Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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"Should we be worried about that?" Ilyara mumbled quietly to Elyona as Tommary greeted the one resident of this little dungeon excursion they'd managed to successfully deal with. They were back in the muck, which was doubly disappointing after spending a few hours so nice and dry...
OOC: Sure. Don't trust them stacking doors for spit. Double-check: we've asked Layla about what else might be lying in the dungeon, ne? She had no information, been stuck in her hallway? Wouldn't know anything about those doors?
Please do not contact or message me.
OOC: Yes, Layla said she did not have any extra information about the rest of the place as she is required to guard this section.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
"He was big and rude. And tasted terrible, so gamey, " *SPITS* "Obviously not as clever as you and your friends."
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
OOC: I think we pacified the goblins too. I mean, they're useless but we saved us some useless bloodshed, like probably reduced the CR of the encounter by 1/8. I guess technically Layla is useless once we played her game too, but the charm offensive was more cordial as opposed to that weird disconnect with the goblin gang.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
OOC: I wouldn't call the goblins a successful encounter, really. Heh, more like "any train wreck you walk away from..."
OOC-to-DM: do the bloody bits look gnoll-y? Or is it more likely that Layla just National Geographic'd some poor hapless follow-up Waywatcher and we're about to have to make a Moral Choice here?
Please do not contact or message me.
There is a well tanned arm floating in the water that looks muscular with arcane tattoos on it. As far as you can remember there are no Barbarian Wizards in the Waywatcher rolls.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
OOC: Well, onwards and onwards.
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OOC: I agree on direction
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It was the shows Title Sequence at the top of every episode. We (the audience) would follow Max through those doors as he headed into work each day. If I recall, we followed them in reverse during the credits sequence as Max left work at the end of each episode too. (It was I tongue-in-cheek jibe at the security paranoia during the Cold War.)
Disclaimer: The following spoiler is chock full of highly divisive personal opinions. If that’s gonna upset anyone, don’t open it. If you do, I kindly ask that nobody debate me on my opinions. If is highly unlikely that anything one might say was not already said by others looking to change my mind, and it didn’t work any of those times either. Not to mention that by definition my opinions cannot be incorrect. Thank you.
Generally I am of the opinion that all Kubrick films are best skipped with the exception of The Shining. It’s the only film he did that I can watch through to the end. I had to sit through 2001 for class in college, and hated that class for it. I can’t even stand movies by other people who copied his style, like Eyes Wise Shut. And if anyone should like that movie it should be me, but nope. Kubrick has made company with such notables as J.D. Saienger, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Michael Bay, and Emeril Laggasi on my list of “overrated hacks.”
Although, I must admit that neither Kubrick nor Bay is responsible for either of the two movies on my “you should be ashamed of yourselves for making this 💩” list. First runner up goes to Forrest Gump (that movie’s only redeeming feature is it’s soundtrack). The tiara for worst movie of all time goes to a “gem” entitled The Holy Mountain. The only reason I was capable of following it at all was due to the chemically self induced brain damage I acquired during my misspent youth. On top of that, the intentional animal cruelty was deplorable.
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Tossing a light brass coin down the hall reveals another watery, scum filled hallway. 10 feet high and wide, the passage leads into darkness to the extend of your short lived sight - about 60 feet.
Tommary's sword gives a soft bzzzt
"Some kinda danger, but not dangerous danger. You know what I mean?"
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
"Well, in this light, or lack thereof, there's not a lot of sense in me going along ahead, and I don't know if it's really worthwhile volunteering Ilyra to probe too far ahead either. Toots and I can keep flipping litecoins ahead of us as we progress until we get into whatever it is we're walking toward, open to other ideas if we want to change things up."
OOC Film Society:
Holy Mountain sounds like a trip. As for Kubrick, his technical mastery was a totally different animal to Michael Bay (who's more like a mashup of Sam Peckinpah and James Cameron with no real pretense to artistic merit). 2001 was ground breaking science fiction, I don't now if we'd have Star Wars if Kubrick hadn't gone all in with the models and music, and bringing some of the mystical science fiction you'd eventually see in Soviet films like Solaris (and a little later Stalker). You grant the Shining, so I'll leave that one alone. Barry Lighton was a good effort to capture in film the same formal tensions you had in novels in the period setting, it's basically torn between Defoe and Sterne. A.I. I'm curious what it would have looked like had Kubrick finished it rather than Spielberg bandaging it up. Eyes Wide Shut turned Cruise and Kidman into the puppets Hollywood actors were becoming outside of independent film, I kinda think there's an elaborate in joke there no one has fully grasped yet. And, dude Full Metal Jacket, ... it's sorta funny there's a sort of chicken and egg problem of the toxic masculinity of war it tears open so accurately it's actually wound up integrated so that folks in military and paramilitary environments can perpetuate said toxicities with an ironic cool. I used to spend some time in a paramilitary training environment full of folks who'd been through a range of military training envrionments, and I'd have to go to said environment on a number occasions as a trainee or trainer during that whole life phase. Anyway, I have seen the "holy shit, a Jelly Donut" scene played out in the mess by training cadre over basic trainees pretty much every other time I had been there. And as far as the weird humor tied into the inhumanity of combat, there's that shot right before the soundtrack kicks into The Trashmen's "Bird is the Word" where Crazy Earl mows down two retreating soldiers then the shot reverses to the actor's face going into a shit eating "did anyone else just see that?" grin including a check for audience (meta), then subsides. Really, most war movie making has been a waste of time since then, aside from maybe Black Hawk Down, which largely updated technical accuracy but desensitizing the profanity. Maybe Generation Kill.
I mean really, I'm willing to call Kubrick one of the best filmmakers of all time just because all the actor gymnastics he put Peter Sellers through in Dr. Strangelove, and he managed to make George C. Scot funny.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Toots and Tommary make DEX saves.
OOC: Not sure who would be in front at any one time.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
OOC: probably me, I think Toots is more the provider of the second Litecoin when I was trying to do basically bounding overwatch illumination until I was reminded light only works for the caster one object at at me, aside from that one time I got creative and decided to toss a candle :D
DEX save: 23
EDIT: ONCE MORE INTO THE DRINK!
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
OOC: you could also be reminded that all three cantrip-having casters in the party can cast Light :P We could do bounding illumination if you like, just gotta juggle casts and we'd lose the older objects. But that comes after y'all end up wet.
EDIT: or I could get smart and use my invisible Arcane Trickster mage hand to just float the one coin along -_-. Blarghe. I've had a week, brain no worky right. Oh well. Resolve Dex saves first.
Please do not contact or message me.
OOC. The bounding overwatch litecoin thing was a sort of OOC dumb / IC dumb but amusing gimmick we've been using. Tommary was spending actual coin on it till Toots suggested using the brass slugs. Further refinement is always welcome, after I sprain my ankle and/or stress my immune system's resilience against waterborne pathogens. HighCON!
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
That's quite funny as that is what happens!
You see Tommary walking along and then *sploop*, he sinks into the floor!
He rises to the surface sputtering, he continues to swim forward and discovers that the pit is 20 feet long and of unknown depth. From where he is, he can see in the dim light, a turn in the hall to the left.
OOC: I made that guess that you would continue rather than turn back.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
"<spit/glug>On<spit>ward!" When Tommary reaches the end of the trench and pulls himself up, he sends message to Toots regarding the chasm, the direction of the passage, and awaits the party to decide where to go from there, squeezing ick water out of his hair while he waits.
OOC: I've only had two haircuts since the pandemic lockdown, one about six months ago, one Friday. Prior to that my hair had been for a bit over a decade more a "slightly longer than regulation" length look, occasionally doing a high and tight in the summer. Midway through this cut, I actually said, "Is this how you want to do this?" when it looked to me she was unwittingly giving me a Mercer (I think she knows I game, I'm sure it's come up), I talked her into a the late 90s Reznor style and I think I might have used that video clip earlier as a reference. Pre cutting, my hair was the longest it had ever been, this is the longest I've let a stylist or barber leave my hair in probably 30 years. I guess enjoy it while I still have it is my going forward strategy. Anycase, yeah, I wasn't aware how much water hair could retain and for how long until probably 8 months back.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Toots’ Dex Save: 17
I can honestly say that whenever I have attempted to watch any Kubrick other than The Shining, I was so distracted by how much I disliked them that I never payed much mind to the visuals. That’s telling all by itself because I personally value stuff like good cinematography. (However, if someone puts a pretty ribbon on a turd, the turd still stinks.) How ******* long was that floating in silence scene in 2001?!? Why?!?!?!?!?!? (I don’t give a fig how pretty it was, pretty don’t earn points with me.) And most of those other things you referenced I see as more evidence that I’m right. Russian cinema is absolutely Godawful. I have tried Russian movies a few times, but now I have started actively checking is a particular movies is Russian so I can avoid them. When the time stamp reads 2:00 and we’re only at the end of the second act, it had better be so Goddamned engrossing that I don’t notice. If I’m looking at the clock instead of the screen then you’ve done it wrong. I shouldn’t feel like I used to during the last 15 minutes at the end of 9th-grade, 8th-period Spanish class in spring, staring at the clock desperate for the end of my sentence. If it’s gonna be meh, make it short and meh. If it’s gonna run 2:45, it had better be ******* riveting.
Most of the other references you mentioned I have either never heard of (Barry Lighton, Generation Kill), thought they looked like movies I wouldn’t enjoy and passed (A.I.), or found so wholly unpleasant that I actively blocked as much of it as possible from my memory (F.M.J.). Every single character in FMJ was so completely unlikable that I activated rooted for them all to die in the story. Blackhawk Down was compelling. Thirty minutes into FMJ and I just wanted to FF to the end in the hope of seeing a fade out shot of some unidentified “enemies” dumping every character in the movie into a mass grave. The guy who shot himself was the lucky one since he got to avoid the rest of the movie. (I was kinda jealous.) It was that movie more than anything else which gave me insight into what an animal must be feeling to chew off its own limb to escape. I don’t need movies about how shitty the world is. I live in the same shitty world and can already see the shitty for myself thank you very much. If I want a refresher on how shitty everything is I can rewatch the 20year 9/11 documentary. I watch a movie when I want to escape the shittyness for a little while.
With not a single shred of exaggeration or disingenuousness I can honestly say that if I were forced to choose between having to watch another Kubrick movie, or taking a full on blow from an NFL punt kicker directly to my dangly bits, without hesitation I would rather get punt kicked in the balls. That would be both less unpleasant, and be over more quickly.
And **** Bay, he’s a moron. He must be a moron because only a moron could make the Autobots and Decepticons so visually similar and have the action so jumbled that I couldn’t tell who the **** was winning unless it was Bee or Optimus. And his signature lens flare is just as much 🐴💩 as Emerril shouting “Bam!” and throwing chopped parsley on everything. If the product is that good, you don’t need the 🐴💩 to trick idiots into buying it. Bay has no “technical mastery,” he has a gimmick and a SE director. And his story telling is just as devoid of merit as his so called “technical mastery.” Every single Bay movie I have ever watched has left me feeling like I wanted my time back. He can keep my money, I can always make more. But the couple dozen hours of my life that he stole with his shitty movies adds up to a day he stole. ****er, gimme my life back! Referring back to the Transformer franchise, if you chopped out all of the terrible action sequences and pointless, slow long shots with the inevitable gimmick, then you could maybe, maybe 3/4 of a movie worth of genuine storytelling. Then you realize that even that is not worthy of salvage since it’s all tainted with Shia LeBuff and that living embodiment of unhealthy female body image that Hollywood has been pushing on us since the ‘80s. *blegh*
Finally, my closing argument is simply that the best thing to happen to the Star Wars franchise was when Disney took it away from Lucas so he couldn’t guck it up any more than he already had. He made three great movies. Then he smeared them all with feces and re-released them. Then he made three absolutely terrible movies. In fact, the only movie I have ever walked out on was Episode 1, we left as soon as the pod race scene was over. I made the mistake of forcing myself to watch Episodes 1-3 years later and have regretted it ever since.
TL/DR: To quote Luke Skywalker, “everything you just said is wrong.” I genuinely find paying taxes less objectionable and less unpleasant than watching Kubrick movies.
I did ask you to not pursue this line of conversation. If I liken someone to Salinger, that means I wish they were alive today so I could demand an apology for them having inflicted their so-called “art” upon me. (Which reminds me I need to finish drafting that letter to Crawford concerning Tasha’s Chamberpot.) It’s okay that you like Kubrick, your fun is not wrong. I happen to have the exact opposite opinion of his work. Please, pretty please, let it be. Yeah? Please? Like, believe it or not, I’m holding back.
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Sure, but leapfrog works just as well with three participants as it does with two.
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OOC: that's sort of what "further refinement is always welcome" means ;) but Tommary had already stepped in it, so to speak. That said "bounding overwatch" is actually best left to two elements (or coins to be literal to this case). If we just have a floating illuminator, that's a different play, and I'm fine with that if Ilyra wants to keep her concentration on it, one you all paddle to this end of the trench ... wait, did I miss an exhaust port in there? I bet there was an exhaust port, through which had we cast magic weapon on a handcrossbow bolt, we could've brought this whole death fortress down, I new I shouldn't have focused on my targeting computer. [Meta] check for an exhaust port in the trench! I'll pretend to peace out for the reward coin only to show up at the last moment with Nine in a fur coat to throw off your pursuers with a cunning action sneak attack from above them. That's probably what the mild danger was, the possibility we could bring this whole volcano down ... and I Gold(coin) leader'd it.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.