There’s a YouTube channel that focuses on how to make cool atmospheric D&D environments like this. I think it’s called AtmosSeeker? They’re smaller than I think they should be.

Really? That second teleport ability sounds super fun. It means the players have to run around the battlefield fighting the monster, and interacting with the terrain, not just standing in front of each other trading blows. Plus it only happens once a round anyway so you can strategize around it.

The first ability also sounds super cool. At that level there are ways around these things anyway. The friendly casters may have teleports of fly spells, players have dimension door and other crazy abilities from their various magic items they’ve collected for 20 levels, and a DC 27 save at that level probably isn’t that hard to hit anyway.

Just goes to show how subjective fun is I suppose because that description makes me more excited to fight that then the standard bag of hit points 5e tarrasque.

Isn’t the opposition conservative? If so, doubt it will be good for the people. I don’t know too much about the politics of Venezuela specifically, but I’ve never seen a conservative government benefit anyone but the rich long term.

Same. The monsters are amazing, and would be a big boost to 5e, but I haven’t been playing it as much lately.

Cool list. #10 reminds me of Vash the Stampede

That’s horrible. This may sound controversial, but I’m going to say it anyway, screw the down votes: I don’t like Saddam Hussein. He was a bad dude.

That’s why everyone said aid through the road would be better and more reliable from the beginning. But then the US would actually have to make Israel do something substantive.

Hopefully they feel vindicated when everyone sanctions Isreal.

There’s hypothetically a bunch of different version of communism for everyone. The thing is, Marx described the problems with capitalism, and some vague sense of what socialism could be, some guidelines of what it should aim for, then kind of left the details up to each individual society to get there how they think is best based on their individual material conditions. He gave his own guesses, but didn’t think he could predict that part fully, it would be up to the people of the future to figure it out and build on. A third world country, rural serf based near fuedal society, like Russia, would have completely different needs from some post-industrial country, like if Germany turned communist, for example. If the world’s sole superpower, the US, turned communist, it would probably be a lot different than communist countries that had to transition under siege neighboring imperialism, like Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam.

This is just to answer your last question. Don’t think this really addresses your other questions, but just wanted to explain that part, as I’ve had it explained to me before. But I generally agree with you. There should still be some form of democracy but it might look different than what we are used to here in the US or liberal west.

Nah it’s just an excuse for where his character gets his cool toys.

It’s not like it’s all ancient history. Sanctions are ongoing, there was the attempted coup with Operation Gideon, plus the weird attempt with Guaido, propaganda campaigns, etc. and how many things we don’t know about. The US is still meddling. They are the largest empire in the world, the sole superpower. Of course they can do a lot of things and have a lot of affect. Of course Venezuela has a lot of itself to blame for its problems, like not diversifying from oil more, but you’re going too far the other direction and acting as if the US has no effect on its own sphere of influence.

You should look up the history of USAID. It would probably make any country nervous when they get involved.

I saw some AT&T workers pickering recently. Are they still on strike? Anyone know what was up with that?

It was about 60/40 when I went, maybe 70/30. Mostly dancing, but some politics sprinkled in there, too. Mostly anti-China stuff. I get that China has done some bad stuff so it was easy easy to applaud and all, but now I know it’s just because they’re a cult that got huge and some Chinese President didn’t like that.

Which isn’t great because freedom of speech should be a thing, but also, huge popular religions can cause great harm, so I’m not really on their side now that I’m seeing what Christian Nationalism can do and looking at what happened in South Korea. Making sure government isn’t hijacked by some crazy popular cult maybe isn’t a bad idea. Also, they’re ultra conservative, anti-medicine and evolution, anti-feminist, homophobic, and support Donald Trump and supported the lie that Biden stole the election, so ya, wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been hiding their politics more since I’ve seen them to stay generally popular and hope people don’t suspect they suck lol.

Meh, we need content. Until we get more people here posting OC, and as long as people comment, which is where the interesting parts have always been in my opinion, I’m okay with it.

So cool.

Withholding votes unless Biden changes is pushing for actual change. So is protesting on campuses but Biden and Blinken hates that, too. Votes and money are the only two things politicians listen to. The huge women protests that got us nothing and the BLM protests that mostly led to changes that got rolled back proved that. Unfortunately, AIPAC has all the money which means protesting and withholding votes is all that’s left.

Ya, a lot of genocide apologia in this thread. It’s off putting, racist, and paternalistic. There’s got to be other ways to support Biden without saying he’ll be good for those poor Palestinians, the group they’re currently helping bomb. Plus, his administration has threatened the ICC and UN for trying to protect them.

But the fact of the matter is that without huge changes to our political systems, the Democrats will just bring out the Project 2025 excuse from now on forever. This is the most important election in the world. Just like the last one. And the one before it. And the next one. Like in this thread, criticism is impossible against the Democrats, even while they push a genocide, for the alternative is Trump or someone like him. Not to say that Project 2025 doesn’t scare the crap out of me. But it does seem best for them to always have the US on the edge of fascism as a cudgel.

They should have had a primary in 2024 if their only candidate was a genocide supporter. If Democrats lose because of this, because they didn’t, I’ll be so pissed.

There aren’t going to be people left by the time Trump takes office. A million people are getting displaced right fucking now. And Biden deserves to be criticized for supporting that. So does Trump, but he’s not President right now. Biden is.