Thinkin’ About Cauldron

Cauldron’s funny in this regard, first because all of its members can fit in a minivan and because literally 90% of their capacity relies on Contessa; when she has to fake her death and can’t intervene Cauldron stops existing within a handful of hours.

And their plan is also based on the bus factor; they let the apocalypse happen early because every 2-3 months a bus crashes and every bus maybe contains the person who can kill Scion. And they are vindicated in this; Foil, Tattletale and Weaver all could have died in any of the 8+ Endbringer fights they went to, and very likely would have eventually died in one of the dozens they would have gone through if Cauldron stopped Jack from setting off Scion

This discussion of superhero logistics reminds me of an element of Worm's background worldbuilding that I've always found really interesting, which is that the heroes are running out of teleporters. They had a cloak-style mass teleporter, Strider, who was apparently indispensable for troop deployment at Endbringer fights, but he didn't get the hell out of dodge in time so by the Behemoth fight they mention having to seriously kludge other not-as-good powers to get everyone on-site on time. No one dies forever in comics so the question of "what are the risks of one guy's powers becoming indispensable to our organization" isn't as salient, but here goes Worm, gesturing at the idea that you might just get super fucking unlucky because you became organizationally dependent on a couple golden gooses who you inexplicably keep bringing to live fire situations. If they weren't hard to replace, they wouldn't exactly be superheroes, would they?

Actually I DO think twelve year olds should get hrt. That’s the normal age to start puberty, so why does it have to be different for trans kids?

The world’s unluckiest criminal award goes to:

- Interlude 1

I think it’s absolutely hilarious to imagine that, at any point in time, Scion could have dropped by and stopped a supervillain or criminal in the story.

How utterly terrifying to imagine planning a bank heist with your team of supervillains and when you open the vault, Scion is there

You could make a pretty good Worm game with the bones of Tactical Breach Wizards

Finally got my copy of The Power Fantasy #6

This discussion of superhero logistics reminds me of an element of Worm's background worldbuilding that I've always found really interesting, which is that the heroes are running out of teleporters. They had a cloak-style mass teleporter, Strider, who was apparently indispensable for troop deployment at Endbringer fights, but he didn't get the hell out of dodge in time so by the Behemoth fight they mention having to seriously kludge other not-as-good powers to get everyone on-site on time. No one dies forever in comics so the question of "what are the risks of one guy's powers becoming indispensable to our organization" isn't as salient, but here goes Worm, gesturing at the idea that you might just get super fucking unlucky because you became organizationally dependent on a couple golden gooses who you inexplicably keep bringing to live fire situations. If they weren't hard to replace, they wouldn't exactly be superheroes, would they?

Truly the tragedy of Taylor is that she was just, the best at violence and discovered this at a time in her life when she had nothing else. Is it any surprise that she ended up as a creature of nought but violence when people only cared about her in relation to her capacity for violence?

list of times taylor hebert used other peoples powers better than them:

when she told genesis to create a body that looked like crawler with the s9 riding on his back

when she used clockblockers power to bisect echidna. this literally fundamentally changed the way clock used his own power

when she made doormaker open and close portals overlapping each other so that the portals were effectively moving (granted this was only possible with the help of taylors multitasking power)

help me add more things to the list

I was about to make a post about the general stress of living in the world of the Power Fantasy caused indoor smoking to have a longer life, but it turns out bans on indoor smoking only really started after the turn of the millennium. They’re younger than me

I believe you but this is insane to me because it’s explicitly a small village, the sort of place that the left is meant to view as a socially conservative backwater. That it’s not being presented negatively, by default in fixing it, is honestly kinda worrying re the state of the left

It says something that every single attempt to "fix" the cute witch in the alps game concept makes something that is vastly, vastly worse than the original idea, and sometimes is more actually fascist.

Mostly it's that the thing the Disco Elysium writers were going for is much harder than it looks from the outside. But also other things.

The following tinkers are all given 2 months to create a basketball team of 5-9 players. These teams have to be entirely made of their creations.

The only limitations are everything has to be bipedal and have a vaguely humanoid shape, cannot have more than 8 limbs (tails count), and cannot be above 7 foot tall.

They then do a tournament. Assume that those that can't explicitly create drones (i.e mannequin) can turn existing stuff into drones. So mannequin could create a drone version of his current weird body as a 'player'.

Directly attacking other players is not allowed but indirectly is. Any damage is repaired between matches. Distorting the field by doing things such as creating acid pools is allowed, so long as the hoop itself is still accessible. Blocking the hoop in any way is not permitted. The ball must be accessible at all times - no teleporting it to alternate dimensions. No teleporting in general, and ball modification is not permitted. Flight or wall climbing is not permitted.

Anything else goes.