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  Kick ALL the Starters, Part III: Fund ALL the Crowds!
Posted by: Mamorien - 02-20-2024, 10:51 PM - Forum: General Chatter - Replies (40)

We rolled over to page 13 without quite noticing, so I'm starting a new thread, and implementing the title change I proposed a while back. And just in time, because this campaign is on Crowdfunding by BackerKit!

Onyx Path Wrote:The Age of Man is long over. Cats – uplifted from our clever feline companions to use tools and language – now rule the world. In the Monarchies of Mau, cats study relics the Old Ones left behind to create new wonders, expand their understanding of the world, and combat the monsters and minions of the Unseen that threaten catkind. Curious cats explore ruins and set sail on the Acid Sea, or participate in games of intrigue against other houses, the dogs of Pugmire, and other rival species.

The world is full of mysteries and dangers, which excellent cats are eager to face.

Welcome to The Curious Cats of Mau. This book details the lives of the cats in the city-states that make up the Monarchies of Mau as they explore the world, plan daring heists and feats of intrigue, learn what they can about the Old Ones, and pounce on the sinister entities called the Unseen. You’ll need Realms of Pugmire to play this game and learn more about the dogs of Pugmire, who have sometimes been the cats’ allies, and often been their rivals.

The cats of the monarchies believe that the Old Ones served them, and the cats’ ancestors granted Man great responsibilities as a reward. Though no one knows what happened to the Old Ones, they left many wonders behind to help the cats in their endeavors. Adventurous cats explore ancient ruins, hoping to discover artifacts they can study — sometimes by breaking them apart to discover how they work.

Several decades ago, the formidable Trillani Persian von Mau united the monarchies at a time when conflict threatened to tear catkind apart. With her clearheaded leadership, she guided the great houses as they worked together, and eventually helped bring about an end to the War of Dogs and Cats. Trillani died recently, and her successor (Threnody von Mau) struggles to keep the hard-earned peace. Cats are expert at schemes and spycraft, and secrets are power. Some plot against other houses, while others seek to renew hostilities between the monarchies and Pugmire. Meanwhile, the threat of the Unseen is ever-present, waiting to strike should the cats’ vigilance waver.

Will you be an excellent cat?

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/ony...ats-of-mau

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  The new Seraph's
Posted by: Dark Seraph - 02-17-2024, 12:55 PM - Forum: The Legendary - Replies (139)

Soooo, *cracks fingers*, the Seraph's in Paragon city... Let's do this.
Seraph is a man in his late thirties from Australia, he came to Paragon after his fiance ditched him when their daughter suffered birth defects, resulting in stunted limbs, heart broken, Seraph took his daughter Neph and traveled the world, looking for aid and ended up in Paragon where doctors fitted the young Neph with cybernetic limbs, it was pricey so Seraph opened a magical workshop to pay his daughters bills.

As they grew, Neph felt some what bitter her birth mother left her and needeled Seraph to try his luck in a new pond, this lead Seraph to a speed dating service where he met the hero Tish Fuego and they clicked, yin and yang, a well noted hero with powers over fire and speed, Tish found Seraph a good anchor while he found her a fresh breath of air, a spunky personality.
Seraph settled to be a stay at home father, working out of his shop while Tish was the bread earner, a system that worked well for them and Neph reluctantly warmed to this new mother figure.

Years later, Seraph and Tish married, but Tish opted to keep her maiden name.

Time passed and one day Seraph caught a street urchin trying to break into his store, rather than report the girl, he took her in and to Tish's initial reluctance, adopted the would be thief named Caroline.

Fast forward to today, Tish has been taking it light on the heroing, so the rest of the Seraph's stepped up to fill the gap, with some hiccups like Neph getting yanked into Pretoria's past to help mend the time line, but other wise all is good.

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  I haven't been on a forum in, like, a decade
Posted by: RadiantGV - 02-15-2024, 07:32 AM - Forum: Introductions - Replies (10)

Hi there! my name is RadiantGV. I have been playing video games for thirty years, and writing fanfiction for over half that time. I'm a transgender woman, I prefer she/they pronouns, and I was introduced to this forum via the Tropes page for "My Apartment Manager is Not An Isekai Character", which I'm rapidly growing in love with on AO3.

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  MCU Fantastic Four Cast Announced
Posted by: Bob Schroeck - 02-14-2024, 02:14 PM - Forum: General Chatter - Replies (1)

Article here, with embedded pic and logo

For those who don't want to bother clicking the link and just want the lowdown: Pedro Pascal as Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing, and Joseph Quinn as Human Torch.

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  Not-quite-203x ADPolice Interceptor as a transformer
Posted by: classicdrogn - 02-14-2024, 07:29 AM - Forum: Drunkard's Walk II: Robot's Rules of Order - Replies (2)

Thanks to being the biggest and first commonly available part of Drunkard's Walk BGC has a special place for a lot of the people on these boards, so I figured I'd mention this here - the new Transformers Earthspark toy being sold under the name "Prowl" is actually a repainted Bumblebee Cyberverse Adventures Hot Rod, which means it's got almost the exact profile of the ADP car Leon an Daley drive in the early episodes (It gets wrecked by the Griffon IIRC, and the replacements are far more econobox.)

So, while it's more white with blue quarter-panels than the on-screen blue with white below a "belly line" and of course has Aurtobot logos instead of ADP, it is at least plausibly close, to the point it can do double duty as a BGC toy on your desk, and who'd have expected that after all this time?

[Image: S4JWNPg.png]
[Image: 81RxfPvikoL._AC_SL1500_.jpg]
Amazon USA listing

Earthspark, like BBCA before it, is a "semi-budget" subline, but this was one of the better BBCA molds so it can still stand up with the average War For Cybertron (Siege|Earthrise|Kingdom) or TF Legacy (adjectiveless|Evo|United) Deluxe despite the lower price point, so at $20 MSRP he's already a good deal and if you find him for less I'd call it a priority buy if you're thinking about getting toys at all.

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  Things Saber is older than...
Posted by: Labster - 02-11-2024, 01:03 AM - Forum: My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character - Replies (5)

We've had to decide where in history to put Artoria Pendragon, our very own Saber.  From the legends, there are two periods which fit the most: the High Middle Ages, a time of crusaders and chivalry, and sub-Roman Britain, a break in the historical record which can accommodate legendary figures among native Britons.

We're going with the earlier time period, 407-577 AD, largely because it offers some of the other elements of the story -- roughly Welsh/Cornish/Brythonic sounding names, an invasion of pagans taking on the Christian people of Britain (i.e. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who would later win... and then later convert to Christianity), and a more blank slate into which to write.  Romans withdrew their last soldiers from Britain in 407, after the Groans of the Britons, circa 450, they disappear from the historical record completely.  Historian and archaeologists are currently on the peaceful immigration meme, just as they supported the tribal conquest meme before 1950, so it's hard to know what really happened.

This thread is about that time, which I don't think people really have a sense of.  So what is our Artoria older than?

  • Chivalry - it's not hard to see why later writers would want to add deeds of chivalry, because the lost kingdom idea is very good romantic literature.  But the idea of a code of knightly ethics largely evolved in the aftermath of Charlemagne's empire, which leads us to...
  • Charlemagne, Karl the Great - his being crowned emperor happened in 800, which is centuries too late.  She may have lived at the same time as Clovis, the first of the Merovingian dynasty, but certainly not alongside a Carolean.
  • Crusades - The First Crusade started in 1096!  Crusading was roughly as close in time to her as we are to Columbus' first voyage of discovery.
  • Islam - And why would you need to crusade, because Mohammed had not yet begun to preach? (He does so in 613 AD.)  The whole of the Mediterranean world was Christian, at least officially.
  • Turks living in Turkey - outside of perhaps a few merchants, Anatolia was thoroughly Greek, having been ruled by Greeks and Greek Romans for a millennium
  • The East-West Schism - The Christian church was not divided to Roman and Orthodox -- but there were other sects like Arianism which were very dominant in Western Europe, via the Vandal and Ostrogoth, and early Lombard kings
  • Hungarians living in Hungary - The Great Migration was in full swing at this period, with the above mentioned people and the Visigoths invading old Roman lands, but the Hungarians didn't come to Europe until the ninth century.
  • Formal/informal distinction in Latin languages - this seems to have emerged in the Middle Ages from the imperial "royal we" getting extended to more and more petty nobles, finally becoming the tu/vous distinction.
  • Venice - The most serene city did not yet exist, being founded later (c. 700) by Roman refugees from Lombard invaders, with many leaving from Aquileia on the land).  Nearby Ravenna did exist, and has very lovely mosaics from the same period as our Arthur/Artoria.
  • Nationalism - This one is obvious, but just a reminder that there was no concept of a British nation back then, or a nation of all of the Gaelic-speaking peoples -- in fact invaders from the north were just as feared as Germanic people from across the seas.  Religious identity played a much larger role (on the Christian side anyway; pagans were rarely concerned with orthodoxy).
  • Jadwiga of Poland - Okay, this one is pretty distant, but in 1382 Hedwig was crowned King of Poland, because there wasn't a rule in the student handbook that women can't be kings.  She was canonized as a Catholic saint in 1997, but is an early example of women ruling as a king.

Just on the topic of of women as rulers, I think there's enough evidence that a female!Arthur as a "king" is at least plausible, historically.  Besides Jadwiga, others included precursor Pharoahs like Nefertiti and Cleopatra VI.  Matilda of Tuscany was an enormously powerful margravine of the Holy Roman Empire in the late eleventh century, and was crowned "Vice-Queen" of Italy in 1111.  It's hard to tell what title Boudica had, given all of our sources are Roman, but she would have ruled in her own right had the Romans not contested the will.  Boudica is closer in time to our Artoria than Jadwiga, though!

Yes, this is a relatively short list of women in power, but it's much more possible than a female Empress of Japan (though there were many powerful Dowager Queens in Korea and the Ottoman Empire).  And much, much, much more plausible than a female Leonardo da Vinci, as suggested in the later Fate works.  There's a tradition of feminist reinterpretations of King Arthur, but not so much of randomly genderswapping people with mountains of written documents about their lives for fanservice.

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  All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIX
Posted by: robkelk - 02-05-2024, 12:32 PM - Forum: All The Tropes Wiki Archive - Replies (298)

Old thread is here



Back in thread XXVI, I asked about Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester, which we couldn't get because we didn't have CirrusSearch. We have CirrusSearch now. Do we want to go through the process of asking the Tropers whether they want it, and asking Miraheze whether we can have it?

Alternately,

In an even earlier thread, Geth wondered about AdvancedSearch. That, we can now turn on whenever we want. Do we want to go through the process of asking the Tropers whether they want it?

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  My Apartment Manager is not a Fanfic Archive
Posted by: Bob Schroeck - 02-01-2024, 09:22 PM - Forum: My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character - Replies (8)

As of tonight, the KanriKyara/ManaChara project now has a presence on Archive of Our Own. We're still going to post our work here, but eventually everything will also be posted on AO3 as well. We're only posting one chapter a week or so there, so as long as we keep writing at a reasonable pace, the Stories subforum should always stay ahead of it.

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  (keep 1hp) I Need a Healer by Kruithne ft Shrm & Letomi
Posted by: classicdrogn - 01-28-2024, 05:30 AM - Forum: The Game Everyone Loves To Play - Replies (5)


non-embedded

effect: Doug can continue functioning at his peak despite any physical damage ... for as long as the song lasts. Then he'd better have reached someone who can at least do some first aid, 'cause the song only lets him hold out until the end of its runtime. Still useful if its five minutes to midnight when his power resets if he's already used all his healing songs that day, has some kind of no-magical-healing debuff, or similar (admittedly quite situational) circumstance.

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  Join The Legendary on Homecoming?
Posted by: jpub - 01-27-2024, 05:27 PM - Forum: The Legendary - Replies (2)

Hi all,

I'm back playing CoH on Homecoming.  I'd like to join whatever incarnation of The Legendary we have running, if possible.  Do y'all have room?

My current Main is a Demon/Time MM (heroic) on Everlasting called Mr. Enigma.

Thanks!

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