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Mikan posted:Six-Guns and Sorcery Hell of a book, hell of a game.
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Apr 6, 2013 22:38
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OJ Simpson killed WEG. WEG was apparently set up as a company that was supposed to lose money as part of a (legal!) tax scheme to offset profits in other parts of the owner's portfolio. That scheme became non-viable when those other parts suddenly exploded in profitability and WEG's reliable money-losing was now a problem for the ownership, and the company spiraled down to nothing quickly thereafter. As you note, the output of their last couple of years was...not good. Like late-era TSR - no playtesting, no editing, bad/recycled art, layout just a couple of steps above Word95's default. OJ Simpson killed WEG because the other business I'm referring to was the owner's license to import Italian shoes - specifically, Bruno Magli shoes, which were what Simpson (allegedly) wore during the murders and were the focus of the trial, which sent their public profile and their demand skyrocketing, and then crashing, wiping out the company and forcing WEG to fend for itself without much in the way of resources, which wasn't easy in the CCG-driven collapsing RPG market of the mid-1990s. Some of WEG's late-era titles were just...I mean, Shatterzone? Paranoia 5E? Tales From The Crypt? Necroscope? TANK GIRL?!? Men In Black had some potential (like Ghostbusters, it's a great premise for an ongoing campaign as the animated TV version demonstrated) but the execution was awful. LOL Wikipedia posted:Eric Gibson has stated in an interview that he was "perhaps naïvely optimistic" in assuming that distributors would order products produced under his ownership of the company "just because it's West End Games." He further stated that this led him to print more books than he could sell, books which he had to destroy in order to save on storage costs.
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Apr 12, 2013 14:21
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It was the code name for the game during its development, and when the time came to release it they couldn't come up with a better name, so they made "Torg" into a setting element (it's the title of someone who manages to become the ruler of all realities. Something similar happened to a game which was called the Great Unnamed Role Playing System during it's development...
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Apr 13, 2013 16:31
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Bieeardo posted:I remember, or more than likely just 'remember', that Greyhawk was supposed to be the default, no-supplements-added setting for 3.0. I remember that feeling weird because, aside from deities that weren't stock Realms in earlier editions, there wasn't anything else to really support that or any big setting splats to give Greyhawk a new-edition renaissance. Greyhawk was also the setting for the abortive 3.x miniatures game. The basic problem with Greyhawk is that it's a pretty dull setting (at least, as it has been presented) and it's not particularly D&D-ish. That giant Darlene map from the original set sure is pretty, though.
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Apr 20, 2013 20:19
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Lemon Curdistan posted:The contest received about 11000 single-page setting pitches, from a mix of amateurs, industry folk and professionals from outside the tabletop industry. Out of all of those, Wizards ended up selecting a mere eleven pitches to be developed into 10-page outlines. The contest had four tiers 11,000 people submitted one-page outlines 11 semi-finalists were chosen to submit ten-page expanded outlines 3 finalists (Baker, Burlew, and Nathan Toomey) were paid $10,000 and asked to submit a hundred-page setting bible one (Baker's Eberron) was chosen and then developed into a full line by WotC http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/dx20021209x And yeah, everything from the Core Three D&D books had to be in the setting somewhere, which is why Eberron has rakshasas and ixitxachitls and dinosaurs and every other weird thing from the MM tucked into the corners.
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Apr 27, 2013 01:16
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Lemon Curdistan posted:If you're asking if Necromancy still has the Evil spell tag, then yes. If you're asking whether anyone gives a flying gently caress and if paladins go around automatically killing necromancers because "they're evil, right?" the answer is no, because this is Eberron and alignment is one of the things it subverts.
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Apr 27, 2013 23:45
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dwarf74 posted:I love oldschool FRPG line art, and Erol Otus is vastly underrated, but yeah... I think their art budget by this point was, "Chuck in Accounting knows how to draw! Let's ask him!"
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Apr 28, 2013 16:47
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Also, AEG had a ton of books that were basically {ONE WORD CONCEPT} and if I'm remembering rightly they all sucked terribly. The grognard.txt threads are full of people who consider this era the absolute high point of Dungeons & Dragons, and have nothing but cold hatred for WotC since they wound down this particular sideshow (with the more-restrictive license they used for 4E).
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May 9, 2013 06:51
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Kai Tave posted:Gonna throw in a vote for Day After Ragnarok because Ken Hite is good poo poo. Seriously, you guys are gonna love this. It also has some of the best sidebars and "top five" lists in an RPG.
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Jun 3, 2013 05:04
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citybeatnik posted:Vykos did it. Those nutty Malkavians...
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Sep 4, 2013 06:04
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Maxwell Lord posted:Why do game designers always have to "darken up" setting concepts? It can't just be a magical school, it has to be a school for magic in a world filled with UNFATHOMABLE EVIL. Why's he even talking about spousal murder in a game about kids? Wick is also a big believer in RPGs being used to push characters and their players to the edge of their tolerance and/or what they feel comfortable with (see his essay collection "Play Dirty" for details). Everything has to be cranked up to 11 all the time, the emotional stakes have got to be sky-high even in a game about kids attending Magic High School. His guitar has only one string on it, and he strums it as hard as he fuckin' can. FMguru fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 06:26
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There was a Harry-Potter-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off D20 RPG that came out during the D20 boom, called Redhurst Academy of Magic. Not sure how well D20 supported HP-style adventuring, but I remember the book being a very nice physical artifact (art/layout/binding).
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Oct 7, 2013 07:17
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Nope. Supposedly they're shooting for a December ship date, but I'd be impressed if they actually made it. ...December 2015, that is.
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Oct 13, 2013 05:53
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ThisIsNoZaku posted:Is it bad? I vaguely remember reading positive things about it. If you don't like Monte Cook's style, or the 3.x ruleset, then give it a pass. But if it sounds at all tempting to you, it's worth checking out.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:13
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't know how much of 7th Sea's rules can be credited / blamed to him or Kevin Wilson.
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Oct 25, 2013 00:01
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Mors Rattus posted:Especially since no one else in 7th Sea's team was on board with that last bit.
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Oct 25, 2013 00:10
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AccidentalHipster posted:I was so disappointed with 7th Sea. I got it because I was told that players could ride cannonballs in to battle Munchhausen (which is technically true with the way death rules work) and assumed that it was the gonzo "Pirate of the Caribbean on crack" game I had always wanted. After a dozen attempts to make an interesting character who wasn't either ridiculously specialized or hopelessly mediocre (or both in most cases) and several
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Oct 25, 2013 00:59
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at some of the rules glitches I decided to just use the setting as inspiration for d20 Modern games with the d20 Past expansion.
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AccidentalHipster posted:There was a d20 7th Sea? How did I not know that? Someone should do a write-up of it. It was from the first wave of D20 adaptations, so absolutely nobody involved had any idea how the D20 system worked. It's a glorious trainwreck (but chock-full of good setting information)
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Oct 25, 2013 01:14
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Kemper Boyd posted:I think it's one of those mechanics that only make sense if there's a sort of agreement between the GM and the players on how the points are handed out and how you're expected to spend them. 7th Sea is such a mess. Such a shitshow. "Mors Rattus' posted:it's also that Panache is just the god of all stats, because more Panache means more actions. A broken action economy was pretty typical for 90s RPGs (Celerity, anyone?), but that's still no excuse. FMguru fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 13:59
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's an age of sail game that takes place on a single continent Ah, 90s RPG design 
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Oct 25, 2013 17:33
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Kellsterik posted:I'm remembering this secondhand, but wasn't there an NPC who was depicted as the always prepared, contingency plan for everything type, to the point that his statblock said that if the PCs do manage to outsmart him you should pause for a few minutes to think of a way out?
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Oct 25, 2013 17:51
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Redeye Flight posted:Let's be fair, here. If there is a Rasputin character in a game, him being unkillable is not only par for the course but should be actively expected. Wanted, even. If you are lucky, the sagas will sing of the day when your characters did the equivalent of fetching a diet Pepsi from the fridge for him.
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Oct 25, 2013 18:37
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Aramoro posted:People in Europe got pretty far past bronze age boats even though you can walk pretty much anywhere in Europe. There are issues with the game but this isn't one of them. 7S is more like China - a single contiguous land mass with no reason to develop anything more advanced than shore-hugging junks to move food from one coastal port to another. Which is what China got by with for thousands of years. And yet in 7S, the seas is covered with navies of fully-rigged multimasted and multidecked sailing vessels and ships of the line, all capable of long oceanic voyages, despite there being nowhere to go and no reason for ships to ever spend more than a couple of days in a row at sea.
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Oct 25, 2013 23:31
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Yay! The Everlasting! Written by White Wolf veterans who decided that the only problems with the classic World of Darkness were that it didn't take itself seriously enough and that there just weren't enough different types of supernatural creatures and factions knocking around. And that mention of "dream control methods" isn't just for show, kiddies - the games actually includes rules for incorporating lucid dreaming into your campaign. e: vvvvvv V:U is just a 98% identical ripoff of the WoD , the goth-horror RPG equivalent of those off-off-brand Star Warrior action Figures. Everlasting is everything in the WoD, only cranked up past 11 and on to like 35 or 40. Strap yourselves in, we're in for a treat. FMguru fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Oct 28, 2013 |
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Oct 28, 2013 16:59
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand The Everlasting is literally the author of "Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand" building his dream WoD-clone-heartbreaker from scratch, and it's every bit the gonzo shitshow you would hope it would be.
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Oct 28, 2013 23:18
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Libertad! posted:Funny that he went on to write a "Wicked Fantasy" book for Pathfinder. Maybe a 3rd Edition variant doesn't count or something. As for writing a PF book, well, a brother's gotta eat.
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Nov 3, 2013 07:50
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Comrade Koba posted:Didn't he also hilariously fail to follow through on this?  Someone really should write it up for F&F (not me, I don't own a copy).
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Nov 3, 2013 08:28
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goatface posted:I want to see the Dune RPG, because I'm really not sure how they're going to make it work.
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Nov 12, 2013 19:01
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To me, 1990s RPGs are defined by a bunch of interlinked traits: splatbooks, metaplot, and the supplement treadmill. The basic business problem with RPGs is that it's really hard to turn an RPG into an ongoing revenue stream because in theory, once you get the core book(s) and a set of dice, you can create your own adventures forever at zero cost (even worse, you only need one set of books for the whole group - everyone else just borrows the GM's copy). So the solution was to break the world into lots and lots of PC factions and NPC factions and nations and (each of which get their own supplement) and thread all the supplements together with a metaplot (so you had to buy pretty much everything that came out in order to keep up with the changing setting, or learn exactly what's really going on in the game that you're supposedly running). Eventually, core books for games were just bare skeletons that were only miminally playable without shelling out a stack of supplement books. I made a crack a few posts up about the Dune RPG being a failure, and this is why. The core book barely gives you enough rules and information to create a minor house and populate it with PCs (the game's conceit is that all PC groups are the top advisors to a minor house, playing the equivalents of Gurney and Thufir and Duncan). The rules and background for Bene Gesserit take up a page, and basically amount to two skills (special physical training and The Voice). Same thing with Mentats (they get two special skills). Nothing on the Spacer's Guild. A bare description of a couple of houses. Two pages of equipment charts. Nothing about CHOAM. And - the kicker - nothing about Arrakis. That's right - no Fremen, no sandworms, no stillsuits, no crysknifes, nothing. And the reason is because it was all meant to covered in supplements. The core book was a wireframe meant to have Bene Gesserit book and a Mentat book and a Smuggler's book and a Great Houses Of The Imperium book and an Arrakis boxed set hung from it. But the gameline was cancelled before any of that could be released, and so the game is hopeless, undernourished, nearly-useless thing. I was lucky enough to buy a copy off of the WotC website during the two hours it was available, and I sold it off on eBay (for a considerable premium) less than a year later, because it was so useless. Like I said: 1990s RPG design. There's much to dislike about 3E and D20 and the explosion of OGL shitware that they brought about, but getting games away from the metaplotted factionalized splatbook publishing model and towards a more toolboxy, here's a bunch of cool things (monsters, NPCs, spells, magic items, prestige classes, etc.) for you to use approach always struck me as a necessary correction.
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Nov 12, 2013 21:03
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Evil Mastermind posted:Who got wiped out in Mage? I know it was the Ravnos (because their antideluvian woke up) and the Stargazers (who just took their ball and went home), but I don't remember Mage having anything that earth-shaking happen. Mage had the Avatar Storm the occurred between Mage 2E and Mage 2E Revised, which destroyed access to the pocket dimension where all the super-powerful setting NPCs lived and made it much harder to do any kind of astral travel.
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Nov 12, 2013 21:51
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Mr. Maltose posted:Didn't the Technocracy do that thing where they used satellites to Sun Laser Ravnos? Or was that in addition to a nuke instead of in place of? Men in black suits explained it away as "phosphorescent swamp gas".
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Nov 12, 2013 22:08
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One other source of these Dumb Metaplot Tricks of the 1990s has its origins in the 1980s. Namely, the discovery by TSR that you could turn RPG settings into big-dollar multiplatform media IP, like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. So in the 1990s, most RPG settings (and their supporting RPGs) were built to be turned into novels and CCGs and LARPs and computer games and tv shows and deluxe pewter figurines and tactical miniature games and comic books and novelty radio singles. An RPG setting should be static - it's presented in all its details, and then turned over to the GMs and players to stomp around in. But 1990s settings were dynamic, like a soap opera, and full of critically plot-important NPCs, which helped give an identity and focus to the line of tie-in novels, but really hampered their utility as RPG settings. Also, I'm pretty sure the percentage of people who followed the WoD metaplot to the letter was very, very small compared to the number of people who, when told that the Tremere antediluvian had just woken up and completely wiped out all the antitribu said "not in my game he didn't" and kept on playing. Metaplot events were great for creating enormous online discussion threads, but I doubt they had much effect on peoples' actual games.
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Nov 12, 2013 22:47
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Halloween Jack posted:I think it reached a point where people bought books to keep up with the setting (and argue about it online) whereas others ragequit buying books because something they liked got smooshed. Like I said, 3.0/D20's emphasis on "lots of poo poo you could use in play" was a real breath of fresh air. And while we're talking about terrible RPG metaplots leading to ragequits, how about F&F's favorite chew-toy 7TH SEA, which had several later supplements that pulled the ol' "You thought the setting was about X, but it's really about Y, and the people you thought were good guys are actually the bad guys, and vice-versa".
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Nov 12, 2013 23:08
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Ratoslov posted:Totally. That sounds amazing. It sounds like an entire game setting based off of taking brown acid and staring at prog rock album covers.
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Nov 12, 2013 23:49
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goatface posted:I made the worlds greatest baker in a version of MERP. He was a swarthy outsider of the wild, who was pretty rubbish at all of that but could do magnificent things with pastry. We never did work out if we were building characters properly, because holy gently caress there were a lot of steps.  And MERP makes a lot more sense when you realize it was originally released in the early 1980s, and its purpose was to describe Tolkien's Middle Earth as a gameable world where you could have D&D style wilderness and dungeon adventures. It's literally just D&D with Nazgul and Palantiri and Balrogs and Mithril and Moria and the Misty Mountains, and it makes almost no effort to connect with any of the themes of Tolkien's writing. So yeah, expect fireball wizards and +4 swords and monsters guarding chests with 4000 silver pieces and two potions of extra healing.
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Nov 13, 2013 20:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Really, the fact that humanity has regressed so far is really what makes it a fantasy world and not a sci-fi world. In the real world technology and practical knowledge is very, very rarely lost, even in the face of empires rising and falling, but in fantasy worlds, it's a goddamn constant. It's hard to find a modern fantasy setting that isn't built on the grand ancient empire that was awesome if only you were there to see it oh well too bad. 
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Nov 25, 2013 18:20
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Tulul posted:There really needs to be a '70s-'80s cartoon game (AW seems like it would work). Scooby-Doo, Thundarr, Papa Smurf, and the Harlem Globetrotters team up to fight Skeletor.
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Dec 11, 2013 22:18
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David J Prokopetz posted:The Factols just kill me. Every last one of them reads like somebody's creepy wish-fulfillment GMPC - no less than two Factions are currently led by nubile teenage girls with strange sexual predilections - and the setting not only furnishes an excuse to regularly get them all together in the same room, but renders them completely ineffectual on a day-to-day basis due to Politics. I can never decide whether it's stupid or awesome. And I always thought the purpose of the factions was to give the setting a little variety and intellectual space than the Great Wheel of alignments, that it was possible to approach the planes with an attitude that didn't slot neatly into a 3x3 grid.
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Dec 30, 2013 17:11
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deadly_pudding posted:Darkflame Montgomery is especially notorious, since she's one of the Factols that got actual stats in the box set. It's like David Cook was just screaming at the reader, "This is my perfect Mary-Sue! Look at all her neat abilities! Oh, she's so sensual, but mysterious! And filled with the energy of youth! She's all statted out! You could, I don't know, use her as a DMPC in every campaign so that she can shine through in all of your Planescape Adventures!"  Boobplate, bare midriff, leggings, and big 80s-hair! And she's sensual and open-minded! My 14 year old self = 
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Dec 30, 2013 19:17
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