing, Quentin.”

He startled as a flashlight beam hit him and straightened up. “Captain Stein.”

His superior raised a hand, the signal, he realized, for a number of SWAT lead by Warner to move in, surrounding him. Quentin raised his hands; he’d be a fool to reach for his gun now.

“Just what is this?” He knew he hadn’t been followed, so where had all of them come from?

“Ever since one of the copycat’s arrows disappeared from evidence, I knew we had a leak,” Stein stated, an underlying smugness in his tone. “And given your possession of a phone with a direct line to the Hood, you were the most obvious candidate. So I ordered Brock to take it out of your desk to have Crosby in CSU put some additional spyware on it. You could say your maneuver with your daughter inspired me,” the man added with a smirk.

Quentin’s blood ran cold as he noticed Brock standing there with his weapon raised alongside Hester, Lopez and — least surprising of all — Daily. These weren’t really his people, not besides Warner, and given the harsh glare she was directing his way, he didn’t think he’d see any leniency from her. The lack of Hall, despite her recruitment to the anti-vigilante task force nearly two months ago now, told him that this was Stein’s own hand-picked crew.

“We weren’t able to crack the encryption to follow the calls back to their source, unfortunately,” Stein continued on. “But I’ll consider bringing you in just one step closer to bringing down these vigilantes.”

Denying what he had been doing would get him nowhere, so Quentin didn’t even bother. “Look, I am trying to do the same thing. By tackling the problems that created the Hood and those like him in the first place. Bringing him in by force wasn’t working.”

“Because you lacked the conviction to do what was necessary. It’s why I had Daily join the Winick Building raid.”

Quentin’s breath stuttered in his chest. “You put him there so he’d shoot my daughter?” The younger officer was smirking where he stood, and if there weren’t a dozen guns pointed at him, he might have gone for the cocky bastard.

“You’ve failed to handle the situation objectively, Detective. Things were running just fine before this vigilante menace showed up, and I intend to see it return to that no matter who gets in the way!”

“Because your backers at Tempest have an interest in seeing it return to business as usual.”

Quentin had never been so relieved to hear the vigilante’s altered voice. Apparently the guy hadn’t pulled a no-show after all.

Two flechettes were thrown into the wrists of Warner and Hester, both of whom dropped their weapons. There were a couple grunts as Quentin caught movement near the back-left of the group; two of the men had fallen down. A few more of them turned, and it was this break in the formation that allowed him to glimpse a woman standing up from a crouched sweep kick, her fists raised. Dressed in black and dark blue with a mask and long, blonde hair, Quentin knew this could only be the Woman of the Glades.

This break in the formation gave the Hood time to rappel down from the roof of the warehouse he’d been waiting on top of, though Quentin didn’t watch to see where he landed as he was busy ducking around the crates to avoid Stein’s gunfire.

He quickly got out his own handgun and raised it, peering around the side to locate his enemy. Stein had moved back, out of reach of the Hood’s blows as he engaged both Daily and Lopez at once. 

The Woman had gotten possession of one of the SWAT shields and was using it as a battering ram on one side while she swung a staff with her free hand, throwing men twice her size to the ground. Quentin watched, however, as Cutter — the department’s first ever female SWAT member, battered the Woman back with her own shield. The Woman stumbled but kept her feet, her head giving a dazed shake for a moment. The two then circled each other before each charged.

Quentin circled around the other side of the crates, doing his best to crouch low in the hopes of getting the drop on Stein. The captain noticed him at the last second, forcing Quentin into a drop and roll as he fired on him.

“Attacking your own, Lance?”

“Trying to put a stop to this before anyone’s seriously hurt!” He called back. These people would have had enough evidence on him to arrest him at the station, but they’d waited to stage a sting operation with the clear intent of getting him and the Hood, and he doubted they’d stop at the Woman, since she’d been good enough to show. There weren’t rubber bullets in those guns, either, and judging by Stein’s attempt on his life just now, the order was shoot to kill.

An arrow sailed through the night and hit Stein’s gun, making him drop it. Quentin charged forward, knocking the older man to the ground and rolling him onto his chest. He wrenched Stein’s arms behind his back and got out his cuffs.

“If you’ve been listening to that phone since the Winick Building, then you could’ve shown up to catch him at Merlyn Global. But you didn’t, because it wasn’t personal yet, was it? You got nervous when I asked him for help rooting out corruption. Well, I’m gonna look through the evidence, find out just what this Tempest is and then it’ll be over for you and them!”

He looked up to take stock on the situation. Officers were either knocked out or tied up with those cable arrow things. The Hood was lifting Cutter up and away from the Woman, who had a split lip. She hauled back and punched the SWAT officer right in the face.

Quentin stood up. “Hey!” He didn’t need them doing that!

The Woman startled and looked away from him, her shoulders hunched. There was something almost sheepish in the gesture. He could also see a small tear in the shoulder of her jacket.

The Hood placed Cutter back on the ground considering she was knocked out cold. Then he walked over towards Quentin, his head ducked to avoid showing much more than his chin.

“This flash drive contains everything you’ll need.”

Quentin took it with a nod of thanks. He couldn’t help noticing that the Woman was already retreating back towards where he could just see the handlebar of a motorbike sticking out from the shadow of a building. Even less talkative than the Hood, apparently. Though that didn’t match the scant reports about her they’d gotten.

Before the Hood could take his leave as well, Quentin gestured towards her retreating form. “So is this, uh, a regular thing now?”

“It won’t be easy cleaning up the corruption and its effects on this city, Detective. You’ll need people like me and her for a while yet.”

It was the opposite of what he had wanted to hear tonight. But the one comfort he could draw was that the Hood sounded far from smug about it. He likely longed for the days when this city wouldn’t need him, too.

“Alright. I better call this in.” He turned away to get out his radio and heard the Hood depart. Now what the hell was he going to say about all this exactly? Best thing to do, request Hilt and see what he thought.

Predictably, his partner felt Quentin had landed them in a whole heap of trouble. “Even if what’s on that flash drive is a hundred percent genuine, you did agree to meet with a vigilante to get it, Quentin. What are we supposed to say to Pike about that?”

“Pike’s gonna have to accept that cops on some special interest group’s payroll is a bigger problem.”

Sooner than he would have liked, they had more officers on the scene to help get the injured parties treatment and to bring Stein, at the very least, in. It turned out he hadn’t put this little raid on the books, so it wasn’t only Quentin who would be answering some awkward questions.

To his great relief, Kelton took the flash drive. He made the CSU promise to guard it with his life. Quentin didn’t doubt that Crosby or someone else in on all this would love to make it disappear.

He sat waiting inside Pike’s office for the rest of that night, waiting for his direct superior to go through all of the evidence and question who he needed to. Quentin knew this probably didn’t look great for him, but he also knew he had done the right thing, and if he could just convince Frank of that, then maybe he might walk out of here a free man.

His real phone buzzed with a text just as the early light of dawn was creeping in through the window. Quentin glanced at it, saw Laurel’s name, and sat up to rub at his eyes. It read how’s everything?

He felt the corner of his mouth twitch. Somehow his girl always knew when to check on him. He considered it a good thing Laurel was actually reaching out considering they’d still only made a few halting attempts each to patch things up. Quentin wrote back, long night, but fine. At least he hoped it would be. But considering he hadn’t been hauled into a holding cell yet, he had hope.

Like a summons, the thought was immediately followed by Pike opening the door to his office and coming around to his side of the desk. A large folder was under his arm that he set down and opened.

“Quentin,” his long-time superior sighed. “This would’ve been easier if you would have just come to me.”

“Maybe, but sir, I did point out my concerns about Daily in particular to you, which you said you couldn’t do anything about. Now we both know why. Stein was protecting his man.”

“But a vigilante? The same vigilante you told me you didn’t want to give up hunting even when I scaled back the taskforce!”

He winced. “Things… changed. I realized I needed someone independent to look into what was going on here. What did Kelton find on that flash drive? Did it say what this Tempest is?”

“I already know what Tempest is,” Frank answered.

That caused his mouth to snap shut for a moment. “What do you mean, ‘you know’?”

“I mean I was informed about this Tempest just this past evening,” the Lieutenant clarified. “If I’d known it related to the vigilante case, I would have called you in.”

Quentin sat back. “Well, hang on, what is it really about?”

“It appears there is a group of the city’s most wealthy who got together to form a bloq,” Pike explained. He passed over the file, and Quentin took it, flipping through. The bribes were there, though not just to the SCPD. As he continued reading, he also came upon a record of property purchases in the Glades. “They’ve been behind a lot of the decisions made in the last several years, deciding what they think is best. And I have to warn you, Quentin, their end goal is… I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it.”

He flipped another page and came upon schematics. Bomb schematics.

“What the… what the hell were they doing with this?”

“Nothing, yet. We were informed about this with enough time to do something. Now that you and, well, the vigilantes, have taken care of the people on the inside here that were working for them, we’ve got the upper hand. Now my source has identified the ringleader of this high society club, and I’m sending you and Hilton with backup to make the arrest.” Frank leaned forward. “You pull this off, Quentin, and no one’s going to care who you’ve been enlisting off the books. We’ll be heroes.”

He opened his mouth to tell his superior to get on with it and tell him who they were bringing in, but then he turned the final page. Quentin froze, his eyes widening.

“I’ll be damned…”

He should have known.

---

Thea relaxed on her bed, taking full advantage of the day off from community service. She was enjoying CNRI more now that Joanna was back and they occasionally actually did stuff, but she wouldn’t be a normal teenager if she wanted to work every single day. Besides, she had a kind of special event planned.

Thea was finally introducing her newly-christened boyfriend Roy to her mother. Thea had never bothered running her previous relationships past her mom, partly because she’d thought she hadn’t cared and partly because Thea hadn’t wanted it to be anyone’s business but hers. But if Walter’s loss had reminded her of anything, it was that you never knew how long you had with family. And truthfully, she thought it might bring her mom some comfort to know that Thea had someone special in her life.

She’d bullied Ollie into promising he would actually show for this since he had a bad habit of ditching family functions at the last second. It had helped that she had pointed out he and Laurel had ditched them at Mr. Merlyn’s memorial, and thus she and their mom hadn’t had the chance to catch up with what appeared to be a rekindling of their own relationship. So Oliver was supposed to be bringing both Laurel and Roy over to the manor.

Thea heard the sound of tires on the drive, so she quickly got up, checked her hair in the mirror and then raced out of her room and down the steps. Just as she reached the foyer, she heard a knock on the other side of the front door. That was weird, unless Ollie was making Roy knock in some stupid big brother intimidation routine.

She wrenched open the door, the smile freezing on her face when she found not her boyfriend, brother and his girlfriend waiting for her, but Detective Lance and his partner Hilton. Both officers grimaced at the sight of her.

“Is something wrong?”

“Where is your mother, Miss Queen?” Detective Hilton asked calmly. Thea couldn’t help noticing, however, that there was another car and two more officers waiting further down the drive.

“She’s, uh—”

“I’m right here.” When she turned around, she saw her mother descending the stairs in an outfit she called her ‘casual best’. Thea had already told her Roy had never had much money. “Can I help you with something, officers?”

Thea watched as Lance gave a shake of his head. “Let’s not drag this out in front of your daughter, alright? You’re coming downtown with us.”

“Wait, what?” Thea asked, only to be forced back as both Lance and Hilton pushed their way through the door, Hilton taking out a pair of handcuffs.

“You must be very mistaken,” her mother said gravely, though Thea couldn’t help noticing how very pale she looked.

“Not unless the thing we found them building at Unidac was actually a piñata,” Lance quipped. “Moira Queen, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, hiring an assassin, and conspiracy to commit mass murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

“Murder?” Thea echoed, somehow both hoarse and shrill at the same time. “No, no that’s crazy.”

“Miss Queen, if you could stay back,” Detective Hilton requested, gently buffeting her aside when she tried to move towards her mother, who had frozen in shock and only started moving when Lance marched her along with one hand under her arm.

“Mom!”

“Stay- stay in the house, baby,” her mother called over her shoulder.

Thea followed them out to the front stoop, her hands pressing to either side of her head as she watched them put her unresisting mother into the back of a squad car and drive away. The other two officers came inside and went up the steps, heading in the direction of her mother’s office.

How could this be happening again? Was she going insane with her life just repeating itself in circles? Her dad dying, Walter dying; Oliver being arrested for murder, her mother being arrested for murder. And how did that make any sense?

What was she supposed to do? Did she call Jean? Ollie? Thea sunk down onto the front step, her knees to her chest as cries were choked out of her.

How could everything have changed so fast and so horribly?

[theonyxpath]

We have sailed the Acid Sea and now know land is near – and with it all the fun a pirate could desire at Waterdog Port! Yarrrrr!

In other words, Pirate of Pugmire‘s Kickstarter has passed its funding goal, and now we’re headed towards some sweet Stretch Goals. Thanks to everyone who pledged so that we can get this companion volume to Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau printed and out into stores!

And if you haven’t yet had a chance to pledge, there are still a few awesome reward tiers left – some of which include having your pet illustrated as a pirate! – and the KS runs until Thursday. There’s a link below in the Blurbs! section for your convenience!

V5 Chicago By Night art by Michael Gaydos

Leading in to our next Kickstarter campaign, today we were thrilled to reveal that we will be posting a Trinity Continuum: Aberrant webcomic starting tomorrow, Tuesday the 18th, here on the Onyx Path website!

The webcomic will run every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for about six weeks, coinciding with the TC: Aberrant Kickstarter starting the first week in July.

We had the extreme pleasure of working with comic book writer extraordinaire Paul Jenkins, who has written so many amazing works for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, including winning an Eisner award for writing the Inhumans for Marvel Knights, that we’ll let you all Google him rather than trying to list them all.

We’ll have more info on Paul, as well as awesome artist Doug Stambaugh, in the weeks to come as “You Are Not Alone.” rolls out. This is our very first webcomic, we are incredibly excited about it, and we hope it won’t be our last, and is designed to give a taste to new and long-time Aberrant fans of just what the world of Trinity Continuum: Aberrant is like.

Shunned By the Moon art by Leonardo Albiero

Another announcement for today is that we’re incredibly happy to be working with the multi-talented Travis Legge as he leads the development of our upcoming Scarred Lands projects. Travis has already sat in with Eddy, Matt, and myself, as we whipped project ideas into a schedule, and now he’ll be pulling those ideas into actual books.

This doesn’t change how we’re handling the new Scarred Lands Creature Collection with our friend Jon Hodgson’s new company, Handiwork Games, and I actually was able to talk with Jon at UK Games Expo and we firmed up plans for the upcoming Kickstarter Jon will be running for the book. Expect amazing art, fantastic layout and usability, and the chance to pick Reward Tiers that allow backers to determine additional monsters to include in the book beyond those already planned.

We also talked with Chris and Matt from Modiphius while at UKGE about our ongoing Vampire 5th Edition projects. Everyone was excited at being able to work closely together on new V5 books – and that was before the recent Origins Award for Best RPG of the Year! Congrats to all involved!

V5 Chicago By Night art by Ken Meyer, Jr

Finally, for anyone who is thinking that every third word I write is Kickstarter, look below at what we have going on sale this week: the Advance PDFs of both the Blood Sea: Crimson Abyss for Scarred Lands, and the long, long, long-awaited Signs of Sorcery for Mage: The Awakening 2e! Neither of which had a KS, so there!

Regardless of how we get there, we’re:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

Our Pirates of Pugmire Kickstarter has funded! Now we’re going for some cool Stretch Goals in these, the final fantastic days! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/pirates-of-pugmire-a-realms-of-pugmire-tabletop-rpg

Pirates of Pugmire is a chronicle sourcebook for both Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau. It’s usable in either game, or as part of a joint experience. Some highlights include: * Two new species for players to enjoy: lizards and birds * Six new callings, including two for dogs and two for cats * Rules for building, sailing, and sinking ships * A trove of new allies, enemies, and treasures * Information on Waterdog Port and Port Matthew * “Going on the Account,” a chronicle of three new adventures, taking characters from 1st through 6th level

You can also hear Eddy discuss the writing and design of Pirates of Pugmire on the Onyx Pathcast on your favorite podcatcher, or here on : https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/)

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Onyx Pathcast art by Michael Gaydos

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features an interview with fantastic writer Klara Herbol!: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

Due to ill health, Matthew has had to postpone the Onyx Path News! It’ll be back later this week

He has however uploaded another episode of the Scarred Lands actual play he ran for Red Moon Roleplaying, so do check that out on the Onyx Path YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/xnEc5Qznsw4

We have two further episodes of Occultists Anonymous, the Mage: The Awakening actual play as follows: Episode 21: The Quest Begins Songbird is charged with making himself useful to the Adamantine Arrow, and with so many ‘nerds’ at close hand, maybe he can make use of that connection to the Mysterium…https://youtu.be/wyE_fVd9KYo

Episode 22: Prime Time A letter is investigated, a message sent, and a being from beyond this world is summoned… Just a normal Tuesday. https://youtu.be/il9VOFSh_gU

The Story Told Podcast have uploaded their excellent interview with Meghan Fitzgerald regarding Changeling: The Lost: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/episode-29-meghan-fitzgerald-interview

For the love of Chardun, check out the Devil’s Luck Gaming Twitch stream if you haven’t already done so: https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING

And that’s it for media this week! We need more actual plays, reviews, and video breakdowns of our games, so please get in touch with the Gentleman Gamer on the Onyx Path Forum is you would like to create content that we can in turn promote!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can now order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we’re releasing an Advance PDF DOUBLE FEATURE with Signs of Sorcery for Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition, and Blood Sea: The Crimson Abyss for Scarred Lands 5e both coming to DriveThruRPG!

CONVENTIONS!

Gen Con: August 1st – 4th Save Against Fear: October 12th – 14th GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon) Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Redlines

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Development

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Manuscript Approval

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

DR:E Threat Guide (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Editing

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Post-Editing Development

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Scion Ready-Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle

Dark Eras 2 – Got all the art in from Sheikman and everyone else is working.

M20 Book of the Fallen – Getting art over to WW for approval.

VtR Spilled Blood – in the worx.

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds

Trinity Continuum Aberrant – KS Sketches and finals coming in.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Ex3 Lunars

They Came From Beneath the Sea – Getting it going.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

In Layout

V5: Chicago

Trinity Core

Trinity Aeon

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel 

Proofing

WtF Shunned by the Moon

DR: E – proofing with Eddy

Aeon Aexpansion

C20 Cup of Dreams – This week.

Ex 3 Monthlies – At WW for approval

At Press

Dragon Blooded – Deluxe shipping to Studio2.

Dragon-Blooded Cloth Map – Shipped to Studio2.

Dragon-Blooded Screen – Printing.

The Realm – Reviewing errata.

Trinity Core Screen – Printing.

TC Aeon Screen – Printing.

C20 Player’s Guide – PoD files uploaded.

Geist 2e – Gathering Errata.

Book of Oblivion – Putting in errata.

Trinity: In Media Res – PoD proofs ordered.

Scion Jumpstart – Backer PDFs going out this week.

Scion Ready-Made Characters – Backer PDFs going out this week.

Blood Sea: The Crimson Abyss (Scarred Lands) – Advance PDF on sale this Weds!

Signs of Sorcery – Advance PDF on sale this Weds!

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today must be the calm before the storm, because tomorrow issues a double helping of birthday fun for both Neall Raemonn Price and The Gentleman Gamer himself, Matthew Dawkins! Many happy returns to you both!

[randomnameless]

Final Chapter - Dozel to Freege!

Seliph continues to liberate the land of his grandfather, and settles down the feud the Chalphyians had with the Freeges for 3 generations.

AND WE SEE THE RISE AND FALL OF OUR HERO - SCIPIO OF JUNGBY

You had men out there? I forgot. I was focused on, you know, the Master Knight with a Holy Weapon.

I hope you’re calling your men cowards, not the Dozels! Or is it another way of Kaga to pile shit on the Dozels, even from within their side?

Yeah, once and for all given how you’re one of the rare bosses to run away and not to die when we defeat you.

A plan?

This is a way to warn the player of what kind of backup units/mechanics are going to happen, so we won’t be going “WTF” at, idk, ballistaes popping up after the 10th turn in a defense map, but it defeats the plot purpose!

there’s no surprise here, so of course Hilda’s plan doesn’t work. If we knew in FE5 that Dastard Jr was going to blow up the bridge after we sent units to cross it, then to send Reinhardt and his pals on us, it wouldn’t have the same impact - we would curse Saias less, but his “tactician” gimmick wouldn’t be translated into the game

Hilda means to fight to death. Well, this is the final map so...

The Gelbenritter, or what’s left of it looks menacing! Hopefully Arvis gave Seliph the Tyrfing in the previous chapter, else Seliph wouldn’t have been able to plow through those guys like Ares does on a regular basis - welp that sounds wrong doesn’t it

What do you mean, random? Is this not a holy war on its own, us having to fight against Loptyr himself?

HE ASKS US TO SUMMON THE TRIFORCE? SUMMON THE POWER OF THE HYLIAN GODDESSES SELIPH!

?? To this day, I still don’t understand what the fuck are those trails. Julia and Seliph? Leif and Seliph? Julia vs Julius? (one good light vs one evil light?)

At least he gave us sufficient funds to repair our HWs.

“slow down you jackass you have a horse now !”

“remember you’re weak and i have to protect you, the usual routine” “hey i have my holy weapon now”

? You’re scared now, but when we were fighting in Thracia you weren’t? OTOH this is the end of the journey, and during Siggy’s end everything burnt, so maybe Larcei’s afraid of that, or she knows that if she manages to rekt Julius before, now he is stronger.

IDK, maybe having your WIFE and not only her BLADE at your side?

Larcei’s supposed to find this romantic, or she’s pissed, idk.

Finally someone’s going to sing something good about the Crusdaders, Neir and co!

smite the devil with a demonic blade? Like in Pok��mon when ghost attacks are very effective against ghost types?

Odo and Hezul hated each other guts or something? One is a saint, the other wields a demonic blade...

Apparently Baldur is only remembered as very pious, or something? the Tyrfing shines in the dark?

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER CRUSADERS DAMN IT

and Baldur “shines a light” but Heim “prays”? I mean, if something should be shiny and have a “light” imagery, it should be the Book of Naga, not the Tyrfing but...

Ooh!

So Heim prays to the white dragon who destroys the shadow dragon, that’s why praying is important and Heim’s reserved stuff!

So the white dragon means light? Baldur and Heim were cosy enough to share their attributes, or Baldur did something awesome to be called the holy knight with a sword that shines light?

Well, wait 60 turns and see.

for we have the power of savestates at our disposal?

OTOH, if Seliph and Julia die here... We can only pull a Manfroy with Linoan, and hope for her Naga-grandson to continue the fight

Children will finish what their parents started, the game is called Genealogy after all!

or he is talking about the power of savestates

MMH

Never lost? The Barahra family nearly went extinct because someone only had eyes for a married woman who ran away!

You believe in Lester, who’s only following us?

I believe in Linoan too, even if she isn’t in the game. Or by light you meant people who want to fight against Loptyr?

You raised more questions than answers, but this song makes me understand what the randoms in Granvalle are really thinking (or what Finn thinks they’re thinking^^) - only the sword crusader counts and that irks me a lot!

Stop swarming us from the rear damn it genealogy of the rear attack : the holy innuendo

Scipio is into dubious kinks

more seriously, who compares himself to a snake? That’s not a noble animal!

DERMOTT NO - he managed to dodge this

Hilda knew Tailte had another child? She must have heard about how Tine defected to join her brother and made 1+1.

She can dirty them around killing randoms, but not by killing Hilda? It doesn’t make any sense :’(

!

Hilda’s aware that she’s going to hell? Or that, whatever she is/was doing, she knew it was something that no one could condone?

HOW’S THAT “WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO BE”

You’re being rude to your street urchin of a cousin Scipio!

the sprites beg to differ, but again, to Scipio and everyone around his age who grew up in the empire Siggy and pals, even Briggid were traitors!

Family bonding time :)

ULSTER NO

YOU RUINED THEIR FAMILY BONDING TIME :’(

Maybe he felt conflicted by hearing that he is the son of Jamke and how the Empire and the Jungbies never gave a flying fuck about his country

Fee remembered that Arthur’s dad was the guy who berated Arthur’s mom for wanting to kill her own dad, Arthur mustn’t slay his relatives! So she’s the one to kill Hilda.

Farewell Hilda, at least you’ll join Blume and you’ll live happily ever after together, with your daughter joining you in the next update!

Come on i’ve seen this before

Try to be more inventive next time, would you?

Finally, we settle things with Freeges! By seizing their castles!

Seliph thinks of the children :)

Felipe ex machina

Oldvis had an aide? With Aida dead, he maybe wanted to share his dastardly plans to someone, or maybe he wanted to talk to anyone who wouldn’t trashtalk him unlike his son(s?)...

OMG OMG OMG

Even the ones from Thracia?

THEY’RE ALL HIDING!!!!

Which raises several issues, how can they all fit, how many were they, how come no one noticed that no children were in Belhalla and reported it to Julius, etc...

Remember that Hilda was the Queen of Miletos, so she spent the majority of her time there!!

And Freege isn’t Hilda’s city, but the Ducal seat of Blume and the Tordo royals!

and here the Ishtar gambit is revealed!

So Ishtar has wrath in her skillset? I never noticed

Hm... You haven’t met a lot of people.

She and Oldvis were really getting along then! We could glimpse it in their convo, too bad it ended in, well, you know. Loptyrpocalypse ruins everything.

Oh, so the children signed their presence sheet, then skipped the “i will sacrifice myself for the sake of Loptyr, our God and Savior” classes.

It still doesn’t make any sense, but why not

They’re going to gie you armorslayers and vulneraries, ask Leif!

Thank you revealing crucial elements of caracterisation the game couldn’t offer us in some other way

“Some results” is the reason why so many people joined Seliph’s quest, and the symbol of the Empire’s tyranny, but whatever

But yes, the real job awaits.

Dead is the only logical conclusion, but the game isn’t logical. And how’s that the only option? Master draconic tactician can’t guess that Loptyr murdered the only one who can kill him before she could hold the tome of Naga?

Or is he desperatly clinging to the little shred of hope he has of Julia being alive not to think about his own naivety of letting her get captured when she is the only one able to save the world?

That’s not what you told us in Chapter 6, you said only Seliph’s destiny was “to free the world from this evil grip” as the “one true heir of Saint Heim”

Freeing the world from the evil grip means getting rid of the idiot sitting in Belhalla, right?

Hopefully even this guy doesn’t contradict the game’s lore. At least one positive point I found about you, yay!

“what about you, you raised her for years?”

“i only fed her wild berries and gave her a roof - i spent more time training Arthur in wind magic than talking and being a relative to Julia, remember how i dropped her on you during your Isaachian campaign without any tomes or staves?”

Hopefully, Julia dosn’t need to be convinced by those dolts, because it’s her destiny as a Falchion to slay an evil Dragon!

[itsbenedict]

No Driver’s License: Session 41

No Driver’s License is a Madoka Magica game I’m running for five players, using a homebrew of Yaruki Zero’s Magical Burst system. It follows five magical girls as they deal with an upheaval in the world’s magic system caused by some strange new three-eyed Incubators. They have to figure out what’s going on, who to trust, and how to put a stop to the cycle of despair.

I post session logs and omakes weekly sporadically, both as a reference for the players and for anyone who wants to follow along with the party’s misadventures.

[adventure log- read from the beginning]

[session 40]

Last time, the party dealt with that one witch that’d been burning a hole in their pocket for ages. It was a lot of consecutive witch fights, but ultimately it wasn’t too big of a deal- what with their numbers and their access to overpowered magic items, they managed to make Sokoko a lot less murderously insane.

So... that’s pretty much it for rogue magical girls menacing the players! With all the relevant immediate threats dealt with, it’s time to decide what needs to be done about the long-term situation. To that end, everyone meets up in Sakura’s aunt’s apartment to discuss plans for the future, and for also maybe hacking magic itself.

(Pictured: the last big crisis rearing its head)

So, Sakura managed to convince Tama-chan it was worth trying to fix magic again, sort of. She’s still a little fuzzy on the specifics of the plan.

Tama-chan’s big question is... what do they all actually want to do to magic? What should the new system actually be, once it’s been “fixed”?

Tama-chan defends the “lobotomy” thing, on the basis that purifying a track isn’t a side-effect, but rather something she deliberately added. Apparently, having all potential suffering across multiple timelines concentrated into your brain such that it causes an uncontrolled expression of magical anguish known as a wish... is not something that leaves you mentally healthy afterwards. Being able to feel the emotion that’s been witched on... is super horrible, so the numbing patch allows you to remain functional.

Sakura’s next idea is to point out that, hey, there’s loads of suffering out there in the world that isn’t being captured and used for power generation. Why don’t they just collect that instead of only focusing on magical girls?

Basically, the suffering of magical girls exceeds that of... the normal suffering of everyone, ever. There’s a lot of potential timelines in which you suffer! Like, more than millions, more than billions! Even if they could perfectly capture ambient grief, it would be kind of a drop in the bucket.

In order to meet quotas, producing more total suffering than would happen naturally is sort of unavoidable. The question is- who suffers, and how? Who do you pick to power Omelas, when you can’t walk away from it?

Tama-chan points out that she sort of... tried this, and that it really didn’t go over very well. The less she says about what happened in America, the better. It apparently went bad enough that a mass brainwashing campaign was necessary. 

A bunch of different ideas are floated as to how to spread it around a little, reduce the burden on magical girls in particular by expanding the contract pool to more people. Unfortunately...

Parceling it out over time was sort of the whole idea of what Tama-chan did in the first place, despite the glitches involved. The question of directly experiencing the witching, though... that’s a good one. Sure, someone has to experience suffering to harvest grief, but who says the source of the suffering needs to be the medium for the suffering?

Then... Sakura has a terrifying, brilliant, or brilliantly terrifying idea.

So- shit, wow, the plan is to take demons- semi-conscious expressions of the Devil’s being- and make them experience suffering for us? If you love suffering so much, why don’t you marry it? That’s... a ballsy move.

Well, Yukari, you don’t have to be such a Negative Nancy all the time! Maybe it’ll work!

There’s a lot of risky ideas flying around- Tama-chan gets a little anxious about the idea of doing this much hacking to the system again, considering how she got burned last time.

What, the one who refuses to inhabit her old human body and prefers to be a cute cat and insists on being referred to as Tama-chan, trans? Where’d you get that idea?

Anyway, this plan they’re going with is very risky. And what do we do when something is very risky?

So... Yukari does this, and it’s pretty much what she expects, with an extra helping of vaporwave mindfuck in her brain to get across how outside of the norm this course of action is. 

Also, when you reach into the future to measure the odds as they pertain to the Devil, a creature very much of the odds of the future, you sometimes, uh, draw its attention, especially on a crit.

The Devil is concerned about these plans to do big risky things that could negatively impact the odds of Madoka existing, and the team fails to coordinate their lies about whether they are planning to do a big risky thing.

Ibara tries to salvage the situation by framing it as reducing risk- surely, IBARA in the Hell Engine is a volatile situation, right? They need to deal with that right away!

...Which might’ve worked, if Homura weren’t capable of seeing how likely something is to affect the probability of Madoka existing, especially parts of her own Devilhood. She says it’s fine.

The Devil only cares about a single thing, and Ibara is not that thing.

Her Heart roll on this attempt to convince her, unfortunately, is very low.

So- side effects of recruiting the literal Devil, inhuman final boss who is the source of all magical suffering: sometimes she is not nice! The best she’ll offer is to just kill the IBARA demon, and put it out of its misery. She says some very intimidating things and attempts to make everyone understand that it’s her way or the highway.

(Not that this is necessarily true- she’s not actually all-powerful, her only real influence is her ordinary magical girl powers plus the ability to flee the timeline and turn off grief power entirely. She’d only do that if they really fucked it up, instead of just threatening to do that.)

The party starts asking some questions about the specifics of her relationship to IBARA and the demons. Does she feel the pain that they do?

The answer is “hypothetically, if she was paying attention to that tiny fraction of her universe-spanning being”. Typically, she ignores most of it.

Other questions are floated, such as what her favorite sweets are.

Sakura offers some delicious candy to the Devil, which she, uh... 

Sakura’s extremely clever and completely intentional gambit to gross out the Devil until she disappears to avoid the social awkwardness of the situation succeeds flawlessly.

With that... the energy to discuss magic-altering plans dies down a little. There’s too much that can go wrong for them to rush into it, so it’s looking like they’ll be biding their time and waiting to be done with the Devil before doing any magic hacker heisting.

As they’re wrapping up, though... crisis strikes!

And the crisis is...

Ibara rolls great on that, so...

Next time on No Driver’s License... which is to say, the very last time on No Driver’s License: we’ll be wrapping up! All the big exciting disasters are resolved, so now we’re going to be using an alternate ruleset to fast-forward over the next few years of their lives, and see how things end up for them. It’s epilogue time!

[inhumansforever]

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #31 Review

spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers

Amy Reeder returns to co-author with Brandon Montclare, artist, Ray-Anthony Height and colorist, Tamra Bonvillain for this special anti-smoking one-shot that seeing Lunella and her dinosaur pal face off against the sinister Warm.  Quick recap and review following the jump.  

The tale begins with Lunella spending some time gardening with her mom, which is nice since it’s been quite a while since us readers have seen anything from Lunella’s parents.  Unfortunately, Lunella is being her same ol self, squandering the quality time by lecturing her mom on the importance of bees and the ways in which gardening pesticides inadvertently harm bees. 

These pesticides actually use a type of nicotine quite deleterious to bees.  Mrs. Lafayette uses this opportunity to steer the conversation toward the dangers of smoking and having her daughter promise to never try cigarettes.  To hammer the point home, Mrs. Lafayette has her and her daughter sneak a peak in on a group of adolescents smoking it up like a bunch of knuckleheads.

It’s all hugely perplexing to Lunella.  She is such an analytical thinker… she just cannot bend her head around why kids her age would do something as foolish as to smoke.   She’s pragmatic and can tell right away that smoking is little more than an addiction and that any sense of ‘pleasure’ a smoker gets from lighting up is just temporarily sating that addiction and gaining relief from withdrawal symptoms.  

Who would be interested in something so foolish?  What she cannot see is that sometimes youngsters smoke just because it’s taboo, a naughty forbidden thing they can do together and sense gain a sense of solidarity in doing something bad together.  Of course that’s a pretty dumb rationale, but kids do dumb things and it continues to be alienating for Lunella to be such an outlier, to be so confused over the mindset of her peers.  And to make matters worse, Lunella is additionally confused over the fact that this cigarette smoke smells so good, so tempting…

Over the next few days, Lunella is increasingly dismayed at seeing more and more of the people in her life smoking.  First it’s her classmate, Eduardo, then other kids in her class.  Even her teacher, someone Lunella hugely admires, admits that she has struggled with cigarette addiction for years.  

The dismay comes to a head when Lunella discovers her mom has bought a carton of her own and has herself started smoking.  What the heck is going on???  

Lunella retreats to her secret lab where she voices her confused exasperation to her buddy, Devil Dinosaur.  Just then Luneela spots an abnormal looking bee buzzing about the lab.  She eventually catches the bee and, upon more expensive investigation, discovers something quite sinister is afoot with this bee.  Somehow, this bee and its countless over bees has been spreading a type of pesticide derivative that has been fostering nicotine addiction among the populace of the Lowe East Side.

Attaching a miniature global positioning system to the bee, Moon Girl releases it and tracks it back to its hive.  Here she and Devil D encounters a mysterious beekeeper.  The beekeeper unmasks, revealing himself as the monstrous super villain known as ‘Swarm!’

Swarm is an old foe of Spider-Man; he is the sentience of an evil nazi scientist who has through some goofy comic book means re-manifested himself in the form of a humanoid phalanx of buzzing bees.  

True to super villain form, Swarm launches right into monologuing… detailing his sinister scheme.  His plan is to ultimately enslave all of humanity by way of spreading a crippling, unquenchable addiction to nicotine.  

Fortunately, Moon Girl is prepared and has connected a set of pressurized cool-air tanks to Devil D’s snout.  The jets of cool air has the effect of rendering the legion of bees unconscious, dissipating Swarm without injuring the various innocent bees that compose his form.  

Lunella is them able to undo the alterations to these bees and neutralize the pesticide toxin that had been effecting the neighborhood.  The day is saved.  

Of course all of this is merely window dressing to hammer home the central premise of warning impressionable minds of the dangers of tobacco use.  An important message and one I fully support.  It’s hard to say how effective a message it all is, but a worthwhile effort nonetheless.

Anti-smoking messages, just like anti-drinking and anti-drug use messages, are a pretty tricky business.  They can easily backfire, increasing awareness and interest in the targeted behavior while failing to fully dissuade experimentation.   Here in the states, The National Health Institute has monitored the efficacy of governmental campaigns designed to discourage smoking, drinking and drug use among young people.  Despite huge amounts of money spent toward these programs, it was found that the various campaigns bore no favorable results and may have even increased experimentation by way of an unintended boomerang effect.   The ‘Just Say No’ campaign from the Reagan Administration has been highlighted as a primary example of how not to discourage drug use.  Something that is especially disheartening considering that The trump Administration is effectively copying the model in its recent efforts to curb the opioid abuse crisis.  

Rather than straight forward ‘just say no’ efforts, the research suggests that a more effective strategy would entail focusing on recovery, the roots of addiction and acknowledging and analyzing the various reasons why people end up addicted to substances.  

This story does an okay job, touching on the biological aspects of nicotine addiction… which I think is a smart approach.  Yet it misses the mark in terms of addressing the insidious ways in which tobacco industries target young people, how menthol cigarettes (which are especially harmful) are target-promoted toward people who are Black, and how vaporized nicotine, or ‘vaping’ can be just as deleterious and addictive despite not have carcinogens. Swarm is a good enough villain, but using him in this story sort of lets off the hook the real culprits when it comes to smoking… that being the tobacco industry.  

A couple of years back, Marvel instituted an executive action ordering that smoking no longer be shown in the comics.  Characters like Wolverine, Nick Fury and J. Jonah Jamison, who had previously be shown as constantly chomping on a cigar, as well as Gambit and Pete Wisdom ,who were often shown as smoking cigarettes, all quite suddenly became smoke free.  Even villains were no longer allowed to be shown smoking. While I’m normally against editorial mandates, this is one I definitely approve of and simply not showing smoking is likely the best a comic book can do in terms of dissuading smoking among young people.  

Smoking is remarkably stupid.  And the sooner it can be relegated to a foolish anachronism of the past, the better.  I definitely laud this issue’s intention, but at the end of the day simply leaving cigarettes out of the Marvel Universe might be the best approach.  

All of this aside, this was a fun enough issue, with some neat action.  Artist, Ray-Anthony Height once again does stellar work filling in for series regular, Natacha Bustos and the coloring by Tamra Bonvillain is, as always, spot on terrific.  

Fun but ultimately skip-worthy.  Two out of Five Lockjaws.  

[youngandhungryent]

Is Tech N9ne In Top 10 Territory?

It goes without saying that rap opinions are subjective. Though as with any creative debate, there does exist a slight hint of objectivity — if only to anchor the discourse. It’s probably one of the reasons top ten lists tend to draw such a passionate response. Should one not match up with another, a hierarchy of taste is inadvertently created. It can lead to hostility at times, and perceived disrespect at others. Look no further than what happened the moment Snoop Dogg claimed Eminem was not included in his top ten. Sometimes, a snub can feel personal, though it is seldom meant to be. Yet what about an artist like Tech N9ne, who has been overlooked on basically every prominent list to surface in recent memory?

Still releasing music with a notable sort of youthful exuberance, it’s hard to imagine that Tech N9ne has been in the game for over twenty years. Boasting seventeen studio albums under his belt, many of which still resonate with fans — Anghellic, Absolute Power, Everready, K.O.D, and All 6s & 7s immediately come to mind — the sheer volume of quality music Tech has released should place him within contention in certain circles. Though some might be hesitant to look beyond his rapid-fire flow, a quality he has adapted more in recent years, few could ever criticize Tech’s content as shallow.

Joey Foley/Getty Images

The man’s music is as autobiographical as an artist can; his darkest moments are rendered with the same detail reserved for his triumphs. The level of brutal honesty he achieves in his music rivals Eminem, providing listeners with ample evidence for a compelling character study. While his early projects like The Calm Before The Storm and The Worst found him discovering his voice-over dark g-funk beats (not to mention honing his flow), Anghellic gave him a platform to open up. On “Devil Boy,” Tech addressed one of the many misconceptions that plagued him — that he worshipped Satan — decrying the accusation with a defiant tone. Album highlight “Suicide Letters” remains one of his most powerful songs to date, a melancholic yet oddly soothing reflection on the allure of his death; his weary cadence painting the picture of a man simply too tired to continue. All the while, Tech flexed sonic diversity throughout, the rapid-fire dexterity he’d come to be known for really only present on “Breathe.”

In 2002, Tech N9ne grew tired of the music industry, launching the appropriately titled Fuck The Industry campaign. A 2002 article from the Chicago Tribune paints the picture of a younger Tech inviting fans to download his fourth album Absolute Power off his website for free. The kicker was, the project had already been released, providing fans with a means of artist-approved “piracy”. He even ran a televised ad-campaign encouraging his fans to go through with the download. Speaking on the decision, Tech’s manager and Strange Music CEO Travis O’Guin claimed to be “banking on the fact that kids will buy good music.” A gamble that not only paid off, but emblemized Tech’s willingness to stand unwaveringly in his own lane. The pinch of salt added to the wound, with a flourish at that, was the passionate opening anthem “The Industry Is Punks.”

Daniel Boczarski/WireImage/Getty Images

Tech’s bold gambit, which in hindsight seems like a genius glimpse of the future musical climate, reveals the spirited confidence of a leader. One who would rally an army of loyal followers on the strength of his artistic output. Though he was never seen on MTV or BET during those early years, the word of mouth was elevating Tech N9ne into hip-hop’s cult leader. An underground emcee with untapped mainstream appeal. As the early millennium bubbled, Tech never suffered from outdated production — though his lack of major label support made securing high-profile producers a difficult task. Yet slowly but surely, his reputation as a top tier emcee began opening new doors. His fifth studio album Everready featured an appearance from E-40; it was also meant to feature Eminem on “My World,” though Proof’s sudden passing ultimately prevented that collaboration. Still, the fact that Tech had reached Eminem’s radar was a testament to his rise. His philosophy that quality would lead to upward mobility within the rap game was paying off.

The following years saw Tech building on the foundation he had laid. The Strange Music army was amassing as he brought like-minded artists into the fold. The ambitious double-disc Killer gave him ample space to explore his seemingly boundless creativity. His gravitation toward the world of heavy metal became more evident; while it would open doors to new fanbases, it would unfortunately alienate others. On paper, however, Tech’s versatility points continued to amass. His fan base grew exponentially, as did his reputation — sadly, tragedy had begun to rear its head in his personal life. His mother was in the middle of a difficult battle with lupus and epilepsy, a challenge that took a toll on Tech’s faith. No stranger to using the studio as therapy. It quickly became clear that the beloved rapper was in a dark place, as the resulting music culminated in an album many still call his magnum opus: K.O.D: King Of Darkness.

 Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

While an album that is simply dark for dark’s sake will fall flat more often than not, Tech’s K.O.D. retained that same brutal honesty that endeared him to listeners. Only this time his emotions were laid bare, revealing anger, depravity, and unbridled hedonism. It’s not the first time Tech has reveled in the whims of a sinner, but this album drove him headlong into the depths of horrorcore. The end result was at once disturbing and cathartic, though an admittedly difficult entry point for curious new fans. Yet the sheer emotion imbued within the project solidified it as a crowning achievement in Tech’s discography. When we spoke about the project, Tech elaborated on its creation. “ I didn’t know that I had that many dark stories to tell that were real,” he confessed. That album took a lot of my energy, of my light. I didn’t like it. But I loved the music.”

From there, it became impossible to deny the unstoppable force that was Tech N9ne. In 2011, Tech connected with Lil Wayne on All 6s & 7s, validation that he was playing in the big leagues; Lil Wayne returned the favor on Tha Carter IV, giving him an interlude collaboration with Andre 3000. That same album found him collaborating with a young Kendrick Lamar, as well as another TDE alumni in Jay Rock. In 2015, Tech secured his first collaboration with Eminem on “Speedom.” The “Worldwide Choppers” movement brought some of hip-hop’s dexterous heavyweights into the mix, including the legendary Busta Rhymes and Twista. All the while, Tech kept his metal-inclined fans satisfied with an increasingly wide breadth of prominent artists; Serj Tankian and Corey Taylor are but a few.

Though his output is showing no signs of slowing down, it feels like now is the time to start putting due respect on Tech N9ne’s name. A self-made man who built an empire off the strength of his creative vision, trusting in his fanbase to spread the good word and never losing sight of his hip-hop roots. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in the sheer volume of his output, though patient listeners can and should familiarize themselves with his canon’s essentials — Anghellic, Absolute Power, Everready, K.O.D, and All 6s & 7s are all great starting points for newcomers. And while there’s absolutely no place in which a given “best rappers alive” list is considered gospel, perhaps more critics should welcome Tech N9ne into the conversation, even if he doesn’t ultimately make the cut. Because in all honesty, only a few emcees have accomplished what the Kansas City chopper has accomplished. All things considered, where do you place Tech N9ne in the greater hip-hop hierarchy — and for those willing to answer, on which albums are you basing your assessment?

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[brothergrimmbo-blog]

Examining my love for Destiny 2 (A Rant)

So I guess I logged a lot of hours into Destiny 2 last year...

According to Playstation’s 2019 Wrap Up, I kind of fell back in love with Destiny last year and I have thoughts on why. This is by no means a comprehensive list of reasons to play Bungie’s fantastic space based looter shooter, it’s just me trying to figure out why Destiny 2 was my most played game of 2019.

My History with Destiny

During Playstation’s 2013 E3 press-conference, I was exposed to the glorious Destiny gameplay-demo. It teased the social elements of an MMO packaged as an expertly crafted first-person-shooter (FPS) experience, all brought to me by one of the most exciting developers in the business, Bungie.

“The guns have names and power levels,” I thought, “I’m in.”  

I purchased the Digital Deluxe Guardian Edition or whatever it was called (the first time I’d ever bought any kind of special edition for a game), and upon release I was almost immediately disappointed. I beat the main campaign in one sitting and felt the ending was underwhelming to say the least. The early days of Destiny were confusing as all hell and frankly, a little dry in the content department. I played a lot of Crucible, but other than that, I never really played through strikes or most of the PVE content in general once I beat the jumbled main story. At the time, I didn’t see the point of logging in, so I didn’t. I put away my Warlock Bonds and stopped playing entirely. And then Shadowkeep happened.  

Enter Shadowkeep

I jumped back in with the Shadowkeep expansion and New Light revamp. Bungie’s tweaks and updates to the game really reinforced the idea that “the world of Destiny” is alive and it will move on with our without me. Main characters have died in my absence. Fallen heroes have been resurrected. The Traveler is broken now? And also sticky portal monsters are a thing. I decided to jump back in, intrigued and hype as all hell.

I still have a lot of catching up to do lore wise, but I’m actually excited to experience it. I’ve loved diving into the robust and so-far extremely friendly Destiny community on Youtube and Reddit, so I know my questions will have answers. The overarching story in Shadowkeep -in addition to the smaller, character-focused quests (like last week’s Devil’s Ruin Exotic Quest)- keep me in the loop way more than Destiny 1’s Grimoire cards ever did.

Destiny in 2020

In terms of “What to do” in Destiny 2, it can be initially overwhelming, but here are the basics:

The Playlists

There are three basic game modes presented as “Playlists”: Strikes, Crucible, and Gambit. These playlists serve as quick and easy “Jump right in”-style fun, catered toward cooperative, competitive, and...Gambit (Destiny’s unique mix of co-op and competitive gameplay). If you want a more chill experience, you can explore or patrol the solar system. In between shooting sessions, you’ll meet your friends, organize loadouts, and talk to bounty vendors at The Tower, Destiny 2’s social hub.

The Tower

In concert with these game modes, you’ll complete daily and weekly bounties obtained from vendors across the multi-planetary map and The Tower. Bounties might task you with using a certain weapon-type, killing a particular boss, collecting specific materials or performing different in-game activities. Once bounties are complete, you can redeem valuable currency, or engrams (Destiny’s randomized loot drops). In addition to bounties, you have the opportunity to acquire and complete meatier quests for more specific, powerful rewards. Quests come in multiple steps that can be as simple as finding specific items in the world to completing the most challenging activities in the game. They come in a wide variety of both difficulty and time consumption, but the rewards have been worth it so far.

The Loop(s)

The gameplay balances the box-checking nature of quests and bounties with great space-shooter gameplay to establish a loop that is both addicting, and rewarding. For example:

Lets say you just got a handful of daily bounties and a few weeklies. You need to get 10 kills with a hand cannon, 10 kills with a solar weapon, and 10 kills in the Crucible. Play one game of Crucible with a solar hand cannon, get 10 kills and you just completed three bounties. Before you head back to the Tower , you’ll realize you need to complete one more bounty for the weekly quest so you play “just one more game” to complete “ just one more bounty” and now it’s 3 in the morning and you have a slew of new gear you just have to try out, and thus the cycle continues.

This extends to the moment-to-moment gameplay as well, it’s not just “shoot the bad guys.” Guardians have special abilities according to their class (Hunter, Warlock and Titan) as well as their elemental subclass (Solar, Arc and Void). Even within those subclasses, there are branching ability trees with different playstyles. Want to fly around and rain fire from the sky? Go top-tree Dawnblade. Want to be a spirit-bombing vampire? Go bottom-tree Voidwalker. Balancing ability cooldowns with gear upgrades makes every second of gameplay count. Throw in some environmental puzzles and some floaty platforming and you’ve got Destiny in a nutshell.

Here’s to another 93 hours

The constant loop of long-form quests, quick-bounties, and an ever-flowing stream of loot keeps me engaged more than any other game on the market. There’s a lot to do without a specific goal in mind, and it doesn't even take into account quests for exotic weapons and armor pieces, story specific events, raids, and seasonal events. There is so much to do in Destiny it’s almost impossible to get bored. Tied together with Bungie’s excellent shooting mechanics and “space-magic” vibe, Destiny 2 is going to continue to take up way too much of my time and I am totally okay with that.

[amulet-of-the-drunkard]

Ah yes, the official Dunno/Sergei romance song.

[newscitygroup]

Impeachment fiasco is a Dem gift to Donald Trump

Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi have managed to pull off a miracle with their impeachment gambit.

They’ve united Republicans around Donald Trump, a feat once thought impossible, and for which the president owes a great deal to Schiff’s dogged Republican counterpart Devin Nunes.

“There has never been so much unity and spirit in the Republican Party, as there is right now!” trumpeted Trump on Twitter Friday.

As support for the president edges up nationally and, notably, in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where 94 percent of Republicans oppose impeachment, he has been gifted a remarkable campaign advantage by his opponents.

He ran as an outsider in 2016, and now he gets to run again as an outsider, despite three years in the White House.

The Beltway Brahmin class of bureaucrats and resistance journalists have provided him a new campaign pitch: “New hoax. Same swamp.”

After two weeks of public impeachment hearings, we are no closer to evidence that Trump committed an impeachable offense over Ukraine. Inappropriate, perhaps, but that’s his middle name.

The partisan audience — and media — sitting in the hearings each day, cheering along Schiff’s cunning narrative, has misled the Democrats into thinking it has popular backing.

Like the boy who cried wolf, if you spend long enough shrieking that Trump is the devil incarnate, eventually people switch off.

You only had to hear the laughter at the end of proceedings Thursday, when Schiff let down his guard and mocked Nunes, to recognize the anti-Trump mood infecting the public gallery in Room 1100.

“This is such a threat to democracy … more so than anything I’ve seen in my life,” said retired attorney Michael Lennie, 77, who had come from San Diego to watch the hearings.

When did he realize the gravity of the case? “November 2016.” Boom.

Nor did retiree Melissa Colbert, 71, and Susan Zengerle, 68, of Maryland, hide their antipathy to the president. They were there representing a grassroots political group, Indivisible Montgomery.

“It’s really an anti-Trump group,” said Zengerle. Naturally, she found the impeachment witnesses “very credible and nonpartisan” and the Republicans “obstructionist.”

Like the men and women who testified, the audience might be patriotic Americans doing their duty, but they also seem convinced that this elected president is an existential threat to the republic.

Once you’ve convinced yourself of that, it’s a small step to insist he must be removed, by fair means or foul, to save the nation.

But this is a dangerous delusion which, after three years of crying wolf, afflicts only a shrinking minority of Americans.

The Democrats’ all-smoke-no-fire game has turned off independent voters already disillusioned with the failed Russia collusion probe.

“You’ve seen the polls, I’m going through the roof,” Trump boasted on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning. “In Wisconsin, in the swing states, I’m well up … because the people get it. It’s a witch hunt.”

He’s not wrong.

As Democrats head home for Thanksgiving to take the temperature of their districts, polls spell impending doom.

Among all-important independent voters, opposition to impeaching Trump leaped from 37 percent to 47 percent over the first week of the public hearings, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll released Tuesday.

An Emerson poll released Wednesday similarly found a rise in opposition to impeachment among independents, from 39 percent last month to 49 percent.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, which Trump won by just 23,000 votes in 2016, a Marquette University poll published Wednesday found 53 percent of all registered voters opposed impeachment, up slightly from last month — and that includes opposition from a whopping 94 percent of Republicans.

The poll also showed Trump flipping the tables to lead every Democratic presidential candidate, including Joe Biden by three points.

Then there’s the Blexit metric. Two polls last week showed Trump’s approval among black voters up around 34 percent.

In the Emerson poll, Trump scored a 34.5 percent job approval rating, echoed in a 34 percent approval in Friday’s Rasmussen poll.

This is the Democrats’ worst nightmare since they need around 85 percent black support to win a presidential race.

Emerson also showed overall approval of Trump jumped to 48 percent from 43 percent last month, before hearings began.

No wonder Democrats in the 31 districts Trump won in 2016 are nervous.

Upstate, Anthony Brindisi, who has a narrow hold on the 22nd District, is trying valiantly to avoid talking about impeachment, as pro-Trump groups prepare to spend millions on TV ads in battleground areas.

“We have to look at what we can start to accomplish over the next few months that will help benefit the American people,” he told WPRI-TV Thursday, “health care, prescription drugs, election security, women’s equality.”

Good luck with that.

In his “Fox & Friends” interview, Trump also described the impeachment process as another “overthrow attempt at the presidency.”

“With no experience I come to Washington. I’ve defeated the Clinton dynasty, the Bush dynasty and the Obama whatever you want to call it … [and] the hatred is incredible.”

It really is. For better or worse, Trump was elected as the great disruptor to change “business as usual” in Washington, to drain the swamp.

The past two weeks, we’ve heard from the bureaucratic state just how much they hate Trump’s disruption.

Tough luck, says America.

Parenting is a job in itself

Andrew Yang got it right in Wednesday’s Democratic debate when he said not all parents want to work outside the home.

“We should not be pushing everyone to leave the home and go to the workforce,” he said. “Many parents … say if they leave the home and go to work, they’d be spending all that money on child care anyway. In many cases, it would we better if the parent stayed with the child.”

Amen. But with Rachel Maddow and MSNBC’s all-female team in charge of proceedings, Yang’s unorthodox honesty guaranteed he would be sidelined the rest of the night, continuing a snub so pointed that he is demanding an apology before he will return to the channel.

For some reason, it is an affront to feminism to point out that the upbringing of children is better done by their parents than outsourced to strangers.

The political party that recognizes parents’ true desires will have an electoral advantage.

Legal pot blows up in Boomers’ face

“OK, Boomer,” was Matt Gaetz’s puerile response to Kellyanne Conway’s concerns about marijuana legalization.

The 37-year-old Florida Republican congressman has it the wrong way around.

Boomers are the marijuana boosters who have caused the problems Conway rightly abhors.

The generation that inhaled still thinks weed is the benign, low-potency drug of their youth. Thus, boomer legislators have failed to understand the threat to mental health, especially for teens, of an easily accessible high-potency drug. Nor did they anticipate the expanding black market and associated environmental threat they now are powerless to control.

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[lostsolsdestinyblog]

D2 PvP dropped below 500k players yesterday. Is it time to discuss player population and the state of the game yet?

14 million people/accounts have played D2 since launch. Yesterday's population:

PvP- 490.5k

PvE- 570.9k

Edit: shout-out to Bungie.Net member TattooedOni who pointed out that DTR numbers include Gambit. I did not know that. Yesterday's Crucible was actually 345,415 and hit a low water mark of 268,000 on February 9. Those are as bad as the game has ever seen.

It will be interesting to see what they bump back up to with the release of the Season of the Drifter, but these numbers are reaching the same lows the game saw in D1 year 3 and D2 year 1.

One could obviously make the argument that it's just players siphoning off as the game gets further into each content release, but here's the issue with that; we have been told repeatedly by the anti-sbmm crowd that SBMM was there reason population numbers dropped in D1 and D2 Y1. We also saw the game bombarded by all the "dead game", "D2 sucks", etc comments all throughout year 1 from both community in general as well as from the major influencers.

Yet here we are, after an expansion in Forsaken that was extremely well received at launch and generally hailed as one of the best Destiny content releases and one that "brought back the hobby", and yet we're approaching half-way through the annual pass and not only are people not logging on in droves, there's not even a hint of excitement for season 6.

This isn't indicative of a game that's returned to "hobby" status and it's incredibly worrying for the remainder of the year. So my question is, what went wrong and why are so many leaving the game?

Obviously there's a lot going on right now with Apex having it's huge surprise launch, as well as Anthem and Division 2 out/about to release, and we are in the final week of the season. Those things taken at a glance and in a vacuum would definitely explain away a lot, but it doesn't come close to telling the entire story.

For as much as Forsaken added to the game in terms of investment and things to do/chase/grind for, the numbers have been in a decline since before this season began and have continued to fall throughout. This is something that all these changes to progression and the amount we have to grind for everything was supposed to curb.

"SBMM makes people stop playing", so Bungie removed it and people have stopped playing faster than than they ever did in D1 and considering the current lack of a massive anti-Destiny campaign like the big name influencers waged in year one to help drive people away, it's staggering how quickly players have left what should have been a light-years better Crucible experience over year one with the complete sandbox overhaul and return to 6v6.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Summit and I know the narrative players had going in, the quality of interaction we experienced and now I've seen where we are and there's a massive disconnect for me. I know most of the people in the rooms wanted a far more grindy game, but I never thought that every positive change vanilla D2 gave the game and franchise would be shuttered and we'd see another massive overcorrect; and yet that's what has happened in my opinion. Forsaken and subsequently Black Armory went too far.

I'll start with matchmaking because I've already mentioned it as well as written volumes on the topic over the course of the season. I think we can finally dispel the notion that skill in matchmaking is what's driven population declines, again particularly seeing how well received the sandbox is now vs year one.

I've said this many times already, but we never got to experience year 2 PvP and all the positive changes with any semblance of fair matchmaking in QP or Comp. Comp has its own fair share of issues there, but QP was easy. Just don't remove skill factoring. Yet that's exactly what happened and in a season where I have ranked up valor 9 times, only 1 of those ranks has been in QP because it's so freaking brutal. It's also made my friends stop playing it outside of needed bounties or quests. No one I know wants to log in just play QP because it's fun, like we did throughout D1 and even in D2 Y1.

It also says something that as broken as IB is with rules and scoring, that it's still so incredibly fun with the new Sandbox paired with decent matchmaking and more fair player vs player engagements, that I've ranked up almost 9 Valor ranks playing it.

Then there's the sandbox that is admittedly a lot better than year one and at one point in Forsaken, I thought maybe the best ever. I've dialed back from that a bit as year 2 has progressed and we start to see a rippling of little issues that grew throughout D1 with balancing.

I never thought year 2 needed kill times dialed to 11 and I think that's starting to be an issue with no ceiling for great weapons without breaking play. Special weapons were really well balanced in year one and just simply adjusting the ammo economy and reworking the slotting would have been a huge start there. They didn't need to have best-in-slot weapons in every slot though or the massive performance boosts to shotguns.

Primaries were in a very good place as well by the end with exotics showing how kill times could be quickened without removing the ceiling across the board.

Grenades and ability cool downs needed the biggest buff going into year 2 and those were nailed perfectly. I still contend that had year one had the grenades and CDs we have now, it wouldn't have tanked nearly as badly.

Heavy was too prevalent in year 1, but it had to be to break up team shooting since that was the only way to use special weapons and again, grenades and abilities were so poor that there were no real neutral games.

Then we got fun new supers in year 2, but inexplicably they were given insane damage resistance, durations and/or damage, as well as mods to get them faster. Players with supers in the first minute isn't uncommon. They were too slow charging at launch, but buffing them up to D1 rates would've been great. Instead we went well beyond.

Then finally there's PvE that I used to play all 3 characters every week for years. Now I have played less an hour of PvE in the last month. I haven't played my Titan or Warlock since last November and I'm not looking forward to SotD pushing power to 700 and having to regrind another 50 levels and deal with the ridiculous infusion economy to just be able to wear and use what I like and already have again.

Beyond that, the further up the cap goes, the less and less desire I have to ever even think about leveling one of my other characters again. As long as the current infusion economy exists and forces me to play wearing and using gear I don't like, I won't be touching another character; and for all the awesome content Forsaken did bring to D2 PvE, the experience of playing it was really soured by not getting to use what I had and loved and absolutely hating my characters because they looked like such garbage.

I'll never understand the hard stance taken on this or what meaningful infusion adds to the game. It's the single worst change to PvE ever made.

Then there's the oversaturation of RNG. Grind is fine. Things like Titles were great. RNG dialed to 11 in everything? Not so much.

And finally, I think random rolls were done wrong. I don't think they're bad with the variety of weapons they've added, but making them random rolls of each was a mistake.

Destiny is a looter-shooter and so lots of loot is good. Destiny does in a sense have a lot more loot now, but it's completely undermined by how it was implemented. My 10th version of Better Devil's is still just another Better Devil's dropping. Cashing in a pile of Crucible tokens and getting 6-7 Anonymous Autumn's isn't any more interesting.

What could have been a lot more interesting is if instead of making the different rolls random versions of the same weapon, is had they been their own named weapons. Even if they had the exact same skins, seeing all the different weapon names all with their own unique set rolls would have been way more interesting.

It also could have solved the collections problem for not being able to pull random rolled weapons out. If each was it's own unique named weapon, that isn't a problem anymore. It also gives more clear rewards to chase with a specific named weapon vs a random variation of one, and yeah not all would be as good and there would be standouts, but it would also make kill feeds a hell of a lot more diverse which would go a long way to curbing nerf requests, and if a particular weapon was way too prevalent or good, it would be a hell of a lot easier to tune that one gun vs tuning Better Devil's and having that affect all variations, which seemed to me the entire point of static rolls to begin with.

I hope that these and other player concerns are at least topics of conversation within the studio. I really feel a huge disconnect from this game that I still do love and think could very easily be course-corrected to a game that truly is a hobby game that has something for all levels of investment, but that starts with understanding that the balance needs to fall in-between what D2 was at launch and is currently and ending the cycle of pushing too far when all that's needed is a light touch or digging in and refusing to acknowledge issues as players leave in waves.

We're all here because we love the game and franchise and want it to succeed. I hope the future is bright.

[tabloidtoc]

People, November 2

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Widowed by COVID-19 -- three months after actor Nick Cordero’s death at 41 his grieving wife Amanda Kloots opens up about staying strong for their son Elvis

Page 1: Chatter -- Kate Hudson on smooching frequent costar Matthew McConaughey onscreen, Eva Mendes on raising two daughters with Ryan Gosling, Sam Smith on trying to find love online, Jennifer Hudson on the late Aretha Franklin whom she portrays in Respect, Blake Shelton on his early performances, Jennifer Lopez on bringing her daughter Emme out during her Super Bowl halftime performance 

Page 2: 5 Things We’re Talking About This Week -- A PAW Patrol movie enlists A-list actors, Dexter plots its return, Dunkin’ debuts the Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut, Yes Cameron Diaz and Nicole Richie are related, Jacob Tremblay plays a young Justin Bieber 

Page 4: Contents 

Page 7: Editor’s Letter 

Page 8: StarTracks -- stars rock the remote Billboard Music Awards -- Lizzo used her speech to speak out against suppression 

Page 9: Alicia Keys, Garth Brooks, Post Malone with host Kelly Clarkson, En Vogue’s Rhona Bennett and Terry Ellis and Cindy Herron celebrated their 30 anniversary as a band 

Page 10: Tom Cruise shared a laugh with his Mission: Impossible 7 costar Hayley Atwell in Rome, Chris Rock sparked romance buzz when he stepped out for lunch with actress Carmen Ejogo in Malibu, Bella Hadid was all smiles during a Michael Kors photo shoot in New York City, Nick Cannon wore a Protect Black Women shirt to the Feed Your City Challenge COVID-19 relief event in Chicago 

Page 11: Royals at Work -- Princess Kate stopped by Imperial College in London to learn about new research on pregnancy loss and premature births, Prince William joined Queen Elizabeth on her visit to the Science and Technology Laboratory in Porton Down for their first public outing in two years

Page 12: First Look at  the upcoming comedy Superintelligence with Melissa McCarthy and Bobby Cannavale, Katie Holmes and boyfriend Emilio Vitolo Jr. went for a spin around Manhattan, Sarah Jessica Parker posed in front of one of her SJP Collection stores for a photo shoot in New York City

Page 13: Jason Derulo attended the drive-in premiere of the musical drama Clouds with his girlfriend Jena Frumes in L.A., Macaulay Culkin and girlfriend Brenda Song went for a walk with their dog on a leash and their cat in a stroller in L.A., just four months after Courtney Robertson and Humberto Preciado welcomed their son Joaquin the couple wed in an intimate outdoor ceremony at the Tlaquepaque Arts & Crafts Village in Sedona, Arizona 

Page 17: Scoop -- John Cena tied the knot with Shay Shariatzadeh in Tampa 

Page 18: Armie Hammer fights Elizabeth Chambers over child custody 

Page 20: Heart Monitor -- Keanu Reeves and Alexandra Grant going strong, J.P. Rosenbaum and Ashley Hebert surprise split, Taraji P. Henson and Kelvin Hayden engagement called off, Zac Efron and Vanessa Valladares getting serious 

Page 21: John Legend and Chrissy Teigen healing after the loss of their third child, Anthony Hopkins has found a creative to help children affected by COVID-19 -- he’s launching a namesake fragrance brand which benefits the nonprofit No Kid Hungry 

Page 22: Maren Morris’ new life as a mom, Then & Now -- Thomas Brodie-Sangster -- the Love Actually kid turns 30 

Page 25: Marlon Wayans from funny man to leading man, how Gretchen Carlson is moving on 

Page 29: Passages, Why I Care -- Lily Collins works to raise funds for vulnerable children as a GO Campaign ambassador 

Page 31: Stories to Make You Smile -- an artist spreads joy with her natural art, this dog is a connoisseur with chopsticks 

Page 35: People Picks -- The Undoing 

Page 36: Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Bad Hair, Bruce Springsteen -- Letter to You, Q&A -- Emily is Paris’s Lucas Bravo 

Page 37: The Queen’s Gambit, Hubie Halloween, Time, One to Watch -- Fargo’s Kelsey Asbille 

Page 39: Books 

Page 40: Cover Story -- Nick Cordero’s widow Amanda Kloots -- I definitely feel Nick’s presence -- her actor husband died of COVID-19 in July and now she’s staying strong for their son and finding solace in support from around the world 

Page 46: Brooke Shields -- what I know now -- the actress opens up about embracing her wage and wearing a bikini at age 55 and how she finally found true confidence 

Page 50: Missing -- help us find these kids -- whether the search has gone on for months or decades loved ones and law enforcement refuse to give up hopes of bringing each one of these children home 

Page 54: Jill Duggar Dillard -- small changes, controversial choices -- for years she followed her family’s rules without question but now after distancing herself from them the reality star opens up about why she’s changed some of her ways 

Page 58: Reasons for Hope in America -- in these uncertain times a celebration of creative people and inspiring acts and natural beauty and much-needed good news 

Page 62: Sarah Cooper -- from Google staffer to comedy star -- a daughter of Jamaican immigrants she went to work at the tech giant then her videos satirizing President Trump went viral and now she’s living her dream 

Page 64: Photographer Camilla McGrath -- candid camera -- photos by an Italian aristocrat wed to a party-hearty American offer a rare peak into the private celebrity life of a bygone era -- Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski 

Page 65: Barbra Streisand and Sydney Pollack, Audrey Hepburn and Anita Loos, Keith Richards and son Marlon 

Page 66: Jacqueline Kennedy and sister Lee Canfield, Michael Douglas and son Cameron

Page 67: Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill and Griffin Dunne, Angelica Huston and Robert Graham 

Page 69: Cameron Dallas -- social media was a drug for me -- he was one of the first influencers to catapult to megafame but the fun soon turned debilitating and now the former teen idol reveals how he got sober and created a more meaningful life 

Page 72: Volunteer Pilots Make a Special Delivery -- puppies with a purpose -- after COVID-19 travel restrictions grounded dozens of young service dogs in training local pilots stepped up to help 

Page 75: Hollywood at Home -- Jane the Virgin star Justin Baldoni’s California oasis -- the actor-director and his wife Emily created a Feng Shui-ed farmhouse in the middle of the city 

Page 87: Second Look -- Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky release tasmanian devils into a sanctuary north of Sydney, Australia 

Page 88: One Last Thing -- Kristin Chenoweth -- the actress stars in Netflix’s rom-com Holidate 

[theonyxpath]

Yes, we’re down to the last week of the Contagion Chronicle Kickstarter – and so I know you’ll all be sad to know that it’s my last week of coming up with awful pun-ny titles for this blog based on the KS.

(Never fear, in several weeks we’ll be starting the Pirates of Pugmire Kickstarter campaign, and you KNOW I’ll have pirate titles for the run on that!)

(Of course, I may just title them “Yarrr!1”, “Yarrr!2”, and so on.)

But back to The Contagion Chronicle!

We’re looking to finish strong on Thursday, so this is really the home stretch. Hopefully, at this point, backers are able to tell whether the project is intriguing them based on the text that’s almost done being released.

And hopefully, folks who are wondering about backing have seen enough from backers posting here and on social media, and the various Actual Play vids that Matthew and James have linked to, to give the project a shot.

Remember, you can back for a mere pittance and get the chance the review the text yourself without being locked in to pledging at the end. Well, at least until it really is the end on Thursday – at that point Kickstarter charges everybody!

Also, by backing at a bit more than a mere pittance, you’ll also receive links to the PDFs of the two Stretch Goal projects that have been being built up throughout the course of the Kickstarter when they are finished. More locations and some alternative rules in the one, and guides to crossovers on a more nuts and bolts level in the other.

Adventures For Curious Cats illustration by Pat Loboyko

Mighty Matt McElroy wanted me to thank all of you that made our 20th Anniversary WoD books PDF sale a huge success! We’re thrilled that so many of you took it as a chance to catch up on some of the WoD20 books you hadn’t yet checked out! Thanks!

He also mentioned reminding all you awesome people that we have two sales on physical books going on at Indie Press Revolution: for physical hardback copies of the Pathfinder rules edition of the Scarred Lands Players Guide, and for the Deluxe 20th Anniversary physical books that IPR still have in stock.

Or, if you prefer, Studio2 also has the Scarred Lands Players Guide – Pathfinder edition – physical books on a deep discount sale right now. You can check out the links below in the BLURBS!

We’ll be having some very cool info about the Scarred Lands Creature Collection for 5e coming up in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that. I’ll say this now, the monster art is looking gorgeous!

Book of Oblivion illustration by Drew Tucker

Following up on last week, we immediately started using the new Errata Form for the Geist 2e and Trinity Continuum KS backers as Backer PDFs went out to them.

So far, the form seems to be working fantastically, so thanks to all of you who have used it for sending us your feedback on these two projects!

Along with that, it’s our plan to wrap up the situation with the Scion 2e errata this week. Neall is working on a message for our Scion community to go with the fixes and a downloadable errata sheet, and our shipper is supposed to start sending out all the KS packages this week.

Our apologies to everyone concerned, frustrated, maddened, or just confused by this whole thing. We truly appreciate everyone’s patience in letting us take the time to delve into what happened, and the extent of the number of errata fixes that got “unfixed”.

It’s like that warning on airlines to don your oxygen mask before assisting others. We had to end our own confusion before we could explain what happened and how we’re dealing with it. And that’ll come later this week.

Dystopia Rising: Evolution illustration by Marco Gonzales

One other thing I wanted to note, which came out of the Scion errata thing, but has popped up before, is that when I’m writing this blog, I generally have to bear in mind that for any given situation I’m trying to address, there are many segments of our community I’m addressing.

What I mean is that sometimes I will make a point during discussing one thing that is also addressing other concerns that other members of our community have. These are folks that maybe don’t feel comfortable voicing their concerns in the dangerous seas of social media, but who have sent me private messages. I need to be responsive to them – but I don’t want to “out” them.

(And there are also those private messages that rip me a new one, that I also don’t share because I’m not here to get into flame-wars, but which have items in them that aren’t true and I don’t want to leave unaddressed).

In both those kinds of cases, if you see a series of messages and I respond and seem to veer off to talk about something else that’s not directly prompted by the thread – this is what is probably on my mind with my answer.

After all, we have a community containing folks of all ages, all kinds of interests, all walks of life, and who may love one, some, or all of our game worlds, and I need to always bear that in mind and try and give everybody the connections they need to explore our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Now in it’s LAST FEW DAYS, the Contagion continues to spread, passing 1275 backers and infecting all in its path with more and more Stretch Goals! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/contagion-chronicle-a-chronicles-of-darkness-cross

The Contagion Chronicle actual play continues on the Onyx Path YouTube channel! https://youtu.be/WR92yIuafU4

He also asks for your Contagion Chronicle-related questions here: https://youtu.be/axvrFeQOvEg

Matthew’s interview on Flames Rising about Contagion Chronicle: http://www.flamesrising.com/matthew-dawkins-is-infected-with-the-contagion-chronicle/

Our next Kickstarter starting in several weeks will be for Pirates of Pugmire!

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Illustration by Charles Bates

On this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast, our team takes a deep dive into the epic “Greco-Apocalyptic” fantasy of The Scarred Lands game line! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

It’s a new episode of the Onyx Path News from host, Matthew Dawkins: https://youtu.be/Cjqey_N3_jQ

Matthew also lets loose several previews regarding Mummy: The Curse Second Edition here: https://youtu.be/X9lbz4TWY9s

If YOU have a podcast, YouTube or Twitch channel, or talk about games on a blog or other website, and want to perform actual plays or make reviews of our games, please reach out to the Gentleman Gamer on the Onyx Path forum. From there we’ll share emails and get you started, so when you do start producing content we’ll be able to promote it on our blog and YouTube channel!

The Contagion Chronicle actual play continues on the Onyx Path YouTube channel! https://youtu.be/WR92yIuafU4

Red Moon Roleplaying have commenced their actual play of Scarred Lands, in a campaign Matthew Dawkins is running named The Great Vilhaim Heist! https://youtu.be/QUFVS4g6gDg

Caffeinated Conquests also continue with their foray into the Scarred Lands, with the Gauntlet of Spiragos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lVL40fkPX8

And as if that wasn’t enough, Devil’s Luck Gaming are still hard at it on the dangerous seas of Scarred Lands on their Twitch channel! https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING

The Story Told Podcast have not one but two shows for you to check out, as they continue their chronicle of Dragon-Blooded for Exalted 3rd Edition, and have even reviewed it today! https://thestorytold.libsyn.com/

Here’s the Gamer’s Table again with their They Came from Beneath the Sea! actual play: http://gamerstable.com/cheesy-sci-fi-horror/

Cheesy Sci-Fi/Horror

And Occultists Anonymous, the Mage: The Awakening chronicle, also continues here: https://youtu.be/i4NNs_G0NNw

If Vampire is your thing, here’s an actual play of the Blood War for Vampire: The Requiem on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhai2P1uktAzDEch4d1r2JZir0VqUrBQJ

And the Dramatic Failure podcast crew continue with their Geist: The Sin-Eaters chronicle too! https://dramaticfailure.podbean.com/

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here’s an update from the App devs:

Onyx Dice!  We’ve recently released the Changeling: The Lost, Trinity Continuum: Aeon dice, and now the Geist dice.  Next up on our radar is: Demon: The Fallen,  Mummy: The Resurrection,  Kindred of the East, Vampire Dark Ages, and Mummy: The Curse.

We have a serious issue on the Pixel and Motorola phones that prevent the user from using the app correctly.  A fix is coming shortly.  A temporary workaround is to minimize the app without shutting it down, and then restore it.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio 2: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can now order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

The Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) and WoD 20th Anniversary Deluxe sales on IPR are still going until the end of the month!: https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Deals-and-Specials/

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we’ll be offering our monthly Exalted 3rd PDF releases on DriveThruRPG!

CONVENTIONS

UK Games Expo: May 31st – June 2nd From the US comes Eddy Webb, Matt McElroy, and Rich Thomas to join with Matthew Dawkins, Steffie de Vann, John Burke, Chris Allen, and Klara Herbol! Gen Con: August 1st – August 4th Save Against Fear: Oct 12-14 GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year.

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Redlines

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

TC: Aeon Ready Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Blood Sea: Crimson Abyss for 5e (Scarred Lands)

DR:E Threat Guide (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Let The Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Manuscript Approval:

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Editing:

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Post-Editing Development:

C20 Novel: Cup of Dreams (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Indexing:

Trinity Core

Trinity Aeon

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff  

Chicago By Night – Art coming in slowly but surely.

They Came From Beneath the Sea!

EX3 Lunars

Hunter: The Vigil 2

Contagion Chronicle – KS.

VtR Spilled Blood – Hiring artists.

M20 Book of the Fallen – Contracted.

Dark Eras 2 – Getting artnotes in from devs.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel – Contracted.

Pirates of Pugmire – KS art contracted, sketches and finals coming in.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – With Josh.

Shunned By the Moon

Scion Jumpstart

Aeon Aexpansion

Proofing

C20 Player’s Guide – At WW for approval.

The Realm

Book of Oblivion – Inputting last corrections.

Dragon-Blooded Screen – At WW for approval.

Signs of Sorcery – First Proof.

Trinity Core and Aeon Screens

At Press

Scion Hero – At Studio2, preparing to ship to backers.

Scion Origin – At Studio2, preparing to ship to backers.

Scion Dice – At Studio2, preparing to ship to backers.

Scion Screen – At Studio2, preparing to ship to backers.

Fetch Quest – Shipped to backers, prepping PoD version.

In Media Res – PDF out to backers, gathering errata with new sheet.

Geist 2e – PDF out to backers, gathering errata with new sheet.

Scarred Lands Spell Cards – PoD proofs ordered.

Adventures for Curious Cats – Going out to backers.

Tales of Excellent Cats – Going out to backers.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: 

Today is Earth Day, and we live here, so let’s celebrate doing what we can to keep Gaia alive!

[bountyofbeads]

The Unraveling of Donald Trump

As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.

Peter Nicholas | Published October 18, 2019 9:45 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.

The boiling mind of Trump has spawned a cottage industry for cognitive experts who have questioned whether he is, well, all there. But as the impeachment inquiry barrels ahead on Capitol Hill, several associates of the president, including former White House aides, worry that his behavior is likely to get worse. Angered by the proceedings, unencumbered by aides willing to question his judgment, and more and more isolated in the West Wing, Trump is apt to lash out more at enemies imagined and real, these people told me. Conduct that has long been unsettling figures to deteriorate as Trump comes under mounting stress. What unfolded Wednesday inside the West Wing’s walls might be only a foretaste of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described that day, after a meeting with Trump, as a presidential “meltdown.”

“He’s grown more comfortable in the job and less willing to assimilate new information and trust new advisers,” a former White House official told me. “He’s decided to throw caution to the wind and go it alone, especially when he’s stressed and feels under attack and threatened in various ways. Then his worst impulses and vices shine through.”

On Wednesday alone, he peddled a discredited conspiracy theory in an Oval Office meeting with his Italian counterpart; threw a tantrum during the meeting with Pelosi; dismissed former Defense Secretary James Mattis as “the world’s most overrated general”; and released a letter he wrote to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that was so bizarre, people weren’t convinced it was real (“Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”).

At least one associate has confronted Trump recently about his judgment, specifically his decision to repeatedly attack the Biden family. Isn’t it unseemly for a president to target Joe Biden’s son Hunter? Wouldn’t it be smarter, at least, to outsource this sort of attack to someone else?

According to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations, Trump’s explanation was that he acts as any normal person might, and that he won’t be moved by what he calls “political correctness.” “You don’t get it,” Trump said.

Most presidents in the modern era have had emotional moorings to sustain them during crises. President Franklin D. Roosevelt fussed over his stamp collection as he plotted victory in World War II. President Barack Obama would play miniature golf with his young daughters and basketball with old friends from Hawaii as he navigated the financial crisis. In Trump’s world, these sorts of leavening influences don’t seem to exist. Apparently absent from his life are traditional family bonds, creative outlets and hobbies, even exercise. (While some of his children are visible and vocal advocates for their father, Trump’s relationships with them are notoriously complex.) Splayed out on Twitter, his life has always seemed a limitless diet of Fox & Friends episodes and interpersonal disputes. Long gone are the trusted aides with whom he seemed comfortable (and who were willing to speak their mind), such as the senior adviser Hope Hicks.

“I think what we’re viewing, if you think about the human side of it, is the man has no life. He just has no life,” the person close to him told me.

A common question these days is whether Trump has an impairment of some sort that might explain his behavior. Writing in The Atlantic earlier this month, the lawyer George Conway, who is married to the Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, described how some health professionals have ascribed two personality disorders to Trump: pathological narcissism and antisocial personality disorder.

But the latest concerns about Trump are just a crescendo in a long-running drama. Sam Nunberg, a former 2016 Trump-campaign aide, told me that a colleague once approached him and asked if Trump was losing it, saying they had just had the same conversation twice. Nunberg dismissed such concerns, assuring him that it was only because Trump likely wasn’t paying attention the first time.

His speech has changed over time, too. Software programs show that Trump currently speaks at a fourth-to-sixth-grade level. (Politicians are practiced at speaking to wide swaths of Americans, but Obama, for example, according to those speech analyses, spoke at an 11th-grade level in his final news conference as president.) A study last year by two University of Pittsburgh professors examining Trump’s appearances on Fox News found that the quality of his speech was worsening. They studied his comments over a seven-year period ending in 2017—just as his presidency began—and found that he had begun using substantially more “filler words”such as um and uh, though the authors did not conclude that the change signaled cognitive decline.

Even a casual observer can see the disordered and nonlinear thinking behind Trump’s speech. A case in point was Trump’s rally last week in Minneapolis. Within minutes of taking the stage, Trump launched, without explanation, into a dramatic reading of what he imagined was the pillow talk between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a pair of former FBI officials who had exchanged text messages critical of the president. He gave no context as to why he was talking about them, leaving it to the audience to fill in the Mall of America–size blanks. Trump never even mentioned that they had worked for the FBI or that Strzok was at one point involved in the Russia investigation—just that they were “lovers” who disliked him. (Still, as theater, it seemed to work. When Trump cooed, “Oh, God. I love you, Lisa!” the audience laughed appreciatively.)

Other people who have worked with Trump in the White House and on the 2016 campaign pushed back on the notion that his mental acuity has eroded over time. “Every president has a super-exaggerated ego and personality in some way,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland-security adviser and a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration, told me. I asked him if presidents or presidential candidates should be subject to a fitness test measuring whether they’re up to the job. Various psychologists have floated this idea in response to Trump’s behavior. “I’m not sure what the fitness standard would reveal about people who are already wired that way,” Bossert said.

Conventional wisdom in Washington is that impeachment won’t lead to Trump’s removal, but that view rests on Republicans continuing to stay by his side. Even those most loyal to Trump could lose patience if his rash decision making collides with their own interests. Trump’s impulsive decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria last week, setting the stage for Turkey’s attack on America’s Kurdish partners, has already infuriated some of his closest friends in Congress. It was soon after the House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, rebuked his Syria gambit on Wednesday that Trump lashed out at Pelosi, prompting her to abruptly walk out of their meeting. (Democrats, of course, are seizing the opportunity. “For those who don’t do politics professionally or even follow it closely: It is getting worse. He is getting worse,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted last night.)

At least one lawmaker thinks that Republicans could hit a tipping point—though he’s a Democrat. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me that it might be easier for Republicans to concede that Trump is unwell than that he’s a criminal who violated his constitutional oath by committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The path to removing Trump, in this formulation, might not be impeachment, but the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Raskin, a former constitutional-law professor, is sponsoring a bill aimed at clarifying a provision of that amendment—a vehicle for removing a president who is unable to carry out his duties, with the consent of the vice president—by shifting responsibility for making such a judgment from the Cabinet to a panel created expressly for that purpose.

“It may be easier for at least certain Republican colleagues just to admit that the president is acting increasingly incapable of meeting the arduous tasks and duties of his office,” Raskin told me.

That’s still a lot to ask of Republican lawmakers who fully grasp Trump’s mystic hold on his political coalition and fear backlash. The question is whether Trump’s base starts to notice, or care, that the man it elected, facing pressures he’s never seen before, is devolving unmistakably into a different sort of man.

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Why Turkey Treated Trump’s Letter as Trash

There may be no more vivid illustration of how American leadership has declined in the world.

David A. Graham | Published October 17, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

When Fox News’ Trish Regan first reported President Donald Trump’s October 9 letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, some journalists and pundits wondered whether it was a joke or a hoax. But the White House confirmed: It was genuine.

“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Trump wrote, signing off incongruously, “I will call you later.”

As it turns out, the Turkish government didn’t stop to puzzle over whether the missive was authentic or a joke: It quickly concluded that it was both.

The letter “was not taken seriously at the time, especially given its lack of diplomatic finesse,” Gülnur Aybet, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, told NPR’s Morning Edition today. The BBC quoted a Turkish source saying that “President Erdoğan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it, and put it in the bin.”

The letter’s language and the puerility of Trump’s attempt at forestalling a Turkish invasion of northern Syria are embarrassing on their own—the language and syntax resembling a tense note exchange in a middle-school classroom far more than the stilted conventions of international relations.

But Trump has long dismissed such critiques of his language as mere tone-policing, another side of the political correctness he decries. His language is, he has contended, “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL”—all caps his, and self-reinforcing. Trump may not sound like a typical president, he and his defenders contend, but his blunt style is more forceful and effective than the mannered language of po-faced diplomats and effete leaders such as Barack Obama.

The fiasco in Syria shows, however, that this style is not only unbecoming—it’s ineffective, too. Faced with a strongly worded missive from the president of the United States—the supposed leader of the free world and the most powerful head of state in NATO, an alliance of which Turkey is a member—Erdoğan snickered and tossed it in the trash. (And not just metaphorically, according to the BBC.) There are perhaps more vivid illustrations of how little respect Washington gets and how American leadership has declined in the world, but none comes to mind at the moment.

The best argument for Trump’s decision to yank American troops out of northern Syria is that Turkey was determined to invade no matter what and the president acted to get U.S. soldiers out of harm’s way. It’s not a very good argument, since Trump successfully held off Erdoğan for two years, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is true.

If so, Trump wasted more than a week of precious time. Erdoğan charged forward with the invasion without regard for Trump’s warnings. When the president moved forward with the sanctions he threatened in the letter, it didn’t rattle Erdoğan at all. American troops were fired on in the chaos of withdrawal. American planes are bombing U.S. munitions dumps to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Independent observers have identified atrocities in the fighting.

Today, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are in Ankara to attempt old-fashioned diplomacy. By now, it might be too late. “They say, ‘Declare a cease-fire.’ We will never declare a cease-fire,” Erdoğan said Tuesday. If Erdoğan sticks to his guns, literally and metaphorically, it will show how little American leadership is respected overseas. If Pence and Pompeo succeed, it will demonstrate the failure of the president’s personal approach. Not that he seems to care what happens. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there,” Trump said yesterday. “So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” It’s hard to believe that world leaders don’t put more stock in his word.

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The Senate Must Rein In Trump

Unless Congress acts, the Kurds may not be the last allies this president abandons.

Chris Coons, Democratic U.S. senator from Delaware | Published October 18, 2019 10:36 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

After President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to abandon the Kurds and withdraw our troops from northern Syria, Congress spent this past week trying to decide how best to respond. A resolution of denunciation? Tough sanctions on Turkey? Reconsider our relationship with Turkey? Convene the coalition against ISIS and consider how to recapture or even track the hundreds of escaped fighters?

I think we have an even bigger problem on our hands.

Until now, it was reasonable to debate whether Trump was simply an unconventional president, the first with no prior experience serving in either our military or government, or whether he was truly willing to work with foreign dictators to place his own political interests ahead of our nation’s. This week, we learned that this was a false choice—he’s both.

First, despite the temporary cease-fire that Vice President Mike Pence and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on Thursday, the damage President Trump has caused cannot be undone. He betrayed our Kurdish allies, aided Russia and Iran, and gave ISIS a chance to reconstitute itself—all to serve his own perceived political interests.

Second, Trump’s abrupt order to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria was not a legitimate response to Americans who are tired of “forever wars.” An abrupt withdrawal from Syria that emboldened our enemies and has already led to the death of hundreds of innocent people was not what the American public had in mind. And just days after Trump announced the withdrawal from Syria, abandoning the Kurds and risking the revival of ISIS, he deployed another 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia. The net impact is more American troops in the Middle East.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Trump knew full well how ill-advised an abrupt withdrawal from Syria would be because he tried to do it once before, in December 2018. In response, Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest and a broad coalition in Congress voiced its strong opposition to the withdrawal.

Less than a year later, all it took to convince Trump once again that Mattis and nearly every serious foreign-policy and security leader from either party in Congress were wrong was a phone call with Erdoğan, the increasingly authoritarian leader of Turkey.

The president apparently chose to listen to the Turkish dictator instead of his top advisers and the bipartisan consensus in Congress because he thought it would make a good campaign talking point.

While we need to do everything we can to limit the impacts of the president’s decision, members of Congress also need to ask ourselves what we can do to prevent Trump from letting other dictators steer U.S. foreign policy as Erdoğan has done.

What’s to stop Trump from pulling the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, offering up Taiwan to China’s President Xi, or handing over Estonia to Vladimir Putin? What about withdrawing our troops from South Korea to secure a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un or abandoning the Baltics to secure peace in Ukraine? Those terrible ideas might strike Trump as bold strokes designed to bring our troops home, too.

We can’t let any of those hypothetical situations come to fruition, because, as we have seen in Syria, the vacuum of American leadership is quickly filled by adversaries.

If the Senate fails to act now to constrain the president and dissuade foreign dictators from asking Trump to desert longtime allies, disregard U.S. interests, and overturn years of U.S. foreign policy, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. It’s true that foreign policy is primarily driven by the executive branch, but it’s Congress’s role to establish guardrails, particularly when the president cannot be trusted to pursue American interests.

The Senate needs to put Trump, our national-security leadership, our allies, and the strongmen with whom Trump regularly flirts on notice. We need to demonstrate to dictators that our system is different: Congress can constrain the president and punish dictators for acting against our interests. There is broad bipartisan support for doing so in this case, and that should extend to preventing a repeat performance.

The Senate must preemptively put in place mechanisms to defend our democracy and our network of alliances before Trump acts against our interests once again, whether to indulge his isolationist impulses or to distract from impeachment.

Specifically, we should pass legislation to prevent a U.S. withdrawal from NATO without congressional approval, require Senate approval of any adjustments to U.S. troop levels in South Korea or Japan, and debate an Authorization for Use of Military Force that accurately reflects the conflicts in which we are currently engaged and claws back war-making authority from the executive branch.

Trump’s tragic decision in Syria unleashed ISIS and abandoned our Kurdish partners to the mercy of their new defenders, whether “Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” as Trump tweeted. This cannot be accepted on its own, and it cannot be allowed to establish a new precedent for American foreign policy.

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The Intelligence Fallout From Trump’s Withdrawal in Syria

The chaotic withdrawal from Syria will severely weaken U.S. efforts in the country—and could also be a boost for Russia and Iran.

Mike Giglio | Published October 18, 2019 6:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

This version of the forever war in Iraq and Syria was built around the work done by local U.S. allies. The fight against ISIS was America’s, but it was also being fought by Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis—a U.S. strategy known as “by, with, and through.” It meant that local troops carried out ground fighting in battles drawn up by American war planners. It meant that they received arms, training, and logistical support from the U.S. military and were backed by U.S. air strikes. Crucially, it also meant that they were getting help from special-operations forces, the U.S. military’s most elite units, who work in the shadows around the world to carry out difficult and sensitive missions.

Perhaps the best-known unit is SEAL Team Six, which carried out the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011. But task forces made up of SEALs and other officially classified units such as the Delta Force have carried out the dangerous work of hunting terrorists and breaking up insurgent networks since America’s forever wars began. Often, they work on their own; but sometimes, as in the war against ISIS, they work with local counterterrorism units specially trained for the task. In the “by, with, and through” strategy, these special-operations forces, along with the better-known U.S. Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, served as a force multiplier—a relatively small number of American troops who made the war effort by local forces far more deadly.

These partnerships have proved invaluable in the war against ISIS. At the same time, they have also opened a small hole in the secrecy that typically shrouds the special-operations community—by giving the local partners who work with these forces a rare and up-close view of who they are and how they do their jobs.

In Syria, elite U.S. troops among the 1,000 American personnel in the country worked closely with Kurdish counterterrorism units while regular Kurdish fighters carried out most of the ground operations against ISIS. The U.S. partnership with the Kurds grew as America armed and trained them and later merged them with Arab groups under an umbrella militia called the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF spearheaded the fight against ISIS in Syria, rolling back its most important strongholds. It has said that it lost more than 10,000 soldiers in that fight.

U.S. military officials wasted no opportunity to laud the SDF’s prowess. So President Donald Trump’s announcement of a hasty and ill-planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria to allow for a Turkish onslaught left everyone—allies, lawmakers, defense officials, but most significantly the Kurdish-led forces themselves—stunned. Fearing for its existence in the face of an invasion from NATO-allied Turkey, which considers it an enemy, the SDF has rushed to strike a deal with the Iran- and Russia-backed Bashar al-Assad regime. While the details of this arrangement remain in flux, one possibility is for SDF forces to be folded into the Syrian state, following negotiations to which they suddenly bring very little leverage. As a result, the same Kurdish counterterrorism units that have worked with U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence may suddenly find themselves working with—or at the mercy of—the Syrian government. This raises a vexing counterintelligence question for America: Might these units be forced to spill their secrets to some of America’s foremost global adversaries, in Assad, Russia, and Iran?

Eric L. Robinson, a former U.S. intelligence official who worked on anti-ISIS strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center, calls the fact that the SDF was forced to seek Assad’s protection in Syria a counterintelligence “nightmare.” He worried, in a Twitter post this week, that “given years of SDF exposure” to U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence, it would “be forced to give up TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], names, locations, etc. What a coup for the Russian intelligence services—five years of history regarding the elite forces of NATO.”

Robinson, who was a senior civilian in the United States Special Operations Command until last year, also noted that the same elite troops who served in Syria also work around the world on America’s most sensitive national-security missions. They’re “from the same community that relieves an embassy under siege, identifies [North Korean] mobile missile capacity, rescues hostages, or defends Tallinn from [a] Russian invasion,” he wrote.

“We’re now five years into a relationship that has metastasized from a handful of basically cellphone connections between American special-operations forces and [Kurdish soldiers] into a robust operation,” Robinson told me by phone.

Along the way, Robinson said, the Kurds “got a close look at the way Americans fight war, and [it was] an extraordinary chance to observe segments of the American military within special operations that are not necessarily covert or clandestine but do try to keep a low profile.”

“Whether [the Kurds] like it or not, they are exposed to the way the United States conducts unconventional warfare,” he added. “Whether you’re talking about communications infrastructure or response times for medevac or response times for aviations support, that stuff is all interesting.” Robinson worries that any potential deal between the Kurds and Assad will include “not just speaking with Syrian intelligence officers but Russians and Iranians,” he told me. “It’s going to turn out that, all of a sudden, the ways that elite American counterterrorism forces operate are known to the opposition.”

The chaotic nature of the U.S. withdrawal from Syria—following a snap decision by Trump during a phone call with the Turkish president earlier this month—is unnerving those who have been involved in all levels of the fight against ISIS.

Brett McGurk, the former senior U.S. diplomat who helped to arrange and then oversee the partnership between the U.S. military and the Kurds, told me by email: “The chain of reaction from Trump’s call with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan to a predictably catastrophic situation on the ground led to abrupt abandonment of military posts and relationships that had been built over years.” (McGurk declined to comment on the specifics of potential intelligence ramifications.) “None of these issues were thought through or prepared, no consequences considered. It’s a disaster.”

Several news outlets have reported that U.S. troops who worked with the Kurds in Syria are “heartbroken” and “ashamed,” while senior administration officials were reportedly left scrambling to deal with the ramifications of Trump’s decision. As they made their retreat in Syria, U.S. troops were reportedly fired on by Turkish-backed fighters. U.S. fighter jets later launched air strikes to destroy ammunition that American forces left behind amid the chaos.

“We’re running out of appendages in which to shoot ourselves,” Brian Katz, a former CIA official who recently took a post as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Understanding how the U.S. military, special-operations, and intelligence community operates is going to be very valuable for Russia and Iran—if not in Syria now, then wherever we’ll be competing and fighting in the coming years. They’ll have a playbook for how we operate.”

A U.S. military official with experience on special-forces missions pushed back against the idea that Kurdish counterterrorism units will reveal sensitive information. “It’s not a huge concern if they go and play ball with somebody else, because the relationship that we have at the tactical level endures over time,” he told me on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. He added that “there’s a counterintelligence risk whenever you work with a partner force,” and the U.S. military is accustomed to mitigating it.

I asked whether he was concerned about the identities of special-operations forces being exposed. “I would say that’s by and large an individual’s responsibility,” he said. “I look about 15 years older and like a wild man when I have my beard [in the field], and I’m assuming that the majority of these guys are probably in similar fashion. There are ways that guys protect their identities when they’re down-range. It’s not like we’re giving our Social Security cards and bank information to the [Kurds].”

A spokesman for the U.S. military, Commander Sean Robertson, declined to comment on the issue in detail. “We take information security and operational security seriously. It is integral to our partnerships, and we plan for it regularly,” he said in an emailed statement.

The Kurdish militants who partnered with the U.S. military in Syria hail from the YPG—an offshoot of a separatist group, the PKK, that has waged a decades-long insurgency in southeastern Turkey and is labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. The U.S. relationship with the YPG was controversial from the start, and a major source of friction between America and Turkey.

While regular YPG forces carried out various ground offensives, its specialized counterterrorism units worked with U.S. special-operations forces to disrupt ISIS networks and target its leadership, Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who briefs the U.S. military on Syria, told me. That work continued even after the demise of ISIS’s so-called territorial caliphate; in fact, it became arguably even more important, as ISIS returned to its roots as an underground insurgency. YPG counterterrorism forces worked with U.S. troops to capture the Tabqa Dam from ISIS, Heras said, and conducted “other discreet operations to capture and kill ISIS targets.”

Heras traveled to SDF-held Syria this summer and met with Kurdish commanders who oversaw the YPG’s counterterrorism units. He learned how they worked not just with U.S. intelligence and special-operations forces, but also with those from Britain and France. “This was a major line of effort that was quietly being done to improve the capabilities of the SDF and prevent the reemergence of ISIS,” he said. “It means U.S. special-operations forces considered certain elements of the YPG to be so trustworthy that they can go on these sensitive missions.”

Heras stressed that it’s still unclear what will become of the YPG and its counterterrorism units under a deal with Assad, though he noted that integration into the Syrian security forces is one likely possibility. Even setting aside the potential counterintelligence risk that would come with the YPG switching sides, he added, the U.S. will suffer a major intelligence setback with the loss of a crucial partner.

“This kind of hasty withdrawal creates a collapse in our intelligence collection on ISIS,” Katz, the former CIA official, told me. “People sometimes think there’s this magical intelligence button that the military and intelligence community hits—boom, start collection now. But building an accurate and active intelligence picture of a terrorist group, and one as savvy and sophisticated as ISIS, is a tedious and years-long enterprise.”

All of that is now at risk of being lost. “It’s human intelligence that gives the U.S. government its best ability to understand the strategic plans and intentions of terrorist groups—not only their movements on the ground, but their plotting of extremist attacks,” Katz said. “And human intelligence requires proximity and access and trust and building relationships with sources on the ground.”

Another ramification for the U.S. intelligence community is the potential for mass escapes of ISIS prisoners. The SDF holds thousands of suspected ISIS militants, including many foreign fighters, in its territory. Some prison breaks have already been reported, and the fate of the prisoners who remain in SDF hands is uncertain. Heras, the Center for a New American Security expert, told me that the possibilities are grim: More could escape, or all could be handed over to the Assad regime, which could torture and execute them, or perhaps seek to co-opt them, as it did in sending jihadists against U.S. troops during the Iraq War.

Regardless, U.S. investigators will likely lose access to a vital source of information about ISIS. One former U.S. military officer who worked at senior levels of the anti-ISIS campaign told me he doubted that U.S. investigators had managed to interview all the ISIS prisoners, especially those captured more recently. “We’ll lose out on interrogations that didn’t happen and on follow-on interrogations that won’t happen,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “The historical knowledge that’s resident there would take years to get through. And that’s knowledge that we’re probably not going to have access to.”

Anne Speckhard, who directs the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, has interviewed dozens of the suspected ISIS prisoners held in SDF prisons. She told me that many had turned against ISIS and were powerful voices in persuading others not to join militant groups. “Most of the people that we interviewed got disillusioned by ISIS—and got disillusioned because they felt ISIS is un-Islamic, corrupt, and really brutal,” she said. “We’re just losing a gold mine of data.”