majestic

So far there are elements that are really good and some that I don't care for. It's not making me want to keep watching all the time like The Vision of Escaflowne did, but to be fair to anime series in general (or any series, that is), that only happens once in a blue moon. There's preciously little realism in the two girls being able to basically annihilate however many enemies are placed in front of them, but that's not any different from any action film.

A bit more Noir, the pacing of the storyline is really a bit glacial, but I have a feeling that's for the best. It keeps hinting at being some sort of secret society/prophecy thing with a splash of religious fervor, not my most favorite mystery combination. The next two episodes are a two parter though, I guess that'll move some things forward.

Well, I didn't know anything about this film, I was mostly thinking about Marriage Story - a film that surprised many people I know with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson doing a really good job. Not surprising to anyone who has seen either in more than the MCU or Star Wars, but for many that was the only exposure. Yeah, well, and maybe that 'wonderful' Ghost in the Shell movie.

Scarlett Johansson is a (more than) decent actress when given good material, but usually everyone's brain turns off when looking at her, hence all the roles she gets where she's supposed to do the same for teenaged boys. Silly action in spandex.

Yeah, I can't think of many scenarios where I'd have Regill in the party outside of doing his quests, but the same is true for many of the companions. Probably all of them except Ember and Lann (whenever he fits into the party as Sacred Huntmaster). You win some, you lose some. Can now take the spells, but you can no longer take feats out of order/without prereqs. So no more Loremaster for Improved Improved Improved... Critical. Well, without playing a Trickster - with a Trickster MC you can improve Ember's ray crit range to ludicrous levels because picking up the regular Improved Critical via Rogue Trick works.

By the way, since you mentioned Ember and casting fire spells. If you give her one level of Cross-Blooded Sorcerer, that'll be an immense boost to her damage. Why? Looking at the Sorcerer and bloodline progressions, you might get the impression that only makes sense if you stay pure classed, or at least add levels in whatever prestige class that allows you to continue your bloodline, right? Well, no. Draconic bloodlines have a funny little aspect: They flat increase the damage per dice rolled of their associated element by 1, and it stacks. If you pick up the Gold, Brass and Red bloodlines from adding a level of Cross-Blooded Sorcerer and the mythic ability 'Second' Bloodline, you get +3 damage per dice rolled as long as it is fire damage. Make sure to give her a Skill Focus so you can pick Loremaster. It is fixed now and you can add spells from other classes, if you do that you can get Creeping Doom from the Druid book or Sirocco from the Wizard book. Selective Sirocco lets you plaster the entire screen with a damaging and crowd controlling firestorm and Creeping Doom summons a swarm of swarms to tank for you. Find swarms annoying? Yeah, enemies do that too. In fact, there are encounters that were designed to be ridiculously problematic, but a single cast of Creeping Doom auto-wins them.

Many, many patches ago Regill made a decent enough Court Poet, but the class never worked as advertised and was then 'fixed' by removing rage powers. Giving him a mount through Sacred Huntmaster is a good idea*, but I'd just keep him as Inquisitor for some utility, that way he contributes something useful besides charges. Not that they don't work, but we're getting into situations where it is hard to find a spot for Regill in the party and Domain Powers make a better argument than simple charge damage. Although it could be a fun build** when running a Trickster. Crit galore. @Gorth: It might not be obvious and shouldn't work, but you can add any class that has an animal companion without breaking the companion's level. That's why all these builds work, you could for instance also add a Sohei level to Regill for a bonus feat at an even level. *Could also make a small raptor Paladin, solving all the issues. Except you'd no longer have Regill in the party - or Seelah. Not the worst of trades, power wise. **Can do the same thing with a Paladin on a horse, and not only will that play better, it will also solve any Mark of Justice issues. As long as one doesn't only want to use premade companions, of course.

Executions are too clean these days. Freeze all their assets and force their children to go to a public school in a minority neighborhood. Not 20 years of jail time. 20 years hard labour at minimum wage, preferably in a cobalt mine. Make them a deal, if they manage to work off their time without getting a poor performance review that would get a regular worker laid off, their assets are restored to them, if not, then they're confiscated and paid as bonus to their fellow laborers, but they can go free afterwards.

The lawful requirement is only annoying in the game because 'lawful' in WotR is basically roleplaying a rigid, fascist law and order guy, and you have to pick some of the lawful options to stay lawful. Now that I think about it, @BruceVC should love playing an Aeon.

Hot Shots! Part Deux Gets another vote from me for being the better of the two.

That is actually what is supposed to happen. However, during the events of the show as they are depicted in the first two episodes, Rhaenyra should be eight, not 'a woman grown' as Viserys put it, and Alicent is supposed to be 18. The series plays in 112 AC, while the events depicted should happen in 105/106 AC (including the alliance that the final scene of the second episode hints at). The show is going to skip a bunch of years at some point in the first season. Probably as early as next episode, given the episode credits. Killer pacing there, pardon the pun.

I'm not 100% sure, but: The fight @Gromnir mentions is one of the ones that become hilariously easy with Selective Grease. Scary high level undead enemy just slips and dies.

So you have no issue eating the grey goo that is the gravy in biscuits and gravy (which probably doubles as the prison slop people eat in movies to show how badly prisoners are treated), but you draw the line at rye bread?

It sure looks like it. Boy are the new fans going to be disappointed in her character arc because they all expect a Dany without the, uhm, mess.

The Targaryens - and any family in old Valyria, if I recall correctly - had equal primogeniture, the Seven Kingdoms did not. When the Old King's (i.e. Jaehaerys I) firstborn died, he, for whatever reason, picked his fourth child (Prince Baelon) as successor, passing over Prince Aemon's daughter Rhaenys (who is now married to token black guy) who would logically be the next in line as direct offspring of the deceased heir apparent. The other male child of Jaehaerys (Vaegon) was a maester, and had forsaken any claims to land and titles. When Baelon unexpectedly died, the Seven Kingdoms were gearing up for a war of succession, hence Jaehaerys calling in the Great Council of 101 AC to pick a successor in some form that will prevent a civil war. With the Lords of the Seven Kingdoms, the Maesters and the Faith deciding, Rhaenys was ruled out, as was her daughter and her son, who at the time was only seven years old, while Viserys was of age and had already fathered a child. The rules were clearly in place before that. The problem here is - and the problem that will still exist in the future - is that Westeros isn't much into letting women rule because by tradition only male heirs are considered for succession. If you put one and one together now, you'll arrive at the plot of the show. Plot twist: edit: All spoilers holding true only if the showrunners don't take liberties with the source material, obviously.

So, this is the scene I meant: Dunno, somehow that just cracked me up. Happens after Mireille asks her if she has brought any swim wear at all. Though, really, who brings a bikini to a hit job? In an ideal world, the two will eventually rub off on each other. Mireille could do with a bit more serious, and Kirika with a little less serious, after all. I have no idea where the story is going, it might turn out to be Alias or Dan Brown level pants after an interesting beginning. I also just watched the fifth episode, and it has an actiony scene near a cathedral that reminded me a whole lot of a certain Cowboy Bebop episode. Cowboy Bebop had better art and animation though, but the style wasn't dissimilar. There's something morbid but 'fun' to see Mireille and Kirika bond over the whirlwind of death they bring (or that follows) wherever they go, particularily in episode five. So far, so fine. It's not The Vision of Escaflowne level entertaining, but it sure is better than Strike Witches. Just hope this doesn't Dan Brown out eventually. I kind of expect it to, truth be told. Eh, also, Amazon's video streams keep being bad, particularily the blacks.

Might not look perfectly obvious at first, but Camellia makes a decent bow user too. Nice debuffs (second spirit Stone, like @Gromnir already said), nice buffs, and the damage output is nothing to balk at either. Give her a few levels of Loremaster for some fun, like adding Sense Vitals to the spell list and the Deadeye bow (-2 AC on hits), Evil Eye and Metal Curse. -10 AC in two rounds, not too shabby. Plus the obligatory Elemental Barrage proccs. Grab the necessary proficiencies by adding a level of Demonslayer or whatever else you like, but Evil Outsider is a fairly useful favored enemy in this game. Now, if only... she would be really useful, would she not? I mean, less disagreeable to have around. She's useful. Uhm. Yeah.

To post something for a change, I began watching ノワール (Nowāru, Noir). The primary reason for doing that was to not continue Strike Witches for the time being, plus the show is old enough to look decent and it comes from Bee Train, a studio I wanted to check out for the longest time. Then I read some reviews and the all more or less agreed that the series begins too slow and is mostly notable for its character interactions, which my brain pretty much translated into an impulse to check it out. Noir, so far, is a bit like an animated series that can most easily be described as a The Bourne Identity type of deal, a film which it preceeds. One of the main characters, Kirika, wakes up one day bereft of her memories. She finds her clothes, an ID card, a school uniform and a pocket watch playing a wistful melody when opened. The other main character is Mireille, a Paris based killer for hire, who is contacted by Kirika. Kirika offers to take her on a mysterious pilgrimage to her past. Whether that contact happens prior to Kirika losing her memory or not isn't entirely made clear, but that's probably a plot point for later. Whatever else Kirika found, she knows that Mereille is a professional. When the two women meet, they not only find out that the melody from the pocked watch triggers repressed memories in Mireille, but also that Kirika is followed by an unknown party trying to kill her. To her surprise, she finds out that she can handily dispatch the group of killers sent after her, and is a bit dismayed at the end of the first epispode. Not that she had to kill people - just how easily she can do that, without batting an eyelash. Intrigued, both women team up. Going by the moniker Noir, something from Kirika's broken memories, they begin taking hit jobs. The series is, so far, a bit schizophrenic in its divided attention to both character development and action. While there's not much in terms of direct depiction of blood and gore, it is, well, pretty violent. Minor spoilers: With their somewhat polar opposite characters, the interactions between the two women are pretty nice so far. Mireille is outgoing and enjoys life, even with what her job is. It is also fairly noticable in the way she walks and dresses, while Kirika just isn't. She's often wistfully gazing at nothing in particular, trying to figure out what happened to her and why. This difference between the two also lead to a bit of hilarious character-building fanservice in an episode where they rent out a house at the sea for a job. Mireille ends up wearing a red bikini while sunbathing, and Kirika sits next to her in a blue dress looking like she doesn't want to be there - but they both agree that the sea is pretty and life is good. I tried looking for a shot of it online, but that turned out to be a bad idea. For some reason there's an awful lot of fan content about Noir out there, and nothing that's particularily great (and a whole lot that's not safe for work). Should have figured it would be like that, the two are the perfect shipping couple. Sigh. Although after watching like only a sixth of the show, who knows where their relationship is going to go yet. I don't really want to spoil myself, like I said, give me a fun mystery and I'm game. I tried making a screenshot of the scene, but that doesn't work on the computer here for some reason (currently not at home). Ah, well, maybe that's for the better. Well, then, take one of the shots that are available. First meetings and their framing. <insert rant about digital coloring here> When in Paris... So far, so good, I'm just hoping that the fan art doesn't mean that this will eventually do a deep dive and ends up being some creepy Yuri show. Or if it does, hopefully it'll at least be more tasteful than the fan art. I could do with less shooting action, but I guess you can't predate The Bourne Identity and have a storyline about two assassins without lots of gunplay.

I hope you plan on following her romance, it makes her so much better.

When it comes to mounts, I've basically done a 360° turn and only use horses - they're the only ones that you can mount with equal enlargement levels. Cast Legendary Proportions or Frightful Aspect on your character and your mount? That works with horses. With anything else? No. The buffs from being able to mount your horse while under LP/FA makes the better stats of wolves or boars irrelevant. Works on Seelah, but of course much better on any mercenary. Angel Oracle can kind of do both at once. The caster level gets high enough for the Angel buffs that make you virtually immune to everything last for a day with Greater Enduring Spells (same as with the Geniekind + Elemental Barrage cheese), you can scale defenses to the point where it can facetank Unfair - well, more or less - and it clears rooms in a cast or two with (Bolstered) Storm of Justice. Plus there's no real reason to not have an invulnerable Angel Oracle and a party with Ember one-shotting demon lords and a mercenary Paladin on a horse charging enemies for four digit damage. Primary reason for doing so is playing on Unfair though - where the bosses aren't the issue, but everything else is, especially in situations where you can't control where enemies spawn and they start one-shotting your backline. Which is about as early as, oh, getting right out of Kenabres to do Sosiel's quest. edit: Plus, Oracles can cast Creeping Doom with Nature Mystery, and why would you not have that? Might as well go to a gun fight with a knife. Primary reason for getting your main stat to an odd number is because you get 5 stat points with 20 levels, and then you end with an even number, and many character builds simply have no use of anything but your main stat, or secondary stats are good enough or begin with even numbers. So, yeah, not having an odd main stat is usually a waste of a stat point, what with how the game is set up and works. A secondary progression path that offers several options, of which many are traps if you don't precisely know what you're doing, and some of which are pitfalls even if you do...

It's not really only about mechanics, these are relatively similar to any d20 game. Base Attack Bonus, Armor Class, etc., but the specific implementation and knowledge of items and how specific mechanics interact in this particular implenentation of the Pathfinder ruleset. To give you a primer, we were talking about just one of these things a page back. Armor Class scaling can't be done with armor at all*, so any characters who are supposed to tank whose defenses rely solely on armor class gained from armor are going to get into a bit of a bind later on. In order to get the armor class necessary to comfortable stand in melee range of enemies and not get beaten into a bloody pulp, you'd need to take an Oracle level with Nature's Whispers, which lets you you take your CHA bonus to armor class (as a bonus, you can now dump DEX to 7) and take one level of Scaled Fist monk. These two stack, because the Monk AC bonus stacks on top of the DEX bonus, which is now caused by CHA. Therefore, starting this character with a CHA of 21 means at the second level the character already has a +10 bonus to AC. Endgame we're looking at 26 base CHA with a +6 CHA item, i.e. 32 CHA. 10 + 11 x 2 = 32 AC before buffs. Good luck finding any armor in the game that comes with stats like that, especially once you figure out that Mage Armor stacks on top of that (+4 AC) and taking a potion of Mage Armor proccs Archmage Armour (adds another +10 AC at Mythic 10, although that is quite late in the game - but you still get to +7 AC from Mage Armor + Archmage Armour relatively quickly!), so we're sitting at 46 AC. 46 AC might sound like it is a lot, but how well do you think that stacks up against enemies having 50+ AB and 8 attacks per round, and we're not even talking about Unfair difficulty yet which just adds even more on top of the insanity... to get through that you need to actively use exploits, like the little fun fact that Mounted Shield only gets checked when mounting your, uhm, mount. So switch to that fat tower shield, climb on top of your horse and switch back to that two handed lance for the extra charge oomph while still having the AC from Mounted Shield... *Technically not true, but the numbers coming out are so low it is near enough to can't be done at all at anything at or above normal.

Alas, unintentional and a missed opportunity, what a double whammy. Shouldn't do long form posts after midnight. There it shows that I was late to the Doctor Who party, because I watched that episode only after the first season of Game of Thrones, but I can imagine it would be distracting. The Doctor Who episode with Dumbledore was strange for me too. Jason Isaacs would have been a good choice, although when I imagine him or Tom Felton with silver hair I think I'd probably call either Daemon Malfoy. Giving the show a reason for exposition by making men chatty after sex is a justification that, while maybe not ideal, is at least a justification. The scenes in House of the Dragon serve the purpose of setting up the contrast in personality between Viserys and Daemon, but for that an orgy would not have been necessary. Much the same with the violence. The cringiest scene was the one where Ms. Bianco was crying and Littlefinger quickly brought up a girl with semen dripping from her mouth. You're not wrong, Game of Thrones had scenes like that for the shock effect / special interest just as well, they just felt less egregious because it wasn't all at once, or maybe because I liked the show better. Can't rightly say. It sure felt like it was. The violence in itself had a point, same as the nudity, a need to set up the conflict between Viserys and his brother (and it is canonical, according to the history books, but that doesn't mean it is necessary to induldge that much), and that does make sense, but it was simply ridiculous in parts. Particularily the chopped off male reproduction organ of the rapist. The C-section in particular, Aemma is supposed to die in child birth, but adding everything else on top is just for shock value. Although as I said, I was highly biased against the series a priori, and it didn't change my mind. Your milage may vary of course.

Let me helpfully link you to a post from back in 2018 that you can report too:

House of the Dragon, Season 1, Episode 1: Another Prequel Nobody Needed The Heirs of the Dragon It's hard to try and be objective about the episode - or indeed the series - when you can read a certain non-review of it online that was written based on a pre-screening of the first six episodes for the sepcial part of the fandom, and who doesn't love A Song of Ice and Fire's very own Keepers of Truth, the glorious Elio and Linda, first of their names, and heir apparent to the legacy of the books. If absolutely nothing of his sentence makes sense for your, dear reader, then that is fine. It just means you're blissfully unaware of this book series incredibly tiresome fandom fandumb. So, naturally, the first inkling I have, seeing a defense by these two of an adaptation for material they contributed to, is to simply dismiss everything they say and assume the opposite. Confirmation bias is a strange thing, so I am already here, watching a prequel I (correctly, as it turns out) deemed unnecessary, expecting it to be, well, not good, and I was, of course, proven right. What else could it be, in the end. This is probably not fair, but hey, this is about my subjective enjoyment of something, after all. Wokey wokey! Well, let's get the obvious woke nonsense out of the way, the series of course makes a girl heir to the throne. A girl. Preposterous. What woman would ever rule in a medieval society, really, I mean... I kid. Sorry. Of course that's the entire point of the show, and spoilers, this will eventually end with civil war, because Westeros just isn't woke enough to accept that sort of thing, particularily not the King's Council who just declares the male succesor king because why not. Oh, wait, are you mad about spoilers for a prequel series about the backstory of a book series that began in 1996? Sue me. Unless the creative team decides to rewrite the entire history of the setting, I can also already tell you how it ends. The dragons all but die out in the civil war and its aftermath, both contenders for the throne die and it will end with Rhaenyra's son Aegon (by her uncle, Daemon) on the throne, who will eventually be nicknamed Dragonbane because the last of the Targaryen's dragons dies under his rule. Woops. I am so sorry. Hey, did you guys know that Jimmy McGill is going to become Saul Goodman during the events of Better Call Saul? With that out of the way, there is one diversity choice in the casting that caused a bit of a hooplah in the fandumb, and that is changing Corlys Velaryon to have black skin color with silver hair, something that is apparently well justified by the world building in the series (at least according to our Glorious Couple, The Lords Paramount of Everything A Song of Ice and Fire). I don't really care, just like I didn't care a whole lot about Heimdall being played by Idris Elba in the Marvel movies. It is what it is though. Corlys Velaryon, played by Steve Toussaint, reeks a bit of the token black guy, and it rankles even more because as far as I know, he shouldn't be Master of Ships. Or on the small council, like, at all. Guess that's one of the headscratchers Elio and Linda mentioned in their decidedly not a review. In a shocking twist, I kind of agree with their assessent that Ser Criston Cole would have been an ideal - and equally important - part of the cast for the change for more diversity. Although maybe the showrunners didn't want their token black guy to become one of the 'bad' guys, because Ser Criston Cole is going to back the other party in the civil war. The side that doesn't want a woman on the throne. Hello, I'm the Doctor! The David Tennant meme above is funnier when you know that his successor as the Doctor, Matt Smith, is playing Daemon Targaryen, future husband of Princess Rhaenyra. While his depiction of Daemon is fine, the casting choice itself is quite a distraction, and it's therefore not a good one in my mind. I keep imagining he'll whip out his sonic screwdriver or do something otherwise whacky that makes no sense. Alas, though, he rode off on a dragon and not in his TARDIS. The actress playing the young version of Rhaenyra seems to have gone through the Emilia Clarke school of acting. This is not a good thing. In fact, young Rhaenyra seems to try to scream I AM THIS SERIES' DAENERYS at you the entire time she's on screen. Viserys is delightful though, and the show did a good job at depicting his onsetting health issues by him having a wound that will not close. Bad wound healing is a sign of diabetes, and I am willing to extend the showrunners the benefit of the doubt here and call this intentional (Viserys should, in the end, become barely capable of ascending the steps towards the Iron Throne by 'virtue' of his failing health and large girth). One-Upping Game of Thrones Oh boy. So this is what simply had to happen, I suppose. We can't have a prequel to Game of Thrones without one-upping it to make sure that watchers are properly entertained, so the first episode is a condensed version of everything that came before - or will come after, if you want to talk in terms of the timeline - in Game of Thrones. Limbs are hacked off, there's a beheading, a head gets violently bashed in, a penis is cut off and my personal favorite, we're treated to a scene depicting a caesarean section in a time where there's no anaesthesia or a way to make the procedure not, uhm, deadly for the mother, and yes, that includes a bunch of people rummaging around in her insides (oh, and the woman in labor begging them not to, I mean... sure, who's asking her). There are also two scenes at a brothel, one of which is an orgy of a size not usually seen outside of special interest films made in the Czech Republic. This is all par for the course of the show, in case you've watched Game of Thrones, but in this one, it's just there to be there. The violence in Game of Thrones, at least initially, had a purpose beyond shock value, as did all the scenes in the brothels. In this series, they have no purpose other than showing violence and naked people. Because that is what Game of Thrones is. Violence and boobies! Hooray. Production values So, the series apparently had five times the budget for its first season than the original first Game of Thrones season, yet I like how it looks a lot less. The attenion to detail in certain scenes is simply stunning, but a whole bunch of the series simply looks weird and wrong to me, and it permeates everything, from the opening clouds to this particular shot: Well, I don't know about you guys, but that background looks pretty odd to me. Does that look odd to you? Similar shot from Game of Thrones as a contrast. Does that shot look better? It does, right? Probably cost a lot less to make, too. Conclusion Am I glad this TV show was made. I'm looking forward about complaining about each and every episode, for years to come (unless this is a limited run prequel series - I honestly have not bothered to check). How delightful. Sure, there's a chance that the series will improve with the timeskip, but I think the foundational issues of having to 'improve' upon Game of Thrones at every turn and this simply being an unnecessary prequel will not change much for me. This is Better Call Saul all over again, except with a less well working cast and production values that are dreadfully expensive for no visual gain that I like.