FuglyDuck

Because we like our unobtainium, okay?

Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)

So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.

I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)

(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)

Puffins are cuter, usually less, ahem, fragrant, too.

1. people are stupid and this is all just hypothetical
2. <you should read this one in Badge 502's voice>NO!

with those disclaimers... I suspect they were trying to make a mold of their poopchute and didn't think it all the way through. I'm not sure if that was then going to be directly used, or if it was going to be used as a negative for something else... but that's my guess.

are we sure we didn't confused for a giant piece of shit?

I guess it's a matter of perspective.

it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with "Solarians" who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter's orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they'd pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)

meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.

the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.

meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)

Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.

My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual's instructions were basically "tell the AI to update the blueprints." which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)

It’s kinda sad.

I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)

One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)

The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres

That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.

Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.

It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)

Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.

Mom would call it “baby poop” green.

I’d call it pea soup green.

Or puke green.

Depends on what the color was on and howl inoffensive I care to be.

Could also be a (darker) mustard yellow depending on the lighting

Kinda hard to let media in when they all have cameras and are going to show the extent of the rubble.

Details, right?

if- and yes that's a very big if- we accept that Jesus had some type of "ministry" he was probably on the level of a proverbial traveling snake oil saleman, selling fake miracles and shit. The iron being, that the reason snake oil salesmen were a thing was because snake oil did have some medicinal properties. Which is more than can be said for random exorcisms and stuffing spit-daubed mud in the eyes.

The gospels were written so far away from where it all supposedly happened that no one was going to go back and check. which is why they were working off the septuagint for the gospels of mathew and luke. and none of the gospels were written by the people they're attributed to, they're all anonymous.

one of the more fun examples of an insertion is the whole virgin birth thing. (Isaiah 7:14, when properly translated says nothing about a virgin giving birth. The word used was 'Almah', which was translated into the septuagint as 'parthenos'. Parthenos basically also meant young woman, but then in christian literature came to mean a virgin, specifically. A mistake they would have caught had they been reading the scriptures in the original language.

Literally every single "and this was to fulfill that" sort of prophecy they claim is like that. It's either not a prophecy, or so obviously not about jesus that it's laughable. (The actual prophecy in Isaiah 7 was about the enemies of King Ahaz, three kingdoms including Israel, who were allies against Ahaz. God was promising to wipe them out. the kid only served as a sort of clock.)

this is why it should be perfectly legal to punch a nazis in the face.

Yup.

actually, in the NT, when he was beefing with the pharisees, it was because they had gone too lax, not because they were legalistic. Like when the pharisees came and bitched about not ritually washing their hands before eating... he literally called them out for not stoning kids. (which was, IIRC a law in Deuteronomy.)

The pharisees followed the "tradition of the elders" that kind of sorta added some things (like ritual hand washing,) and kinda sorta glossed over some things (Stoning kids that talked back.)

and the 'good' bits people like...? Yeah. that wasn't an original thing either. That time and place there were two movements going on: "Hey be nice" and... basically... the fundamentalism groupies going 'back' to the written law of moses.

Jesus literally had more to say about paying taxes than slavery. Jesus would have been that asshole saying "if you just comply, they won't kill you."

And all that is assuming he actually existed. (or wasn't legendarized. like King Arthur, or Charlemagne an his pallies.)

Even if he did exist, there's exactly zero reason to believe he actually said anything he's supposed to have said. Or even had a "ministry." We need not mention the miracles. (well, I am going to mention that there was a reason that he couldn't do them in his hometown: they knew he was full of shit.)

The point I'm making, though, is even if you just accept it all at face value, his morals were fairly awful. Which is why you get lots of people who follow him and have fairly awful morals themselves.

For the record... when Jesus was talking about "love one another' or "love your neighbor as yourself" and similar, it wasn't the all-encompassing "one another" we think of today. He taught adherence and obedience to the Law of Moses, and he certainly wasn't talking about loving one's slaves. (who were property.)

or unruly children that talked back to their parents. (Those... he was all for having them stoned.)

Jesus wasn't a shining example of goodness, but he's less awful than certain of his modern followers.