(no subject)

My Met subscription 2019-2020:

Verdi's Macbeth, Oct 1, 2019 (Rosh Hashanah, mental note to swap tickets to a different date)
Glass's Akhnaten, Nov 19, 2019
Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Dec 3, 2019
Berg's Wozzeck, Jan 7, 2020
Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Jan 28, 2020
Handel's Agrippina, Feb 25, 2020
Massenet's Werther, Mar 31, 2020
Puccini's Manon Lescaut, May 5, 2020
Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova, May 6, 2020


Excited about everything except the Puccini, as usual. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to join me for

(no subject)

An idea I had that could go terribly wrong:

I had to figure out how clerics would work with my guild merit XP system and I thought for a while and decided they just wouldn't. Clerics and paladins and druids get normal XP, i.e., XP for defeating bad guys.

This works at a simple level to mechanically indicate that they're not part of the guild system, which I like, but the more I thought about the more I like the implication that there's an economic incentive to the religious orders to provoke wars and send out holy warriors to spread their God's message in a way that nobody else in the economy has. And one of the roles of the guild system is to restrain the religious sects.

And yet the political order is dependent on the Temples, because literally one of the first ideas I had about this world when I first conceived of the earliest versions of it for a one shot seven years ago was that the powers that be take Divination and Prophecy EXTREMELY SERIOUSLY. That one-shot revolved around a false prophecy that caused the council to send the party on a risky and unsupported mission with poor intel. The direct link to the Gods that the Temples have is both extremely important and extremely dangerous.