Category: Uncategorized

Simple modules

Thee can be used if you have a free hour or so (real time, not in game) and don’t want to finish early or start the next part of the campaign until next session.

Pestering Boar

A very aggressive boar is running rampant in the nearby woods. It poses a threat to hunters and gatherers trying to harvest game and mushrooms. The tavern keep already has plans to cook it up in celebration for getting rid of the pest.

Players can track and kill it or set a trap for it. There is a bonus for killing it with an arrow to the heart with streamers in the town’s colors tied to the arrow.

Collect a mcguffin

kill spiders in a cave for their venom, penalize players for smashing them with a blunt weapon and destroying their venom sacs.

kill boars for their tusks

Someone lost a ring in the woods. You need to retrieve it. The PCs escort the person while retracing his steps. The party is attacked by whatever is appropriate while searching. If the attacker is a boar this can lead to the pestering boar quest.

Some effort required

Less straightforward quests that can have multiple endings or require some pre-planning from the DM or players. Expect these to last 1 session.

Acquiring a free home

The town’s sorcerer moved our years ago and his tower still stands vacant at the edge of town. You can have it for yourself but you have to evict the pests that have moved in. NPC enemies can be goblins, robbers, kobolds, whatever is level and location appropriate.
The tower stands 4 stories tall with a flat roof. The bottom floor has 4 barred windows and one entrance. The second floor has 2 windows, one of which is broken. The third and fourth floor have one window each which can be left open for sneaky ingress. There is a cellar hatch on the roof that covers access from the 4th floor. Enemies are mostly congregated on the lower 2 floors with a stronger mini boss on the 4th floor.

Players can choose to charge in or wait for an opportune time to sneak in while enemies are unaware (at night while sleeping, during the day for nocturnal enemies, or after the NPC party leaves to go raiding/foraging the PCs can sneak in and lie in wait after setting traps. gnolls and kobolds will leave traps in the building. The window sills and roof parapet can hold a grappling hook that would allow a rogue to climb up and scout or kill off sleeping enemies.

Revenge for a wayward woman

The city’s guard captain was cuckolded by a man with a silver tongue. He wants something done about it but doesn’t want rumors getting out. Players need to quietly make him disappear either by running him out of the city or showing him just how beautiful the city’s water features are from the bed of the canal, so to speak.

Due debts

A man owes a large gambling debt. The den boss knows that he came into some money recently but still isn’t paying up. Simply roughing him up for his coin purse wont do and killing him means not being able to recover the money. Players need to find out where the money is stashed and get it for the den boss one way or another.

The DM can also tie this into another quest from the man that owes the debt. Paying off his debt could be an option that leads to another quest with a higher reward or could make the debtor’s quest much easier.

Advanced modules

Quests that will probably take more than one session and will definitely require more planning. I try my best to break them up into parts (for example: planning a heist, executing, and then fencing stolen goods)

Stealing business plans

A rich man is hosting a party at his mansion for the city’s elite. His rival wants you to steal some documents from his personal study on an upper floor.

Players will have a few days to move about the city to gather information to make a quiet ingress. Here is some of the information they can learn and how they can use it:
At the brothel it is learned that he will be hiring entertainers. Players can find a way to get on the list of entertainers.
Players can find which butchers and food vendors are catering the party. With how big the order is these businesses would be more than willing to hire temporary help for delivering and serving.
Players can find who holds the gust list and secretly add themselves to the list or bribe/extort him for admission. They could also impersonate someone they knew was going, although they’d have to make sure that person was not attending somehow.
PCs can hire someone to grab the documents when they are dropped out of the window instead of trying to sneak them out.

PCs will have to gain entrance to the party and then while there sneak up to the upper floors which are lightly guarded until they find the study and retrieve the documents. Afterwards they will have to escape with them.

The route that PCs take to get into the party influences how much free access they have to the mansion. a caterer would only have access to the first floor and cellar (which would be easier to egress from rather than the front door). A party goer would only have access to the first floor but instead of getting in trouble on the upper floors like a caterer would, they could have “gotten lost looking for the latrine” and be shoo’d downstairs with a warning. Entertainers could be given a changing room upstairs but would get into much more trouble if found on the third floor where the goal is.

Not because it’s wrong or anything like that.

For a long time I’ve felt it necessary to watch popular media so that I don’t feel left out of conversations. When I was a kid Harry Potter was all the rage but my parents didn’t allow me to read or watch the series because it contained witchcraft. I wasn’t particularly unhappy because I wasn’t interested in the series, but I was left out of the conversations about it and I felt that in a way I was being distanced from my peers because they would discuss it often and I didn’t know anything about the story.

After growing up I would consistently consume whatever the popular thing was just to not feel left out. Most of the movies or TV series I watched were not interesting. It was often a boring slog to get through. I wasn’t keen on giving money to the people who made these shows because they are consistently found to be child rapists, serial rapists, serial child rapists, child molesters (as well as enabling and covering up such behavior), etc. For this reason I would pirate these shows.

Eventually I became too busy and too tired to continue this pattern. I stopped watching the popular thing just because it was popular and nothing has changed. I’m not left out of conversations just because I’ve not seen a show. People who are so obsessed with a particular piece of media that they can only talk about that thing are boring. I avoid talking to them unless they have something else to say and my life has been better as a result. Not talking to boring people about boring consumer media or boring current events means that conversations are more vibrant and interesting.

Don’t just refuse to watch something because its popular: Refuse to talk about it. It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth your time, attention, or money.

A few friends have asked me for recommendations recently so I thought I would write a guide with recommendations and explain why I chose them.

The recommendations:

• Vpn.AC – fairly cheap, good speeds, does not spy on you
  • downside: does log time, IP, and bandwidth but not actual traffic
• Mullvad – fairly cheap, takes antispying very seriously, anonymous payment
  • downside: does not support easy payment such as PayPal. Your best bet is to buy bitcoin, which is easy but an extra step.

The basis of my recommendations:

• Threat model: Your threat model is the basis of who you are hiding sensitive information from. If you are in a US university they are legally required to log information about the internet traffic you generate, that is, they are mandated to spy on your browsing history, and some people may not like the websites you visit. Even if you are not in a university, internet service providers will soon be allowed legally to sell information about you and your browsing habits to advertisers and that is creepy. Even if you “have nothing to hide” this information is still valuable to bad guys who want to know things like the name of you dog or you mothers maiden name. That information is valuable for password reset security questions and for stealing your identity. This guide should cover most threat models. Personally, my interest in in hiding from advertisers and the government.
• Is the provider based in a Five Eyes or Seven Eyes country?
  • Five Eyes / Seven Eyes / Fourteen Eyes is an international spying program in which countries spy on their citizens. If the information is stored, it can either be used for immoral purposes or it can be hacked and stolen.
• Does the provider store logs?
  • if the provider logs things like your IP, the times you were logged into the service, your bandwidth used, or the websites you visit that information could be either sold to creepy advertisers or hacked and used against you. You are paying for the product, you should not also be the product.
• Does the provider by default put policies into place to avoid leaking data.
  • A misconfigured VPN can leak DNS data, which is the method that your computer translates a domain name (google.com) to an IP address (216.58.193.142). Providers should force DNS data through the VPN so that your university, ISP, or other DNS provider cannot see the websites you visit.
  • Misconfigurations can also leak WebRTC traffic which unmasks a permanent token that can be used to track your web browsing.
• Do policies require full disclosure?
  • This basically means that the VPN provider will promise to always make a public statement when they receive a legal order for user data, or if they have a security breach.

You can see a huge comparison chart of VPN providers here to see a larger list of issues and providers to do your own research and select your own. Edit: TOPS sold out and the link now redirects to some fake comparison advertisement site. I could link to some wayback machine archive but it would be 2 years out of date.

I recently started an excellent new job in Kansas and I left Ohio for it. During my last week at my old church my leaving was announced and there were quite a few people who wanted to see me one last time to give me well wishes. Even though I had not made an effort there to be well connected with them, they still cared to give me heartfelt goodbyes, capped off with lunch with my Pastor who recommended me an excellent church near my new hometown. I partied with my friends one last time, even having one old friend come that I had fallen off with since finishing highschool.

After leaving I’ve been hearing stories that members of my old church are asking my mother how I am doing to the point that she confided in me that she wishes they would not as their queries remind her that I am no longer there with my family. In my friend groups I am hearing that they are remembering me by trading fun stories of me in my absence.

I expected more to miss my old life there, possibly even to feel remorse for leaving, but in keeping touch with family and closest friends the disconnected feelings are kept far at bay. Still, it gets me that all of these people care so much. I really feel that love. It reminds me of my inability to read people and understand them, but without the typical negative feelings of disconnection and disassociation from people. These feelings allow me to better explore new healthy social connections instead of being mired down in feelings of not being able to form social relationships with people and become a happier person out here in windy Kansas.

I used to have two dogs. One died a few years ago. She just sort of gave up died during the night and passed. I saw her the next morning before going to work and while I was sad, I knew that she was gone and was able to move on.

The second one was put down last week. She spent her last night in the house, I said goodbye to her the next morning, then she was taken off to the vet. I saw the car leave the house, but I didn’t actually see her dead. I think because of that whenever I walk near one of the places she typically lays around at I still expect to see her and want to go over to her to show her some affection on the way to where ever it is that I’m going.  I come home and the first thing i think about is needing to let her out.

I think I see now why funerals have viewings. I had never considered the impact that comes from actually seeing someone who has passed.

I used to run this blog on the Ghost platform. I chose Ghost because it did not link to any outside resources, which was important to me at the time because I did not want my users to feel like they were being tracked, now I honestly care a lot less and am leaving anti-tracking practices up to the user. I am still anti-tracking myself, I just dont want to go out of my to stop it for someone else if they can block trackers themselves. I ended up scrapping the Ghost blog because of a very annoying issue related to NPM and pm2 that I didnt care to fix because I wanted to move away from Ghost anyway.

With Ghost, the blog was started with npm start from the ghost dir. To keep Ghost running after closing the shell or rebooting it was recommended to use pm2 to start it. starting Ghost from pm2 would start a different instance that would have different content than what would be seen if Ghost was started with npm. After upgrading, pm2 is not able to start ghost anymore and the blog content is missing. The only thing lost from scrapping the blog are the weekly link dumps, an outdated review of the Plex media server, and a notification that the DEF CON warrant canary was out of date. It was fixed a day later after I alerted someone.

Setting up WordPress was ultimately much easier to complete than Ghost. Node and NPM were a mess that I never want to touch again.

now zaph will stop bothering me

dont let him know i havnt set up ssl yet

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