If you are familiar with tabletop role playing games, you know Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a quote I like from the late, great Terry Pratchett, regarding J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence on the world of fantasy:
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
Dungeons and Dragons is like this in the world of tabletop gaming. If you’re making a TTRPG, you need to know where you stand on being compared to D&D. Will you try to differentiate yourself with interesting mechanics, a new setting, or will you try to learn from the game that invented tabletop roleplay? Like painting a scene of Japan without Fuji, it’s hard to not have D&D in the background somewhere, making its presence be known in the way you handled stats and skills, the shape of the dice you use, or even the deep, deep roots of your game’s concept.
What do you do when you are Mt. Fuji, though? How does the mountain learn to grow and change itself when the time comes to? What influences could Dungeons and Dragons itself draw from in the late 90s, the waning days of the Second Edition and the beginning of the Third?
Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition was a turning point for the game. It was D&D’s attempt to re-capture lightning in a bottle, to relive the heady days of its 80s fame, and make a Dungeons and Dragons game that was truly worthy of the name. It was… well, it certainly was a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons, that much can be said.
NFTs are all the rage on the internet right now, with basically every single internet artist there is getting on board. Who can blame them? Like any good investment bubble, the prices are skyrocketing with major brands like Pizza Hut, Pringles, Charmin, Taco Bell, and even musician Aphex Twin joining the fun. There’s no downside, except for the massive amount of electrical power NFTs demand driving us further into global warming and people losing their money for what is basically a hyperlink on a blockchain. It’s time for us to get in on the trend, and make ourselves some money… but we’re not satisfied with mere NFTs.
We here at Eggware.XYZ are proud to introduce the next evolution of NFTs: HFTs. These Highly Fungible Tokens are a revolution in the crypto market due to their simple difference: these tokens are infinitely fungible. Allowing for fully democratized distribution, consistency in value, and easy-to-process validity checking, the HFT system can be implemented in almost any common file format and exchanged between users freely with virtually instantaneous transaction time on any common file exchange system.
Want to get on board? Just download our first official HFT below:
Just right click and hit “Save As”, and you’ve got the HFT on your system. Send it to your friends, and the magic of the Highly Fungible Token begins: your friends receive an identical HFT, while you keep your original one. The value of both the original token and the new token is the same - and this process can be repeated indefinitely. By multiplying the number of HFT tokens, you can have potentially unlimited value growth! And the best part is, you don’t even need a friend to make HFT duplications. Just make multiple copies of the HFT on your own hard drive, and watch the value grow. Make five hundred copies to increase your HFT wallet’s value five hundred times. Or a thousand. Or a million. The only limit is your hard drive space.
We hope you’ll share this new HFT technology with your friends, family, and loved ones across the globe.
For the sake of my fragile mental health during quarantine, I’ve started exclusively reading Twitter through their Tweetdeck app, which allows me to customize my experience to my enjoyment. I can choose not to see retweets, for one thing, and Tweetdeck doesn’t push people’s ‘likes’ onto my feed. I only use it to network with artists I enjoy, and occasionally retweet the stray meme. My exposure to the woes of the cursed blue website is mercifully minimal. If you want to live like me, I strongly recommend this plan of action: log into Tweetdeck, uninstall the app from your phone, read Ed Zitron’s article on how to enjoy Twitter, and follow all your Twitter mutuals on non-Twitter sites.
It’s because of my strict no-Twitter-angst diet that I managed to miss out on the website’s latest stunningly atrocious fast food PR scandal until just today. So you guys are probably rolling your eyes - gee, look at this chump writing an article 3 days late! But my tardiness is because I take care of myself first, and you should too. If I were to expose myself to every horrible thing going on in the world right now, I would almost certainly instantly take 20d6 poison damage and die.
It’s for these reasons that I sincerely advise not reading this article unless you’re in a good enough place mentally and you really want to see my take on it. I don’t have anything to gain from stressing you out pointlessly, and neither do you, and also I really don’t want to be giving Burger King any more free advertising than they’re already getting right now.
If you feel like you have to know, you don’t. It’s not that funny and it’s absolutely not worth it. Here, I’ll sum it up for you: Burger King said a stupid out-of-context thing about women while they were trying to say something positive, and it was probably on purpose to stir up social media drama. There you go! Now go do something else. Go play some Wobbledogs or whatever the hell it is you people like to do these days.
So have you been shopping at Aldi yet?? Last week we told you about their awesome chips so of course you ran straight to Aldi and bought everything they have and now you’re a big fan of them. But did you buy the Red Bag Chicken? Oh man, you gotta try the red bag chicken. You seriously haven’t tried the red bag chicken yet?
What is the red bag chicken? First off, it’s chicken. And it comes in a red bag. It’s properly known as “Kirkwood Breaded Chicken Breast Fillets,” but because that’s a mouthful people just call it the red bag chicken. And it’s a sensation! Everybody just has to try the Red Bag Chicken. Why are you even shopping at Aldi if it’s not for following the trends??
Maybe you’re just a little anxious. You maybe got hurt when a bottle of Trader Joe’s Everything Bagel Seasoning didn’t live up to the hype. Maybe you don’t even live near an Aldi and you have to take our word on this one. That’s fine, we understand. That’s what we’re here for. We ate the Red Bag Chicken, and we’re going to tell you how it is. So don’t be afraid.
Aldi is the best grocery store in the world. The Germans really knew what they were doing with this one! Cheap prices, small stores, good products - what’s not to love?
True Aldi fans know what the best part of shopping at Aldi is: the legendary middle aisle. This is where Aldi puts its limited-time specials, which can include but is not limited to new flavors of cereals, real name-brand foods, housewares, clothing, and even pet toys. Aldi shoppers will tell you about the times they walk out of the store with a cat’s scratching post, a new coffee maker, slippers, and none of the milk they went in to buy in the first place.
We found these new flavors of chips in our local Aldi’s middle aisle, and we just couldn’t walk out without them. Hot Chicken Kettle Chips is one thing, but seeing Cuban Sandwich Kettle Chips is too good to ignore. We ended up grabbing both bags, because that’s how it is with Aldi, and we probably ended up forgetting to buy some very important essential thing like paper towels. But that’s fine - now you can share the chips with us. At least, you can read what we thought of them.
We. Love. Chex Quest. It’s one of the best games of all time. It’s certainly the best Doom game of all time. AND it came with a free box of cereal - you can’t beat that for a bargain! In the classic shooter community, Chex Quest has always had a tiny but dedicated core of fans who have clamored for years for more cereal-based shooter content.
Limited Run is a company of game merchandise makers that, by no small coincidence, caters to small fandoms by making fun feely packs with trinkets and shirts and fun things like that. And wow, they made a CHEX QUEST BOX! Real Chex Quest merch for real Chex Quest fans! It was an instant buy, even if it cost 150 dollars. And so, in April of 2020, we placed our order the second we saw it. It was our little quarantine gift to ourselves. It would be worth it.
And so we waited. And waited. Just like how we were waiting for quarantine to end.
Our order did not arrive until January of 2021. Nine months later. We know it was a pre-order, we know there was a Dang Pandemic on, but oh man, that’s a long time to wait. We were almost at the point of giving up completely on this ever arriving when we finally got the notification it had shipped. Now it’s here, and has cemented us as Real Chex Quest fans. So why not go over it, and take a look at everything that came in it?
