Here’s my thoughts from when I ran GoSM:

Ghosts isn’t really a campaign. It’s a really un-connected series of individual mini-dungeon crawls. In particular, if you were hoping for a focus to be on the three factions within Saltmarsh itself, I will warn you that almost none of the modules have anything to do with that. The leadership divisions in Saltmarsh are just kind of there to help DMs build on their own homebrew stuff. Despite much being made of the Sea Princes, they’re more or less unmentioned in the rest of the campaign, as are the other two factions.

Notably, the modules’ antagonists break down into two major categories:

• Underwater creatures (Sahuagin in ‘The Final Enemy’, S’gothgah the Aboleth in ‘The Styes’, and a giant octopus that’s more of an environmental hazard in ‘Salvage Operation’).
• Undead (Isle of the Abbey, Tammeraut’s Fate).
• There’s also some unconnected pirates in Danger at Dunwater and a random priest of Lolth in Salvage Operation. The mini-encounters (Cove Reef, Wreck of the Marshal, Warthalkeel) are kind of just there. You might notice there’s no real theme here. Like I said, this is very open to homebrewing.

In my case, I decided I liked undead as a final antagonist better than an Aboleth. The entire thing became a plot by Orcus - my ultimate BBEG - to drown and slaughter everything in the Saltmarsh region. Everyone else - Syrgaul Tammeraut, the Aboleth S’gothgah, the Sahuagin - were either intentionally or unintentionally working towards Orcus’ goals, some being duped into doing so. This required some reskinning - the generic evil cult in ‘Isle of the Abbey’ and the Lolth priest in ‘Salvage Operation’ became Orcus worshippers.

In your case, if you want to focus on the three factions of Saltmarsh, I think you could go two ways:

• Have reach of the modules be a task or threat created by each faction. For instance, maybe the Loyalists send you on the Salvage Operation, hoping to get some dirt on Anders Solmor’s mysterious missing parents. Maybe the Sea Princes are stirring up the Sahuagin to attack Saltmarsh to break the King’s control, etc.
• Have one BBEG running all three factions. In this case, again, I would encourage you to look to either S’gothgah the Aboleth, or whoever Syrgaul Tammeraut’s magical patron is. Perhaps they are simply playing all three groups against each other to leave Saltmarsh depleted and ruined, at which point they will move in.

In either case, the political side of Saltmarsh is relatively undeveloped, giving you lots of room to work in, but also lots of work to do if that’s what you want.

I am tinkering with something similar right now, with the elf-equivalents being virtually illegal outside the borders of their own empire.

So, here’s what I would suggest you consider:

• First, discuss it with your players and make sure you’re not going to piss any of them off by doing this. If any of them were planning on playing said race, make sure they’re okay with the impact on their play style.

• Consider the storytelling conflicts you want to explore with this. What encounters do you want to put your players through, and why? What themes are you looking to explore?

• Consider the larger impact on other parts of your world. Try to make this more than a point that exists in isolation and a vacuum.

Welp. Since Hasbro overall seems intent on running its properties into the ground, I have little doubt the next one will continue the cycle of enshittification. I’d love to be wrong, but I doubt it.

Whoever said this doesn’t know either setting very well. Borg become resistant, not immune to weapons they encounter. Starships were still perfectly capable of damaging Borg ships with the same weapons years later.

The problem is that the two settings operate on entirely different scales. Individual Turbolaser bolts are something like thousands of 24th century Photon Torpedoes? Even if we assume the Cube can resist 90% of the energy from each bolt, it’s still having a very bad day.

So, this is a bit of a “depending on the group & situation” thing.

Fudging HP is definitely a thing DMs (myself included) do. However, with an experienced group who can get a sense for how much HP is typical for mobs at a given level, and if the amount of damage done is quite clearly far enough that he ought to be dead, it can be hard to add HP without “showing the finger on the scales” - at which point the illusion breaks and it becomes “un-fun”.

This is exactly why single chunky bosses drive me nuts. I once watched a rogue annihilate a major chapter boss with a single opportunity attack and some very lucky rolls.

Yep. Someone else mentioned something called the “Typhon Pact”, which I didn’t know about but sounds reasonably close to what I was thinking.

I’d be kind of looking at a Cardassian-led counter-federation. Maybe the Gorn, maybe some others.

What would be interesting is if it weren’t an overtly evil “rah, rah, we gonna beat up the UFP and reclaim our glory!” so much as a “with the Klingons firmly Federation allies, the Dominion crushed, and the Romulans devastated, the Federation is unquestionably on top… and that kind of scares us. We’re going to band together because otherwise, the Federation could do whatever it wanted with us.”

Going to echo the prior comment. But here’s my thoughts:

1. Was there a “session zero” in which the group’s expectations for the campaign and interactions were laid out? If not, it may be a good idea to pause and have this. Sometimes groups who are familiar with each other skip this because they “know each other”, but it can still be good on a campaign-by-campaign basis.

2. When you discuss it with them, try to start by determining why the DM is acting this way: Since it sounds like the DM likes firmly heroic characters, is this just what they find ‘cool’ or do they actually object to playing / having grey-er characters in their party or campaign? (Same kind of applies to the cleric’s player - are they just “playing the character”, or is this what the player feels is right?)

3. Ask if there’s been any miscommunications involved. The thing that sticks out as odd to me here, is that the DM clearly seemed to be urging you towards combat with stereotypically evil enemies in these scenarios… but views you initiating combat as “evil”? It’s possible something is getting lost in translation.

4. Since you and the rogue are both clearly enjoying less cut-and-dry characters, express that this isn’t just you-versus-them. Or you-versus-cleric-player. Broadly, try to avoid turning this into an argument between people.

5. This will fluctuate a bit depending on how roleplay-heavy your group is, but consider asking if this could be dealt with in-character. Is the cleric open to having a crisis of faith over working with such “tainted” people? Are you okay with your character sometimes being held back by other party members when they’d like to be proactive, so long as their view isn’t changed?

Gaming “journalism” can’t afford outright say “company deliberately tries to hide enshittification of their game” aloud. Might lose that access to selective early copies for review!

This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”

The Discord notification thing actually is actually a really cool idea. That’s where it feels like it moves from hobby into daily practical use kind of stuff.

One question I have, if you don’t mind - did the washer/dryer come with some smart functionality, or did you have to do somethin like opening them up and wiring into the electrical line for the beep speaker to sense voltage?

One in which the population is well-educated, possesses good common sense, has an appreciable sense of empthaty, and is politically involved.

After that, it’s pretty much just details.

Hah, I think I twitched a bit just reading that! Those stupid SEO answers drive me absolutely insane.

Stuff from locally-owned stores. Tools, supplies, car parts, food… if the markup isn’t egregious, I’ll always try and get from them before a big box or online. Not only does it help the owners, but they’re frequently knowledgeable and can sometimes work stuff out for you.

They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers

This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., “borked.exe high CPU usage” or “how to partition a drive”) and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:

• The first 5-8 results are near-identical “help” sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% “download our app!”, and 5% actually useful tips.

• There are tech site results listed… but they’re from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.

• "Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need… [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]

• If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.

I’d consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.

I’m really struggling to remember any instance of this, although admittedly I’m not that much up on superhero comics.

But that said, I’d look at:

• Is the hero responding with an appropriate amount of force, given the capabilities and crimes of the antagonist?

• Is the villain also affected by some larger system or circumstance which makes their actions, when examined on a larger scale, sympathetic?

• Does the surviving villain understand that what they are doing is wrong?

Modnotes. Right now we don’t have a good and simple way to track repeated offenders.

I am really, really glad that someone else had said this before I got here.

The opening of ANH is a really great demonstration of minimalist storytelling. Not a moment of design - starship, character, action, nothing - is wasted; every interaction conveys something be it emotion or plot points. And after forcing the audience to sit through the opening crawl, I think that deluge of information is needed - anything less would have lost the audience.

Assuming the majority of the material on it is still Radium, the good news is it’s mostly undergoing Alpha decay - which can be stopped by something as simple as your skin. Depending on the decay chain, there’s also probably a bit of Beta decay in there, for which a strong metal box will probably suffice.

But the real point here is that 10 uSv is the radiation equivalent of being alive for an average day, so brief exposure is unlikely to cause real injury. But here are some things you can do if you’re still concerned:

• Limit time exposed to it. It’s okay to take it out to show to friends and family, but otherwise keep it somewhere people aren’t likely to be nearby.

• The aforementioned metal box.

• Wash your hands thoroughly after handling, and/or wear gloves. It’s unlikely, especially if the radium-painted parts are under glass, but possible that radioactive materials could end up on your skin. Washing hands should prevent this.

If you’ve heard of the “Radium girls”, the thing that really made them sick is that they were licking radium-coated paintbrushes, causing radioactive material to end up inside their bodies. Since (I presume) you’re not licking the compass, you’re much less at risk.