Sleep remains elusive, so, GURPS

The prerequisites chain for Restoration / Regeneration : I know they obviously meant the Healing college spells starting 'Restore', but I reckoned the Making-Breaking college spell 'Restore' would mean they regenerated with non-living parts, magecrafted prostheses. ( Read more... )

Powerstones and the $ material requirements for creating them at high power: I found a formula in Low Tech for pricing gems. ( Read more... )

that would mean the real determining factor on how much power you could pour into a thing would be how much people want the thing.

Which is kind of cool.



I keep looking in rulesets for story seeds. It's different just deciding to generate a character worth x points. Makes you think about how they arrived at the point the character sheet describes.


... at some point I should either turn this into fiction or acquire a gaming group and do something with it.

... all meta, no trouser...

Missing the point: Vampire Slayer style

There's a fic series where Clint Barton is the Slayer, and I just cannot get past the first page, not because writing, but because of how wrong headed it is to make the Slayer a guy.

I mean, they mocked the idea within the series, with Andrew saying how a guy would be cooler. And imitator series have tried making the Slayer a guy and been really really bad. And the idea of the Chosen One being male? Not exactly rocking any boats. So why flip the gender back to guys doing violence, unless they're actively trying to prop up patriarchy.

The Slayer was a girl, in canon, because she could be both bait and trap. She would look small weak defenceless tasty, and then get the stake out. Make a guy like Clint Barton a Slayer? Who would be dumb enough to read him as weak? No bait, no trap.

( Read more... )

Guys as Slayers though... when it's girl Slayers being pounced by guy vampires in alleys and then fighting them all off it's a metaphor about resistance to the dominant patriarchal power that sees them as available to slake their biological urges on. When it's a guy being pounced? Either it's other guys, when it's just the model of masculinity whereby they solve problems by violence, and the admittedly useful side where it makes monsters and wrecks lives, or it's girl vampires, and it's male violence against monstrous women yet again. It gets skewed ugly real easy. Angel being the monster first and trying to deal with it by eliminating other monsters, that was mostly noir about how that worked really badly. Give a guy super strength and it does not, on the whole, improve things for him.

So for all I know this fic could be awesome. I haven't read it, I've read the tags at most, I have no idea. But I just can't get started on it because the simple gender flip for me undermines all the basic point of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It could very easily have a different basic point about a different set of inequalities (because in the end it's about power). But by using specifically Buffy to illustrate them, it loses me on page one, because that was girl power, and they don't get to give it back to the guys.