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Feinne posted:Yeah Herald of the Outer Gods sounds awesome on paper but that means you're the guy who gets sent to hang out with loser cultists because Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth would literally rather do anything else and Azathoth is too far from anything recognizable to even communicate intelligibly. Also there's that incessant atonal thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:51
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Battle Mad Ronin posted:Moore himself admitted Neonomicon was poo poo (or at least got as close to admitting it as his ego allows). I assure you Providence is, like, 90% rape free. It's also a brilliant series. That's nice to hear. I remember reading Neonomicon was so dark because he was angry at having to pay his tax bill or something. OH GOOD I AM GLAD THERE WAS A REASON.
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Jan 17, 2018 20:22
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Robindaybird posted:Yeah, you can have fun going full ham on doing Heavy Metal Bards, Brutal Legend, or just exorcising demons with the power of rock at Madison Square Garden, but given who this is, how many pages will it take before we get how mystical it is to have sex with an underaged groupie Would lay money down on opening fiction.
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Jan 20, 2018 01:38
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Kurieg posted:I'll take this time to remind everyone that Beast was edited by Matt's wife. ...oh. Dear.
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Jan 20, 2018 02:49
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Kurieg posted:That seems to happen a lot in the "hippy love magick" books. Tribebook: CoGR and Changing Breeds pull the same trick... in fact I'm pretty sure all the books Comer and Brucato wrote pull that trick. Ethan Skemp earned some admiration from me when he took full responsibility for letting CoG Revised slip through.* He just wasn't paying attention or similar, as I recall. *More 'violently murdered the guards and escaped over the wall' really.
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Jan 21, 2018 18:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:What happened in the CoG revised book? I don't remember anything about that. There's a review of it up on the FATAL and Friends compilation site, written by our very own Kurieg.
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Jan 21, 2018 18:35
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You know, the talk of Beast got me to re-read the review and given they were developed by the same person, I'd love to know why Beasts have such a hate-boner for Demons.
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Jan 21, 2018 18:56
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That Old Tree posted:As I mention every single time it comes up, "you can't even turn into a dragon*, your soul just feels like a dragon" demonstrates Beast failing at the elevator pitch stage. Which in a way is impressive, like a spectacular car wreck. That's what killed it for me, really. Before anything else. I saw there was an aquatic-based brood or whatever and was like, "Oh, huh, can I play Godzilla? That'd be fun!" And was told totally, yes, you could play Godzilla. So I asked how the game ran being able to turn into a giant radioactive rage-lizard and was met with 'oh, my, no, you can't actually turn INTO Gojira he's just like your spirit animal." Pfft. Bush league. If I want monsters with a job to do, I've got Forsaken. Sure, it's playing supernatural park ranger, but it's still something with legs.
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Jan 21, 2018 19:55
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:That's one of those, X person was totally a X entries in a Clan/Tradition/Tribe book. All the books are from the perspective of an unreliable narrator so they really have no idea what they're talking about if it's someone from outside their lifetime. That's why Mata Hari and Rasputin are all over the place. My favorite is still Jim Morrison being a Cultist of Ecstasy.
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Jan 21, 2018 20:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Or alternatively if that's too depressing, make their morality stat a measure of where they fall on a spectrum from "basically otherkin Freddie Krueger" to "wise old oracle that the Hero seeks out for guidance." Make defeating heroes or helping them equally valid ways of progressing their power stat, which measures their progress into becoming purely Astral beings -- of achieving their escape. This also sets up fantastic opportunities for Beast vs. Beast gameplay because what part of "magical dreamworld Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, with the soul of Pleasantville at stake" doesn't sound like fun? Maybe go for a more Arthurian flavor than Greek if you do it this way. So the end goal is to become the dragon in Dragonheart. Done!
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Jan 21, 2018 22:02
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I remember noping out of M20 when we were told that the character creation example girl was kicked out of her house for having a teenage orgy. I'd struggled, until then. I had. And then all hope was lost.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:43
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Robindaybird posted:The more one hears about oChangeling, the better for it that nChangeling just completely start over I've seen some speak well of C20. Sadly it was developed by Matt McFarland so... yeah...
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Jan 22, 2018 23:18
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Night10194 posted:The real final boss is that d10/d100 sanity loss. Oh, and the final Mehmet Eats Your Mind gently caress You roll. What would be fair? Straight up d10 SAN loss? I mean, it IS freaky but...
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Jan 26, 2018 19:34
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Rand Brittain posted:White Wolf (by which we mean the people at Paradox Interactive who bought the old White Wolf), and Onyx Path (by which we mean a new company formed by people who worked for the old White Wolf) are separate entities. World of Darkness and Exalted are owned by nuWW and licensed by OPP, and OPP makes them but nuWW has creative control and occasionally exercises it. Like a minor note, their preview of the Egyptian pantheon was pretty cool. I like Bast as 'put upon pantheon enforcer who Ra kept foisting duties off on with a bit of a drinking problem' instead of 'sexy Catwoman.'
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Jan 27, 2018 20:20
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:I thought Yahweh/The Father was a Titan, and the Son and Holy Spirit were his jailers? Or something else amazingly blasphemous but kind of coherent if you squint at it, like that. ...they did what? Oh. Ew.
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Jan 30, 2018 00:01
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So Phil's musical hill to die on is KISS, huh? Wow. Just... wow.
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Jan 30, 2018 21:46
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FMguru posted:KISS is hilarious because they were a mediocre bunch of crowd-pleasers, led by one of the most mercenary and bottom-line focused bandleaders in the history of music - which you'd think would be the opposite of a game that's seemingly all about when music meant something and wasn't just a bunch of watered down corporate crap, maaaaan. That is the sticking point. What powerful themes does KISS explore in their music? That Detroit is a rockin' town? That you should lick things up? To shout? Also it just has to be said - getting pissy because nobody wants to call you Ravenwolf Grigori or whatever when people use the names 'Henry Rollins' and 'Gene Simmons' is because those names exist in nature. Looking forward to the rest of this mess, Daeren. Go with God.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:24
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:Eh. Everybody calls Chaim Witz, "Gene Simmons." Nobody calls him the Demon or whatever. Yeah, I wasn't even talking about calling them Space Ace or whatever.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:05
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Daeren posted:He's mentioned three times, actually: as a "dangerous psycho", as an example for a maxed out Bad Reputation flaw-equivalent, and as part of a litany of musicians that destroyed themselves with drugs. Brucato definitely has a soft spot for punk and shock rock, though - I've already glossed over a mention of Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics as one of the bands his father introduced him to, and she's brought up quite a few times. "I wish blowing up cars on stage meant something now," Brucato said wistfully, staring out the window.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:38
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Wikipedia Brown posted:The weirdest thing about that family of games is just the almost-Trek setting, since it's licensed from the Franz Joseph Star Fleet Technical Manual. That, and in being devised for Star Fleet Battles, it tends to be a version of Trek where massive wars and arms races are a constant. On the surface, it's not a terribad idea, the Prime Team. I even kind of like it as an excuse to have Federation starships carry around what amounts to a group of adventurers. That said the game itself is super American-centric to a degree that will drop nobody's jaw, complete with current USMC ideals and such carried on into the 23rd century. They even still say 'Semper Fi' which I don't exactly have a problem with, but to think one country's thing beat out even coming up with something new in the face of having a bunch more species join, to say nothing of countries and planets, shows at best a lack of imagination. quote:*We could have a whole thread about Steve Cole. I don't know anything about him, but have no trouble believing everything about an old wargames dude is probably terrible. Sad, really.
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Feb 1, 2018 15:45
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Animated Star Trek is official canon by the way. Anything that was on TV or in a movie is according to various sources over the years. Everything else isn't canon. Doesn't that backdoor the Kzinti into the canon, since Niven wrote some episodes and they were in them, or at least one?
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Feb 1, 2018 20:59
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theironjef posted:I just went for a rewatch and it wasn't long before I was skipping all the LaForge and Troi episodes. My favorite so far is the one where there's some super dangerous prisoner with wicked 80s facepaint in the brig (who has just killed five people), and Deanna just walks in(not with any sort of assignment), sort of half-philosophize/half-flirts with him for a few minutes, then heads straight to the ready room to tell Picard he's a cool guy and they should let him out. Poor Levar Burton. He didn't deserve to have to play a character who crushed on a hologram and then thought that meant he should date the real woman.
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Feb 4, 2018 15:38
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Kurieg posted:Geordi's luck with women was so bad they made Harry Kim inherit it as a character trait. The clear hate that the Voyager execs had for Garrett Wang is baffling. You CAN write people off the show if you loathe them so much.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:45
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Hostile V posted:Yeah disregarding my own biases and my F&F of the whole series, I have never heard anyone refer to BNW positively or generally at all out in the online tabletop scene. Like I was honestly a little surprised that some folks here remembered the line enough to have any sort of opinion on any of it because the whole series felt just abandoned and forgotten every time I remembered it existed (before running the series and realizing "yeah okay this is fine if everyone forgets it"). I think y'all will be fine and won't get much anger if it all. I honestly think it was more caught up in the tide of how well-liked Deadlands was at the time than anything on its own. I remember being really excited by it for like a week, and then deciding I'd rather play something without really limited 'power packages.'
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Feb 15, 2018 03:33
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The Chad Jihad posted:Idle thought, is Federation and Empire a candidate for this thread or would that strictly be Prime Directive Whether you like it or hate it, we are dumb for consumption in this thread. Post away.
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Feb 15, 2018 20:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Not really? There isn't a lot more to say to than that. He wanted to play the concept of gravity with a katana, I told him no, and it's been too long to remember much more accurately. I could go on about bad characters I had to deny, I suppose. But it's been many, many years since I was foolish enough to wallow around in the dumpster of fandom those games tend towards, and it's probably more suited to something like the catpiss thread, should I ever catch up with that. It is a shame modding PC applications is not as story rich as one thinks it might be. Like, 90% of the bad ones are just that, bad. I did it for a WW site for a good while and most of them were things like either super ancient and powerful or wanting to play a member of the clan who is hideously ugly but they of course are beautiful for reasons.
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Feb 17, 2018 17:25
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I have a hard time buying it, given their rhetoric and characterization up to this point. When we get into the actual Tolkeen conflict, it'll hold even less water. Also, with the amount of unclaimed land, nuking one city is almost of little actual consequence, given they probably don't have interest in the magical infrastructure of a city like Tolkeen. Nonetheless, we're told they'll only use it if a rival nation was on the verge of annihilating them, which is presently unlikely (apparently only Atlantis qualifies, and they have no invasion plans). They might target the Gargoyle Empire with nukes to assist the New German Republic, however, and if they start expanding too far, alien-dominated locales like the Arkhon Freehold are likely targets. Somebody should do the Siege of Tolkeen and try to chart the exact moment Bill Coffin threw up his hands and yelled, "Nope! I'm out!" (For those who don't know, Bill understandably didn't want to write a book or books where the post-apoc fascists were written in even a semi-positive light and it was the straw broke the camel's back.)
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Feb 20, 2018 00:16
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Nessus posted:Poor replacement infrastructure? Stupidity and incompetence? Their relative advantage actually being less than you'd think in practice? I genuinely don't think much from the Navy book ever comes up again, although admittedly I've never read the Siege of Tolkeen. Although those aircraft carriers bring up the interesting problem of power creep in RIFTS. Supposedly Atlantis is militarily untouchable because of its high-grade tech and magic and blah blah blah, but that book was the second World Book ever and the line has been topping itself for ages. Those three aircraft carriers might be able to take out Atlantis' fleet by themselves now for all I know. I'm not terribly certain who the Navy book is for either. Perhaps with the release of LucasArts' TIE Fighter a couple of years earlier made Kevin think the iron was hot enough to strike with playing air quotes heroic fascists. Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 14:18
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occamsnailfile posted:The worst thing with those aircraft carriers is that with 12,000 MDC, they're still weaklings compared to the big Splugorth ships from Underseas, and they have three of them while the Splugorth have three hundred. That's without touching on the Horune pirates or other threats from Underseas that will happily eat carriers. This must be in the era when Siembieda has begun thinking of the Coalition as humanity's true savior, not just because of the endless wank over parts of it nobody cares about, but those are the kinds of odds he assigns to what he considers "good guy" factions when he thinks about game balance at all. Oh, man, I forgot about those so take back whatever I said about the Coalition's carriers. Even when I was a RIFTS junkie I didn't buy Underseas because... er... Underseas. I also forgot that while I do like a lot of CJ Carella's writing, the dude loved to throw around some giant MDC numbers.
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Feb 21, 2018 20:37
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Golden Age Weaponsmiths suddenly became a Thing around this time, too, and I always wondered if it wasn't because Wayne Breaux wanted some stuff to draw with easily available reference material for a change. In theory it's all lesser-MDC stuff from the modern day and also less expensive, but your PCs still probably can't afford it save by GM fiat. It was always odd to me as a kid, too. "Here's a GIANT ROBOT with a GUN FOR A HEAD!" versus "here is an M1 Abrams but with less MDC than a suit of power armor."
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Feb 21, 2018 21:25
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SirPhoebos posted:What was to stop RIFTS PCs from just stealing this poo poo? Skill checks or NPCs, from personal experience. That said, why I mentioned it was there's credit values for everything which could make one think they were to ostensibly be available for purchase (and indeed some really high-powered stuff says 'NEVER AVAILABLE EVER!' or something similar).
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Feb 22, 2018 01:54
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ramon Perez is easily one of the best artists they had. The last thing I bought of Rifts, and the only thing I kept, was the compilation of the comic he did in the Rifter (complete with an adventure and stats of the group). It comes complete with a wacky fishmalk Crazy! Ha, ha... ha.
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Feb 22, 2018 16:26
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wdarkk posted:It can be hilarious to see how hard it is to get into certain classes. Yeah. Our fix was 'if you want to play it, take the minimum required attribute if you didn't roll it.' Of course we went to 'roll 4d6 drop the lowest' early on too, which helps. Also 'you pick where the stats go.' Not that this excuses putting player options that may not be options for players, mind you.
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Feb 22, 2018 17:55
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theironjef posted:I ran into Ramon Perez once at Comic Con, he was there repping for Marvel since had been doing some inking for them. I was like crazy excited because I loved his work on the 2nd Edition Heroes Unlimited, and he was honestly embarassed. It was nuts. I was like "Oh man are you the same Ramon Perez as the Palladium Games artist?" and he looked both ways and sighed deeply before answering. That's a shame. He did some great work. It's all over but for some reason I recall the Lone Star World Book the most.
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Feb 22, 2018 19:43
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yes, Brom did work on Dark Sun (and actually has a few pieces in Rifts). Oh, I'd forgotten about all that stuff! Isn't that the Meta-4 universe? I think Crooks! was a supplement?
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Feb 23, 2018 02:25
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Out of curiosity, and I looked up the Kisent aliens in said Aliens Unlimited. They are, you're sitting down? Good. They're a plant-based race whose mining and forging of weapons is a big deal in the AU-verse. They have a SUPER DUPER SECRET technique for forging called 'laser forging' which is obviously special as it uses lasers. People are so in love with their forging and Kisentite weaponry they've developed a tourist trade off it. (One reminds the court that Aliens Unlimited was written by Wayne Breaux. Not even an assist credits by Kevin. So every word in this book is clearly gold from the author's pen.)
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Feb 23, 2018 21:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, I think META-4 is in the original core, Crooks, and the first Annual, and then just vanishes after that, never to be seen again. I was always curious as to why the only thing M&M seemed to keep from it was the 1E iconic techno-hero Gimmick, and even she wasn't really an NPC or anything. (Although one book is named after her.)
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Feb 24, 2018 03:07
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unseenlibrarian posted:Because the folks who were doing the Meta-4 universe development got the license to print Dungeon and Dragon from Wizards and then when that fell through, went on to produce Pathfinder, mostly. Never heard of it. Although on a serious note, while Crooks! itself is fun, I found I wound up preferring the DC analogues of Freedom City when it came to my hero NPCs anyhow. The Clique remains one of my favorite things to torment teen heroes with ever, so SU obviously did good and lasting work.
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Feb 24, 2018 15:02
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How many potentially world-ending/world-conquering threats lurk in the Federation of Magic!? I cannot wait to find out! : :(There's a big one in Psycape, but since CJ wrote it I don't think it comes up again. Much the same as the big evil squid god in Underseas.) Also Kevin forgot about an entire manuscript that somebody wrote for him. A whole manuscript. Wow.
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Feb 24, 2018 23:38
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EverettLO posted:I would like to do Twilight Honor at some point. If you thought I spent too much time laying out how bullshit the fights here were, explaining the capstone battle of TH against the Shadowlands requiring twelve consecutive battle rolls and expecting your players to last through is proof that the writers have no idea how their systems work. I gawked at it the first time I read it. Which one randomly starts out having Yokuni show up and say 'hey go to the Carpenter Wall because reasons?' And then when you get there the Crab daimyo's kid holds a big wrestling tournament that everybody can participate in, unless you're a girl. Because Crab randomly hated the idea of female bushi for this specific adventure and never mentioned it again.
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Feb 25, 2018 00:41
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