I heard it snarl before I saw it. It was chasing a deer, noticed me, stopped and just sat there staring at me about 50 yds away across a little valley, not menacing towards me, more curious. I put my hands on my head to try to “look big”. After a while of us staring at each other, I lost my nerve and backed away and then sprinted away towards a nearby street. It didn’t chase. Based on the ease with which it leaped up that hill after the deer, it obviously could have caught me if it wanted to. Funnily enough I met someone else on the trail just afterwards, told him there was a mountain lion, and he was like "where?"and ran towards where I saw it… This was in southern California.

Pillars of Eternity was moddable only because it was written in C# (Unity iirc), making it possible (though not straightforward) to more or less modify the code however you want. So a mod was essentially a bunch of overwritten classes.

A game that you could literally just fork on GitHub and change things would certainly be moddable in a sense… Handling multiple mods without conflicts, however, is another thing. For that you need a proper modding interface, like the original Baldur’s Gate or Skyrim.

I’m the same way. I play music solely for fun, by myself. I love playing with others as well, but even in the times in my life when I was lucky enough to be able to do that I still would play music by myself. Common attitudes about music are really toxic imo. Music is at its best when it is free, live, amateur, and enjoyed alone or with close friends, not for an audience with outsized expectations based on the ubiquity of recorded professional music.

Fresh bamboo shoots.

A certain wotc module has a level 2 party fight a suicidal enemy with Fireball in a small room. Also the fireball does necrotic damage just to make sure no one can resist it. Went exactly as you’d expect. I haven’t read the module myself so not sure if the DM messed something up or what. I thought it was hilarious but the other players all rage quit so that campaign ended there.

Most humans believe in magic in some form (gods, spirits, miracles, astrology, etc) so we don’t have to guess how people would respond if they believed reality was irrational. They rationalize it endlessly and try desperately not to look at the parts that make no sense.

All I remember from that game is some character named Xai or something like that. Xain? That and the world map was cool.

Overworld theme and Dead Sea tracks are phenomenal.

Are any of these monster books actually good? The fact they don’t seem to have sample monsters makes me doubt it.