Count Chocula posted:

It'd probably sell more copies with that title. But my views about nature are...unorthodox.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Palladium: it's just bad

wiegieman posted:

Somebody post that Planetary page where HP Lovecraft is utterly convinced that black people are an egg laying alien species.

Cassa posted:

An industrial demand for slaughter does do wonders for new murder implements.

And who the hell thought of a chainsaw when it comes to surgery? Is it surgery on bigfoot?

quote:

He was six foot two, and operated in a bottle-green coat with wellington boots. He sprung across the blood-stained boards upon his swooning, sweating, strapped-down patient like a duelist, calling, 'Time me gentlemen, time me!' to students craning with pocket watches from the iron-railinged galleries. Everyone swore that the first flash of his knife was followed so swiftly by the rasp of saw on bone that sight and sound seemed simultaneous. To free both hands, he would clasp the bloody knife between his teeth

Liston's most famous case posted:

Amputated the leg in under 2 1⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene; they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he dropped dead from fright.

That was the only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality.
— Richard Gordon

Hostile V posted:

What women!

No for real there's...nothing. There is absolutely nothing in the book to answer this question. I'm just so convinced they just actively forgot that there could be female prisoners on the Gehenna when there's poo poo like that Trait. And this is just, like, the tip of the Weird Bad Shitberg.

JcDent posted:

(...except for the part in Tempestus Scions book - the worst book - where women can't join the navy anymore)

Nessus posted:

Isn't the Imperium's navy this massive thing where the ships are practically Zeonic colonies unto themselves with entire generations of void-born spawning and mutating and poo poo beyond the hallowed surface of a planet?

JcDent posted:

Oh, the women are free to be basically anyone else, just not Space Marines (because Emperor engineered it that way and No Female Space Marines (in 40K) is my weird hill to die on. I'm also willing to die on No Male SoB hill, which is adjacent, but much smaller), Commissars or Navis Nobilite (the officers), and I have issues with the last two. Aside for the Scions book being needlessly cruel and stupid about things (All Scions (human operators operating operationally) need a painful memory deleting drug for their transformation into Scions just cuz AND THE STOCKS ARE RUNNING OUT NOOOO), I'm really not against female Commissars (and countless horny nerds are already voting with their wallets at Wargame Exclusive et al) while a female space officer in a strapping uniform is such an entrenched trope that I would not want to go away from 40K.

And Vasquez is the reason why we need more female Guardsmen. And for Guardsmen to look more like Colonial Marines rather than movie Mobile Infantry.

EDIT: Wait, I think I might have been wrong. I took a glance at the book and in the two places they mention selection, they don't mention Navis. Now how did I get this brainfart...

Mors Rattus posted:

I'd actually say more the Yehat, albeit with some rather notable twists. Most notably: not a patriarchal society with women in a particularly poor place.

E: It should also be noted, Kzinti telepaths tend to be weedy, stringy little assholes by kzin standards, but are very useful militarily...most of the time. The first Man-Kzin War got kicked off when a Kzinti telepath reported to his captain that a human ship had no weapons, humans having been at peace for a long-rear end time before meeting the Kzin. This was true, to an extent, except that human ships run on reaction drives, leading to what both species remember as the Kzinti's Lesson: a reaction drive is a weapon whose power is directly related to its efficiency as a drive.

Which is to say, humans lost the first battle but managed to take out a single Kzinti ship by hitting it with the giant fusion flame come out of their ship, because the Kzinti thought it was unarmed and were basically toying with it until that happened.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Halloween Jack posted:

I think one of the main reasons Vigil succeeds where Reckoning failed is the way Hunters' special powers are framed. Hunters were not all created by the same source or phenomenon. They were not suddenly created by a divine power. Without monsters to fight, Hunters go back to being civilians.

Their powers are also something external to them. They don't have a Power Stat (nor their own kind of Morality). Valkyrie uses superweapons, the Ascending use superdrugs, the Aegis uses magic artifacts. Even Cheiron's implants are, well, just dangerous experimental implants, and the Lucifuge and Malleus are invoking powers that come from somewhere else.