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Sion posted:I didn't realise that V20 did stuff to the metaplot. I just thought it was a sort of greatest hits album. V20 didn't add things to the metaplot per se, but there were setting developments that seem to have been ignored, or at least not mentioned in any meaningful way.
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Mar 13, 2019 01:19
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Technically yeah the v20 core book didn't, but the v20 supplements added stuff to the metaplot, and there's a whole bunch of those. The v20 Companion, Children of the Revolution, Hunters Hunted 2, Anarchs Unbound, Rites of Blood, Dread Names/Red List, Lore of the Clans, the Black Hand, Lore of the Bloodlines, Beckett's Jyhad Diary (which summarizes the biggest metaplot events). And they're still making more. Looks like Victorian Mage 20th is going to be a thing, too.
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Mar 13, 2019 02:10
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nofather posted:Technically yeah the v20 core book didn't, but the v20 supplements added stuff to the metaplot, and there's a whole bunch of those. The v20 Companion, Children of the Revolution, Hunters Hunted 2, Anarchs Unbound, Rites of Blood, Dread Names/Red List, Lore of the Clans, the Black Hand, Lore of the Bloodlines, Beckett's Jyhad Diary (which summarizes the biggest metaplot events). And they're still making more. Yeah, but all those added setting, not metaplot. BJD, which was officially the 'bridge' to V5, was the only one that actually touched on plots that had come up before and created new plots for the timeline. VtM's metaplot is more about the advancing timeline than setting elements, and V20 was (admittedly by OPP) meant to be metaplot agnostic, rather than 'this is set between book X7 and book Y4' type of deal.
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Mar 13, 2019 03:10
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Zereth posted:I remember when I was young I fond the incredibly terrible network security displayed by everybody ever (including making everything internet-connected even if that's not actually like, remotely useful) bafflingly unrealistic Used to be you could sort of manage this by restricting the ability of devices to call home via your local network, but the dream of 5G is putting LTE radios in every device big enough to fit the chip! Your teapot will sell your dick pics to Mark Zuckerberg and there'll be nothing you can do about it, short of prying open everything you own and cutting the right thing off the circuitboard. Haha! We live in hell! Digital Osmosis posted:nMage will invariably lead to you angrily arguing esoteric philosophy My favorite session of Mage I've been in was one where the cabal spent the whole time in a conference room politely arguing about the ethics of how we were going to intervene in a mystery we discovered (an apartment building of people that got operant conditioned by gearpunk spider bonethiefs).
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Mar 13, 2019 04:43
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Exactly how 'hostile' do people make their spirit worlds? It's hard sometimes to get a sense of how a 'routine' trip goes down - if the world is filled with spirits and basically everything is out to get you or if it's a bit more "don't bother the wildlife and it won't bother you, unless it's desperate or hungry". The situation I've got so far in the early stages of my Melbourne game - but readers should feel free to suggest something cooler - is that the most powerful spirit in the city is the Clock Hydra - the spirit of Flinders Street Railway Station, which has trains for heads and a necklace of clocks around its neck. Its tyrannical and overly meticulous nature is mollified by the urge to allow free travel, and so the bargain it has with mages, werewolves and other such gauntlet-crossers in its territory is that it will allow free movement through its domain (though this protection doesn't apply to spirits outside its general domain of public transport) to anyone with a 'valid ticket'. 'Valid tickets' last a year. They can be bought for either a prodigious offering of essence, or some equivalent service performed. Your ticket is invalidated if you act to impede the functioning of public transport somehow. The Thyrsus in the party has been graciously 'paid up' for the year by his mentor - if he wants to bring his buddies into the Shadow, though, he's going to need to work something out. In general I figure the mages in my setting are happy to prop up the Clock Hydra, as its a relatively benevolent dictator as far as spirits go, and most see its usurping of its position from Yarra Yarra (the river spirit, leaving the river in the area mostly lifeless and dead-looking) an acceptable loss. Yarra Yarra still lives, but only has the power to attack the Clock Hydra during intense storms that flood the river.
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Mar 13, 2019 07:20
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For my werewolf game, the hisil around their territory is pretty friendly. The characters are known and don't abuse the spirits around them. Neutral territory sees a mix of friendly and aloof spirits along with a few straight up hostile ones. Territory belonging to the Pure is straight up hostile, while the characters probably won't be attacked unless there's a rank 3 spirit around to rile up the lesser spirits, they can expect their movement to be tracked and the Pure to find them pretty quick. Now, that's just for the city. The pack has taken their first trip out into the swampland and the spirits of the swamp are not very friendly at all. The characters are very urban and modern, which is a threat to the more natural spirits. Everything has to be bargained for and, if they break the bargain, whether on purpose or not, poo poo will hit the fan.
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Mar 13, 2019 07:36
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What's important about Shadow at least is that spirits have needs that are wholly alien to the human mindset. For one, spirits don't (or don't always) have moral imperatives, even intelligent spirits; worse, some due, but their axis of moral alignment are things like, 'that which causes the most suffering is the most good' and that one is pretty banal. Spirits are incidentally hostile because the things they want are usually unhealthy for humans. It also makes it difficult to communicate when a spirit of knives communicates largely by trying to cut you. 'Most' spirits seem to be of animal or near-animal intelligence, and the lowest rungs of the spirit world are pretty lovely even for spirits, so just being able to throw your weight around is probably a big help. I think mucking around in a fairly 'mundane' urban Shadow probably has a mix of extremely nasty spirits and benign spirits that can suddenly become hostile if the situation turns sour. A 'mundane' trip to the Shadow is only mundane for those who have powers specifically designed to make spirits not do what they are naturally inclined to do.
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Mar 13, 2019 07:46
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Yeah, the irraka befriended a fear sprit and it needs to eat. Only their locus generates hope and healing flavored essence. So she needs to take it on field trips where they cause enough fear for it to feed. Things are escalating.
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Mar 13, 2019 08:00
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Soonmot posted:Yeah, the irraka befriended a fear sprit and it needs to eat. Only their locus generates hope and healing flavored essence. So she needs to take it on field trips where they cause enough fear for it to feed. Things are escalating.  viewers.
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Mar 13, 2019 08:18
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Soonmot posted:Yeah, the irraka befriended a fear sprit and it needs to eat. Only their locus generates hope and healing flavored essence. So she needs to take it on field trips where they cause enough fear for it to feed. Things are escalating. I'm glad to hear your pack has decided to become an indie horror filmmaking collective,
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Mar 13, 2019 09:38
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Soonmot posted:Yeah, the irraka befriended a fear sprit and it needs to eat. Only their locus generates hope and healing flavored essence. So she needs to take it on field trips where they cause enough fear for it to feed. Things are escalating. Good news: werewolves are scary!! Better news: werewolves are really good at violently dealing with the consequences of being scary!! THIS CYCLE CANNOT POSSIBLY GO BAD PLACES
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Mar 13, 2019 14:27
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When all you have is rage-fueled claws and fangs, everything looks like... something that can be torn apart by rage-fueled claws and fangs.
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Mar 13, 2019 14:40
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Crasical posted:I can't decide if the visual of some bloated claimed rupturing and their swollen flesh erupting into a grey-winged flock of moths is gruesome or oddly beautiful. It is unmistakable beauty.
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Mar 13, 2019 14:47
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Dammit Who? posted:Haha! We live in hell! 
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Mar 13, 2019 15:44
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I've been thinking about using the Beshilu as minor antagonists in my Mage: the Awakening game. Them tearing holes in the Gauntlet could elad to all kinds of shenanigans. Any ideas on how these guys work in a Mage game?
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Mar 13, 2019 22:49
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MonsieurChoc posted:I've been thinking about using the Beshilu as minor antagonists in my Mage: the Awakening game. Them tearing holes in the Gauntlet could elad to all kinds of shenanigans. Any ideas on how these guys work in a Mage game? I did that too and the material really writes itself. I recommend a “rat king” final boss - like a bunch of the big hybrids with their tails tied together who therefore have a group mind. I spiced things up with an abyssal fungus infestation but the sky is really the limit here. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Mar 13, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 22:52
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Ferrinus posted:I did that too and the material really writes itself. I recommend a “rat king” final boss. Nice! I'll be running the Reign of the Exarchs chronicle but the book assumes stories between it's episodes so I need some stuff to set the stage. This will do nicely.
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Mar 13, 2019 22:55
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MonsieurChoc posted:I've been thinking about using the Beshilu as minor antagonists in my Mage: the Awakening game. Them tearing holes in the Gauntlet could elad to all kinds of shenanigans. Any ideas on how these guys work in a Mage game? Can always go the infiltrator route. A lot of beshilu powers aren't active (like, just talking to rats, beshilu, etc, and coordinating among themselves), so they're not something they might do in front of mage to ping their mage sense. So you can have the mayor, assorted members of the police force and municipal employees, all working for a common goal and helping spread smaller beshilu who do the bulk of the gnaw-work, tearing open the Gauntlet out of sight, like in sewers, crawlspaces under or between buildings, apartments or abandoned factories. Perhaps led by a larger king or group (Shadows of the UK has a group of ancient, individually powerful 'ministers' each with their own title and domain (the Minister of Sickness, the Minister or Rot, the Minister of filth, etc, each with their own 'Sacred Mission'), who preach to rats, rat spirits, the weak and the wounded. If you did go that route you might want to have another mystery in the vein of 'why here?' Which could tie into something like Shadows of the UK's prophecies involving Thisrah, the Rat of Unrest, a sort of Rat Messiah "whose return will bring about the End times and the Tearing, and the ascension, the Final Joining of the faithful (read: Beshilu that accept the Rat Gospel) with the Plague King." Or some sort of ancient Bound Rat or Disease entity. And obviously just tearing open the Gauntlet, even thinning it in some places can cause a lot of chaos, allowing certain spirits across that you wouldn't want across, but also possibly letting regular people stumble into the Shadow and become victims of the entities there. nofather fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Mar 13, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 23:44
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nofather posted:Can always go the infiltrator route. A lot of beshilu powers aren't active (like, just talking to rats, beshilu, etc, and coordinating among themselves), so they're not something they might do in front of mage to ping their mage sense. So you can have the mayor, assorted members of the police force and municipal employees, all working for a common goal and helping spread smaller beshilu who do the bulk of the gnaw-work, tearing open the Gauntlet out of sight, like in sewers, crawlspaces under or between buildings, apartments or abandoned factories. Perhaps led by a larger king or group (Shadows of the UK has a group of ancient, individually powerful 'ministers' each with their own title and domain (the Minister of Sickness, the Minister or Rot, the Minister of filth, etc, each with their own 'Sacred Mission'), who preach to rats, rat spirits, the weak and the wounded. That's some really cool stuff, but feels more like major antagonist stuff and that spot is already taken by the Seers/Exarchs. I was thinking more of a smaller Beshilu group in the Cabal's territory, to act as a first problem with unforeseen consequences (due to the Gauntlet breach) and as a hint of the many many mysteries Mages can hunt in the good ole WoD.
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Mar 14, 2019 01:40
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I still can't quite forgive the Beshilu for taking Ratkin away from me but what y'all are saying about them is getting me to consider it.
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Mar 14, 2019 01:52
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MonsieurChoc posted:That's some really cool stuff, but feels more like major antagonist stuff and that spot is already taken by the Seers/Exarchs. I was thinking more of a smaller Beshilu group in the Cabal's territory, to act as a first problem with unforeseen consequences (due to the Gauntlet breach) and as a hint of the many many mysteries Mages can hunt in the good ole WoD. They don't have to be good at it. Big Hubris fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 02:09
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citybeatnik posted:I still can't quite forgive the Beshilu for taking Ratkin away from me but what y'all are saying about them is getting me to consider it. Why not both?
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Mar 14, 2019 04:32
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First Mage game tonight, wish me luck.
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Mar 15, 2019 19:06
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There's no such thing as luck, there's just not having enough dots in Fate to be able to properly understand the supernal pattern behind so called "coincidences." (good luck!)
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Mar 15, 2019 19:25
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MonsieurChoc posted:First Mage game tonight, wish me luck. Good luck! Are you STing or playing a character? (Sorry if you've already said in the thread).
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Mar 15, 2019 19:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:Good luck! Are you STing or playing a character? (Sorry if you've already said in the thread). STing. I,ve ran quite a few oWoD and nWoD games over the years, but never managed to run an Awakening game before.
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Mar 15, 2019 19:55
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Well, please keep us updated! I've been running one game of Awakening for about ... wow, almost three years now? That can't be right. But I'm curious how it goes, since you're a veteran ST with the setting and system (my previous ST experience was all Exalted).
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Mar 15, 2019 20:04
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Far out, my Awakening game is just over 2 years in and we’re adding a new player this week. Mage is a blast, embrace the crazy world breaking magic and hope that they go wild with magic. Last session they used magic to break a washing machine and cause a flood in a Seer’s basement. Why? Because they wanted to pick on him.
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Mar 15, 2019 20:59
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MonsieurChoc posted:STing. I,ve ran quite a few oWoD and nWoD games over the years, but never managed to run an Awakening game before. Good luck! Remember: The point of Mage is for players to break your carefully laid breadcrumb trail over their knee. Just roll with it!
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Mar 15, 2019 21:19
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Jhet posted:Last session they used magic to break a washing machine and cause a flood in a Seer’s basement. Why? Because they wanted to pick on him. There are absolutely worse ways that someone can use their cosmic powers than by picking on an rear end in a top hat nerd.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:37
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Absolutely. They finished the night by turning a lowlife into a stalker antenna to follow another Seer who when in a sufficiently safe and crowded place shot their tail dead and proceeded to discard the body like yesterday’s newspaper. I’m expecting more than just basic tomfoolery now that stage 1 of surveillance is moving.
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Mar 15, 2019 22:40
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The first game went well! My players had zero experience with Forsaken and so were completely blindsided by the Beshilu they uncovered gnawing the Gauntlet in their territory. Next game they’re going to the Abattoir (a neutral bar in the Chicago setting) to try and find a werewolf who might know something about the weird rat-creature they fought.
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Mar 16, 2019 03:17
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Glad to hear it's going well  Our first encounters with beshilu were terrifying. We sneaked into a building through the Shadow, found a verge and went back into the physical world, where the rats covered everything so thickly you couldn't make out the floors or furniture. We set fire to the place and ran, and the bigger ones, the human-sized ones were chasing after us in the trees, like ninjas, and there was this particularly bulky one who was just a brutal brawler. He kicked my dude's rear end. I'm always surprised to note that the beshilu seem to make more appearances than the azlu. I think maybe it's because of the size? Easier to depict a single beshilu as a nasty-looking rat, while a spider that isn't a tarantula might be so small that it's overlooked. It also would be hard to portray recognizable humanoid mannerisms. Until you get to the human-spider thing, or massive drider-like things, of course.
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Mar 16, 2019 06:17
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I've tracked down one of the elusive issues of White Wolf Magazine. I doubt it has anything of worth but hey, might as well be thorough. I also don't recall if I ever mentioned but I have the complete run of the weird little fanzine Virtual Lore, which featured unofficial work by Billy Aguiar (Wraith 2E and a bunch of Shadowrun stuff), Tim Toner (Unknown Armies supplements), Deird're Brooks (Children of the Night, CtD 1E, Changeling's Book of Storyteller Secrets, The Autumn People, some of the Warcraft tabletop RPG and d20 Adventure! ) and Rick Jones (Book of the City, Book of the Wyld, Hunting Ground Rockies, Apocalypse, Guardians of the Veil, and d20 Adventure!) It's non-canonical but it has a sufficient host of 'legit' White Wolfers and tabletop developers that I'm including it on the same level as the less canonical White Wolf Magazine issues.
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Mar 18, 2019 09:22
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I'm still a little surprised that Schere's Disease was at least sufficiently canonical to show up in the Gehenna countdown stuff- one of the stories concerned somebody who'd been called to testify in court successfully requesting a nighttime court appearance due to her Schere's diagnosis.
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Mar 18, 2019 10:35
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm still a little surprised that Schere's Disease was at least sufficiently canonical to show up in the Gehenna countdown stuff- one of the stories concerned somebody who'd been called to testify in court successfully requesting a nighttime court appearance due to her Schere's diagnosis. All the WWM stuff was official material so it's no shock. The only stuff from the magazines I mark as quasi-canonical is where it involved crossovers with other universes.
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Mar 18, 2019 11:48
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I hadn't ever heard of Schere's Disease before but it honestly makes a lot of sense to me as a polite fiction to help keep a vampire integrated with society.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:49
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Deviant is very clear that the Remade are broken monsters who don’t have appropriate responses to stress any more. is this really something we should be encouraging in people
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Mar 18, 2019 21:02
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:is this really something we should be encouraging in people In a CofD game? Yes. it’s sort of the point, and I look down on the games that lose sight of the fact that their protagonists are monsters. If that gets too heavy, play something else. Or conciously work against it. Deviant’s tone - which, I must emphasise, was my doing - is part of why I’ve stepped down from it, as it was affecting my mood getting myself into that headspace for devving. I would rather hand the game over to someone else than see it watered down.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:29
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:is this really something we should be encouraging in people
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