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kaffo posted:Regarding Exalted storytelling. Can anyone who's run or been in a really successful Exalted campaign maybe share the story structure? My game's currently on hiatus but it's been going for a very long time and is at Essence 5. It went something like: * Classic "meet at ancestral Circle's tomb" dungeon crawl in which a plot device object is found along with some artifacts * Save a town from some demons in a dungeon crawl. When some NPCs just ask for the plot device the PCs shrug and hand it over. So much for that idea! * Get to a big city in which the PCs have to lay low and politic a bit, go on another dungeon crawl for crafting components, ultimately save the place from an Abyssal attack and turn a riot into a revolution that leaves their friends in charge * Fly across the map in their new airship, making a stopover at a mountain settlement under Realm occupation that is freed from that + marauding fair folk and becomes another little dominion loyal to the Circle * Get to Nexus, meet the 1e signature Solars (who got really hosed up by the Emissary), do a bunch of stuff there like fighting in the arena, infiltrating one of the Tombs to rescue Panther, etc * Head to Great Forks and raise a demon army to basically go to war with the Princess Magnificent, who turns out to have been "defeated" rather than defeated * Drive that demon army further and further east to attack Mahalanka and retake it from Raksi in a gigantic campaign that involves cutting a deal with Chejop Kejak among other things * Finally decide it's time to found a nation, pick an empty but cool-looking spot on the map and do a bunch of surveying, exploration, and crafting while also summoning allies from across the map to come settle * Huge bossfight with solar akuma and his mind-controlled insect legions during attempt to geomantically cure the weird malady that afflicts the region and left it unsettled in the first place; success basically turns it into Zeal from Chrono Trigger * Start doing diplomacy and cutting deals with various regional powers like the Nameless Lair, Thorns, and the Confederacy of Rivers; discover that Lookshy might be about to betray the Confederacy for the Realm because of various factors * Infiltrate and destroy the secret Inland Sea facility that the Realm's been doing weird supersoldier crap in and was offering to let Lookshy get a piece of (campaign pauses here) Things actually ramped up in geopolitical scale pretty smoothly. Most of this stuff wasn't planned out unless you count thinking about it in the shower the day before the game, but I did start with a few very vague, very big threats in mind (the Mask increasingly becoming in charge of the Scavenger Lands, impossibly huge behemoths slowly marching in from the elemental poles towards the center of creation, a malfunctioning realm defense grid) that I'd keep in the back of my mind while making up more immediate threats and situations and which have at least motivated the behavior of a lot of NPCs the players meet and deal with. One thing that hasn't made up a huge portion of the game but has been fun to at least draw into the margins has been how other Solars behave in the world; they are, of course, also insanely powerful and ambitious, but tend to play less nicely with each other or generally be more selfish, so like there are ideological and personal differences in the classic 1e signature Circle that tends to leave it working at cross purposes with itself or just more up its own rear end than the PCs usually are, the Bull of the North actually destroyed (but also sacrificed himself in so doing) one of the nigh-invincible elemental behemoths while the PCs were otherwise occupied, etc. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 19:56
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Yeah, Cult of the Illuminated wasn't a very good book because it assumed that the Sidereals involved were so completely sinister that they would wind up shattering the whole campaign framework by brainwashing everybody even when they didn't really need to. But the basic idea is sound, both as a framework to base stories on and as the general idea of "let's just tell the Solars that they're golden heroes sent to save the world, which is in fact correct, and begin pointing them at our problems while pointing the Wyld Hunt in the other direction."
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Jun 30, 2022 19:56
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It didn't help that the fanbase took a look at the Sidereals and immediately decided they were King poo poo Master Scryers Wot Knew Everything Your Noob Anathema Would Ever Think Of Doing, And Will Come To Kill You At Their Leisure. Those were some weird loving arguments.
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Jun 30, 2022 21:58
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What if this teacup is the one with the Sidereal assassin? Better use my paranoia combo.
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Jun 30, 2022 22:09
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Ferrinus's description of his campaign is cool, but personally I'd have put more in there about the solar goddess of war who also became a Performance/Craft master that ended up a rock star across the north and also introduced pizza as street food in Nexus. There's a lot you can do with the Solar charm suite that isn't fighting! Crion fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 22:15
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My Charm rewrite now stretches all the way through Socialize, and I'm starting to realize that I'm actually likely to finish this project. It's time to start commissioning the cover art in earnest, and groan as I think about how I really need to go over it from the beginning and add a bunch of examples.
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Jul 2, 2022 05:39
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Creaking towards the end now, with everything up to Survival added to the PDF. I can just skip War, right? Nobody would notice. But now that I went and finished with Sail there's no point letting War defeat me, since people do use it sometimes.
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Jul 10, 2022 11:14
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Rand Brittain posted:Creaking towards the end now, with everything up to Survival added to the PDF. I can just skip War, right? Nobody would notice. But now that I went and finished with Sail there's no point letting War defeat me, since people do use it sometimes. War! What is it good for?  (No, seriously, what do people use it for?)
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Jul 10, 2022 11:33
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War is a great skill. A properly commanded battle group becomes horrifyingly effective. It's a great combat skill for a social character, letting you use charisma and a minimal charm investment to lay waste to your enemies
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Jul 10, 2022 18:59
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It's done. It's done, though it nearly destroyed me (a bit). My revised Solar Charmset is now assembled from Archery all the way through to War. The next step is to solicit feedback as I go through the whole thing adding examples, incorporating the rules changes introduced in Exigents, seeing about interior art, and commissioning a cover before putting the whole thing on the Vault.
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Jul 11, 2022 09:00
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Schwarzwald posted:I recently learned Holden has released an updated version of his free fan thing, Exalted versus World of Darkness. This fansplat is quite good, but I personally am holding out for the other planned splat, Exalted In The Chronicles Of Darkness. My reasoning is that ExVsWoD suffers from there being no core rulebook. You have to pick a game and then hack it to fight your preferred Exalted, which is messy. EitC will use the base Chronicle rules to make things more unified. Apparently, there will also be a bit more reimagining of world lore to fit the Exalted in more naturally rather than have them be beings from another world. Which, actually, I don't like as much lol, but still. Anyway, this project was quite good and turned out a lot better than his attempt at doing a PbtA, which was pretty messy.
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Jul 11, 2022 19:32
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Cult of the Illuminated were always way cooler without the sidereal backing IMO - we had an absolutely grand time with the Solar PCs having to deal with local cultist groups treating them as the returned chosen ones and deciding to Help by doing things like assassinating the local rulers in advance. Have them help out a time or two and then unleash the loose cannons for the rest of the campaign as absolute chaos agents.
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Jul 12, 2022 06:50
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xiw posted:Cult of the Illuminated were always way cooler without the sidereal backing IMO - we had an absolutely grand time with the Solar PCs having to deal with local cultist groups treating them as the returned chosen ones and deciding to Help by doing things like assassinating the local rulers in advance. Have them help out a time or two and then unleash the loose cannons for the rest of the campaign as absolute chaos agents.
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Jul 12, 2022 20:43
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That's kinda missing the point, really. What makes the Cult of the Illuminated so interesting is that it's already unraveling and turning from a controlled plan into a hot mess in spite of major league Sidereals overseeing it. That's what's fun about it. It gives the players immediate agency to gain a very significant powerbase and resources Solars normally don't get access to, as well as potentially turn some of the most dangerous people in Creation into their allies (and if that fails, form longstanding blood feuds, so you end up with either interesting friends or interesting enemies). The whole idea of 'nah remove the powerful people from it so Solars can free roam' is like, why even bother at that point. Just run literally any other story. Like even the book itself has a plot hook about one of the Sidereal overseers of one of the camps falling in love with one of her star pupils in spite of her best efforts to maintain distance, and growing more and more desperate over how it feels like control is gradually slipping from her grasp. That's Drama (TM). May as well embrace it.
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Jul 13, 2022 00:29
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I mean, kind of, but at the same time I think people just want to play heroic rock star Solars who save the day from various problems Sidereal Zordon points them at and then retire for the night with their hot-and-cold running groupies, and to be able to do that without feeling like they're obviously getting played for suckers.
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Jul 13, 2022 00:58
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, kind of, but at the same time I think people just want to play heroic rock star Solars who save the day from various problems Sidereal Zordon points them at and then retire for the night with their hot-and-cold running groupies, and to be able to do that without feeling like they're obviously getting played for suckers. You can do that by default. That's the exact, and I mean exact vibe of the book. What you do has value, it matters, it's legitimately improving lives, and it's making you both politically and personally more powerful. I feel like people need to go (re)play Wild Arms 2, maybe. Sometimes it's fun to have a morally questionable guide who is nonetheless working for the good of the world. Coming up with your own personal answer to what 'the good of the world' is and then making it real is a fun time. Fake edit: I would also argue that if what people want is a generically 'good guys save the day' scenario, then one that has significant cross-splat interaction is probably actually not the play. That actually sounds more like material for an adventure path, more than a scenario setup. After all, your classic standard 'a circle of solars awakens in a conquered nation and installs itself as its glorious kings leading a revolution against the Realm' plot is something that is pretty tragically underserved in the official materials overall. There's probably a market for a book that just offers you a ready-made kingdom to rule and love and a bunch of straightforward Dragonblooded villains to defeat in a glorious just war. I just feel sacrificing the philosophical space that CotI explores for the sake of providing that would be an actual tragedy, is all. Transient People fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Jul 13, 2022 |
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Jul 13, 2022 13:20
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kaffo posted:Regarding Exalted storytelling. Can anyone who's run or been in a really successful Exalted campaign maybe share the story structure? I actually have several hundred pages of IC journals, but our campaign had a lot of 1) Go Place 2) Be Heroes 3) Return Later to see how things went wild. Sometimes this meant enemy forces taking over, sometimes it meant internal issues. At one point my infernal character started a death cult that turned members into sea mutants (and thereby unlocking enlightened essence and magical martial arts) so that local yokels could defend themselves. Started at a random town, then went to Great Forks (which later got invaded by the Realm AND a rather fascist Solar at the same time, so it became a multidirectional war+insurgency. Another infernal fed the populace with mana locusts, but that turned the people into Creatures of Darkness) Then we cracked open Denethor, And finally went to Heaven in heavy disguise and started forcibly reforming multiple bureaucracies and taking over a few slums. Had the campaign continued, we probably would have been forced to escape the Bronze Faction in Heaven and sheltered in Malfeas, thereby finishing our tour of nearly every reality. -- Wherever we went, there were big grand Dramatis Personae to form longterm relationships with, whether they were City God's, enemy Abyssals trying to infiltrate the circle, friendly (and enemy) Infernals, a Siderial plucking unhelpful memories from their Solar disciple (who discovered this and murdered their mentor), the aforementioned Fascist Solar, or the leader of the Realm Armies ( who turned out to be a Solar PC's mother)
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Jul 13, 2022 14:55
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I keep iterating on this finished revised Solar Charmset, but it's becoming clear to me that it's actually quite hard to get people to read a 100-page document and provide thoughtful feedback on the set as a whole purely out of the goodness of their heart. What they actually want to do is skip immediately to their favorite Controversial Charm and judge the set based on what you did with that. So it looks like I'm going to have to start recruiting people for some playtest games.
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Jul 21, 2022 19:46
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Rand Brittain posted:So it looks like I'm going to have to start recruiting people for some playtest games. 
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Jul 21, 2022 20:32
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Yeah, people can just let me know if they want an invite to my Discord server. Right now it looks like I'm doing Saturday evenings in Great Forks, but that could change or it could even split into multiple games.
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Jul 21, 2022 20:53
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I would like to actually play some games, depending on what kind of timeslots they happen in.
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Jul 21, 2022 22:21
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Playtesting a complete Charmset with a single group turned out to be pretty difficult, but things have finally begun to move towards the final stages, and I've received the cover illustration for Golden Calibration, the revised Solar Charmset, and can start on the final stage of making the Charm trees: It's going to require some experimentation to get everything looking really nice, I think, but progress is progress and I expect I'll have the thing on sale sometime in November. Meanwhile, there's a big Exalted sale on, and I can't help noticing that the banner includes one official product and one by yours truly! Clearly I've arrived, but I'm hoping that this release will be an even bigger success before I move on to writing my own Exalted heartbreaker and the distressingly real isekai game.
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Nov 4, 2022 22:33
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After a year or more of writing, arguing, vectoring, and laying-out, my revised Solar Charmset, Golden Calibration, is finally up for sale. God, I hope someone likes it. I'm very tired. Now I can finally retire from this labor and work on my own damned game for once.
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Nov 13, 2022 19:34
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Rand Brittain posted:After a year or more of writing, arguing, vectoring, and laying-out, my revised Solar Charmset, Golden Calibration, is finally up for sale. God, I hope someone likes it. I'm very tired. Awesome work, thanks and congrats! Will make sure to snag it.
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Nov 13, 2022 23:41
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Congrats on finally getting that put together! I'll definitely take a look at it next payday.
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Nov 13, 2022 23:52
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Rand Brittain posted:After a year or more of writing, arguing, vectoring, and laying-out, my revised Solar Charmset, Golden Calibration, is finally up for sale. God, I hope someone likes it. I'm very tired. I can search for it but I can't actually click on it or buy it, might want to address that
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Nov 14, 2022 00:38
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Mile'ionaha posted:I can search for it but I can't actually click on it or buy it, might want to address that Can confirm - it was there, but now is gone.
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Nov 14, 2022 01:18
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You're right; it's vanished for me also. Looks like it's been set back to private, although I'm not currently sure why.
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Nov 14, 2022 01:50
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It looks like DTRPG is currently reviewing the book to decide whether a heavily-rewritten version of the Solar Charmset should fall within the Vault's rules for "alternate versions of published Charmsets." Hopefully they decide in my favor (it's within the letter of the rules and it benefits everybody while harming nobody as far as I can see), but if not, I'll be releasing it as a free fanbook under the Dark Pack, so I'll let you know what winds up happening.
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Nov 20, 2022 04:03
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I guess someone ought to mention that the Sidereal kickstarter is ongoing. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/sidereals-charting-fates-course-for-exalted-third-edition It's met its budget, and from what I've heard people discuss elsewhere the backer drafts have been very promising.
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Nov 29, 2022 20:42
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So, in the end, DriveThruRPG didn't feel qualified to judge whether Golden Calibration should be allowed on the Storyteller's Vault or not (not being Exalted people) and it seemed as though it might take weeks, months, or longer to get a response from Paradox on the topic. The few people on the Exalted team I was able to talk to seemed to lean towards the negative, so between those two things, I decided that the easiest course of action was the best. Here is Golden Calibration, released as a free supplement under the Dark Pack rules. I hope it brings you joy! I hope it encourages people to play Exalted who otherwise would not. I hope it encourages other people to stop putting unnecessary space between paragraphs and, for the love of God, Metagaos, quit indenting the paragraph following a heading. I'll be around to take comments and make corrections as they're needed. Otherwise, I'm retiring from writing things for IP that I don't own to make horny isekai games.
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Dec 2, 2022 03:42
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I haven't read it yet, but just the formatting is such a huge upgrade. And the charm cascades! It's so wild the base book doesn't have anything visualizing the charm trees. Thank you for sharing.
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Dec 2, 2022 04:21
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Wittgen posted:I haven't read it yet, but just the formatting is such a huge upgrade. And the charm cascades! It's so wild the base book doesn't have anything visualizing the charm trees. In fairness putting them in the book adds 50 pages. In double fairness, I was able to save about fifty pages or so by not having absolutely terrible layout. They also could have made some as a separate PDF, which isn't the same but would have been helpful and I have no idea why Onyx Path didn't do it.
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Dec 2, 2022 04:53
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Rand Brittain posted:Otherwise, I'm retiring from writing things for IP that I don't own to make horny isekai games. The Dream. Also, what if people want to voluntarily throw a few bucks at you?
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Dec 2, 2022 15:13
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Mile'ionaha posted:The Dream. Just put it to Jenna Moran's Patreon instead.
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Dec 2, 2022 16:35
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Rand Brittain posted:So, in the end, DriveThruRPG didn't feel qualified to judge whether Golden Calibration should be allowed on the Storyteller's Vault or not (not being Exalted people) and it seemed as though it might take weeks, months, or longer to get a response from Paradox on the topic. The few people on the Exalted team I was able to talk to seemed to lean towards the negative, so between those two things, I decided that the easiest course of action was the best. That situation sucks but thank for putting this out there.
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Dec 2, 2022 16:43
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Dang, Rand, that sucks. I know you've been working on Golden Calibration for an age now. For what it's worth, the end project looks nice as hell.
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Dec 2, 2022 16:51
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At least you can have this in your portfolio if you decide to actually get a job working on Exalted.
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Dec 2, 2022 17:21
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Terrible shame to have done all that work and not get anything for it. 
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Dec 3, 2022 15:14
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Lord_Hambrose posted:At least you can have this in your portfolio if you decide to actually get a job working on Exalted. I doubt that will ever happen, since I understand that Rich Thomas has disliked me ever since I pointed out that the original Mummy Kickstarter was just the developer telling you how great the game was going to be but didn't tell you anything about the game itself, and I've compounded that over the years by repeatedly criticizing his company for paying freelancers beer money to do all the actual game design. Besides, they would want me to lay it out wrong, and I did this project so I could lay it out right.
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Dec 4, 2022 00:02
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