I'm picturing Car Wars or Twisted Metal, but with dragons.
I'm thinking more along the lines of "here's a 87 toyota camry, and forty thousand dollars. go kill that dragon, but the car has to be what lands the fatal blow"
Does it count if the car explodes?
yes, but getting to keep the car is part of the rewards. so, you know.
but, if it's a real cool explosion it might be exciting and that could get a better reward from the terminally bored immortal duke.
D&D has a lot of deeply racist stuff stuck in it still, even still baked into some mechanics when it comes to racial traits
it's something that super pisses me off and I desperately try and remember to avoid whenever possible
You know I hadn’t thought about it much before, but I can see what you mean. Some of them make sense, like dark vision or physical resistance, since they’re directly linked to physical traits. You hit a grey area with something like raw intelligence though, and by the time you get to stuff like “all Kobolds are cowards” you’re barrelling into the centre of Gross Town with no brakes.
"all orcs and to a lesser but still present degree all half-orcs hear the voice of their very evil orc god telling them to be angry violent psychopaths in the backs of their heads all the time" is another great one that seems to still be around in 5E, somehow
In other news, it looks highly likely that I will be running a Genesys-based Cyberpunk game in the Android setting soon (the fan supplement is good enough to get us started). Now I need to get these nascent ideas / themes a little more formed. I know I want to play around with clone cults, doing some exploration of how Bioroids and other brainmapped AI are still fundamentally human in some ways (since their brains are based off of human minds), class issues, and maybe mirroring the clone cult stuff with a cult of AIs who are trying to bring about a ‘pure’ AI not based off of the map of some human’s brain.
This wouldn't happen to be an online game, would it? Cause that sounds awesome
It is going to be a real-life game. Well, assuming I have a a fourth player.
It’s kind of funny that I am basically going to turn the PCs into shadowrunners, since those don’t exactly exist in the game-world as written (unless you count the Infiltration Card game they discontinued).
There's still hit squads, black ops and private security galore in Android. It's just not overtly militarized in the same way Shadowrun's kevlar laced office walls are.
In general the big thing is that a group of problem solvers like that isn't going to be independent but tied to either a strong ideology (and have very short lives) or a strong power bloc/corporate interest. It's important to remember than SanSan is a mega city where like, 60% of it is a shit hole no one with money cares about outside of data raking some ad views or gentrifying for political acquisition. There's tons of places for shady, overtly violent things to happen.
Other than that I super suggest reading Monster Slayer: The camp but mostly fun book about Reina Roja's life as an ideologically driven operator in SanSan.
In terms of the stuff about alternate labour and sentience there's actually a good lore end to tug on: Haas Bioroid actually provides mid and high level Bioroids with a pittance of a salary. Mostly for the experimental question of what they would even spend their money on. One example provided is a bar that was going out of business due to all the laborers it used to have as customers being replaced by Bioroids. That is until one bioroid came in, sat down and started playing Chess. Now the bar's a board game club with a clientele of mostly bioroids.
I'm also happy to drag out my world of Android book if you have any questions before the full Genesys supplement comes out.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
In completely other news, my Actual Play thread of Marvel's Agents of STRIKE just wrapped up Season 3. The thread is now caught up, more or less, with the actual real life game so now's a great time to check it out as there's not going to be new installments for several months.
It's definitely one of the very best games I've ever gotten to be a player in and being able to share it with people on PA and have like, fans! - who want to know about our characters and the game system and what happens next - has been such a stupidly cool feeling.
"all orcs and to a lesser but still present degree all half-orcs hear the voice of their very evil orc god telling them to be angry violent psychopaths in the backs of their heads all the time" is another great one that seems to still be around in 5E, somehow
I feel there's a needle to thread here about freeing orcs from the influence of their god, but it will take a better writer than I to make it.
"all orcs and to a lesser but still present degree all half-orcs hear the voice of their very evil orc god telling them to be angry violent psychopaths in the backs of their heads all the time" is another great one that seems to still be around in 5E, somehow
I feel there's a needle to thread here about freeing orcs from the influence of their god, but it will take a better writer than I to make it.
I dunno if it'd be that hard, just play it like Immortan Joe and his War Boys
Another way to do orcs is what I’ve done for goblins for... huh, years now. That must be the only consistent thing in my games!
Yeah, so, goblins are just whatever group of short nearly-people that civilised folk don’t know enough about.
So I have bat-head communal goblins, 3 foot mud elemental goblins, gooey goblins that wear seashells, decadent pig goblins that steal and wear noble clothing and jewellery in unconventional ways, psychotic little hairless cat goblins...
That way you can run the whole gambit of orc, from fanatical berserkers with tusks to basically green muscle elves.
Edit: Alternate post—Change stuff up it is fun and stops stuff from becoming a dead horse to beat.
Another way to do orcs is what I’ve done for goblins for... huh, years now. That must be the only consistent thing in my games!
Yeah, so, goblins are just whatever group of short nearly-people that civilised folk don’t know enough about.
So I have bat-head communal goblins, 3 foot mud elemental goblins, gooey goblins that wear seashells, decadent pig goblins that steal and wear noble clothing and jewellery in unconventional ways, psychotic little hairless cat goblins...
That way you can run the whole gambit of orc, from fanatical berserkers with tusks to basically green muscle elves.
Edit: Alternate post—Change stuff up it is fun and stops stuff from becoming a dead horse to beat.
All of my goblins are Gobbos, who are frat-bro douchebags.
There is nothing inherently awful about them but their culture is the culmination of every worst aspect of America's toxic masculinity.
In other news, it looks highly likely that I will be running a Genesys-based Cyberpunk game in the Android setting soon (the fan supplement is good enough to get us started). Now I need to get these nascent ideas / themes a little more formed. I know I want to play around with clone cults, doing some exploration of how Bioroids and other brainmapped AI are still fundamentally human in some ways (since their brains are based off of human minds), class issues, and maybe mirroring the clone cult stuff with a cult of AIs who are trying to bring about a ‘pure’ AI not based off of the map of some human’s brain.
This wouldn't happen to be an online game, would it? Cause that sounds awesome
It is going to be a real-life game. Well, assuming I have a a fourth player.
It’s kind of funny that I am basically going to turn the PCs into shadowrunners, since those don’t exactly exist in the game-world as written (unless you count the Infiltration Card game they discontinued).
There's still hit squads, black ops and private security galore in Android. It's just not overtly militarized in the same way Shadowrun's kevlar laced office walls are.
In general the big thing is that a group of problem solvers like that isn't going to be independent but tied to either a strong ideology (and have very short lives) or a strong power bloc/corporate interest. It's important to remember than SanSan is a mega city where like, 60% of it is a shit hole no one with money cares about outside of data raking some ad views or gentrifying for political acquisition. There's tons of places for shady, overtly violent things to happen.
Other than that I super suggest reading Monster Slayer: The camp but mostly fun book about Reina Roja's life as an ideologically driven operator in SanSan.
In terms of the stuff about alternate labour and sentience there's actually a good lore end to tug on: Haas Bioroid actually provides mid and high level Bioroids with a pittance of a salary. Mostly for the experimental question of what they would even spend their money on. One example provided is a bar that was going out of business due to all the laborers it used to have as customers being replaced by Bioroids. That is until one bioroid came in, sat down and started playing Chess. Now the bar's a board game club with a clientele of mostly bioroids.
I'm also happy to drag out my world of Android book if you have any questions before the full Genesys supplement comes out.
Thanks! I have the Worlds of Android book and have been jotting down ideas out of it for the last couple of weeks. My basic plan is kind of contrived, but the players’ character ideas are kind of all over the place, and only one of them is super into the troupe style game I pitched—where every player would have a PC with a separate major storyline leading toward the same end point, and they would play NPCs when their PC wasn’t the center of the episode. Basically am going to hit them with a massive shared debt / obligation, and an inherited home base area (again heavily influenced by HBS’ Shadowrun games) which is the primary place where they can impact some positive hange if they want. So they have to take on runs to avoid getting murderated or feel better about themselves or whatever.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
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GrogMy sword is only steelin a useful shape.Registered Userregular
Basing fantasy non-human cultures on poc cultures gets shady quickly. Like I've got no problem with modelling orcs after vikings, but when they are mongolian hordes you're getting a yikes from me.
In other news, it looks highly likely that I will be running a Genesys-based Cyberpunk game in the Android setting soon (the fan supplement is good enough to get us started). Now I need to get these nascent ideas / themes a little more formed. I know I want to play around with clone cults, doing some exploration of how Bioroids and other brainmapped AI are still fundamentally human in some ways (since their brains are based off of human minds), class issues, and maybe mirroring the clone cult stuff with a cult of AIs who are trying to bring about a ‘pure’ AI not based off of the map of some human’s brain.
This wouldn't happen to be an online game, would it? Cause that sounds awesome
It is going to be a real-life game. Well, assuming I have a a fourth player.
It’s kind of funny that I am basically going to turn the PCs into shadowrunners, since those don’t exactly exist in the game-world as written (unless you count the Infiltration Card game they discontinued).
There's still hit squads, black ops and private security galore in Android. It's just not overtly militarized in the same way Shadowrun's kevlar laced office walls are.
In general the big thing is that a group of problem solvers like that isn't going to be independent but tied to either a strong ideology (and have very short lives) or a strong power bloc/corporate interest. It's important to remember than SanSan is a mega city where like, 60% of it is a shit hole no one with money cares about outside of data raking some ad views or gentrifying for political acquisition. There's tons of places for shady, overtly violent things to happen.
Other than that I super suggest reading Monster Slayer: The camp but mostly fun book about Reina Roja's life as an ideologically driven operator in SanSan.
In terms of the stuff about alternate labour and sentience there's actually a good lore end to tug on: Haas Bioroid actually provides mid and high level Bioroids with a pittance of a salary. Mostly for the experimental question of what they would even spend their money on. One example provided is a bar that was going out of business due to all the laborers it used to have as customers being replaced by Bioroids. That is until one bioroid came in, sat down and started playing Chess. Now the bar's a board game club with a clientele of mostly bioroids.
I'm also happy to drag out my world of Android book if you have any questions before the full Genesys supplement comes out.
Thanks! I have the Worlds of Android book and have been jotting down ideas out of it for the last couple of weeks. My basic plan is kind of contrived, but the players’ character ideas are kind of all over the place, and only one of them is super into the troupe style game I pitched—where every player would have a PC with a separate major storyline leading toward the same end point, and they would play NPCs when their PC wasn’t the center of the episode. Basically am going to hit them with a massive shared debt / obligation, and an inherited home base area (again heavily influenced by HBS’ Shadowrun games) which is the primary place where they can impact some positive hange if they want. So they have to take on runs to avoid getting murderated or feel better about themselves or whatever.
Considering Android's love of detective stories and corporate mysteries I'd have it be so all the players have to write some sort of debt into their background and then have their new digs provided by someone who brought up all that debt and consolidated the talents of the crew together for their own purposes. Without actually making it clear who they're working for.
Basing fantasy non-human cultures on poc cultures gets shady quickly. Like I've got no problem with modelling orcs after vikings, but when they are mongolian hordes you're getting a yikes from me.
I think, similar to the discussions about Zootopia, the nuances of the discussions here can get confusing very quickly when comparing fantasy to reality. Certainly it's not difficult to find offense when mapping just about any fantasy race to a real-world culture, so I think there's got to be an understanding at the table of what everyone's getting into and what the game is going to be about. I think this ties back into the earlier alignment discussion too: if a player just wants to sit down at the table and smite orcs because she's good and they're bad, she's probably not thinking of the moral implications of Othering a species. On the other hand if players at the table want to use D&D to explore post-modern thought on the virtues of Deontology v Utilitarianism, well they'd probably have to find a smarter DM than me, but more power to them.
For my current game I've set it in 300 AD Rome for a variety of reasons: to take advantage of existing maps, cultural knowledge, imagery, functional government & religions, etc. And also because it's a super interesting time: you've got an established empire in decline, assailed on all sides by 'barbarian' hordes, failing under its bureaucratic weight, wrestling with a cult movement within... There are so many amazing stories to tell, especially when I'm pretty loose with the actual history and timelines of events. So after pitching that idea the group sat down and mapped out who to fit D&D into the 3rd century map. We decided that mapping fantasy races to real world ethnicities, while potentially problematic, was easier and more interesting than not doing that. Romans are Human, Greeks are Dragonborn, Halflings are Spanish, Dwarves are the Gauls, Orcs the Germanic hordes, Goblinkin the Slavs, Goliaths the remnants of Carthage, and so on. Orcs and Goblins are very much 'othered' in this campaign because its from the perspective of the Roman empire. The players are a mix of "I wanna smash" and "I want to lead an interesting politically motivated narrative campaign" so we're kinda working it out as we go along. When/if they eventually go north (the campaign started in Macedonia) to see how the 5th century early Slavic migration has affected the empire, they'll need to decide how they'll deal with it. Whether that be fighting back against the goblinoid hordes themselves, trying to negotiate some kind of deal or relocation program (and with whom exactly would they work this deal?), or finding the route of the problem: Orc tribes displacing them as they run from Gnolls (representing the Huns) led as they are by their Demon God-king. Because at the end of the day we are playing D&D and there's an expectation that the players will eventually become powerful enough to kill a god that's causing all the problems. Not the most intellectual take, but we're not exactly playing Shadowrun either.
You could go the opposite direction with the Orc Problem by getting rid of the premise of villages, societies and young. They are a baleful force that appears when darkness covers the land and wicked hearts crave power. They emerge fully formed from nowhere as evil grows.
Basing fantasy non-human cultures on poc cultures gets shady quickly. Like I've got no problem with modelling orcs after vikings, but when they are mongolian hordes you're getting a yikes from me.
Warhammer mapped orcs to football hooligans which was a smart play
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
My favored mapping for orcs is ancient Egypt, but I tend towards Greco-Roman really heavily with my own fantasy stuff
What if orcs were the technologically more advanced colonial power?
I don’t have the quote on me but Tolkien supposed that orcs would make WW1/2 level weaponry well before the other races of Middle Earth, mainly because he associated WW2 with pure evil, which, yeah.
Warhammer did a clever job with morality of Orcs/Orrucs/Orks/whatever as well as their culture. They 1) aren't evil, really, just naturally inimical to other life due to an inbuilt urge to scrap and perfectly happy to be that way, 2) don't resent anyone else fighting them at all, and actually love it and 3) at no point in 40K especially are you really the good guys and therefore the moral answer to "is this really morally acceptable?" is "haha no we're playing Inquisitorial henchmen!" and that is part of the game's appeal.
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GrogMy sword is only steelin a useful shape.Registered Userregular
Fuckin love warhammer orks. The only happiness to be found in the grimdarkness.
remember when orc flamers where also metla weapons? that was cool.
also, i figured out the best way to use a car to kill a dragon, but it needs airbags and you need something that can pierce a dragon's hide.
What you're going to want to do is mount a solid steel plate to the front of the car, and to the front of that, mount some long sharpened spikes with explosives inside them - drive the spikes into the dragon, detonate the explosives, the steel plate protects you from the worst of it.
remember when orc flamers where also metla weapons? that was cool.
also, i figured out the best way to use a car to kill a dragon, but it needs airbags and you need something that can pierce a dragon's hide.
What you're going to want to do is mount a solid steel plate to the front of the car, and to the front of that, mount some long sharpened spikes with explosives inside them - drive the spikes into the dragon, detonate the explosives, the steel plate protects you from the worst of it.
nah see, you take the airbag out of the wheel and passenger bit, armour up the driver seat like that car in death proof, then load like a sword of dragon's bane in a steal pipe to act as like a barrel and use the airbag set up and actual airbag as the propulsion. so you crash the car into the dragon doing that sweet sweet car at 100 mph damage, and then the airbag goes off shooting the sword at airbag speeds into the dragon point blank.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
Aww, but I wanted to explode it from the inside out using non-magical weapons!
Enchant the car to phase through solids when you turn on the radio, attach a mining drill to the top of it that isn’t, drive into the mouth with the drill spinning.
Have the car be a real fume fiend, no restrictions to emissions and air/fuel mix so rich it spews gas vapors. Find a dragon lair and park that sucker in idle by the cave entrance and a pipe from the tailpipe inside.
you'd think a creature that lives in active volcanoes full of all sorts of noxious fumes that are deadly to most creatures would not be affected by carbon monoxide poisoning, but you'd be wrong
you know that thing katana wielders do in fiction, where they draw their blade and pass by their opponent, seemingly doing no damage until their target falls in half?
do that in a car, with extreme drifting
bam, no more dragon
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"all orcs and to a lesser but still present degree all half-orcs hear the voice of their very evil orc god telling them to be angry violent psychopaths in the backs of their heads all the time" is another great one that seems to still be around in 5E, somehow
There was nothing like that for half-orcs in 4e. I'd have to double-check for orcs proper.
Posts
yes, but getting to keep the car is part of the rewards. so, you know.
but, if it's a real cool explosion it might be exciting and that could get a better reward from the terminally bored immortal duke.
You know I hadn’t thought about it much before, but I can see what you mean. Some of them make sense, like dark vision or physical resistance, since they’re directly linked to physical traits. You hit a grey area with something like raw intelligence though, and by the time you get to stuff like “all Kobolds are cowards” you’re barrelling into the centre of Gross Town with no brakes.
There's still hit squads, black ops and private security galore in Android. It's just not overtly militarized in the same way Shadowrun's kevlar laced office walls are.
In general the big thing is that a group of problem solvers like that isn't going to be independent but tied to either a strong ideology (and have very short lives) or a strong power bloc/corporate interest. It's important to remember than SanSan is a mega city where like, 60% of it is a shit hole no one with money cares about outside of data raking some ad views or gentrifying for political acquisition. There's tons of places for shady, overtly violent things to happen.
Other than that I super suggest reading Monster Slayer: The camp but mostly fun book about Reina Roja's life as an ideologically driven operator in SanSan.
In terms of the stuff about alternate labour and sentience there's actually a good lore end to tug on: Haas Bioroid actually provides mid and high level Bioroids with a pittance of a salary. Mostly for the experimental question of what they would even spend their money on. One example provided is a bar that was going out of business due to all the laborers it used to have as customers being replaced by Bioroids. That is until one bioroid came in, sat down and started playing Chess. Now the bar's a board game club with a clientele of mostly bioroids.
I'm also happy to drag out my world of Android book if you have any questions before the full Genesys supplement comes out.
It's definitely one of the very best games I've ever gotten to be a player in and being able to share it with people on PA and have like, fans! - who want to know about our characters and the game system and what happens next - has been such a stupidly cool feeling.
I feel there's a needle to thread here about freeing orcs from the influence of their god, but it will take a better writer than I to make it.
I dunno if it'd be that hard, just play it like Immortan Joe and his War Boys
My Steam
Yeah, so, goblins are just whatever group of short nearly-people that civilised folk don’t know enough about.
So I have bat-head communal goblins, 3 foot mud elemental goblins, gooey goblins that wear seashells, decadent pig goblins that steal and wear noble clothing and jewellery in unconventional ways, psychotic little hairless cat goblins...
That way you can run the whole gambit of orc, from fanatical berserkers with tusks to basically green muscle elves.
Edit: Alternate post—Change stuff up it is fun and stops stuff from becoming a dead horse to beat.
The FFG 40K RPGs are so much fun
The combat is so satisfyingly ultraviolent
All of my goblins are Gobbos, who are frat-bro douchebags.
There is nothing inherently awful about them but their culture is the culmination of every worst aspect of America's toxic masculinity.
Down the pub
Depending on the game and the group all of the above.
Thanks! I have the Worlds of Android book and have been jotting down ideas out of it for the last couple of weeks. My basic plan is kind of contrived, but the players’ character ideas are kind of all over the place, and only one of them is super into the troupe style game I pitched—where every player would have a PC with a separate major storyline leading toward the same end point, and they would play NPCs when their PC wasn’t the center of the episode. Basically am going to hit them with a massive shared debt / obligation, and an inherited home base area (again heavily influenced by HBS’ Shadowrun games) which is the primary place where they can impact some positive hange if they want. So they have to take on runs to avoid getting murderated or feel better about themselves or whatever.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
Considering Android's love of detective stories and corporate mysteries I'd have it be so all the players have to write some sort of debt into their background and then have their new digs provided by someone who brought up all that debt and consolidated the talents of the crew together for their own purposes. Without actually making it clear who they're working for.
I think, similar to the discussions about Zootopia, the nuances of the discussions here can get confusing very quickly when comparing fantasy to reality. Certainly it's not difficult to find offense when mapping just about any fantasy race to a real-world culture, so I think there's got to be an understanding at the table of what everyone's getting into and what the game is going to be about. I think this ties back into the earlier alignment discussion too: if a player just wants to sit down at the table and smite orcs because she's good and they're bad, she's probably not thinking of the moral implications of Othering a species. On the other hand if players at the table want to use D&D to explore post-modern thought on the virtues of Deontology v Utilitarianism, well they'd probably have to find a smarter DM than me, but more power to them.
For my current game I've set it in 300 AD Rome for a variety of reasons: to take advantage of existing maps, cultural knowledge, imagery, functional government & religions, etc. And also because it's a super interesting time: you've got an established empire in decline, assailed on all sides by 'barbarian' hordes, failing under its bureaucratic weight, wrestling with a cult movement within... There are so many amazing stories to tell, especially when I'm pretty loose with the actual history and timelines of events. So after pitching that idea the group sat down and mapped out who to fit D&D into the 3rd century map. We decided that mapping fantasy races to real world ethnicities, while potentially problematic, was easier and more interesting than not doing that. Romans are Human, Greeks are Dragonborn, Halflings are Spanish, Dwarves are the Gauls, Orcs the Germanic hordes, Goblinkin the Slavs, Goliaths the remnants of Carthage, and so on. Orcs and Goblins are very much 'othered' in this campaign because its from the perspective of the Roman empire. The players are a mix of "I wanna smash" and "I want to lead an interesting politically motivated narrative campaign" so we're kinda working it out as we go along. When/if they eventually go north (the campaign started in Macedonia) to see how the 5th century early Slavic migration has affected the empire, they'll need to decide how they'll deal with it. Whether that be fighting back against the goblinoid hordes themselves, trying to negotiate some kind of deal or relocation program (and with whom exactly would they work this deal?), or finding the route of the problem: Orc tribes displacing them as they run from Gnolls (representing the Huns) led as they are by their Demon God-king. Because at the end of the day we are playing D&D and there's an expectation that the players will eventually become powerful enough to kill a god that's causing all the problems. Not the most intellectual take, but we're not exactly playing Shadowrun either.
Warhammer mapped orcs to football hooligans which was a smart play
I don’t have the quote on me but Tolkien supposed that orcs would make WW1/2 level weaponry well before the other races of Middle Earth, mainly because he associated WW2 with pure evil, which, yeah.
also, i figured out the best way to use a car to kill a dragon, but it needs airbags and you need something that can pierce a dragon's hide.
What you're going to want to do is mount a solid steel plate to the front of the car, and to the front of that, mount some long sharpened spikes with explosives inside them - drive the spikes into the dragon, detonate the explosives, the steel plate protects you from the worst of it.
nah see, you take the airbag out of the wheel and passenger bit, armour up the driver seat like that car in death proof, then load like a sword of dragon's bane in a steal pipe to act as like a barrel and use the airbag set up and actual airbag as the propulsion. so you crash the car into the dragon doing that sweet sweet car at 100 mph damage, and then the airbag goes off shooting the sword at airbag speeds into the dragon point blank.
Profit?
do that in a car, with extreme drifting
bam, no more dragon
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Do they make RPGs with dragon-scale piercing warheads? I suppose a HEAT round would probably do the trick...
RIFTS
There was nothing like that for half-orcs in 4e. I'd have to double-check for orcs proper.
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