The Joy and Pain of Loving Fortnite in 2026

So I have this guilty pleasure.

Yes, I am an avid Fortnite player, usually for like, a quarter at a time. Zero Build, of course, I'm not a monster. What can I say? I think the game can be pretty fun. Despite the childish associations it's often a pretty good time for me and my friends. And y'know? Some of the most fun stuff out there is made for children, so like, who cares, really. My time with Fortnite is typically very enjoyable, and it's almost never an especially stressful game, even if I'm losing. It's pretty harmless fun, and every so often the game devs will whip up some cool new twist on a season that makes playing feel fresh and exciting. As of the time of writing, they have a system in place that allows you to track down a randomly selected player/squad within a certain radius of yourself, which does a good job of speeding up engagement. Good stuff.

Recently though, I've been having this problem with the game. It's not actually a new problem, and whenever it rears its head, it usually means my Fortnite craze dies down and I fall back into my normal video game habits. Which is to say Minecraft. Jesus writing this makes me feel like I'm 10 years old. Anyways, my issue is this. Crossovers.

This might sound strange to you since for most of its lifetime at this point, Fortnite has been the crossover game. In fact, its first ever crossover event happened in 2018, just eight months after the game's release. This collaboration with Marvel Entertainment in the lead up to Infinity War set the tone for a lot of what was to come in the future, and now the idea of Fortnite without crossovers feels ridiculous. And I won't deny, they're fun! But they also suuuuuuuuuuuuck.

The central issue I have with Fortnite crossovers is the way that they absolutely infect a season. Basically every time I play, things will be going normally for a while, and I'll have a decent opportunity to enjoy my time with the game, until the season reaches its later stages, at which point I am playing Collab Fortnite. It doesn't matter what the collab is, because it usually turns out the same. Currently it's Overwatch, but in my playtime I've also had to sit through Avatar the Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, and DC Comics collaborations. 

It kinda doesn't matter what the collab is, they tend to play out the same. Some new thematically appropriate items are added to the loot pool. They're often very good, and so the gameplay shifts from being mostly gunplay based to fighting with these weird collab weapons, which often have some sort of crazy movement ability to go along with their pushed stats. This means that final fights revolve heavily around a very frenetic and hard to follow run-and-gun style gameplay where I am at a massive disadvantage because my computer is slow and I can't keep track of all the Jujutsu Kaisen characters flying across my screen. Game states are just too damn difficult to track. I don't really enjoy this style of gameplay, even when I win, there's something that feels very hollow about it. The crossover items feel like gimicky skinner boxes, designed to get all of the dopamine receptors in your brain firing at max capacity. Consequently this means that while they are fun momentarily, they start to suck very bad with continued usage as your brain gets wise to the trickery at play, hidden behind flashy movement and VFX. 

Now, less offensive but maybe a bit more crass feeling are the purely cosmetic crossovers, and there's just so many of them that it's really easy to lose track. They're funny some percentage of the time (I am often rocking a Sabrina Carpenter skin) but the joke wears thin with constant repetition, and they can be very distracting. Sometimes that's funny, like seeing Ben Ten rise from behind the mountain like a Greek god, fists ablaze with light and holy fury, raining down shotgun shells like thunder bolts from Olympus. More often it just sorta feels dumb. Now, Fortnite is certainly eclectic even without these skins but typically their in house creations share a certain artistic style that makes them feel a bit more sympatico with one another, making them much more easy to comprehend. Once again, I'm not totally against these, it just feels like Fortnite has knocked the cookie jar off the top shelf and is gorging itself past the point of joy or benefit. 

Recently though I've been thinking, and I think it's pretty clear that the crossover events are emblematic of a deeper problem in Fortnite. Like, in this current season, half of the items I hate aren't even crossover items, they're just normal fortnite loot. They have the exact same problems as described above! The overdrive rifle and the seven gauntlets come to mind as being just deeply uninteresting to me, and the overdrive rifle isn't even new to this season. This sickness does not come from outside of the game, but from within. And really, I should've known that shouldn't I? 

Fortnite is, first and foremost, a commercial product. It pretty much always has been. That's not to say the devs or the teams working on it have no love for the project, I am sure they do, and I'm sure they do their best to make it as good as possible. But Fortnite has always been ruled by something more crude than love. Part of me feels like it must've been better once, maybe in the few months that I played the game with my father back in 2017, before it was seized by all of the things I can't stand. I'm skeptical though. I'm not writing this because I think anything will change, even though I want it to, I guess I'm just sorta disappointed that financial interests are so tightly wound against this thing I like. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while Fortnite has lost its chance at having its own identity, the game is still pretty financially scummy, and that sucks. Even so, while there may not have been much art in the previous version of the game, there was at least something, and the loss of that something is a bit sad to think about. I don't know, I'm not really all that worked up about it. It's the way the game is, and I can still love it, even if sometimes the way it's designed means I'm going to hate it. Such is life.

Hey what the fuck's up with all these Magic cards?

Chainlink #7: Mind Flayers

Among D&D's stable of original monsters, there are few I'm more fond of than mind flayers*. Here's a take on them. Not a revolutionary one, but hopefully interesting enough to get me excited enough to run with them as a campaign frame.

It should be noted, none of this is cannon to Coris, which is my principle setting, and the one that most of my writing on this blog centers on (save for the previous two chainlink posts, which are for something else I think). Or at least, they're not for this current version of my setting. When I go through and make Coris Continuity II, where the Gods probably don't exist and the Celestial Empire that nearly doomed the world were a bunch of space alien elves, I might throw in some squid men for variety's sake. Maybe that's when the Meyasoa will finally be canon as well. Who knows. Anyways, on to the boring prehistory stuff.

The Boring Prehistory.

Art by Wayne Reynolds

There was a time where every star in the sky was theirs. The long arm of their ancient empire reached endlessly across time and space to grasp at worlds unknown, to know them, to take from them their treasure, to feast. To them, other life in the galaxy could be nothing more than cattle or sheep dogs, beasts born for slaughter, or for servitude. They were not cold and emotionless, at least not totally. They didn't have much love, but they had art, philosophy, ideals, maybe even religion, in some alien sense. At this time, there was no hatred in their actions, everything in the universe was simply beneath hate. Their evil was mundane, banal, uncaring. Nobody hates the sheep for giving up its meat, they simply don't think of it.

They were masters of psionics, a power born of the mind, with the ability to shape the body. Most of their technology was founded on their own psionic abilities in conjunction with bio-engineering, a craft they had essentially mastered. Their ships, their computers, their fighting machines, all of these things were grown. Sometimes these were creatures of their own creation, often they were things the illithids discovered and molded into a desired shape. 

They fell the way any great empire falls, it was a slow and painful demise, death by a thousand cuts. A military defeat here, several bloody revolts there, a dash of bureaucratic breakdown, a pinch of infighting. If you were to ask them, though, the end came with one final act of revolt at the hands of a species only recently enslaved. A rebel leader arose with enough tactical wit and political clout to form an alliance, which struck at the heart of the already dying empire. Their perfect world died when the rebellion kicked down the doors of the royal palace and took the head of the Eternal Emperor, the bedrock which their empire rested upon. In but a moment, their world died. 

There were pockets of resistance out there for some time, but they all began to break down due to a lack of sustainable food sources, infighting, and pressure from newly forming alliances. The only place where they managed to establish a foothold worth anything is here, wherever that is. To them, our world is the ultimate galactic backwater, an undeveloped, pre-industrial piece of shit,  ruled over beings no more intelligent than cattle. Even so, with their numbers so diminished, their technology broken or breaking, their leaders dead and gone, any attempt at an overt, hostile takeover of our planet would be suicidal. Even if they should succeed against our world's meager technology and power rooted in superstition, hose who finally felled their empire still patrol the stars, searching for any sign that their work is not yet done. 

This infuriates them. If you should meet one, know that this fury is all they have left in their hearts, a ferocious, undying anger towards anything other than them. They will have sophisticated, self-deluding  justifications for everything they do to you, every act of torture, every cruel experiment, every brain sucked out of its skull, but in their hearts, their anger is the only justification they need. Their small clutches of society are dominated by this anger, by a need to put things right again, to restore themselves to glory, to punish their enemies for rebelling and to punish us for merely existing. When you know how they live, it's easy to see why they are so angry indeed.

Invasion

Now, they've become very good at hiding, with most taking to the world's subterranean depths. Some live aboard the last of their great ships, if their cloaking technology still works, floating along in the planet's upper atmosphere, descending only to feed. Others live within the seas, dwelling off the coast in camouflaged glass domes. Wherever they live, it's usually close to humans, because our brains are the only decent food on this planet. They try to be subtle, preying on only the easiest of targets, but even this will cause attention eventually. Much of their scientific work is dedicated to easing this tension by creating artificial brains, their most recent attempt, which has been successful enough to spread amongst most of the known colonies, involved the creation of a new creature, created from simian DNA. They're not especially intelligent, which poses a problem for the mind flayers. It makes meals dull, uninteresting, flavorless. Still, it's better than discovery, so human brains are a rare delicacy, eaten in celebration.

The other reason they live near humans is because they need manpower. In the grand scheme of things, humans aren't the most desirable servants, but we stick around primarily because their limited genetic fabrication processes do not allow for the easy cultivation of psionic talent. That's something they have to find, and fortunately for them, latent psionic ability is decently common in human life, about found in maybe 5% of the population. Every illithid is psionic, of course, but given there are so few of them, they're better off recruiting and awakening humans (brainwashing and torturing these latent psionics until they have a massive seizure and their powers awaken). Human thralls may serve as guards, hunters, assassins, spies, and laborers, depending on their abilities, which vary from the spectacular, to the pathetic, to the grotesque. If they are exceptionally powerful and the brainwashing and awakening haven't totally fried their brains, they might even be allowed to serve as technicians. 

When the Emperor died, this didn't just represent the head of the state being eliminated, but essentially a universal collapse in long range communication for the illithid empire. The Emperor was less of a ruler and more of a gestalt consciousness of minds, broadcasting a psychic signal that interfaced with all illithid technology, allowing for easy and near instant psionic communication between the most disparate reaches of the empire. The Emperor's minds also dictated much of the empire's actions, with a cold, emotionless sort of logic, coordinating its actions like some sort of galaxy spanning brain. In its absence, flayers have had to adapt, and many are attempting to replicate the role of the Emperor with psionic fulcrums of their own design. Such creations take the form of massive brains, the first of which were allegedly seeded from bits of the Eternal Emperor's very own grey matter. These brains are large enough they need supportive scaffolding as to not collapse under their own weight. They're effectively very powerful supercomputers, able to perform thousands of complex calculations in mere seconds, broadcast psionic signals across countries, and coordinate between one another. Their maintenance is of utmost importance to a colony, who tend to them fervently, with a sort of religious devotion. Thralls gently scrub away any dirt or grime that collects on their bulk, moisten them with fluid, and prune any tumorous growths that are skewing calculations. Technicians attune to the brains psionically, reading their output and feeding them fresh data, while monitoring their output to make sure it seems consistent with reality. 

These brain computers would be incredible if not for the fact that they all tend to be mildly sapient and in possession of a conscious will. Unlike the supposedly dispassionate, analytical Emperor, they have obsessions, fears, desires, and grudges. This fact makes them unpredictable at times, and if not properly cared for, they may even attempt to enthrall their entire colony for their own usage. Leadership in any given colony is split somewhat haphazardly between these machines and a handful of mind flayers, and at any moment, a brutal power struggle could emerge between the two. If the computers weren't essential for coordination between and within colonies, it would be easy to leave the technology behind, but so far nobody's found a better alternative, and so they remain.

Growing Pains

This is true of much of what the illithids do. A colony is full of half measures and band-aids, solutions are often simply tourniquets wrapped around a bleeding stump, hastily tied to afford the colony just a little more time. Their reliance on unclean and chaotic biological technology, as well as unpredictable and, by comparison, ineffectual human psionics, is utterly infuriating for them. They are constantly searching for ways to return to their former levels of heightened psionic technology, and constantly failing. Most illithids are old enough to remember the twilight years of their empire, and are consequently filled with fury when they contemplate how far they have fallen. Younger illithids are a rarity, for producing them is perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, for those who remember how easy child rearing once was.

Illithid spawn are small, voracious tadpoles, that look something like tiny squid. They spend the early days of their life suspended in shallow pools of brine, where they drift aimlessly, eating any biological material they come into contact with. Once they're large enough (about the size of your index finger), they're plucked from their pool, and inserted into a suitable host. They will move towards the host's skull, devour most of its brain, before connecting their nervous system with that of the host body, wiring directly into their brain stem. At this point, they fill the entire cranial cavity of the host, and will begin to slowly make changes to their claimed body. They remove and eat the eyes, protruding a set of temporary sensory organs through the empty lids, these can sense light, but can't see very well. Their other tentacles pass through the body's mouth. This is what they will look like for a few months, though their body will quickly begin to change as the growing illithid secretes a set of appropriating hormones. The body's skin will shed, revealing a new, oily purple layer of the epidermis. The skull will soften, giving way to the squid's head, now finally fit with proper eyes. Their brain is soaking up knowledge like a sponge at this point in time, especially from other mature mind flayers, from whom it may inherit some basic personality traits and short memories. At this point, it's ready to go to work

The process is unwieldy, even at the best of times. In the days of the empire, there was a species of host bodies grown by illithids, to smooth the whole process out. You can tell if an illithid was born before the fall if they only have four fingers, a telltale sign that one of these host bodies was used to usher them into the world. The host brains were theoretically functional, but each body was functionally not alive, they lacked any sort of subjectivity. Now, without these bodies, illithids must be implanted into humans, who do have such subjectivity. This makes things messy, because newborn illithids will inherit some of their memories or quirks, which makes them particularly unruly. The vast majority of these new converts are still illithids at heart, they have the same deep seated hatred for our kind, but their nostalgia for the empire is foggier, and sometimes nonexistent. This has lead to a deep generational divide in their societies, yet another conflict bubbling beneath the surface, ready to boil over at any point in time.

The Plan

Even amidst their lack of coordination, their limited resources, and their unwinnable situation, they continue to plan. There is no unified goal amongst illithid colonies, indeed they often hate one another nearly as much as they hate us, but something of a doctrine has emerged over the years.

They are dedicated to secrecy above all. None can know they exist, that they move against the world in the shadows. Any action that would expose their existence is tantamount to suicide. If a colony intends to throw off their cowl, to break the masquerade, they will be dealt with swiftly. Any humans who witness an illithid are likewise dispatched with extreme prejudice. There can be no possibility of discovery.

Many of their dreams of world domination are stifled by a lack of technology and manpower, so they continue to work. Every colony is trying its best to advance its technology as quickly as possible. As said above, they often fail, but breakthroughs are being made every year. There is a slow, definite creep forward amongst the most prominent groups. 

Of course, if overt domination is a no go, that makes something more covert a rather attractive option. The most ordinary seeming of thralls become spies, living in human society, carrying about their daily tasks as normal. Many are installed in positions with proximity to power. Through these means they have learned much of our world's culture, our art, philosophy, ideals, religions. They have learned how deeply we can hate one another, and conversely, how deeply we love as well. 

They despise us all the same. Every new drop of information is read through eyes clouded by venom, poured over and examined with the same disgust one might regard a particularly unusual insect with. Each new fact about us is more kindling to stoke the cold fire in their hearts, to steel their resolve and push them to new heights of depraved cruelty. At night, when their brain activity drops into what could only barely be called sleep, I suppose they dream of the day in which they can cast off the shadows settled like a cloak about their existence and scour this world of our presence. I suppose they wake up grief stricken at this fantasy's current impossibility. I suppose, it is possible they spend some mornings weeping, if they are capable of such a thing. Only our destruction can make them whole, only our sorrow will bring them joy. One day their dream will be realized, maybe one day soon. Until that day comes, they will work ceaselessly to bring it about, so they continue to work in the darkness. For now.

*Gelatinous Motherfucking Cubes, baby. 

Hobgoblinization: A Dubiously Canonical Exploration

In the most recent version of my setting, I've been moving towards a model where the different fantasy peoples of the world are more like separate species from one another, that is, they probably can't make babies due to divergent or entirely separate evolutionary history and genetics. The gods are only dubiously real, and everything you can play as either evolved biologically or was created via magic by someone a bit later down the line (ie beastfolk). The three big groups in my mind are humans (we're basically the same), elves (they're weird and mostly extinct space aliens), and orcs/goblins, who oscillate between being a very bespoke sort of beastfolk, some sort of alternate branch of primate evolution that also yielded intelligence, or creatures from an alternate dimension who've been stranded on Coris for a few thousand years. I can't decide which one I like better, though I think the first and third options are probably more believable, since they make more sense as to why they haven't outcompeted humans or vice versa. Whatever the case, I want them to feel a bit weird biologically speaking, so here's an idea I'm tossing out to see how it feels in my mouth.

Goblins have a larval tadpole stage like frogs. They are born in clutches of a few dozen, deposited into a local pond where they will eat and be eaten, until few are left, perhaps 5 or 6. Once they're nice and docile, around when their sharp teeth fall out and their "social" teeth grow in, they'll be taken back into the house and reared as standard citizens. The normal ailments that affect human children still weigh on these baby goblins, so it's very possible only one will live to see adulthood. Hobgoblins, which humans erroneously think of as a separate subspecies of goblins, are merely the goblin aristocracy, who have learned to take advantage of this process.

To make a hobgoblin, you need three things: food, warmth, and high humidity. For most, the mundane realities of life make this difficult; goblins live in the Northern reaches of Lakarta where the weather is cold, and for most food is a bit scarce. Those who can make hobgoblins are the aristocracy of the goblin world, able to afford these things with ease. Here's what they do. First, they construct a large subterranean chamber, dig out a pool, and fill the room with heated water.  When the clutch of baby goblins are welcomed into the world, a select few are hand picked by parents, typically the largest or healthiest looking. The other tadpoles will be fed to these heirs, who will also be fed on a rich diet, mostly meat, while spending their time lounging around in their warm, muggy basement chambers. They will grow exceptionally plump when fed with a steady supply of food. Fat little amphibians, cooing happily as they soak in their muggy ponds, exceptionally cute, but for the chicken blood staining their lips. After a few months, their time in the pond will end, and they will begin to grow prodigiously. A hobgoblin child is quite large compared to a goblin child, and that difference will continue into adulthood. Hobgoblins are typically around 6 feet tall, whereas goblins sit more in the 3-4 foot range. Nearly every old money aristocrat you meet will be a hobgoblin, to usher one's progeny into the world in such a way is seen as a beautiful, honorable thing.

This process happens because young goblins have a genetic switch that fires off when they're in a resource rich environment. Their body detects the glut of food, the luxurious temperature, and the rich atmosphere, and begins increasing their hunger signals and pumping out growth hormones. The original home of the goblins was a tempestuous place, where the environment could theoretically change on a dime, so they evolved to take advantage of good times with they could, growing at a rapid pace. This happens to older goblins too, but the effects are lessened, typically they'll only gain an inch or two. Ogre-making takes advantage of this process. A baby goblin is selected, much as one is in a hobgoblin clutch, and fed consistently for months, while their growth hormones are augmented with transmutation magic, turning them into veritable behemoths.

Yeah, I think that's too weird for my tastes. I'll file it away for some other project.

Grief and Something Else

 

Four weeks ago a vet came to the house to put our cat Wilson down. Wilson had been sick for a few months, but we hadn’t quite realized the severity of his condition. The main symptom was a near total loss of appetite, and given the spell of nausea coincided with a painful dental operation to remove three of his teeth, we assumed it was simply too painful for him to eat. We found out about the stomach tumor later, after he continued to refuse food. His last few weeks were full of discomfort, which we did our best to treat with a cocktail of drugs; a steroid, an opiate, a nausea suppressant, for a while an appetite stimulant. 

He was fat and strong, giving him the medicine was always incredibly difficult because of this. He could push you away so easily, dig his claws into your arm and shove, refusing the things that would make him feel better with a stupid, stubborn determination. To administer them we had to use two people, my father and my mother most times, but I stood in for her while she was at work. On the second to last day of his life, I remember how strongly he smelled of vomit as we worked, and how frustrated he was. After he was given the syringe, I remember him letting out the single most soul rending wail I’d heard him make. It broke my heart. He was the gentlest creature you'd ever meet, he deserved this least of anyone.

Yesterday, my father found a kitten in the middle of the road. He was in poor shape, flea ridden, eyes infected, dirty, the works. My father brought him home, then to the vet, then back to our house. It’s likely we won’t keep him, but for the past 48 hours we’ve been his caretakers before he gets sent to the shelter. He’s so cute I can’t imagine he’ll spend long waiting for a home. He is a fuzzy little thing, tenacious and loud, a very squeaky little animal. He’s got a perfectly symmetrical little tuxedo pattern on his body, and a stupidly cute heart shaped birthmark on the central paw pad of his bottom left leg. He is perfect. He is 4 weeks old.

As I scoop him up in a towel and feed him with the same syringe my father used to administer medicine to Wilson, the symmetry is inescapable. Unlike Wilson, [he’s so small he can’t fight back/his life is just beginning/he stops fighting once he tastes the food/he eats, with gusto]. I think especially about how much time I’ve spent in bathrooms alone with cats this year.

Those last few days, Wilson retreated behind the toilet, where I would sit with him, crying, petting him, tunelessly humming “I’m on Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. It was another former cat’s favorite song, the music we played for her when she died of a tumor much like his. Wilson wasn’t so sophisticated as to have an opinion on music, but in my grief it’s the only thing that made sense to do, so I sang, poorly. Now as I scoop this new furball off the floor and into my arms, to administer his antibiotic, no sound escapes my lips, but The Boss is certainly on my mind, his old refrain tugging on my heartstrings; “Hey little girl is your daddy home, did he go and leave you all alone…”

I push the syringe into his mouth once more, and he accepts it. He licks his lips after the liquid runs down his throat, looking up at me with uncomprehending baby blue eyes. I dream of the life he’ll have, the beautiful home, the love he’ll experience. He has no name as of yet, but I hope, I dream, against all odds, that they’ll name him Wilson. 

It's a good name.

 

Thinking About Martial Realism in D&D

In the D&D discourse I've observed it is often supposed that in 5th Edition, spellcasters are more powerful than non-spellcasters (henceforth referred to as martials). Whether or not you agree with that doesn't matter, this is mostly just an exercise in categorization of game styles. Examining the way that this divide is treated and/or solved is valuable, even if it doesn't, so let's just pretend it does.

If you're not familiar with the argument I'm discussing, the very very basic idea is just that people feel like spellcasters do a lot more in comparison to martial characters, and often there's a lot of hay being made about whether or not that's true and how to fix it. Generally there's this worry that martial characters being balanced according to spellcasters will break realism in some way, which is what I'm thinking about now. 

Often a lot of people's proposed solution to the divide includes giving martials more impressive stuff to do, because a big area of dissatisfaction is that their higher level abilities are more conservative in comparison to spellcasters' toys. A level 20 fighter gets 4 attacks, lots of HP, and the ability to shrug off a few effects, while wizards get the ability to summon meteors, teleport across the world, and travel between dimensions. Jealously eyeing the wizard's lunch, some people feel that your 20th level fighter should be endowed with Herculean, mythological strength. They should be able to cover great distances with a single bound, and cut through steel, and use your favorite daily ability from 4th edition, yada yada, blah blah blah. 

When this idea is brought up, other people get upset because they want what the martial classes can do to feel more or less plausible for a normal human being to achieve, and then everyone fights about what realism means and why we should/shouldn't care about it in our games. I think a good overview of the different desires folks have for martials can be found rather succinctly here, in the TV Tropes article on Charles Atlas Superpowers. You can read through the article if you'd like, but I'll do my best to summarize the parts that I consider essential to the discussion here. 

The Part of the Article in Which I Paraphrase TV Tropes at You

So, Charles Atlas Superpowers are superpowers that one gets through doing a lot of training. In the classical example, there's basically nothing magical about them at all, they're just the result of someone pushing human capabilities to their absolute physical limit through dedicated training. I believe the Ur-example of this is Batman and all of the nonsense we're told he can pull off by being crazy prepared, or from the techniques he learned training with monks, so on and so forth. The article describes the trope as having several gradients to it though, essentially splitting this trope into two. From the article itself:

Or, to put it a different way, there are essentially two different variations on this trope. The first, "Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers", is the western version and has the character performing feats that are not strictly realistic, but at least seem plausible enough...The second, "Skill-Trumps-Physics", has the character performing feats that are out-and-out impossible in real life, with an explanation not attributed to any Applied Phlebotinum but instead because "they are just that damn good".

Hey, look at that, we've got our two groups! Even better, 3rd Edition D&D is directly sighted as having a fair heaping of this trope, especially on the more fantastical side of things. I wasn't around for that one so I'll just have to take their word for it. Another quote that I find quite instructive, from later in the same paragraph:

The line between the variations can be messy and subjective, but as a brief example: a climber who can consistently scale a rock wall faster than the world-record holders would be ["Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers"], a climber who can scale a sandstorm would be ["Skill-Trumps-Physics"], and someone who can climb a slick glass skyscraper would be somewhere in between.

Whether you want Charles Atlas Superpowers at all in your game, and to what degree you'd like them, is something that's highly variable. Some people are going to be okay with the mundane players in the party basically being humans of average capability, while others are going to want their martial characters to be highly competent, but still within the ballpark of plausible human achievement. Some people, as mentioned, want their martials to be Hercules. I think these are all very acceptable positions to hold, and it sounds like they're going to be suited to different styles of gameplay more often than not. I'm partial to the middle of this scale, at least because it really gets my goat when someone can level a city block and the only explanation as to why is "he's a really good warrior," at least in the context of the world I'm trying to construct. 

I wrote this post because I suspect if we have some slightly more sophisticated language we can sidestep more of those disagreements about realism and the like, I thought this was a suitable frame to examine things within. Often I see people express surprise at folks who argue against the far end of this scale. Sometimes they feel the need to point out the fairly obvious fact that D&D is already highly unrealistic to these folks, without considering that there are degrees to this. I like cool powers and I like PCs being able to do incredible things, but even so, sometimes something not being magic just feels implausible. If you don't mind that, more power to you! I can totally imagine a game where I wouldn't care in the slightest. More often than not though, that's not the game I'm playing.

Addendum: Categorizing the Classes

Let's take a look at 5e's classes and see if we can categorize them as "Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers" or "Skill-Trumps-Physics".

Out of the running right away, we have the pure spellcasting classes, which means Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer, Druid, Cleric, and Bard are straight up magicians. Artificers, Paladins, and Rangers are out too, on account of their half caster status. That leaves us with four remaining classes, the pure martial characters: Barbarians, Fighters, Monks, and Rogues. 

Now with these four classes things get a little weird as to where they fall on the scale. I'm fairly certain two have actual superpowers. The Barbarian's base class doesn't do a whole lot of magical crap, so they could qualify as a member of the Charles Atlas club in theory, but a whopping 7 out of 9 of their subclasses have very clear magical abilities, and the two that don't are widely considered to be the worst subclasses the Barbarian has to offer. In practice, you will never meet a nonmagical barbarian. Monks are the other culprit, and let's be honest, they're basically just wizards who went to the Jujutsu Kaisen school of spellcraft. If you squint you could maybe suggest that Drunken Master and Open Hand are mundane, but if the class isn't supernatural, all of its abilities are at the far, far end of "Skill-Trumps-Physics." This seems like the right place to stick both of these classes to me, since they could trend more or less magical depending on player choice, and I'm inclined to just take the average. Anecdotally, I think this is also a good place to stick their capabilities since I've heard folks who prefer a bit more mundane martial classes express disdain for the pseudo-magical powers they possess. 

That leaves us with 2 character classes remaining, the Fighter and the Rogue. I'm honestly a little surprised that these are the only two we can plausibly call normal or low-atlas, I guess I never realized how limited the selection of nonmagical guys is in 5th edition. Even amongst these two classes, there's a fair amount of supernatural dickery happening in the subclasses; 3 of the rogue's 9 options, and 5 of the fighter's 10 are magical. Without those in the mix, the high level rogues and fighters can both do some crazy stuff, but I think it's safe to say they're still mostly normal guys, so we're going to throw them in the "Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers" bin. Poor, lonely fellas. 

Addendum 2: An Alternative Approach

Draw Steel, MCDM's flagship roleplaying game, is not particularly concerned with realism or simulation, it's a very game-y game. Even still, I appreciate it's approach to this, it feels pretty in line with what I'm looking for. If we were to categorize Draw Steel's classes like 5e's we'd find pretty quickly that there are very few options you can consider non-magical (or non-supernatural, I guess, since psionics are a distinct thing from magic which throws things off). In fact, I think there's only one, and that's the Tactician, which is essentially our Fighter rep. Everything else, the Fury, the Shadow, and the Null (vaguely analogous to the Barbarian, Rogue, and Monk), all have some pretty explicitly magical stuff going on. The Fury can make portals to the primordial chaos, the Shadow is basically nightcrawler, the Null is very explicitly a psychic. Amongst all of the very supernatural shenanigans, I think the Tactician is really the perfect sort of mundane character, since their abilities don't really have to get all that weird. They're a support oriented class, a high degree of their abilities are focused on directing their allies to strike or reposition. This means the Tactician effectively scales with the rest of the party's crazy magic by using the rest of their party as weapons. I like it, something about it feels very Captain America to me, where their strength is focused on directing their teammates to higher highs. A good way to have your cake and eat it too.

Quickie: Dragonslayer Fever

Toxoplasma Gondii is a parasitic organism that can only reproduce in the guts of cats. When cats poop, it spreads to rats (when they eat the poop, gross, I know), where it then proceeds to affect their mental state, preventing them from feeling fear at the presence of cats. The rats get eaten, then the cat has the parasite in its stomach, and the cycle starts all over again.

Dragonslayer Fever is a disease caused by a similar parasite, except this one needs, as the name might imply, humanoids and dragons. The most common means of infection is by handling gold from a dragon's horde, which can carry such parasites for several months if it is not properly decontaminated. 

It is a very dangerous infection, often highly lethal. The main symptom is courage. Dragons are (super)naturally terrifying beings, but those who have contracted dragonslayer fever meet them with unshakeable resolve. Combine that with a highly honed urge to seek out dragons and to do violence to them and you have a perfectly honed recipe for dying a glorious death. If one is infected for long enough, the disease will erode their fear response to the point that basically nothing phases the sickened individual, much to their detriment. The disease is often misinterpreted as heroism or spectacular bravery, and indeed many a village hero has secretly been harboring such a parasite, driving them to take on greater and stupider challenges as their risk assessment atrophies to the point of uselessness.  

In mechanical terms, they get advantage vs fear effects caused by dragons after the first week, then advantage vs all fear effects after two. After two more weeks, they are completely immune to fear. Every week after the second, their wisdom score (or system equivalent) decreases by 1, down to a reasonable lower limit (they're not complete idiots, it would probably cap off around leaving them with a modifier -2 or 3. The disease won't kill them by reducing the stat to 0 if that's something your system cares about.) Their wisdom decreasing also makes the infected individual worse at saves against charm in my system of choice (5e, lol) which feels right somehow.

I've heard that toxoplasma gondii causes rats to associate the smell of cat urine with sex, so maybe that's what's going on here, the idea of killing dragons is getting your fighter hot and bothered, to the point that his mind is so distracted he can't put up proper defenses against the charm effects of the green dragon they're fighting. That's why it makes clerics worse at spellcasting too, thinking too many impure thoughts, your god does not approve of such lasciviousness. 

Chainlink #6: The Mimic*

Mimics are an utterly undying myth amongst adventure seekers, dungeon delvers, and treasure hunters of all stripes, an infamous tall tale that is earnestly believed by few but known by all. Living, gummy, rapacious chests, hiding down dark corridors in the forgotten catacombs of yore, an ambush predator whose proverbial lantern lure is greed. As stated, it's a common story, and a wrong one, but truth aside, it's easy to understand why it's so persistent. Adventurers live dangerous lives in search of treasure, and what could be more painful than death right before the moment of ultimate triumph? You're right on the cusp of having enough money to pay off your debts, maybe even enough to buy yourself a new horse without a limp, and blam, you're being gnawed on by a ridiculously ostentatious and slimy box. Beyond that, mimics are a good representation of the fear one feels of all monsters, the challenge that they pose, keeping you from the insurmountable wealth that surely must be just around the corner.

Sages claim that mimics are an impossibility, for such exact precision is simply beyond the natural world. Wizards claim that it would be so difficult to create an organism like the mimic through arcane means would be far too difficult to justify as opposed to a magical trap. Priests claim God created animals before man created furniture, so a creature suited to mimic such objects is a simple impossibility. Evolutionary Biologists (whoever they are) claim that the likelihood of a creature specializing in chest mimicry is very very low for a number of reasons, low enough that it's doubtful such a creature could ever exist. Pretty unanimous consensus all around, mimics are fake. 

Man, sorta anticlimactic isn't it? But it's almost the end of the month, so maybe it's for the best it was a short post. Less of a scramble, y'know?

Hey wait wasn't there an asterisk in the title?

*: The Dungeon Squid

The name is a misnomer, they're really more closely related to octopi.

They're a rarity amongst cephalopods in that they eschew the water in favor of drier land, but they still avoid the surface, more for light reasons than anything else. Their favored environment is the subterranean, where they clung to cave walls and slithered through crevasses for millennia, undisturbed by mortals, the inhabitants of an utterly alien world beneath our feet. When we started tunneling into their caves to build catacombs and prisons, they took notice. Corpses and prisoners were easy food and weren't missed too much, and most who were in a position to take advantage of these food sources quickly learned how to avoid the priests and wardens that shepherded these spaces (unless they were especially hungry). Eventually our first catacombs and dungeons would sink deeper into the weary earth on their journey to the underworld, and they made themselves fully at home; even though the food had long since dried up, they made good nests. When other weirder, scarier, monstrous things had the same idea, they got good at hiding. Elastic, pliable bodies meant they could fit almost anywhere they wanted, within reason. 

They especially like boxes, for instance, but they'll take anything they can get. Crawlspaces, coffins, trash chutes, armor (maybe even animated armor if they're delicate while getting in), basically any container or hard to reach place. They're good at getting into secret passages and rooms too, partly because of that elasticity, partly because they're also really smart (maybe a bit smarter than your average adventurer). Most monsters, or rather, most bestial monsters, don't have a purpose for treasure or an interest in finding secret passages, so they go unexamined, and the squids get left alone. Adventurers on the other hand, are much more likely to encounter said creatures, which makes sense since a lot of their work involves looking for things that are well hidden. An unfortunate amount of time, that thing turns out to be a 200 pound invertebrate,  who's grumpy about the torchlight and the draft and the oily fingers poking at its eyeball.

Of course, a dungeon is typically confusing, weird, frightening, and above all else, dark, so when your buddy Johan throws a chest open and starts getting choked out by tentacles and slammed on the ground, it's very easy to think "Holy fuck that chest is eating him!" Not many people are aware that they're actually squids; outside of their hiding holes they can be pretty stealthy, you see, so most folks just see the tentacles and the chest and assume they're one and the same. Of course, as adventurers get more common in a given dungeon, squids will typically learn to avoid chests and other containers which look like they might have valuables to plunder. Alternatively, if one is particularly hungry, it might learn to use chests more proactively, as a lure for unsuspecting humanoids. Be suspicious of chests in otherwise safe chambers.

While interaction between squids and humans are often antagonistic, they don't have to be. Squids will often greet (in a metaphorical sense, as they are unlikely to reveal themselves to you at all) humans with curiosity, if not disturbed or attacked. Indeed, they are sometimes even able to be bribed with meat or other such food. Some even understand the concepts of trade and barter (in a very loose sense) and will try and present you with baubles in exchange for your salt pork, or mastiff, or halfling. 

Biologically speaking, they're also close relatives to ropers (or maybe the same species, haven't decided yet). Their skin is typically mottled gray but they can shift color a bit (they tend to look dull, okay in low light). Their eyesight is pretty good in the dark but bright light makes them uncomfortable, maybe like a quasi-sunlight sensitivity trait.  

If you can talk to them, via speak with animals (or some such equivalent ability), they'll be intelligent, but weird. You can probably strike a pretty handy deal with them, but don't expect them to understand sentiment, or empathy, or morality. Also be aware that at any time they might get hungry and think "hey, why the hell don't I just eat the smallest one and run away?" They're intelligent, but they're still wild animals (and also total bastards).