Chapters 192-195 – We choose to try to sympathize with, and humanize, the Fucking Penndraigs not because it is easy, but because it is hard!
Podcasts spawned from the Discord:
2 Rash 2 Unadvised – read through of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series
Shaping Exercises 101 – read through of Domagoj Kurmaic’s Mother of Learning serial
Uncultured Swine – read through of Ian M. Banks’ “The Culture” series
The Mind Killer – rationalist perspectives on weekly news events
For next week — 196-199
196. Notes II
197. Second Degree
198. Prurient Interest
199. Nearest and Dearest
Worth the Candle on Amazon (ebook and audio!)
Cakoluchiam’s stellar Character Sheet
Steven’s Predictions – Everything is a Clue
Worth the Candle can be read at AO3 or RoyalRoad.
You can support this podcast at our Patreon. Alexander Wales can be supported at his Patreon. We have a Discord as well.
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If all of Worth the Candle is a DnD session being played by different people, it would make sense that Pallida is a player who is not often available. They killed her once as Fenn, returned with a new character later, and when the player can’t come back to play the next session, they kill her off, just spend some years on the time chamber and have a justification for the character to come back later.
Now that I think about it, a similar thing could be happening with Valencia. The player is not available for this campaign, and the character will return an indefinite amount of time later.
Though the paper bag is not in the current ruleset, I checked and it was in the original ACSLB rules. It was removed because “players didn’t understand that it was a joke”, which leads me to believe that it was referencing the Shia Labeauf paper bag incident ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia_LaBeouf#Performance_art ) where he appeared at a festival with a brown paper bag on his head. (This predates when the rules were written.)
Possibly the paper bag thing is also a reference to the wonderful exploit in Skyrim where you can steal anything from shopkeepers without penalty by first placing a bucket over their head, at which point they will no longer have line of sight to your acts of thieving, and they don’t have the AI to take it off or react in any way.
“Shia LaBeouf was on fire and punching a gold dragon in the face.” is probably the best sentence of the book I’ve read so far.
I would guess the rules are that Shia can’t, or won’t, desummon from the area while his victims still live. So he cannot be summoned because he is already summoned to Greychapel, but he can’t finish his mission because he is pacified by the bag. So he’s going to be safe until everyone in the summon radius has died of other causes, at least.
Also I’m a bit worried this is starting a trend of using the unicorn bones as an authorial cheat for deadly danger. So far as I can recall, Joon has never been shown to use a unicorn bone when he didn’t almost immediately need it.
And finally, I’m caught up! Let’s see if it lasts.