When I Rolled Seventeen

When I rolled seventeen, it was a very good hit
It was a very good hit for a fighter with a plus one sword
It would’ve been a crit if my weapon were keen
When I rolled seventeen

Apologies to Jake of the Mummy’s Mask group for misremembering his particular mangling.

“We’re from the Carnacki Institute at UMass-Arkham. We’re ready to believe you.”

“Your pickle wife, while beautiful, is a gopher.”

Auberon Crane puts the mayor of Illmarsh in his place.^[1]

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^[1] That gem floated up out of my deep memory last night. As it was uttered during the great recap hiatus, I must ensure its existence outside the Twittersphere.

The Thief of Olympus

Apropos of nothing save that I’ve liked this passage since I first read it in Tradition Book: Order of Hermes, thinking it encapsulated the promise of a literal renaissance of a proud fraternity languishing in senescence and at the time not many Mage: the Ascensionfans gave the potential of that revitalization much credit, consider this:

Hermes Trismegistus, from Wikipedia.

The idols of today’s youth ride broomsticks or wield spells. They fight balrogs and cyborgs, learn witchcraft and microtechnology. The children themselves bear Tolkien and Linux for Dummies in the same bookbag; chat in cybertongues to distant friends; don virtual disguises to enter imaginary worlds where aliens and faeries are one and the same.

And when they mature, these brave children learn to think around corners. To fly on words and unlock puzzles, weave illusions and craft new colors. Mastering arcane codes and words of power, they’ll summon Umbrood that Great Solomon never knew existed.

And some of them even make that final leap: Awakening to our Reality.

How Hermetic.

How like that Trickster, to confound his enemies this way! For using Technocratic tools to undo Technocratic Order is a jest worthy of the Thief of Olympus. Mythic Hermes stole Apollo’s cattle; modern Hermes steals the “cattle” from the Technocratic god — using their own goads to do it!

— Tradition Book: Order of Hermes, pg. 34, by Stephen Michael DiPesa and Phil Brucato

[Pathfinder Society] Building My Bard and Skeleton Moon

As part of following through on my plan to get into the biweekly Pathfinder Society game at Quarterstaff, I delayed and delayed making a character until that very afternoon. I’d known since flipping through the book back in early January that I wanted my character to be a bard, because I hadn’t played that class yet and it seemed like Pathfinder had given them some interesting tricks. Fortunately, one of the regular GMs, Neil, had gone so far as to put together a character building worksheet, including possible attribute spreads using Pathfinder Society’s point-buy system, so most of my work was done for me.

I had some points of confusion, in places you would expect: where Pathfinder differs from Dungeons & Dragons, I second-guessed a bit, trying to find the spot in the text where it would explicitly say how something worked. This particularly tripped me up with skills, since in Pathfinder, there are significantly fewer skill points to spread around. Until Annick pointed out that +3 bonus a character gets for putting a rank in a class skill filled in the “gap” left by only being able to put one point in a skill, compared to Dungeons & Dragons‘ method of giving you lots of skill points and a higher rank cap than character level, I didn’t get how that worked out at all.