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SimonChris posted:I just kind of like the idea of running a fractal heist where individual actions expand into earlier heists. I realize that's not the normal way of doing things, and the sub-heists would need to be very short, but it could be cool setup for a particularly epic score. Could you also Rashomon a flashback? Is there anything for that?
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Sep 8, 2023 17:45
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Chiming in to say I agree that I think the fractal/miniheist thing can be a fun framing device but that's not really the point of the flashback mechanic. Think of the mechanic the same way as the crew pulling stuff out of their pockets and marking gear slots. The whole point is to keep the game moving and encourage players to not over pre-plan heists, while still narratively letting characters do so. The stress cost should reflect how much you're 'letting them get one over' and asserting narrative control, and if it requires a roll or not should reflect if you have an interesting narrative complication. As always, if you've got nothing in the tank or can't think of how failure could be interesting don't have players roll. Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Could you also Rashomon a flashback? Is there anything for that? It could be a fun narrative structure potentially, but is not supported by the flashback mechanic. It'd be the same as doing Roshomon in any other game.
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Sep 8, 2023 19:22
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Could you also Rashomon a flashback? Is there anything for that? Maybe allow the players to flash back to an earlier scene and explain what really happened. The stuff that played out earlier was just the cover story they told everyone to put them off guard! I don't think this is technically allowed by the rules, but so what?
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Sep 9, 2023 09:55
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SimonChris posted:I just kind of like the idea of running a fractal heist where individual actions expand into earlier heists. I realize that's not the normal way of doing things, and the sub-heists would need to be very short, but it could be cool setup for a particularly epic score. This is basically how Broken Spire is structured. Its very cool! I recommend everyone check it out since its set in the same universe as BITD just with a different emphasis.
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Sep 9, 2023 11:07
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SimonChris posted:Maybe allow the players to flash back to an earlier scene and explain what really happened. The stuff that played out earlier was just the cover story they told everyone to put them off guard! You can't contradict anything that previously happened with a flashback within the rules, but you can give it a Rashomon-esque feel with flavorful narration. Character A flashbacks to them seducing a guard with their limitless charm, later Character B flashbacks to when they were standing in the background of that scene and talks about how they lifted the guard's spare keys while A was being a horny dumbass drooling over a random berk.
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Sep 9, 2023 16:11
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My hawker players have spent several sessions setting up a previously haunted mansion to host a rave and sell their drugs at, what are some things I could have happen during the inaugural opening rave? Not wanting to plot it out obv, just wanting some happenings and left turns to throw in
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Sep 9, 2023 21:39
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Have a ghost / spirit / vampire crash the party. They can be as destructive/ disruptive as you deem necessary.
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Sep 9, 2023 21:43
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sebmojo posted:My hawker players have spent several sessions setting up a previously haunted mansion to host a rave and sell their drugs at, what are some things I could have happen during the inaugural opening rave? Not wanting to plot it out obv, just wanting some happenings and left turns to throw in A significant minority of ravers think the place is still haunted, and that they're really cool and brave for being at a haunted rave. As everyone gets higher and higher, their constant overdone reactions to mundane happenings get tiresome. They keep shushing the band to hear messages from beyond. Any amount of uppers gets them screaming at basically everything. A curtain flaps and one of them turns over the Big Drugs Table to have an impromptu seance. Someone has brought a fake (probably fake, right?) deathseeker crow in a cage and they keep doing "wow the mood just died in here huh" style jokes. Rumours start to circulate that some hard lads are having a shooting contest at midnight. Turns out its the intravenous drugs type of shooting, but everyone has been real loving oblique about that. A very sad leviathan hunter turns up and is completely, inhumanly unable to get high off of any amount of drugs. Uninvited eel pie merchant turns out to have Tier IV protection for his Tier 0 pies.
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Sep 9, 2023 22:31
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A couple of Bluecoats show up and kill the mood at the entrance for a minute, but don't actually say anything. Then the stuffy-looking noblewomen they're being paid under the table to act as bodyguards to show up and commence to get 10000% ripped out of their minds. This may be fun or still bring the mood down depending on people's attitudes towards these women or nobles in general. Rumor starts going around that a card game is haunted or otherwise magically addictive, or a player is a warlock entrapping people with it. It turns out they're just really well-illustrated and everyone playing is extremely high.
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Sep 10, 2023 00:39
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sebmojo posted:My hawker players have spent several sessions setting up a previously haunted mansion to host a rave and sell their drugs at, what are some things I could have happen during the inaugural opening rave? Not wanting to plot it out obv, just wanting some happenings and left turns to throw in -A teen attached to a faction they're not on friendly terms with shows up tossing around way too much coin and really enjoys what your gang is selling. They're reckless and party way too hard. Does the crew fleece them? Use them for leverage or to get on better terms? What happens if they OD or cause trouble? How does this help or hinder relations with that faction? -Cultists who used to (or planned to) use the haunted house in their rituals are not happy about this neighborhood gentrification defiling a place of power for them. Alternatively, maybe this is exactly what they wanted, so now you've got creeps ruining the mood and rambling about how the drugs and performances will totally allow old gods to commune with everyone there. -A stronger tier faction is very impressed and wants to buy the crew out, or otherwise needs to be glad handled but not too much. -Toilets clogged by eels -Outside 'vendors' sneaking in to supply inferior/superior drugs
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Sep 10, 2023 04:58
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOMUfql2Smc Not directly TTRPG related, but Mary Robinette Kowal made a great video on structuring Heist stories. I particular like her advice on how to treat the team as a character with its own arc.
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Sep 10, 2023 11:05
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My group just finished up a year long OSR game and we decided our next campaign will be scum and villainy set in Star wars world, right before the events of ANH. Any overall advice using S&V in SWuniverse? Lessons learned etc.
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Sep 26, 2023 21:17
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:My group just finished up a year long OSR game and we decided our next campaign will be scum and villainy set in Star wars world, right before the events of ANH. I've only run straight FitD (including S&V), no Star Wars, but the first thing that jumped to mind is factions are really core to the gameplay. I think things will be a lot richer if you have more than five or six factions. A lot of the gameplay comes from factions' expectations/belligerence rubbing against each other right where the PCs are standing. Sure, the Empire is a faction all it's own, but so too are there separate factions run by Moff Sinestrous, Adjudicator Brix, ISB Chief Snoopaz, Chief Accountant Tallyman, etc., and they'll have their own separate interests in the PCs, whether for good or bad. I would also think about modifying Heat to be something more like BitD, where you have a single heat score, rather than per-system, since there's so many in the Star Wars. If they want to jet off to Dantooine and try to pick up some smuggling jobs from the nobodies there, that's effectively a Lay Low downtime action. (Or maybe a new crew move: get a crappier job at the benefit of dumping heat points.) Will they be smugglers, rebels, or something else? Or will they start as one and move toward another? Or do you not have a sense of that yet? (More for my own curiosity.)
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Sep 26, 2023 21:35
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I would start small and not have them directly present in the bigger conflict. I think the system works much better at the gritty street level so to speak than the grand epic galactic conflict level. Have them bump against the big stuff sure, but not be directly involved. Faction advice above is good and should be easy to adapt to the framework the S&V factions already give you.
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Sep 26, 2023 22:30
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Honestly, Saw Gerrera's partisans just after escaping Jedha, just as ANH starts and with Saw dead and the Rebellion not too happy with you, seems like a really neat crew idea. Lots of opportunity for street level scum play, but also higher ideals that can rub against it.
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Sep 26, 2023 23:36
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I always felt like S&V dropped the ball with the heat changes. BitD's pressure cooker system of Heat, Factions etc. is one of it's strongest points, and the fact you can't just gently caress off elsewhere is a solid motivator to force the players to deal with consequences.
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Sep 27, 2023 07:05
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Shockeh posted:I always felt like S&V dropped the ball with the heat changes. BitD's pressure cooker system of Heat, Factions etc. is one of it's strongest points, and the fact you can't just gently caress off elsewhere is a solid motivator to force the players to deal with consequences. I think the biggest weakness of Scum & Villainy comes from being an early hack for Blades, developed and released before we really knew the stengths and weaknesses of the system. In my Scum & Villainy experience the multiple heat tracks work, but it's very much a system where you need to restrict the players to the 3 systems and make it so travel requires either scrutiny or risks. That's kind of leaning into "Oh here's something the game and rules don't tell you, but you need to enforce..." like effectively the players can't just gently caress off, you need to use waygates to travel which are heavily under Hegemony control, or risk basically traveling the Warhammer 40k warp.
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Sep 27, 2023 07:41
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Are there any recent BitD hacks that folks would recommend?
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Sep 27, 2023 09:11
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I think the idea of being able to lay low in another part of the galaxy to get rid of Heat could work, I just feel there needs to be a cost there. Like, you can’t manage whatever you got going and NPC factions in that area can act completely unopposed by you because you are far away and unable to do anything if you don’t want attention brought to you.Josef bugman posted:Are there any recent BitD hacks that folks would recommend? I played a game of Copperhead County a while back and had a lot of fun. I played when it was getting updated more frequently, so we didn’t always convert our moves/gear/various abilities to the latest version since it could change. It’d be a bit different today, but I think I would have enjoyed it the same.
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Sep 27, 2023 10:22
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Josef bugman posted:Are there any recent BitD hacks that folks would recommend? The Hunted is a couple years old but as a pure improv folk horror one-shot, it’s superb and it does some interesting things around using improv and lore creation as an integral part of the action roll.
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Sep 27, 2023 17:21
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Josef bugman posted:Are there any recent BitD hacks that folks would recommend? I wouldn't call it recent since it was released in 2020 (updated in 2022), but I had a very good time playing CRASH//CART about a month ago. CRASH//CART is about a cyberpunk group of EMTs in their VTOL ambulance trying to rescue patients while flying under a repressive corporate budget. I mainly attribute having a blast to the very good GM we had; we had some issues with some of the mechanics. I wrote up an Actual Play of the game and critique of the system along with solutions on my blog here: https://nightmarethoughts6.blogspot.com/2023/08/crashcart-after-action-report-and-review.html CRASH//CART: $10 https://nightjargames.itch.io/crashcart
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Sep 28, 2023 01:08
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Josef bugman posted:Are there any recent BitD hacks that folks would recommend? Heliotrope posted:I think the idea of being able to lay low in another part of the galaxy to get rid of Heat could work, I just feel there needs to be a cost there. Like, you can’t manage whatever you got going and NPC factions in that area can act completely unopposed by you because you are far away and unable to do anything if you don’t want attention brought to you. Yeah, CC is rather good! Y'all should check it out: https://zzzwizard.itch.io/copperhead
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Sep 28, 2023 08:44
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Coolness Averted posted:I think the biggest weakness of Scum & Villainy comes from being an early hack for Blades, developed and released before we really knew the stengths and weaknesses of the system. Plus by making travel between systems heavily restricted you can re-enact the border crossing scene from Sicario.
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Sep 28, 2023 20:26
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SimonChris posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOMUfql2Smc She's a terrific novelist. I'll recommend the Lady Astronaut series and the standalone The Spare Man without hesitation.
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Oct 15, 2023 04:40
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A Burglar's Guide to the City Just learned about this book, which seems like it would be extremely useful for BitD. Apparently, it was an inspiration for the developers of Dishonored.
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Oct 27, 2023 08:43
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Josef bugman posted:Are there any recent BitD hacks that folks would recommend? I don't have a lot of experience in the system, but High Magic Lowlives is a pretty good read (wizard school dropouts ripping off the immortal aristocracy). Does anyone else have opinions about it? It has a lot of extra bits that make it a little, I guess, bulky for lack of a better word, but I really like the core idea.
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Nov 4, 2023 19:35
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Some strange stuff going on around Wicked Ones. It seems to have been taken off of DriveThruRPG. Both the deluxe and the free version. The writer for Wicked Ones suddenly closed down the game's discord server last year it was very strange. It also kind of looks like the Kickstarter for the deluxe print run including their new Undead Awakening expansion is basically dead now with there having been no updates since April of last year. Same thing with their Kickstarter for the game Relic they had started a while ago. This kinda sucks I was a pretty solid backer on both of those and the weird thing is that I they did at least send out the PDF for the Undead Awakening, just not the physical books, I've got nothing for Relic though. Not sure DTRPG took down Wicked Ones themselves or if the creator just nuked it but the whole situation sucks all around. I talked with Ben on Discord a while ago and he seemed like a pretty nice guy, I wonder if there were some sudden hardships with the Kickstarter rather than someone just taking the money and running with it. But who knows really.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:41
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DarkAvenger211 posted:Some strange stuff going on around Wicked Ones. It seems to have been taken off of DriveThruRPG. Both the deluxe and the free version. IIRC he announced a while back that he was getting out of writing RPGs entirely, a few months after shutting down his itch.io page and pivoted to hosting his stuff on DTRPG. The Discord was apparently closed down because he felt like it was just not popular enough to deserve its own community over just getting a channel in the official Blades in the Dark server. Apparently the Kickstarter for print copies of Undead Awakening/reprinting the base book hasn't fulfilled yet and the last update was from April 2023 announcing a delay until Q4 2023, which has obviously just passed. If you check the BitD Discord, one of the Undead Awakening authors just posted he has no idea why the product pages are gone and reached out to DTRPG for comment. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 18:41
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This is the danger in investing in one person. At the end of the day, Bandit Camp was one person. Wicked Ones was such a well-polished game, from the systems to the writing to the physical components, that I went all in on Relics. The fact that it's never coming out really sucks.
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Jan 5, 2024 19:05
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That guy sent me a bill on PayPal when Kickstarter dropped my pledge because I had no money. When I asked him to stop, he got in my face about it. That was one of the weirdest Kickstarter experiences I have ever had.
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Jan 5, 2024 20:46
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DarkAvenger211 posted:Some strange stuff going on around Wicked Ones. It seems to have been taken off of DriveThruRPG. Both the deluxe and the free version. He got weird in general right around the time he got kicked from the official BitD discord server for going on racist rants. He had some troubling things to say to an admin on there about how another creator gets more attention than him just because they're black. Around that time he became more withdrawn and stopped engaging with any community much, even his own. Then he started taking all his stuff down.
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Jan 6, 2024 02:28
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Space Skeleton posted:He got weird in general right around the time he got kicked from the official BitD discord server for going on racist rants. He had some troubling things to say to an admin on there about how another creator gets more attention than him just because they're black. Around that time he became more withdrawn and stopped engaging with any community much, even his own. Then he started taking all his stuff down. Hot drat really? That's wild, I take back what I said about him seeming like a nice guy then.
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Jan 6, 2024 16:26
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DarkAvenger211 posted:Hot drat really? That's wild, I take back what I said about him seeming like a nice guy then. It could be mental illness if they genuinely were a nice person without lovely views who suddenly shifted, but it also could just be the circumstances weren't right to see their lovely side. Most people with bigoted views aren't in 100% shithead mode all the time, and some are also savvy enough to realize they need to filter before they feel safe enough to say gross things.
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Jan 6, 2024 20:27
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Bloody hell, hadn't heard anything about that. I'd bought Wiked Ones and was thinking of getting one of the expansions/future stuff but bloody hell.
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Jan 6, 2024 22:12
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/banditcamp/wo-ua-hardcover/posts/4001335 Well, it's Creative Commons now. I didn't know about the racist meltdown (anyone have more info on this?) But it sounds like he got very unlucky and was never able to recover monetarily.
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Jan 8, 2024 21:07
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Further evidence I'm never going to see Relic, alas.
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Jan 8, 2024 21:21
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LaSquida posted:(anyone have more info on this?) It led to the memorable line from one of his staff: "Ben, this is your PR rep speaking, shut it down." and was able to find the convo again when I searched it in the BitD discord just now. He couldn't let it go and it got taken to DMs between him and the server staff and it went so poorly there they banned him forever. Space Skeleton fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 04:19
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At least he released it under CC. Still though, urgh.
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Jan 9, 2024 08:22
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Definitely a weird end to that one, especially since I really liked WO in a lot of ways, I think it really fixed a lot of the issues I had with base blades*, and in particular in a genre (RPG books) where authors seem utterly unable to not include super racist things in their books, I can't think of anything in WO that felt nearly as off as, well, every single WOD or D&D book. Wish I could say I saw it coming or something but no, pretty surprised that this is how it ends. And I guess, anybody got the CC links? I only ever got the free stuff and I'm not even sure that's the most up to date. *For the record, these would be too much overlap in a couple of the skills, crews that encourage repetitive gameplay, and a trauma system that encourages excessive caution. I think #2 and #3 and even moreso #3 are more matters of taste than universally considered flaws. WO condensed from 12 skills to 9 skills and that removes a lot of the trouble my table had with not being 100% sure when something was Finesse vs Prowl for example, which feels prettly clearly good, and I like the crew equivalent being more about goals than methods, and I like that the trauma system is still a penalty but more of a kind of fun and repeatable one than in base blades.
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Jan 9, 2024 18:59
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The overlap in actions is completely by design so that there are multiple verbs that make sense for any given thing the players want to do.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:27
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