See, that makes sense, but no. I mean cases where a character who is explicitly dead monologues about how there is no afterlife and consciousness is lost, failing to notice the irony.
It didn't come off as intentionally making a point of unreliable narrator. ETA: Kind of reminds me of my pet peeve in horror fiction where the characters unquestioningly believe everything a demon tells them.
Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, and I don't like the law enforcement system as it is IRL any more than anyone else here, but it strikes me as just a touch ironic to have an aside about how police/guards/militia/etc must all be evil for taking a career involving "legitimate violence" in the instructions for a TTRPG which involves semi-legally breaking into dungeons to rob/kill monsters who explicitly used to be marginalised women just like the PCs. What, is illegitimate violence somehow more okay? ETA: Also, the book has multiple pages on welcoming non-cis players, but all the suggested character backstories are obviously written about cis women, and all the art depicts cis-looking bodies.
Aww lookit them pretending to care. Bless. Or they're real early in their "getting with the times" journey and honestly dont know better. They could've gotten some sensitivity readers though. Or something.
And, like, you can conceive of monsters and corpse resurrection and sex majyyks but you can't conceive that, in a world explicitly inhabited by human-eating monsters and a corrupt feudal system, someone might want to become a town guard to protect people or feed their family? I mean, they could still be antagonistic to the PCs if they did, if that's so important!
The more I think about this game the less it makes sense. To be fair on my objection above, the PCs may not know the monsters are people, and I do like the premise that marginalised people in the setting are forced into dungeon delving because nowhere else will take them, but if the politics of the issue are so important, wouldn't it make more sense for the PCs to survive by robbing their oppressors instead of the even-more-marginalised? Not to mention the oppressors probably have stuff that's more worth stealing? That's not impossible within the rules of the game, but it's not how the game is presented. And if the transformed monsters are actually dangerous and need taking out, well, THAT doesn't have horribly unfortunate implications, does it? Also, claiming cops have a "monopoly on legitimate violence" isn't even true IRL. Domestic abuse gets laughed off half the time, doctors regularly kill marginalised patients through neglect or malice, and popular sports result in permanent injury a lot even when people aren't actively trying to cause it so I'm sure lots of people join up with those careers just to hurt people too. Not saying lots of cops aren't shit or that the system isn't fucked, but a lot of the time I just get the impression people are repeating buzzwords about them rather than actually thinking about how to fix any of the problems. I would also be unhappy about a game which condemned CEOs as villains while the PCs' objective was to rob workers, even though I know CEOs do exploit/underpay workers.
Anyone else ever wondered if the generally-illogical Oppressed Mages trope might spring from the fact that the nerds who write most fantasy were bullied as kids and had adults justify it with "they're jealous of you" rather than help? I know that happened to me a lot.
I'm... fairly sure this is physics fail, but they might be trying to describe something I'm not familiar with? In this book, the characters need a super-fast way to shoot the tooth of a giant monster into another giant monster, and they decide to use a laser gun. I thought this was obviously stupid since lasers don't push a projectile, especially not at the speed of light. They then said something about the gun firing "delayed laser bursts" which have "bullet-shaped covers" and "Once the burst surges, the cover shoots out first at over two hundred miles per hour". I have never heard of anything like this but I'm not familiar enough with laser technology and similar fields to say there's nothing that could be described this way (even badly). It's a very frustrating feeling.
I'm not super familiar with laser technology but I have to say that sounds like a load of nonsense. Maybe an electrolaser, but described badly, and backwards. Also, 200 mph is really, really slow for a bullet.
I have to admit I was kind of hung up on the "using a beam of light to push a projectile" bit. Pretty sure all that would happen there is the laser would burn through the projectile.
Yeah, that makes no sense at all for a literal laser. A laser delivers much more heat than force. At reasonable power levels, your projectile melts inside your gun. At unreasonable power levels, your projectile explodes inside your gun. It's marginally more reasonable if "laser" means "something that would look like the blasters in Star Wars" which are definitely not lasers. (mumble-something-plasma?) But really, if you want a sci-fi way to shoot something solid, you're looking for a railgun or a gravity gun.
It wasn't specified if that was what they meant. I don't think the writer knew what he was describing either.
You can use lasers to push an object, either by simple optic pressure or ablation. The former is very slow, it's basically a solar sail but more... steerable, and can be more effective at a greater distance. The latter is basically that you're vaporizing the target in a very selective way, such that the expelled gases push it in the direction you want. It's going to be a relatively slow, steady acceleration though if you're using a conventional (i.e. something like the ones we currently have), a short duration pulse is going to be much less efficient and controllable. It's something you can do to, for instance, intercept asteroids, useful when you want to move something without touching it (and don't care too much about breaking it). I think that's what they're trying to imply, but if you're firing a projectile *out of a gun*, that's a completely insane method of doing so. There are much, much more efficient ways of launching a projectile that you have on hand. Like a catapult. (Seriously, 200 mph is the kind of speed you get out of bows) ETA: Maybe... maybe the author heard about a Casaba Howitzer and is badly repeating that? Or just the idea of a shaped charge more generally. Those are usually not initiated by a laser, though. Like, from the description it seems like a lot of effort to invent the worst possible variation of the gun.
Had to stop reading another book after one chapter because the author felt the need to explain EVERYTHING four or five times. Demonstrate a piece of tech being used, then clarify it in narration, fine, but both of those things, then also have the characters discuss it, and introduce a new character into the scene who can observe that it's being used and also describe how it works after the prior characters already did... Cut out all the redundancy and the book would be a page long!
Bragging about how unique and specially clever you are for putting black characters in a Renaissance Europe-esque fantasy setting and citing it as a change you made to the real world to make your fictional world more egalitarian doesn't impress anyone who's ever heard of Othello or the many actual black people who existed in Renaissance Europe. Putting them on equal social standing with white people in said setting would be a different matter, but not them just existing.
Describing a room as "rotund" instead of "round" makes it clear the author doesn't know how to work a thesaurus and reminds me of that time in The Eye of Argon where Grignr descends a staircase to its posterior.
