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Tezzor posted:it's actually a goon having a hilarious meltdown over nothing It's a full-page rant about a book's internal development codename, not even anyhing that made it into print.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:38
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Gerund posted:Onyx Path publicly advertised the name "sexmurder" in customer-facing branding for a long time before print. The rant itself existed before you ever brought it to print. Until nearly the print was made, the product was to all consumers known as sexmurder. And if you go back to early last thread, you'll see me promising to bring the name up with Rose based on people's reactions to it here. And lo, it was changed, thanks to several writers and Developers disagreeing with the way calling Blood & Smoke that was going. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3504652&userid=187851 I was the very opposite of dismissive of the misstep. I complained about it in the middle of the process of becoming Awakening Developer. I *am* dismissive of sticking it in the intro to this thread, as though it's anything like a going concern.
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Apr 10, 2015 20:58
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tatankatonk posted:It's an abbreviation of "Baby versus Dog", referencing a dumb piece of chapter intro fiction from...I want to say Danse Macabre? One of the Vampire books. Where a ghouled baby fights a ghouled dog for the entertainment of jaded vampires, if it was unclear. The baby's actually a vampire - what in 2E would be a revenant. But yeah. Bloodsports for extremely bored ancillae.
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Apr 11, 2015 02:36
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Also, I thought it was pretty clear that Kuei-Jin aren't the same sort of monster as western Kindred viewed through a cultural filter, they're Risen. As in the minor Crow-alike splat from Wraith. Wheras the African vampires are the same things as western Kindred given different names and social roles for the clans. Well, until DAV20, anyway.
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Apr 11, 2015 02:40
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Mors Rattus posted:Rose Bailey is heavily involved. Matt McFarland is running Beast; he and Rose were the developers on Demon. Writers on Demon were Dave Brookshaw, N. Conte, Susann Hessen, David A. Hill Jr, Alec Humphrey, Danielle Lauzon, Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Matt McFarland, Mark Stone, Travis Stout, Stew Wilson and Eric Zawadzki. Could not tell you how many of them are on Beast, but Rose and Matt have a history of quality product. I wrote the Lair rules for Beast, and the Mummy, Mage, and Promethean crossover sections.
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Apr 13, 2015 23:22
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moths posted:So Lairs are Freddy's boiler room? Yes. Also my thrown gauntlet to white room combat "analysis", as Beats are never in a white room; they drag their environmental tilts around with them. But it's like Freddy's Boiler Room, yes. Or the room in IT, or the cave in the Fire Worm, or any number of other examples.
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Apr 14, 2015 09:51
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Ferrinus posted:Well, I don't really like how the game is shaping up, but I can't fault Matt's response to the leak. Good on him for not going all-in on the kind of "listen, it's JUST the beta, it's not AT ALL INDICATIVE of ANYTHING that-" stance that people often use to defend bad previews/demos/leaks/pre-expansion releases/whatever. A freelancer who worked on Promethean volunteered to Storytell Beast in the invitational playtest and called for players online. One of the group then leaked it to get her in trouble. Don't know if it was an old grudge or simply for the lulz of it. Doesn't really matter - she's not in trouble.
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Apr 17, 2015 01:08
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Crion posted:Interested to see if the trend continues and Mage 2E Thyrsus are explicitly all about being primal, passionate shapeshifters that fight hard and gently caress harder Not really, no.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:17
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, I was being too soft on Metis. It is far worse than Chiminage. (Don't use Metis.) Chiminage has been dropped in Forsaken second ed.
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Apr 25, 2015 08:19
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Gerund posted:A quick ctrl+f through the Kith Draft reveals that there are no 9-again abilities, only 8-again. 9-again's utter crapness is sinking in a bit after years of Stew and I harping on about it in design discussions.
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Apr 29, 2015 15:37
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Ferrinus posted:That's an attack spell. No, no it isn't. The Bashing at 3, Lethal / Agg at 4 is for Direct Attack Spells, which are when a mage looks at someone and thinks "you there, take 3 bashing damage" as her imago. If you make their car crash, or the building collapse on them, or make electricity arc out of the walls onto them, or superheat the air around them, or curse them with luck so terrible a safe falls on their head, they will take whatever damage is appropriate, no matter which dot of which Arcanum you used to set them up for a fall.
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Apr 30, 2015 08:21
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Yawgmoth posted:Yeah, that sounds like the kind of thing that positively screams "abuse the hell out of me!" because if blasting a guy with fire is Forces+Gnosis-Defense but setting his clothes on fire is just Forces+Gnosis, why in the hell would anyone do the former? Whoever said blasting a guy with fire was Forces+Gnosis-Defense? (EDIT: Sorry. Yes. To clarify - whoever said you got Defense against spells?)
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Apr 30, 2015 20:49
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Yawgmoth posted:I am going off the assumption that spells are going to have a resistance stat of some sort in the same manner that every single other power in every other game that directly targets someone has a resistance stat of some kind. If this isn't the case then it is one hell of a paradigm shift in the way powers function on both a general and specific level. I refer the honorable gentleman to Demon: The Descent.
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May 1, 2015 02:31
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Flavivirus posted:New mage blog: http://theonyxpath.com/supporting-cast-mage-the-awakening/ And we've managed to fit the rules for Proximi into the corebook, too!
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May 3, 2015 21:28
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Ferrinus posted:Every psychic, ghoul, wolf-blood, etc. being a Sleepwalker is a pretty big change. If Dissonance actually has teeth relative to Disbelief, it'd even be a buff of sorts for mages who antagonize or get antagonized by other monsters. I'm mad keen on the idea, toyed with in both Ascension and Awakening, that full mages share their societies with a panapoly of lesser talents and in-the-know muggles. But just as "Sorcerer" presented the Traditions as being full of linear mages but was then ignored by the rest of the line, things like the Proximus rules being relegated to Silver Ladder hurt the presentation of it in Awakening. We could only give a new Dynasty if we reprinted the rules, and the only writer bloody-minded enough to do so was... me. In Seers of the Throne. So... High Priority. The core Proximus rules don't take up much room (less than they did in 1e, even), but I'm not going to allow second edition's core to get printed without them. Same way I have absolutely no desire to re-explain what the Eleven Major Exarchs are every bloody book.
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May 3, 2015 21:38
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Cabbit posted:I agree, we should talk about nWoD mage more instead. Yes, we should!
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May 22, 2015 00:26
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I keep gamely pitching Blue-books as well. There's only so many resources to go around.
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May 23, 2015 02:48
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Soonmot posted:Which is the hospital? I keep meaning to grab 13th precient, but I was unaware of a hospital themed book. Asylum actually covers all medical professionals. We could do with an Organised Crime one, IMO.
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May 23, 2015 11:26
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Nah, I was just describing a process. Different teams use the open development process in their own ways. Mage and Changeling both went for a "warts and all" where as soon as the developer thought something neat arose, it went up. I completed my dev edits of the Paths recently and they are considerably refined from the first hack at it. Plus, different writers submit at different stages in their processes. Newer writers use a much more back and forth process where pre-1st drafts go to the developer in a really embryonic stage, get kicked back, and go forth again, and might get shared for open dev at any point. I came up during a period where I had to delete a ton of email just to have room for a single small Word doc to go back and forth, so I tend to grind and grind and then throw the final result at Dave or whoever, so you'll tend to see my work at a later stage. Also "this hasn't been seen by an editor" when David says it is the whole truth - he just puts drafts up. When I say it, it's technically true (the editor won't get Mage until I'm done with it over the next few months) but not the whole truth. The Path spoilers haven't been seen by an editor, but I *did* go through them and clean up some things precisely so that fans would actually read them rather than obsessing about dropped words or misplaced emdashes. So, if they read "cleaner" than Changeling's spoilers, that would be why. It's certainly not because Filamena (the author of the Changeling Seemings) is a newer freelancer. She's just as much a veteran as Malcolm. EDIT: And when I put excerpts of her work on Awakening up, not a peep of complaint. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 18:37
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Speaking purely for myself, but when writing Beast I followed the opinion that Beasts are full of poo poo, and basically have the same appropriating behavior toward other beings that fans (and the weaker freelancers) accuse mages of. But also that it didn't matter.
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Jun 7, 2015 22:58
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I mean, here's an example that's not about crossover with my gameline. So I wrote the Promethean page, which a lot of people hate because it establishes Beasts as being immune to Disquiet. Here was my thinking - Prometheans are inhuman, but (except for Centimani) want to be human. Disquiet is the emotional effect of their inhumanity seeping out, which they regard as a curse. Beasts are inhumanity cheerleaders. They don't see a problem with being inhuman, and don't understand why Prometheans want to be. They aren't affected by disquiet to reinforce that. In Promethean's case, we all know that that makes Beasts horribly condescending and misguided. We know Prometheans, and that the entire point of the game is the yearning to be human.
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Jun 7, 2015 23:18
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The mage page states that mages sometimes listen to Beasts going on about the Dark Mother and take away the idea that Beasts are servants of the Life Exarch. An "honor" literally no other splat gets - vampires and mummies get classed as "related to the lower depths" by the Orders, werewolves and Sin-Eaters are regarded as native guides to their respective otherworlds, but Beasts are the guys who a non-zero number of mages look at and decide must represent everything wrong with the universe. Now, if you play Beast, those mages are obviously wrong. But it's not exactly Poochie.
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Jun 7, 2015 23:46
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Axelgear posted:In his defense, Dave later stated he meant between-splat balance, not in-splat balance. Vampires and werewolves aren't going to be consistently designed with one another in mind, so why bother? Matt's opinions are clearly laid out in the blog post linked to up thread. I do believe in game balance, within the confines of a game. Matt generally doesn't care if, say, one Demonic Embed is "better" than another, because you can't predict the usefulness they'll be in a game. I do try for balance between powers of the same class. It helps that Mage has a central set of casting mechanics, and Arcana that are ten different themes of the same power progression. If one spell seems very useful in one Arcanum, the flexibility of creative thaumaturgy will even it out in the end. Which helps because once I've got a central mechanic I like, I hate artificially balancing powers within it. So, while Awakening 2 is much clearer about what a Potency level is worth in a spell, it sheds all speed-bumps and cases where spells have been tuned against their Practices. Second ed Acceleration is not Celerity with the names changed, and Forces Adepts can actually fly. What I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about is balance between gamelines. If you run a crossover, that's your own problem. Where our two philosophies meet (that is, where I work for him) you get things like Beast's Lair system, where there's a central framework that the game then attaches any Environmental Tilt to.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:58
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Ferrinus posted:That was true in the oWoD, not the new one. nWoD supernaturals don't run on mutually contradictory metaphysical premises and at least aren't SUPPOSED to exist on completely separate tiers in terms of personal character-to-character power and influence. Compatability and even footing were part of the nWoD's basic pitch; part of the appeal is that I can have vampires fight werewolves in a way that's not a ridiculous steamrolling or nonsensical chaos circus. No. Compatibility was. "Even Footing" has never been an issue beyond a few powers here and there, mostly in Mage's original corebook. Examples of second-edition work we've done for Compatibility are things like the Dream Form rules in Beast, which you'll see again in Changeling and Mage, the Gauntlet rules in Werewolf and Mage, the Clash of Wills Mechanic, ephemeral entities being a rules base things like qashmallim, Strix, Supernal entities, and even Beast's Souls then modify. It's things like mage's rules for Sleepers being based on Integrity, the corebook spirit rules leaving mechanical connectors that hopefully one day a second edition of Geist will plug into (I won't say they'll definitely get an honorary ghost "Rank" like Werewolves do, but I wouldn't bet against it). Not "this splat has a power that increases Strength. All other Strength-increasing powers should be the same". Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 18:05
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If we do another nWoD game, I kinda want to do a deliberately lower-powered one compared to the others.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:13
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Gerund posted:What would be the purpose of designing a game with that intent in mind, other than to provide a talking point in a discussion about brand-level game design? We've done four games in a row now dealing with the cosmic limits of the nWoD - Geist, Mummy, Demon, and Beast. If we do another game, I'd like it to be closer to Vampire or Hunter, simply because doing the same thing over and over again is boring. Eh, we'll see what happens come Pitch season. Just musing.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:05
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Mors Rattus posted:Excellent. That bloodline was the first thing I wrote for White Wolf. You and me both. The million dollars wouldn't go amiss, either.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:32
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Gerund posted:Considering that every single writer from OP has distanced themselves from Beast Really? loving time zones! No one tells me anything.
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Jun 9, 2015 12:10
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Brutal Casting So one of the amusing things about this meme, is that Brutal Casting doesn't actually exist. I didn't like it in the first draft of Mage's Merits, so I deleted it in the redlines. And not a single one of you knows what it was supposed to do. Only David Hill and I do.
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Jun 9, 2015 21:01
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Kai Tave posted:Rose Bailey is trans herself, but I don't know how much she has to do with Beast. She wrote the Families.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:47
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm under the impression that OPP doesn't really want to use the Humanity/Morality mechanic as a downwards spiral of losing yourself to being a horrible person except for in Vampire, so they've been getting creative with what to use instead. It's not so much that Beasts have a Morality-stat that they also use as power points - it's that Beasts don't have a Morality-stat. Which is a shame - I rather liked what Morality/Humanity/Wisdom did to the game; it doesn't matter that you're a powerful mage; being a dick to people still reflects on you. Nah, Wisdom is still a downward spiral of increasing hubris as your Obsessions drive you mad.
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Jun 10, 2015 22:54
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I Am Just a Box posted:Bravo on this one, Malcolm. I was waiting to form too concrete an opinion on the Sardonyx previews until we saw more, and this preview is the first one that really shows it coming together and how the preceding pieces fit. I like almost everything in this bit, the scale factors, the focus mechanic, the inclusion of cooperative social actions. My misgivings about Sardonyx as previewed thus far overall are pretty small and nitpicky; it's perhaps more in-depth mechanically than I anticipated, but I understand there's a large sector of the audience that digs that, and it's not so onerous as to put me off it. The stuff about Fields in combat? My idea. Someone on Big Purple said (as an example of why they didn't like it, natch) that it reminded them of the New York fight in Avengers. Good; that's exactly what I was thinking of. We'll get into more of the things I designed later on. Much of what I contributed prior to stepping back to concentrate on Mage has already been superceded, but in general, I did the early work for how power stats, the equivalent for Merits/Backgrounds/Whathaveyou, and how Legend will work in Scion.
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Jun 18, 2015 20:49
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Night10194 posted:Does this mean they're doing a rewrite of Aberrant? Because there was a great concept that definitely needed the gallons of old White Wolf hosed off of it. Yes, indeed. I believe Ian's gameplan is to take the original Trinity of games in their traditional reverse order: Trinity Corebook, the Aeon, then Aberrant, then Adventure, and then to Infinity, Beyond, and if he has his way Dino Riders.
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Jun 18, 2015 20:51
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Ferrinus posted:Unless you're playing on an actual grid I don't see what you'd use if not fields/range bands/etc. Keeping track of who's on which roof or whatever is about as much as you want to do in a theater of the mind system. Oh, I entirely agree, and you'll see more of it as Neall gets into the more detailed combat rules. EDIT: Fields aren't quite range bands. You can have range bands within a Field. Fields are things like "The top of Stark Tower" - "The street level". Characters can move from one to the other. They can shoot from one *into* the other, or forcibly move opponents between them. But they're "grouped" by the system. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 21:16
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Kavak posted:Blog post on Neolithic Mage/Werewolf is up. I don't know if I'm cool with an origin that Eurocentric for the Uratha, but it's not like there's a set canon for nWoD anyway. The human culture we're showing is the Vinca (and we mention their neighbours), but the Uratha live in Pangaea, which stretches across the whole world.
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Jun 20, 2015 13:32
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Kavak posted:How does that work? Will we see Uratha NPCs from other parts of the world? One of the things about this being pre-Sundering, is that we're finally getting a look at Uratha culture as separate from any mortal human society - they live in their own tribes in their own world, and obvious Wolf-Blooded in (at least) the human society we're focusing on get sent into the wild to join their own kind. Different tribes of Uratha will have different customs, follow different Firstborn, and have different opinions on what to do about Wolf's illness, but while a mage could (say) wander far across the world via Space magic and meet a radically different civilization there, if he then went into Pangaea the werewolves would be werewolves.
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Jun 20, 2015 14:41
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I was round at Chris' flat this evening (he wrote the Neolithic chapter) and commented that we seem to have gotten away with revealing that Father Wolf was not actually a Spirit. I was expecting more fan push-back on that one.
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Jun 23, 2015 01:10
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All credit and admiration to Digitalraven, who has let me stomp all over his gameline's backstory. I know that if, say, the other Dave developed a Changeling Dark Era that casually revealed the Exarchs were True Fae I'd throw a fit. But, as you say, the revelation that there used to be creatures very much like spirits, but made of flesh, explains the weirder parts of werewolves' own origin story, implies horrible things about the Wolf-Hosts from that one book, gives the Baal-Hadad new plot hooks, gives a backstory to the weird fleshy monsters all the way back in Predators... It fits, and hopefully the finished setting will be received as well as the teaser has been.
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Jun 23, 2015 01:43
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DJ Dizzy posted:Awakening> Ascension. Hth. Well, yes. Of course. 
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Jun 25, 2015 12:54
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Rand Brittain posted:It's the second-least-bad of all the nMummy books. (The first and only actually good book overall is DC.) The first chapter, about the very first time any mummies ever woke up, is actually really good. The rest is sort of middlling. I'll take that for a dollar. (Malcolm and I wrote the First Turn.)
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Jun 26, 2015 07:19
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