Now, some DMs/GMs already have systems set up to put their players/PCs in any given atmosphere at a moment’s notice: a choice in background music, a key phrase, what have you.
However, more sadistic DMs/GMs could use these key phrases or songs….. but not tell the players what it signals. Drive up the anxiety and paranoia by playing boss battle music when a boss is nearby, but not necessarily if that boss instigates a battle or makes themselves known. You can tell the party “You feel like you’re missing something” if their perception is high enough, but that could be either a hint that there’s a special item in the room, or a hint that this place will not be there/will be in disrepair when they return (thus, they might truly be missing something… or someone.)
I got the idea from playing Terraria with a map/character who just began Hardmode. I hadn’t brought in any of the new crafting materials yet, aside from just having the new Hallow biome spawn, and the literal first night after starting Hardmode I see the flavor text in the corner appear:
“This is going to be a terrible night…”
… Which, for those who don’t play Terraria, is the text that pops up shortly before the game spawns the Twins…. one of the bosses of Hardmode…. which I wasn’t ready for in the slightest.
And so there I stood, fearing the worst, and I waited…
And waited…
And waited. The Twinsnever showed up. I waited till the in-world morning and restarted the game, thinking the game glitched out for a second and needed a reset. But let me tell you all: those few minutes of sitting there, expecting two gigantic, mechanical eyeballs to fly in and devastate me and my villagers were some of the most anxiety-causing minutes I’ve ever lived.
… And then, I thought to myself, “… Imagine what hell this would be like in a tabletop game.”
Two newly discovered dinosaurs may be missing links in an unusual lineage of predators that lived between 160 million and 90 million years ago, new research suggests.
The two species, Xiyunykus and Bannykus, were theropods—a group of bipedal, largely carnivorous dinosaurs. Some theropods eventually gave rise to birds, while another branch, the alvarezsauroids, evolved into strange-looking insectivores with short arms and hands with an enlarged finger for digging into nests.
But until now, little was understood about how this change happened because of the 70-million-year evolutionary gap separating the insect-eating alvarezsauroids from the earliest known member of the group, Haplocheirus.
“The significance of Xiyunykus and Bannykus is that they fall within that gap and shed light on patterns of evolution within Alvarezsauroidea,” explained Corwin Sullivan, a University of Alberta paleontologist who participated in the international study.
They’re just overly fancy gems, Satima has broken tougher stuff than that
If anyone’s answer is anything other than “Saitama knocks Thanos’ head clean off his shoulders” then they’re wrong
Saitama breaks Thanos’ bling bling arm then straight mollywops him for an hour.
Powerlevel hypotheticals involving Saitama always strike me as kind of a wasted effort. Or at least moreso than every powerlevel argument is by default? The point is he’s not even in the Goku/Superman category, he’s in the Roger Rabbit category; he’s however strong he has to be for it to be funny when the bad guy dies.
the man who spents hundreds of pages describing trees and meals and worked out the linguistics of multiple fictional languages and the entire cosmology of his fictionsl world called the Beatles’ rehearsal sounds “indescribable”
The actual Beatles didn’t live in Oxford… Tolkien was complaining about the “indescribable noise” from a group of random young men in his neighborhood who wanted to become a “Beatle Group.” He really wasn’t a pop music sort of person. But no, it wasn’t the actual Beatles. He just didn’t want them to touch his film rights.
Tolkien was a regressive pastoralist who didn’t believe in refrigerated food. He also believed that Disney films destroy the aesthetic taste of children, harming their development and corrupting their ability to distinguish between trashy entertainment and art. So he absolutely refused to let Disney have his film rights either. Which was a good move, really
Plot Designing 