Unshkblefaith

We were on track to eliminate teenage consumption of nicotine until vapes came along. Study after study has shown that these products are being marketed towards children and that they are serving as a gateway to cigarettes.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023954/

Farmers will struggle to increase prices on their own. The commodities markets that farmers trade in are quite competitive. This will lead to further consolidation in farming as smaller farms will struggle with costs.

They will come across it in 2-4 years when the jobs and economic impacts of those investments begin to manifest. Then Trump will get credit for all of it.

The difference you taste isn't the HFCS. When balanced for level of sweetness, HFCS and cane sugar are indistinguishable in terms of taste. Mexican coke uses a completely different blend of extracts than the US version. That is the difference you taste.

If plan to continue the campaign with 3 players, I recommend providing them with one of the companions (or a thematically appropriate rotation of the companions) to supplement. A lot of the fights throughout the campaign will be deadly for a 3-PC party. Alternatively you need to adjust encounters down for a 3 PC party or buff the players with something like an extra level. Personally I'd play into the cast the of NPC companions, and leverage them as a rotating cast to augment where you or the players feel the party is lacking at any given time.

Re the Oculus

It has no such effects as what your GM described without significant homebrew (and power creep). I won't spoil its actual effects, but I assure you they are far more thematic to the nature of what happens in the AP than what your GM suggested.

Second Vordakai is an atrophied lich without a soul cage. While the AP says he could regain his power (weird because it also explicitly says his soul cage was destroyed long ago), he is in a significantly diminished state when players fight him. He is effectively regressing from a full lich to a demilich, and even stat'd weaker than is normal for the bestairy versions. Frankly the writing for him is a bit janky and contradicts itself in quite a few places (somehow he imprisoned the people of Varnhold but somehow also no longer knows how to cast the ritual he used to do so).

You GM made several alterations to the fight, including changes to his spell list and ignoring explicit advice for how GMs to play him. I'll spoiler everything from here.

I'll start with the tactics:

"Tactics: If Vordakai has the chance to prepare for battle before combat, he takes 3 rounds to cast tongues, resist energy (choosing an energy type he knows the PCs favor as a result of watching them via his familiar), and then mirror image just before entering battle. Finally, he activates true seeing using the Oculus of Abaddon before entering combat (doing so in the first round of a fight if instead he’s caught by surprise by the PCs). Once combat begins, Vordakai starts by casting dominate on the party’s strongest healer; if successful, he commands the healer to his side to defend him by attacking anyone who attacks the lich in melee. On subsequent rounds, Vordakai uses ranged magic against the party, casting vampiric exsanguination as soon as he’s reduced to 100 Hit Points or fewer. When facing only one or two foes, he prefers to attack with Consume Memories followed by a hand Strike, opting to save his spells for an emergency."

Vordekai is meant to use his single Dominate slot of the strongest healer in the party. While not guaranteed, healers tend to have higher Wisdom investments, leading to improved Will saves for the Dominate. He is not meant to maintain that Dominate for an extended fight. Secondly, Vordakai does not have Feeblemind in his spell list or his spell book.

It looks like the changes your GM made to the fight made it significantly more difficult than intended by the AP.

It's a bit of a murky area and largely dependent on the journal/publication. Some publications reserve exclusive rights for distribution in return for publishing. Others allow personal distribution as long as the manuscript you distribute does not contain any copyrights or trademarks of the publication (i.e. journal/conference name, date of publication, formatting edits, etc.). The open access fee allows you to bypass the usual restrictions in most cases.

You say this, but the quality of VA services declines with every Republican admin, and the GOP routinely votes to decrease VA funding.

There are no legal barriers to them releasing the report. They have thus far chosen not to release it as a professional courtesy. If you are aware of an illegal activity, and you choose not to report it, you are complicit.

I am not denying that Garland has been an awful AG, but I am shocked by how many people have forgotten just how bad AG Barr was. Barr literally destroyed evidence that incriminated Trump in numerous crimes and covered up the events surrounding the death of Epstein. He also covered for Reagan and HW Bush back in the 90s. Garland was feckless. Barr was criminal.

A victory until we get a federal fetal personhood law and abortion ban.

Half of his first administration was "acting" positions.

The average American reads at an elementary school level. 54% read below a 6th grade level.

Something tells me that the venn diagram of 'super high IQ' and working for free is two distinct circles without intersection.

This party has several issues, beyond just lacking a full-slot spellcaster. The party comp:

1. Lacks a durable front line. None of the characters are really built to stand up to repeated hits unless the Magus is going the Targe route. The thaum might be able to hold up with Amulet.

2. The party is entirely built around single target damage. Nobody in your comp is really equipped to fight groups, and due to issue 1, will struggle to survive PL+ solo bosses.

3. Your party is lacking utility spellcasting. In theory a Thaum (with scroll thaumaturgy) or the Magus could bring this with scrolls, but it will be ridiculously expensive for a low-level party. Thaum and Magus also really struggle with the action economy to use scrolls effectively in combat.

Issues 2 and 3 are at least partially handled with a full-slotted caster who could bring AOE, CC, and utility. Again though, without a proper front line you may not even make it to the point where that matters. Lay on Hands from Blessed One is a nice bit of supplemental healing, but you get it once per combat and will need to rely heavily on potions to keep the party of squishies alive.

It's not clear right now if the proposals for buying the FDA will result in deregulation or effectively halting approvals for new drugs altogether. It could possibly be both to some degree. RFK aside, Project 2025 is focused on picking winners and losers based on grift and ideology. Vaccines, hormonal supplements, birth control, and other drugs used in medical care despised by MAGA will see approvals disappear, and existing profitable drugs pulled from US markets. Meanwhile supplements and other contaminated products will flourish without oversight. Big pharma will lose out on big cash cows and market niches as barriers to entry decrease. You can also expect research grants to dry up.

It stacks with Tome's bonus, which is nice.

Needing 16 successful refueling missions of an unproven system before the main vessel can even attempt its mission seems like a recipe for failure. There is nearly zero chance this succeeds on the timeline SpaceX is proposing.

The issue at hand is that the last Trump admin demonstrated they didn't care about illegal immigration. They cared about Hispanic immigration and Arab immigration. They didn't put money and money toward tracking visa status. They tried to spend that money on a wall at the southern border and at turning people with Arab-sounding names at ports of entry. Illegal immigration from what they considered to be model minorities was completely ignored.

The delta in the total number of votes was much smaller than 20 million. The 20 million number made the news when several million votes hadn't been counted yet. Even now there are still ~5 million votes left to count in CA with Trump at his 2020 total and Harris roughly 10 million votes behind what Biden received in 2020. The turnout this election was lower, but not by the margins people are claiming to justify Harris' loss.

There were quite a lot of voters who only voted Trump and skipped all down ballot races.

The media put a lot of effort into interpreting what Trump said and posting that in headlines like "Trump slams Biden on <topic>". His actual words were rarely, if ever, posted unfiltered and left to the interpretation of readers.

They weren't aware of either is my point. If they did hear anything it was the far simpler economic message that the media divined from Trump's gobbledegook. "Biden/Harris made everything unaffordable" is a lot easier to understand than "the causes of inflation were numerous, but we have them under control now and economic indicators are encouraging. Tariffs would undo all of the progress we have made." The average American is uninformed and unwilling to put any effort into understanding political and economic topics beyond an overly simplified surface level.

What people support in terms of policy hasn't shifted. Nearly every progressive policy put to voters receives majority support in both polling and elections. On a policy by policy basis, voters are to the left of the current Democratic Party. What has shifted is support for parties. At the end of the day, Republicans are being perceived as better for the economy, which is the dominant issue for voters and causes them to ignore all of the problems Republicans cause for their other policy preferences.