Casino Party Hire - Uk's Number 1 Casino Party Service

hire casino equipment for party

hire casino equipment for party - win

Background test for new job reveils unknown pety theft charge

During the first 6 months of the covid nightmare i lost my job of 6 years in the credit dept for a major dept store. while timing sucked i knew i had a great work history and resume . while it took a little bit longer then i expected i was offered a job doing the same type of work for a different company. and started training right away even though i had to do a drug screen and a background check. which is not a problem im 47 years old and lead a normal boring life.so i did both tests and accouple days later on a Friday i get a call from the employment agency who found me that job saying that i had some sort of flag on my background check from a petty theft charge that i got from from 8/14/2020. i about fell over i have never stolen anything much less get a charge. thinking that the company had made some sort of mistake i went to company and filed a complaint asking them to check again . they said they would but tit could take up 2 a month to get the results back . i took what info they had and went back to work. . then next day bright and early i get a call saying that the company doesn't feel that i was a good fit and. they didn't say anything abut the background check it was pretty clear. i called the police dept for info but was told i would need to speak to the officer filing the complaint and was told the she works the night shift and o call back after 10 pm. which i did and was told the she hadn't come in yet and try again in like an hour which i did only to find out the she didn't show for work. I was told try her tomorrow . so over the week i have faithfully made attempt 2 reach her but no response . on day seven the person answering the phone said that if i came in and went to the clerk window they should be able to pull a copy for me. which i did only to find out after waiting in line for an hour iwas told due 2 Florida state statue does not allow me to get info on an open case even though its about me , but somehow they can give to 3rd party background check company. Again i was told to contact the officer for more detail. so so never have i gotten any response . then a week later i get another job offer this time a bigger company for more money and exactly what i was hoping for. so i start training and do the drug test and background test and don't hear anything till 3 days later, when setting up my home office to stat the work from home perk of the job. i get a call from the head of the hr dept telling me that it shows i have an active warrant for a petty theft charge and that he would be at my front door with in the hour to pick up all the computer equipment and my services were no longer wanted. . he did give me a bit more detail on the charge not only showing the date of the supposed theft but also the date the charge was filed which was a 40 days after the incident. also says a deposition date the beginning of October and that they made 3 attempts to serve me but was not able to. It shows my old address from 6 years ago . and which i changed my drivers license as soon as i moved to the new house and turned in the old to the DMV q .but within a month of moving here and buying the house i got my drivers license renewed with the current address and i turned in my old ID 2 the DMV as required. So a little confused on that because if the ran my name it would show this address, heck they have even been to the house a couple times since the charge was made and called me by my name. I looked back on my calendar as well as bank statements 2 see what I was doing around that time period. It was 7 days before Partners Birthday on a Friday . I had just gotten paid and we ubered out to the casino/resort 45 minutes away as not to drink and drive 2 visit friends . I still have every receipt showing paid in full with a excellent tip. Our friends drove us back the next morning where we stayed home the rest of the weekend till I had to work on Monday .This is so frustrating I have never stolen anything . And I cant get the police officer to call me back. Im mortified what the company must think of me, but worse of all i cant get a job in my field with a charge attached. im about out of all funds and certainly cant hire an attorney. any help or advice is appreciated.
submitted by 33713 to legaladvice [link] [comments]

Working Wise or Wizardly Working: how magic items affect the world

Magic items. Objects imbued with magic in order to make them better, or even gain a completely different function. But apparently the only places they exist are in monster hoards and adventurers' backpacks.
Realistically however, everyone wants things that are better at what they do. And eventually, people get what they want.
Today i will go over some objects that are useful outside of the context of adventuring, as well as how they might change the world around them. I will not mention artifacts, since those are one-of-a-kind objects with pre-established locations, usage, etc.
While the topic has always existed, Tasha's Cauldron has added a few interesting toys to our proverbial tool box, which makes this as good a time as any to take a look and
Much like in the Spells and Society post, the rarer an item the more amazingly powerful it must be to be worthy of mention. Actually i recommend reading that post before this one. Since a lot of magic items just allow you to cast spells for free, knowing which spells alter the world gives a good idea of which items can do the same.

Uncommon

+1 tools.
That's right, +1 tools. Not +1 weapons.
Consider a guard. How much of his time is actually spent fighting? A minute every other day? That's not getting a lot of use out of his sword. Even a soldier spends weeks marching, or months guarding a fort, and then only fights for a few minutes or hours. Even if a guard has a superb weapon that doubles his combat effectiveness, it only makes him 1% or 2% better at being a guard[1]. Given a choice of uncommon item, any guard and most soldiers would rather have a Weapon of Warning to prevent being backstabbed, ambushed or caught off-guard.
Now consider a lumberjack or miner. They spend several hours a day hitting trees and rocks. An enchanted axe, saw or pickaxe would see continuous use in their hands. Not only that, magic items are also described as being "at least as durable as a nonmagical item of its kind. Most magic items, other than potions and scrolls, have resistance to all damage". This means the +1 pickaxe would be far, far more resilient to wear and tear than a mundane one, potentially being passed down for generations. And with your miners and lumberjacks being more efficient, you need less of them. Which in turn means you get to have more guards.
Another noteworthy thing here is adamantine items. They deal automatic critical damage to objects and are much harder to destroy. In other words, they're great at chopping trees and ores, bending hot metal, cutting cloth, plowing a field, etc. All while having a fraction of the wear and tear.

Bags of Holding, Handy Haversacks and Portable Holes.
AKA your transporty boyes.
The bag of holding is an old favorite among players, and the reason is obvious: it has a million uses.
Most adventurers use it for carrying all their junk. The bad guys in the original Baldurs Gate game used bags of holding to smuggle whole shipments to and from their iron mine base with just one guy. One of my players once put a huge boulder in it, then flew up and dropped the boulder on an enemy transport ship. And let us not forget the classic Arrowhead of Total Destruction.
All of these are perfectly valid uses. Smuggling a small object is easier than smuggling a large object. Dropping huge objects from a high place turns anything that flies into a siege weapon. And the Arrowhead, while expensive, can deal with very large threats that could level a city.
But honestly, every merchant is a smuggler at heart. After all, as long as brigands roam the roads, there will always be a need to hide your valuables in an extraplanar space small enough to fit any orifice. Not only that, the bag allows you to dump a cart entirely and just ride to your destination much faster (and therefore, more safely).
Of course not every merchant can afford a bag of holding, so this brings about an interesting topic of inequality in your campaign. Some merchants can go from A to B faster and more safely on a horse, while the majority must go with a bull-drawn cart that is slow and vulnerable. And bags of holding don't even require attunement, so once you have one and your income soars you can get another, and another... Its a serious rich-get-richer situation, and you risk running all the mundane merchants out of business.

Broom of Flying.
I'm gonna start this one with saying that brooms of flying and carpets of flying are overpowered. They are consistently better than items of similar rarity that provide the same benefit, like boots and wings of flying. The reason here is, in my humble opinion, the same reason why Fireball deals more damage than any 3rd level spell and most 5th level ones: its iconic.
As for the item itself, its pretty much a permanent flying speed of 50 while carrying up to 200lbs, or 30ft. speed while carrying 201-400lbs. Its a deliveryboy's dream... except not.
You see, the broom of flying isn't just a hoverbike, its also a drone. You say the command word, and it flies up to a mile a way. Say it again, it comes back. In other words, the crazy wizard in his tower can just tie some money and a note on the broom and send it to a shop, then call it back once the shopkeeper has tied the groceries to it. Poor delivery boy just lost his job.
But wait, there's more! If the broom can fly on its own, can it plow a field? Can it spin an "animal" traction mill? The answer is: yes. But there's no reason to use magic where a common animal would do, unless its a crazy high magic setting or something.

Decanter of Endless Water
I think anyone can see how infinite water is broken as fuck[2]. But that's not all. By speaking the command word and pulling the lid, you can cause 30 gallons (136.4 litres) of water to pour out with enough force to push a 200 pound object 15 feet. This action can be repeated every turn (6 seconds), since a decanter of endless water has no limit on how often it can be used.
So a decanter is not just infinite water, but also infinite energy provided you have enough technology to build a mill. Even more energy if you activate the decanter in a high place and use gravity to give those 30 gallons even more potential.
Do keep in mind however that in 5e there must be someone using their action to activate it every turn. In previous editions however one could leave the decanter open and it would pour water constantly.

Hat of Disguise
This wee cap is not game-breaking for its great usefulness, but rather for its ability to fuck the world up. Any charlatan with a Hat of Disguise can walk into a bank, guild, ship, etc. and pretend to be anyone. Sure it doesn't happen often, but when it happens the crime spree is enormous. And while there are ways to work around disguised criminals, the fact people have to work around it is an issue in and of itself.
Societies based on trust pretty much can't function. Does everyone sign everything? Do people start using IDs? Do organizations start using items or employing animals that can see through illusions? Is there an industry for door frames that detect illusions?
Even without the hat, Disguise Self is still a 1st level spell. Yet somehow the sourcebooks have no mention of how the world might adapt to the idea that you can't trust people to be who they seem to be. And if anyone with access to 1st-level spells can walk up to the king without difficulties, you wont have kings for long.

Ring of Mind Shielding
A great item, if you're an asshole. Keeps people from sensing your evil alignment, keeps them from reading your evil thoughts, keeps pesky zones of truth from sensing your lies, and it even makes itself invisible so nobody can notice you're wearing the "i am evil" ring. It even keeps your immortal soul from going into eternal damnation!
One thing i always think of soul-trapping items is that they're a good way for evil people to avoid the afterlife. If you're good, you want to go to Celestia, Elysium, Arborea or Ysgard. Yet if you're evil, being stuck in a ring and talking to its wearer might be better than Baator, Carceri or the Abyss.

Sending Stones
Another classic, unfortunately the stones were nerfed and now can only Send to each other once a day.
Still, long range communication is nothing to scoff at. And while hiring someone to Send for you is cheaper, the stones provide more privacy and can be sent to far off corners of the world where you can't afford to station a caster full time.
Expect each mayor or baron to have one of these, while someone in the capital answers their "calls". Something of a royal secretary if you will. While magic items are expensive, shaving days off of your disaster response time can be the difference between having a kingdom and having ruins.

Rare

Bag of Beans
An often overlooked item, the BoB is crazy powerful. It has 3d4 beans, each of which can trigger a random effect. Notably they have a 10% chance of creating a random potion that lasts 30 days, a 10% chance of creating 1d4+3 eggs that can permanently raise an attribute by 1[3], a 9% chance of spawning a full on pyramid with a mummy lord and appropriate loot[4], and a 1% chance of leading anywhere.
Why bother with tomes when you can get twice as many stats from a bag of beans?

Helm of Teleportation.
1d3 castings of Teleport every day, plain and simple. That means 9 people can travel about 14 times in a week[5].
That's a lot of potential trading to be had for sure, but why stop there?
Say your kingdom spent tons of time and money training and equipping an elite unit. You wouldn't want them to spend 80% of their time on the road and 20% solving issues right? One rare item can make your 9-men unit five times more efficient.
Adventurers are in much the same boat: small group, lots of capital invested into their gear and training, yet they somehow spend most of their time going back and forth between adventures (until level 9 if they have a bard, sorcerer or wizard in the party, past 9 if they don't). It honestly amazes me that the Helm of Teleportation is not listed more often as a must-have party item.

Manuals/Tomes
For those unaware: there are 3 manuals and 3 tomes in the game, each increases an attribute by 2 when used and then loses its magic for 100 years.
The #1 item on any adventurer's to-get list, the existence of the tomes raises far more questions than answers. Who makes these? Why are they not mass produced? Can i get a magically accelerated demiplane, throw the books in and recharge them in a fraction of the time? Why do people not abuse the f*** out of them?
And when i mean abuse, i mean make smart use of them. Say a kingdom has, over the course of generations, acquired 5 or so tomes. Then the ruler reads them and becomes super smart/wise/popular. That sounds like the sort of thing that would make the whole realm prosper. Do it on an elven/dwarven kingdom and the ruler can read his tomes multiple times, granting him a godlike mind.
And that's without considering the idea of immortals. Or even high level druids. Any lich or vampire could become insanely powerful, not only from being able to use each tome a dozen times, but also from having eons to look for more or even craft them[6].
One thing i really like about tomes is watching the party decide what to do with them after spending the magic. Do they auction the books? Trade with some elf for favors? Give it to a friendly vampire?

Very rare

Candle of Invocation
For 4 hours clerics and druid of the proper alignment within 30ft can cast 1st level spells without using spell slots. In other words, crazy amounts of healing. Pop one after a battle and in a few minutes your whole army will be ready for more. Or pop it during a battle, and have the Healing Word the crap out of your troops from a safe-ish distance.

Carpet of flying, Peregrine Mask
Carpets of flying function much like brooms of flying, except they are faster or carry more weight (depending on size). They would be a strict upgrade, except they lack the drone function the broom has.
A peregrine mask provides a flying speed of 60, but has no carrying capacity. That means if you have a Powerful Build or a similar feature it can actually carry more than the carpets.

Cauldron of Rebirth
If there's one thing Tasha's Cauldron has brought us, its this cauldron.
It has some minor uses for scrying making potions, but here's the deal breaker: you put a corpse in the cauldron, fill it with 10gp worth of salt (200lbs.) and it casts Raise Dead on the creature.
Resurrection normally costs 500gp. worth of diamonds. With the cauldron it costs 10gp worth of salt. Sure there's a one week cooldown, but who cares? I see two scenarios here: either a resurrection every week is more than the local demand, or less than the local demand.
If its more than the demand, that means everyone who dies of unnatural causes and has 10gp to spare gets resurrected.
If its less than the demand, that means you're raising one person every 7 days. Depending on how high the demand is you could be making as much as 500gp a week, or 26k a year. Considering that the DMG says a Very Rare magic item costs 10.000-50.000 gold, the cauldron can pay for itself in under two years. Even if the math is way off for some reason, it is still crazy strong.
Honestly, this should be an artifact. Or at least have some heavy downside. The idea that someone over at Wizards of the Coast read this and said "Ah yes, 10gp resurrection, perfectly fine" simply boggles the mind.

Crystalline Chronicle
Speaking of items that make things cheap, 1d3 times a day this spellbook allows you to cast a wizard spell without material components of up to 100gp.
That means two spells on average, so let's take a look at a few good options: Continual Flame[7], Magic Circle (exactly 100!), Stoneskin (100!), Teleportation Circle and Astral Projection.
The ones that stand out here are Continual Flame and Teleportation Circle. Both cost 50 and have a huge demand in the world. Where a permanent TP circle would normally consume 18.250gp worth of materials over a year, it will now cost nothing[8].

Legendary

Staff of the Magi
This is, i think, the most powerful item in the game.
Has a bunch of charges, yadda yadda, here's the important part:
  1. When someone else casts a spell on you, you can use a reaction to absorb the spell. The staff then gains charges equal to the level of the spell it just ate.
  2. It can cast Plane Shift for 7 charges.
This means on an average day you get 16 charges, or two Plane Shifts, from the natural charge generation. But what if you could have someone cast spells on you without spending spell slots?
There are several monsters who can cast spells at will, too many to list. But there are also a few ways for players to do it. The first that comes to mind is the level 18 Wizard feature Spell Mastery, allowing any 2nd level spell. There's also the level 15 invocation Shroud of Shadow that allows infinite casts of Invisibility. Either case allows a duo to have infinite Plane Shifts a day, which is really powerful.
As usual, trade comes to mind. But with infinite charges you might as well start a tourism agency or a hotel and/or casino that brings in people from all planes. Yet what few people realize is that Plane Shift can be used offensively in order to permanently banish anyone to any plane. Infinite save-or-die effects.
You could also just settle for a fuckton of Shifts instead of infinite, and use a warlock or four-elements monk to convert their short rest resources into charges for the staff.
Now think of the possibilities and plot hooks. Mad king banishing dissidents, Red Queen style. Alternative death sentence. A high level wizard/warlock stranded somewhere because the guy who was attuned to the staff died or got separated from him. Random archdemon bringing an army to the Material Plane a couple demons a minute.

Notable mentions

These are items i left out, but which i will get yelled at in the comments if i "forget" about them.

Anything that creates energy
The truth is that a lot of magic items can do that. Fire for heating things, wind or water for pushing things, etc. For an energy source to be noteworthy it has to provide a considerable amount of continuous energy, without charges or daily limitations. Otherwise you might as well just use a regular water mill or a bull.

Alchemy Jug (uncommon)
It creates an amount of a liquid (beer, honey, etc) every day. It does nothing that cannot be done by an amount of workers, and for it to be world-altering we'd have to go into a lengthy math argument of how many labor hours of a bee farmer are needed to make a gallon of honey, and how that compares to the initial investment of hiring a wizard to make the item.
As a general rule, if something can be done mundanely it will be done mundanely. Let the casters focus on stuff where they have an infinite comparative advantage, like flying stuff, teleportation, resurrection, etc.

Cap of Water Breathing (uncommon)
It allows you to breathe underwater indefinitely. Can be great if you have important stuff to do underwater, and might enable interaction with sentient water folk. But in and of itself, not a world-altering item.

Horseshoes of Speed (rare)
Essentially +30 speed for hooved creatures, without requiring attunement. Honestly this item does not really fit this list, but i just thought the idea of pegasi flying real fast with these was worth mentioning. Sure a helm of teleportation outclasses it entirely for travel, but that's not useful in combat.
And i really want to play a centaur monk with these some day. Unfortunately the item description specifically says you have to have four equipped to benefit, so don't even think about it you satyrs and tieflings out there.

Lyre of Building (rare)
At a glance this looks like a regular magic items, with nothing too weird about it. Until you look at its spell selection and notice you can cast them as an action.
Mending normally takes a minute to cast, with the lyre its an action, and you can do it at will even without knowing the spell.
Fabricate takes ten minutes to cast, with the lyre its an action. That means once a day you can turn the ground under an enemy into a spiky cage, his sword into sword parts, etc. Until the lyre came about the only way to instantly cast fabricate was with a Wish, and that is a pretty good combat use of the 9th level spell.

Conclusion

To be quite frank, a lot of these item uses are a little niche and wont work in every setting. Then again, that that is never the goal with these posts. I hope i have provided you with at least a few interesting plot hooks and other crazy ideas, whether to amaze your players or ruin your DM's plans.

Notes

[1] There is a notable exception however. If your kingdom has a group dedicated to fighting monsters, some of which are resistant to nonmagic damage, then those guys should be prioritized. Not only does the +1 weapon double their damage output in this scenario, it also prevents your kingdom from losing special soldiers that are very expensive to train and replace.
[2] Stuff like constant abuse of Decanters of Endless Water are why in my setting there is a doomsayer cult that believes the world will be flooded some day. As they say it, every time someone activates a decanter, magically creates water, creates food and water, opens a portal to the Plane of Water, etc; the amount of water in the world rises just a bit. Given enough time, everything will be flooded by it. Unless someone like, puts a Sphere of Annihilation by the shore or something. But nobody said the cult has to be right.
[3] The bag has 3d4 beans. Each bean has a 10% chance of spawning 1d4+3 eggs. That means 7.5*0.1*5.5 = 4.125 raised stats, on average. Sure I'm assuming you'll pass the DC20 save every time, but with proper preparation its quite doable. Be near a paladin, get bardicly inspired, have someone cast Resistance, find ways to reroll a failed save, etc. Since the eggs last forever, you have all the time in the world to stack the saving throw in your favor. Or just use Portents.
[4] The mummy lord could have anything, even another bag of beans!
[5] Someone will say "but what about the chance of going off target? What if nobody has teleportation circles?" To that person i say: associated object. Get a pebble every time you're in a region, and you wont need a circle. Buy a bit of silk and you can teleport to any place along the silk road. Buy a used horseshoe and you can go all over the country. Now I'm just imagining this badass-looking special-ops soldier, clad in the finest plate, wielding a blazing blade, his cloak cackling thunder... and with a rusty-ass horseshoe tied to his helmet.
[6] And thus is born the legend of Swolomon the Buff. He was once a base vampire, who got stuck in a tomb for 4000 years with nothing but a Manual of Bodily Health and a Manual of Gainly Exercise. Now he's... selling supplements or something.
[7] See On Spells and Society linked at the top for why there's a near infinite demand for Continual Flame.
[8] You can even make two circles at a time, but there's some math about it. You have 3 charges, use 2, so you should always be with one to spare. Until you roll a 1 on the d3, and then its gone. After that whenever you roll a 1 without first rolling a 3 you'll have to pay the 50gp or let the circle go to waste. In other words, you'd be paying roughly 1/6 of the regular cost.
submitted by DungeonMercenary to DnDBehindTheScreen [link] [comments]

Ontario Stage 3 Reopening Megathread

As always this information comes straight from the official Government of Ontario's "Framework for Reopening Our Province". This is not meant to be a complete guide but only some information for a regular person to understand what's open and what isn't. This post will follow a similar format to the Stage 2 post. This post will be updated when new information becomes available, if any is missing please let us know. Please report any inaccuracies.
July 31st Updates:

Am I in Stage 3?.

  • All regions are in Stage 3.

What is remaining closed in Stage 3?

The Chief Medical Officer of Health, public health experts and other officials have advised the following high-risk places and activities are not yet safe to open, due to the likelihood of large crowds congregating, difficulties with physical distancing, or challenges maintaining the proper cleaning and sanitation required to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
  • Amusement parks and water parks
  • Buffet-style food services
  • Dancing at restaurants and bars, other than by performers hired by the establishment following specific requirements
  • Overnight stays at camps for children
  • Private karaoke rooms
  • Prolonged or deliberate contact while playing sports•Saunas, steam rooms, bath houses and oxygen bars
  • Table games at casinos and gaming establishments.

What are the new gathering limits?

Based on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer of Health and public health experts, gathering limits for regions in Stage 3 will increase. The gathering limit of 10 people indoors or outdoors will continue to apply for regions in Stage 2 until they enter Stage 3. Social circles should continue to be kept at 10 people province-wide, regardless of stage.
  • Indoor gathering limits will increase to a maximum of 50 people
  • Outdoor gathering limits will increase to a maximum of 100 people.
  • In all cases, individuals are required to continue to maintain physical distancing of at least two metres with people from outside their households or social circles.
  • All businesses, services and public spaces when hosting an event are subject to indoor or outdoor gathering limits and ensuring physical distancing can be maintained.
  • People at their place of work, including performers and crews, do not count towards gathering limits.
  • People gathering indoors for religious services, rites or ceremonies, and wedding ceremonies or funeral services, can continue to fill up to 30 per cent of the capacity of the particular room, as introduced in Stage 2.

When Do Gathering Limits Apply?

Based on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer of Health and other public health experts, gathering limits apply to higher risk settings and activities where people congregate, including:
  • All organized or spontaneous indoor and outdoor events and social gatherings(e.g., parties, fundraisers, fairs, wedding receptions, funeral receptions)
  • Casinos, bingo halls and gaming establishments
  • Concerts and live shows, including performing arts
  • Convention centres and other meeting or event spaces
  • Recreational attractions, courses and instruction (e.g., fitness classes, music lessons,tutoring)
  • Festivals
  • Facilities for sports and recreational fitness activities (e.g., gyms, fitness studios)
  • movie theatres
  • Sporting and racing events
  • Real estate open houses
  • Tour and guide services (including boat tours)
Now for some additional restrictions

Amusement Parks and Water Parks

Amusement parks and water parks are not yet permitted to open in Stage 3

Casinos and Charitable Gaming Establishments

  • Table games must remain closed.
  • Casinos and charitable gaming establishments are subject to gathering limits and physical distancing measures, which apply to the entire facility.

Convention Centres, Meeting and Event Spaces

  • Convention centres, meeting and event spaces are subject to physical distancing measures and gathering limits, which apply to the entire facility

Facilities for Sports and Recreational Fitness Activities

Examples of facilities for sports and recreational fitness activities include gyms, fitness studios, and community centres.
  • Physical distancing must be maintained, except if playing a team sport or as needed for personal training.
  • The total number of people permitted in areas containing weights or exercise machines is limited to the number of people that can maintain physical distancing of at least two metres, whichcannot exceed the indoor gathering limit of 50 people.
  • The total number people permitted in classes or organized activities at any one time is limited to the number of people that can maintain physical distancing of at least two metres, and cannot exceed the indoor gathering limit of 50 people or the outdoor limit of 100.
  • Assigned spaces are strongly recommended for organized fitness classes (e.g., by marking circles on the floor to designate where each person should exercise)
  • Gathering limits do not apply in all other areas (e.g., pools, tennis courts and rinks).
  • Equipment must be cleaned and disinfected between user sets or at the end of a game.
  • Any washrooms, locker rooms, change rooms, showers or similar amenities made available to the public must be cleaned and disinfected frequently.
  • Steam rooms and saunas are not yet permitted to open.

Fitting Rooms

  • All fitting rooms may reopen, as long as patrons are not permitted to occupy adjacent fitting room stalls at any one time.
  • Cleaning and disinfection between fitting room customers should continue

Interactive Exhibits at Museums, Attractions and Heritage Institutions

  • In addition to the exhibits opened in Stage 2, high-contact surfaces such as interactive exhibits and displays may open. They must be cleaned and disinfected frequently
  • All special events, instructional classes and performances at these locations are subject to gathering limits and physical distancing measures.

Libraries

  • In addition to the services resumed in Stage 2, libraries may reopen for all on-site services, as long as materials that are circulated, returned or accessed within the library are disinfected or quarantined before being recirculated.

Live Shows, Performing Arts and Movie Theatres

Concerts, artistic events, theatrical productions, performances, and movie theatres may resume operations, including rehearsals, with the following restrictions
  • Performers must maintain physical distancing of two metres from every other person,except from other performers where necessary for purposes of the performance.
  • Audiences are subject to the number of people that can maintain physical distancing of at least two metres and cannot exceed gathering limits of 50 indoors and 100 outdoors.This applies to the entire facility, regardless of the number of theatres or performance stages within the facility
  • Performers and staff are not included in the gathering limits.
  • Plexiglass or some other impermeable barrier is required between the audience and singers as well as players of brass or wind instruments
  • Drive-in and drive-through venues, as permitted in Stage 2, are not subject to gathering limits
  • Concessions stands at drive-through venues may be accessed in-person or by drive-through or delivery to vehicles

Personal Care Services

  • In addition to the services permitted in Stage 2, all services that tend to a customer’s face are permitted (e.g., facials, ear piercing, eyebrow grooming and eyelash extensions).
  • Patrons must wear face coverings except while receiving services on an area of their face that would otherwise be covered by a face covering.
  • Personal care services must take measures to enable physical distancing between patrons, such as limiting the number of people who may be in the business at any one time.
  • Businesses should also consider recording each patron’s name and contact information to support effective contact tracing in case of an outbreak.
  • Oxygen bars, bath houses, steam rooms and saunas are not yet permitted to open.

Playgrounds and Play Structures

  • Outdoor playgrounds and play structures are permitted to reopen in Stage 3.
  • Physical distancing of at least two metres must be in place at all indoor playgrounds and play structures, except between individuals from the same household or social circle

Recreational Courses and Instruction

Examples of recreational courses and instruction include music lessons, language classes, tutoring and art classes.
  • All instructional classes are subject to gathering limits.
  • Physical distancing must be in place for participants, other than when necessary for instruction. Face coverings are recommended in those situations
  • Equipment must be cleaned and disinfected frequently
  • Plexiglass or some other impermeable barrier and physical distancing are required for any instruction that involves singing or playing wind or brass instruments

Recreational Attractions and Businesses

  • Examples of indoor recreational facilities and attractions include arcade rooms, escape rooms, bowling alleys, and pool halls.
  • Physical distancing of at least two metres must be in place.
  • Equipment must be cleaned and disinfected frequently.
  • Karaoke is permitted only outside of private karaoke rooms, which are not yet able to open in Stage 3, with restrictions including barriers, physical distancing and increased cleaning and disinfecting.

Restaurants, Bars and Nightclubs

  • All restaurants, bars, concession stands,and other food and drink establishments may open for indoor dine-in.
  • Nightclubs are not yet safe to open, except for the purpose of serving food or drinks to patrons in accordance with the conditions that apply to restaurants and bars
  • All patrons must be seated when eating or drinking at the establishment.
  • Establishments must take appropriate measures to ensure physical distancing of at least two metres between patrons from different tables, unless separated by plexiglass or some other impermeable barrier
  • Buffet-style service is not yet permitted in Stage 3.
  • Singing or music may be performed by a person or group at the restaurant or bar, with restrictions, including barriers between the performers and patrons and physical distancing. Dancing may only be performed by someone working at the establishment with restrictions
  • Karaoke is permitted only outside of private karaoke rooms, which are not yet permitted to open in Stage 3, with restrictions including barriers, physical distancing and increased cleaning and disinfecting.
  • Physical distancing of two metres between patrons from different households or social circles also continues to apply to food trucks, food courts, concession stands and tours, including tastings at wineries, breweries and distilleries.

Team Sports and Live Sporting Events

  • Prolonged or deliberate contact while playing sports is not permitted.
  • Team sports in which body contact between players is either an integral component of the sport or commonly occurs while engaged in the sport (e.g., wrestling, judo) are not yet permitted, unless the approach can be modified to prevent prolonged or deliberate physical contact
  • Amateur and recreational sports leagues may resume so long as they do not allow prolonged or deliberate physical contact between players or if they have modifications to avoid physical contact between players.
  • Leagues must contain no more than 50 participants total. If participants in a leagueexceed 50, the league may divide into smaller groups of no more than 50. Players are not yet permitted to play against players outside of their league or group.
  • Spectators at all sporting events, including professional sports, will be subject to gathering limits and physical distancing measures, with assigned seating where possible

Tour and Guide Services

  • For tour and guide services, including boat tours, the number of patrons is subject to gathering limits.
  • Physical distancing of at least two metres must be maintained between all individuals, except for those from the same household or social circle.
  • The outdoor gathering limit of 100 applies if patrons will be outside for the duration of the tour except to access washrooms, in transit to an outdoor area, or for health and safety reasons.
  • As with other gatherings and events, the indoor gathering limit of 50 applies if the gathering is fully or partially indoors.

Beyond Stage 3

The health and well-being of the people of Ontario will continue to guide every step of the government’s response to COVID-19. The success of Stage 3 will be critical for Ontario’s long-term economic recovery. As more businesses and activities reopen, the Chief Medical Officer of Health and public health officials will continue to closely monitor the evolving situation to advise when more regions can enter Stage 3, if public health restrictions can be further eased, or if they need to be tightened or reapplied.
With almost all businesses and public spaces reopening in Stage 3, Ontario has put enhanced case and contact management in place to quickly test, trace and isolate cases of COVID-19 to prepare for any future outbreaks, surges or waves. Just as important, people must continue to follow public health advice and workplace safety guidelines to keep each other safe. This is about treating each other with respect and taking personal responsibility, so that we can successfully beat COVID-19 and get on the path to a strong recovery.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone. As more of the province safely and gradually reopens, people are encouraged to support small businesses in their communities, shop local and look for products that are Ontario made. We are all in this together, and together we will emerge stronger than ever before.
The Ontario Spirit will continue to carry us forward as we work towards recovery and begin building a brighter and more prosperous future for every family, in every region of our province.
submitted by uarentme to ontario [link] [comments]

A Guide to the Differences Between JRPGs Ports and Enhanced Versions (Part 1).

A new day, a new guide.
This is the hardest one of the guides I wanted to make, because the information is never easy to get, which is weird. So please forgive me if I missed some changes, and by all means tell me if I missed any of them or if any of them are incorrect.
Since this list is really long, this guide is going to come in parts, this part covers:

Important Notes:

  • This is made for Ports and Enhanced versions, so No Remakes. So this is about differences between the different versions of Chrono Trigger, and not about the differences between FF7 ps1 and FF7 Remake.
  • The differences are taken from all over the internet, either from official sources, wikis, youtube, and even forums.
  • I cover all the changes for a game, unless there is too many, in which case I will highlight the ones worth mentioning.

~ Valkyrie profile (PSX US.ver): vs Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth PSP vs iOS & Andriod. ~

Valkyrie profile PSX:

Nearly identical to the Japan version but with minor fixes in the menu screen. In the Japanese version, Characters not in the party were unable to change or learn skills nor were they able change or remove equipment. The US version allowed out of party members to change and learn skills as well as change or remove equipment without being added to the party. Also in the Japanese version, Lenneth would unequip all her skills and equipment when switching between sword and bow. The US version 'remembers' the previous setting when switching weaponry and is automatically equipped with the skills and equip. Another improvement over the Japanese version is an improved item sorting option.
There are a few instances of censoring such as Badrach's smoking.

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth PSP:

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth lacks the improvement made in US version. Rather than re-rendering the textures of the dungeon maps, TOSE cropped and upscaled the pre-rendered images to fit the portable console's screen, resulting in severe blurring in some areas. This version also removes the anime opening movie in favor of 3D CGI, animated movie. Certain key story-sequences were animated in the same style as the opening movie and can be viewed at anytime in the Gallery option in the title screen once unlocked in the story. The animated scenes include:
  • Opening Movie
  • Lenneth's Awakening
  • Jelanda's Transformation
  • Alicia witnesses Barbarossa's execution
  • Lenneth's encounter with the Lord of the Undead
  • Lenneth and the Homunculi
  • A chance encounter between "Meril" and Lucian
  • Lenneth in Weeping Lily Meadow
  • Lucian's departure to Valhalla
  • Hrist's Awakening
  • The Sovereign's Rite
  • A Ending
Other big changes are:
  • An enhanced version of the original game's localization
  • Square Enix cleaned up the original game's English script and additional voice over dialogue for the CG movies was recorded by New Generation Pictures, rather than the original company, TAJ Productions.

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth iOS & Andriod:

This is the PSP version being ported to iOS & Andriod, with the following changes:
  • Enhanced graphics such as character portraits. >* Enhanced Text.
  • Enhanced UI.
  • The option to skip cut-scenes.
  • In-app purchases to unlock collectibles
  • Ability to turn on auto-battle.

~ Chrono Trigger (SNES): PSX vs NDS vs iOS & Andriod vs PC. ~

Chrono Trigger PSX:

Anime cut scenes created by original character designer Akira Toriyama's Bird Studio and animated by Toei Animation.
A new Extra Mode Option was added that is divided into different categories of viewable extras, that are unlocked as you finish the game, and just as shown in the picture, they are:
  • Theater.
  • Art Gallery.
  • Music Box.
  • Tech Showcase.
  • Monster Data.
  • Boss Data.
  • Endings.
  • Treasure Map.

Chrono Trigger NDS:

This version includes everything new in the PSX version, and also has big and a long list of changes and additions, which I will try to condense them as much as possible:
  • Ability to play using the two screens and the touch screen, or in classic mode through a single screen.
  • Added the Arena of Ages: A monster arena where You pick basic monsters and raise them to fight computer and wireless opponents.
  • Added the Lost Sanctum: A sidequest during the main game. It consists of two dungeons in two different eras.
  • Added the Dimensional Vortex: A extra Dungeon, available after beating the game once and appears in three different eras. Each dungeon is different.
  • A lot of New Items.
  • New Enemies in the new dungeons, in the form of palette swaps of old enemies.
  • One New Ending after finishing the Dimensional Vortex completely.
  • New Translation that changes a lot of names form the original version to something more faithful to the Japanese version.

Chrono Trigger iOS & Android:

Both versions initially were based on the NDS version, but later on got an update to make them similar to the PC version.

Chrono Trigger PC:

Everything on the NDS version is present here except there is No Arena of Ages. What they did add however is:
  • Auto-Save feature.
  • Higher Resolution Graphics and update UI.
  • Support for mouse and keyboard controls.
  • Remastered sound and music.

~ Star Ocean: The Second Story (PSX): vs Star Ocean: Second Evolution (PSP) vs PS4 (JP.ver). ~

Star Ocean: Second Evolution:

  • A New Translation that changes almost everything in the game.
  • New voice actors. >* New voiced acted scenes; All major story events now have voice acting.
  • New recruitable character: Welch Vineyard.
  • New Private Actions and 13 new Endings.
  • Unlocking the Galaxy and Universe modes now require defeating a specific number of enemies in a single playthrough rather than unlocking voices in the Voice Collection. >>>* Practically all Combat Skills have been refined, some being removed (such as Cancel, which is now automatically implemented).
  • The combat system has been slightly refined, now allowing all melee fighters to perform a 3-hit combo as their normal attack.
  • The Super Specialty "Bunny Call" no longer allows the player to "climb" on towns and some terrains. The player now will enter a town upon approaching while in Bunny Form, and can even activate private actions.
  • All items in the inventory screen are now depicted as 2D icons instead of the original 3D models.
  • Many bugs and glitches have been fixed (most notably the infamous random Cave of Trials screen freeze).
  • Ring of Lightspeed (called Slayer Ring in Second Story) now works on Dias Flac.
  • New character designs and portraits.
  • No magic combo mechanic.
  • Crafting animations are now replaced by a still 2D image.

Star Ocean: Second Evolution PS4 JP.ver:

This enhanced version was released only in Japan on the PS4, with enhanced graphics and BGM, and a DLC that helps you with the gameplay.

~ The Last Remnant (Xbox360): vs PC vs PS4 & Switch Remastered. ~

The Last Remnant PC:

This version is only available to purchase in the EU SquareEnix online store as of right now:
Battles:
  • Turbo Mode is now available, and can be toggled on or off while giving orders to unions in battle. When on, battles play out at double the speed.
  • Crimson Flare, a new Arcana, is now available.
  • New formations, such as Eremurus Rain, are now available.
  • Enemies hit considerably harder.
  • Rare Monsters can have significantly higher HP than their XBOX 360 counterparts.
  • Arcana require substantially more AP.
  • Unique Arts now require AP.
  • Remnant Arts can only be performed by union leader, Weapon Arts now require high union morale.
  • Offensive Weapon Arts now increase morale when used.
  • Additionally, Arcana and offensive Special Arts now raise morale by a fixed amount.
  • Likewise, certain Enemy Arts now lower morale by a fixed amount.
  • Wards now affect the entire union.
  • Attributes required for formation upgrades are vastly different.
  • Healing no longer raises morale, and morale increased by Critical Hits has been dramatically reduced.
  • Union morale now fluctuates based on more conditions (IE: taking an action, successfully landing a hit, receiving damage, etc.). In the X360 version, union morale stayed somewhat static, usually changing when being healed, being KO'd/terminated, executing a successful Critical Trigger. It also did not drop to 0 whenever an offensive Special Art was executed, whereas it will do so on the PC.
  • Linking additional enemies together does not increase your Battle Rank further than having fought them separately.
  • Special commands, such as the use of David's Gae Bolg, are no longer interrupted by being raidlocked by a different union or having targeted enemy union defeated by an ally.
  • Allies now have the option to cure a friendly union's Curse status ailment via "Cure them even if it kills them!" command. This command is in the XBOX 360 version as well, but is only available when the union is Enthralled; it will not be available when the union is cursed.
Items:
  • Items are color-coded in the PC version, and a new preview feature lets you see what the item looks like in battle.
  • You can now toggle between viewing the stats of a weapon or shield and viewing a preview of what it looks like in battle.
  • Components and consumables are now categorized.
  • Items are now color-coded based on their rarity.
  • Creation or customization of some items require fewer components.
  • New items available via Blueprint 4.
  • Various weapon stats have changed.
  • Some very rare monster-specific drops can now be split from monsters (e.g., Godwood Timber, Spiritwood Timber).
Units:
  • The leader limit is no longer imposed. Unions can be composed entirely of leader units if the player desires.
  • Likewise, soldiers can now be set as union leaders.
  • The stat cap has been lifted for all characters to allow a maximum of 255 for each stat.
  • The Seven are now recruitable after completing Union of the Golden Chalice Task #70: For Our Lord.
  • Rush can now be removed from the active party.
  • Khrynia can learn the new Unique Art Dual Snowpetal.
  • Arts can be disabled, filtering which skills a unit may use in combat.
  • Leaders' requested components are displayed when viewing their stats.
  • Leaders' wield style can be changed depending on their equipped weapon.
  • Shields now prevent style changes mid-battle.
  • The following classes now prevent style changes: Guardian, Scout, Hunter, Wanderer, Thief, Alchemist, all Mystic classes, Vagrant, Mercenary, Aristocrat, Djin, Fortuneteller, Sage and General.
  • The experience required to advance Wield Style skills has been reduced, and the experience required to advance Weapon Type skills has been increased.
  • Three new classes are now available: Ataraxian, Cleric, and Ninja.
  • The Guardian, Fencer, and Warrior classes now require non-sovani wield styles, and are thus not available to Sovani.
  • The Gladiator class now requires Power Grip and Wards.
  • Hybrid classes (Item+Combat and Mystic+Combat) can now be achieved by units who do not start in one.
  • Some leaders now have a different weapon upgrade path, which caused some units to learn new Weapon Arts while others lost theirs.
  • Leaders can request weapons that do not coincide with their weapon upgrade path as long as they match their equipped weapon type and size.
  • Soldiers can now request weapon drops.
  • Some units have had their starting Unit BR level, stats, class, equipment, arts, and hiring wage changed.
Sidequests:
  • The completion of At Hatred's End is no longer required in order to activate Things Unchangeable.
  • Duke of Ghor now has a … icon when you speak with him between the first, third, and fifth base battles.
  • The component requirements in The Assistant have lowered.
  • The DLC content is now unlocked differently; the majority of the extra content now requires the completion of certain guild tasks.
  • The Leader Extraordinaire guild tasks which required three units of a single class now only require one.
  • The Monsterslayer guild tasks require different enemies to be defeated.
New Game Plus and Hard Mode: After the epilogue and credits, you can now save your game. When you're taken back to the main menu, you can load this save to begin a new playthrough that carries over certain elements from your previous playthrough. You will also be given the option to start the new game in Hard Mode.
Miscellaneous:
  • The PC version will warn you if you cannot leave an area without a fight.
  • Auto Save is now available, which automatically saves after having changed zones or having won a battle.
  • Battle Rank is now viewable outside of combat, in the party menu.
  • Battle Rank progression has been slowed considerably; it takes more encounters/enemy unions terminated to increase in rank.
  • Characters with … icons are now identified with markers on the map.
  • Enemies can no longer be respawned by saving and reloading an adjacent area.
  • New saving opportunities are now available, such as before the base's boss.
  • A warning message is now displayed if you attempt to save your game in an area which you cannot leave until you defeat a boss.
  • Mr Diggs's digging animations are now much quicker.
  • The loading screens that explained some of the game's mechanics have been disabled.
  • Many areas of the game have had their spawn tables altered or repopulated.
  • Starting battle music now coincides with starting morale in most battles.
  • "Turn the Tide" and "Beat the Odds" now play during the second half instead of after entering Elysion.
  • Union highlighting during the selection phase has been toned down (ie: ally unions don't look quite as blue).
  • Leaders in reserve no longer gain skills via the Rush only skill grind trick.
  • Soldiers now slowly improve their stats in reserves.
  • Camera in battle doesn't swing around as wildly anymore.
  • Mitra soldiers' idle stances now come in 2 varieties: the one shared by both male and female units and the one exclusive to larger male units, rather than just the "large male mitra" stance.

The Last Remnant Remastered PS4 & Switch:

Based on the PC version, also added:
  • Graphics now are in Unreal Engine 4
  • A new function to run faster on the overworld.
  • Extra save slots.
Yes I am salty about this if you can't tell, since they removed the PC version from steam.

~ Tales of Vesperia (Xbox360): vs PS3 vs Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition vs PS4/PC/Switch/Xbox One. ~

Tales of Vesperia PS3:

  • Features full voice acting, nearly twice as much voice work as the original.
  • New Characters, including 2 new playable characters: Flynn (permanantly playable now), and Patty Fleur.
  • New subplots, skits, and main game quests, and sidequests.
  • New mini-games
  • New songs
  • Remodeled towns and new towns and dungeons.
  • New bosses.
  • The ability to replay boss fights.
  • New 8 Mystic Arts.
  • New artes, skills, and equipment.
  • New item: the "Artes Ball", which allows an additional eight artes shortcuts to be assigned to the previous eight slots combined with the L1 button, which allows for a maximum of 16 artes
  • New character costumes

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive editionvs PS4/PC/Switch/Xbox One:

Based on the PS3 version, it has everything from it and all the DLC included for free, with higher resolution graphics depending on the system.

~ Tales of Symphonia (GC): vs PS2 (JP.ver only) vs PS3/PC. ~

Tales of Symphonia PS2 JP.ver only:

  • New animated sequences.
  • New Mystic Arts.
  • New Unison Arts.
  • New Arts for playable characters and enemies.
  • New Techniques.
  • The frame rate was lowered from 60 frames per second to 30 frames per second.
  • New customs.
  • The "Synopsis" option in the menu displays newer entries at the top
  • The Casino in the game is now actually fully playable with it's own mini-games, and chips to collecet and exchange for items.
  • The skits are graphically more dynamic. Portraits get larger or smaller quickly, swing from side to side, shake, and so on.
  • New Titles
  • More post-battle animations.
  • Niflheim dungeon extended and 6 new boss characters, fought in 2 new boss battles.
  • Bug Fixes
  • New events to help raise affection.
  • Includes new side quests, new camera angles on some cutscenes, new animated cutscenes not featured in the GameCube version

Tales of Symphonia PS3/PC:

  • More customs.
  • Improved character textures and improved some environments.
  • Dual-audio support: Japanese and English voiceovers, which neither the PS2 or GameCube versions had
  • Cutscenes support voice acting in both languages, but skits only have voice acting in Japanese. If you select English, you will just see the subtitles during skits. This is not a porting issue, as this is just how the GameCube version was.
  • While the original GameCube version ran at 60fps, the Japanese PS2 port which the PS3 Chronicles HD version is based off of ran at 30fps. The Steam version can run at 40FPS.
  • HD graphics

~ Skies of Arcadia (DC): vs Skies of Arcadia: Legends GC. ~

Skies of Arcadia: Legends GC:

  • New Ranks for the Swashbuckler Rating system.
  • Random encounters occur less frequently and load considerably faster than the Dreamcast version, and EXP offered per battle is adjusted to compensate.
  • Graphically, the game sports mild improvements to character models, most noticeably adding individual fingers to the designs. The modifier volume shadows and (weirdly enough) point-mipmapping from the original release are still present.
  • One of the new sidequests available is Bounty Hunting. Sailor's Guilds offer information about each person on the bounty list as they are unlocked through story progression. After reading about them, they can be found in a constant location.
  • There are a number of new discoveries to be found.
  • Two linked sidequests
  • "Pinta Quest" minigame was removed
  • DLC comes with the game.

~ Persona 3 (PS2): vs Persona 3 FES PS2 (English.ver) vs P3P PSP. ~

FES PS2 (English.ver):

  • A whole additional epilogue has been added, The Answer. This chapter is only available in one difficulty setting, which is supposed to be on par with Persona 3's Hard mode.
  • New Personas have been added
  • Secret videos of the protagonist's dorm mates have been added to flesh them out.
  • Koromaru can now be taken on walks.
  • Several of the Social Links have been modified slightly, such as Tanaka being available at a different time
  • Several new Quests have been added.
  • New costumes can be worn in battle.
  • A new event involving Chidori Yoshino was added.
  • Naganaki Shrine was completely overhauled.
  • A hard mode was added.
  • Save data from Persona 3 can be transferred into the game,

P3P PSP:

  • The Answer is not included in this verion.
  • Added a Female Main Character, so now you can choose between the Male and Female MCs.
  • The game lacks 3D environments and character models (outside of Tartarus), all anime cutscenes are gone, the graphics and audio quality were compressed,
  • The storyline of the female protagonist features many differences from that of the male protagonist, such as new social interactions as well as Social Links.
  • New voiced dialogue.
  • Players have the choice of selecting Elizabeth or a male-equivalent named Theodore to be Igor's assistant in the Velvet Room.
  • The ability to pick who the protagonist spends the last moments of the game with. This feature is only accessible on a New Cycle
  • The Desert of Doors from the Abyss of Time seen in The Answer will still appear, however, in an extra feature known as the Vision Quest. In this mode, the party can fight stronger incarnations of the Full Moon shadow bosses — save for Arcana Magician — and partake in special battles that test the party's abilities. When all of the battles have been successfully met, a second optional boss can be fought: Margaret, Igor's assistant in Persona 4 and guardian of the Desert of Doors in P3P.
  • There are now two overworld save points; Aside from the log book in the Iwatodai Dormitory, there is also one on the main character's desk at school.
  • In Paulownia Mall, the police station is now the only place where the protagonist can buy equipment and sell items. Aohige Pharmacy is now a buy-only store, and Be Blue V is just a part-time work site and hangout to improve the main character's condition
  • From previous versions, two difficulty modes have been added: Beginner and Maniac alongside Easy and Normal in Persona 3 and Hard in Persona 3 FES:
  • A new tactic, "Direct," has been added to the game, allowing control of the party members, unlike Persona 3 and Persona 3 FES.
  • The "Wait" command is replaced with the "Defense" command, and will decrease the damage and any knockdown effects of the next attack the user suffers.
  • The game grants "1 More" to a combatant who attacks multiple enemies not knocking all of them down; the original Persona 3 required all hit enemies to be knocked down for a 1 more.
  • Party members who have been knocked down no longer spend the turn by getting up and can act as soon as they stand.
  • Upon landing a critical hit or striking an enemy's weakness, party members can follow up with a co-op attack.
  • Fusion Spells from the original Persona 3 are now activated from items instead of equipping a persona and selecting it like other spells.
  • Allies can now take a fatal blow to the protagonist for them if they are able.
  • "Dizzy" has been added as a status effect.
  • Returning to the main lobby in Tartarus no longer automatically restores the party, and must now be done for a fee via the save point (this cost varies based on the date in-game and status effects currently inflicted on the party)
  • Floors can be directly returned to from the entrance of Tartarus instead of being restricted to the restore point like previous versions.
  • "Tired" status no longer is inflicted during Tartarus exploration, and is inflicted to all used party members after leaving (this will only drop to "Good" if the character used was at "Great" during exploration).
  • Unlike previous versions, money found by party members when split up will now be given to the protagonist.
  • Party members' equipment and status can now be accessed at any time from the pause menu, unlike in previous versions, which required the protagonist to speak to them while exploring Tartarus in order to change their equipment or view their status.
  • You can now control Party members directly.
  • The protagonists only have access to one weapon type (instead of having access to all weapon types like in P3 and FES); the male protagonist wields one-handed swords, and the female protagonist wields naginatas. As a result, the Skills "Fist Master," "Bow Master," "1hdSwdMaster" and similar skills have all been combined into a single skill called "Weapons Master." Its skill card is called "Phys Boost," and all Personas which had learned a "master" ability (like Cybele with Bow Master) now learn "Weapons Master."
  • Personas now have the ability to produce a Skill Card when raised to a specific level. Each card can be used on any Persona to teach them a skill.
  • The Inari Sushi in Naganaki Shrine no longer grants random bonuses for item gaining and Tartarus explorations. Instead, it offers to duplicate Skill Cards, which will take 5 days to complete

~ Persona 4 (PS2): vs Persona 4 Golden Vita vs Persona 4 Golden PC. ~

Persona 4 Golden Vita:

  • Two new Social Links.
  • A New Dungeon.
  • A New bad ending.
  • New Difficulty levels have been added: Safety/Easy/Normal/Hard/Risky.
  • Several new music tracks.
  • Additional voice-over dialogue.
  • Chie and Teddie have new voice actors in the English version.
  • New animated cutscenes.
  • More Personas, including new Ultimate Personas for the Investigation Team.
  • New areas can be visited.
  • New events.
  • The protagonist can now explore Inaba in the evening when Dojima is not home.
  • The protagonist and his friends now have motorized scooters to explore various areas.
  • Costumes are now available to buy at Croco Fur, in Okina City.
  • New Garden and Bug Catching features.
  • The ability to choose which skills can be inherited by the Persona the protagonist is fusing.
  • New scene skipping function
  • If the necessary criteria for at least the good ending are fulfilled, daily activities are expanded to February 14, 2012, giving more time for events and social links.
  • New epilogue has been added for the True Ending.
  • The list of Requests and the Fox' emas have been modified.
  • Rise can now assist the Investigation Team in All-Out-Attacks.
  • Added Tag Team attacks: two members can team up to perform a united attack.
  • Added Cavalry Attacks: Attacks from members of the Investigation Team that are not currently in the party.
  • Spell buffs and debuffs can now be used on the same character to prolong the effect
  • A new gallery menu has been added: "TV Listings." It displays bonus content unlocked through the main game at any time.
  • Floors and chests in dungeons can now reset by changing floors instead of leaving the dungeon and TV world, or visiting another dungeon.

Persona 4 Golden PC:

  • Bug fixes
  • The game will run at up to 4K resolution with 60FPS+ as opposed to the Vita's 476p resolution and 30FPS target
  • Includes dual audio language and multiple text language. The anime cutscenes now also include subtitles
  • In the Steam version, the player may customize their difficulty setting at any time, in contrast to the Vita version only letting you do so on New Game Plus.The player may select a preset difficulty setting, or individually alter the following parameters
  • The player may select a preset difficulty setting, or individually alter the following parameters.

~ .hack//G.U (PS2): vs .hack//G.U. Last Recode PS4/PC. ~

.hack//G.U. Last Recode PS4/PC:

  • A brand new episode titled Vol.4//Reconnection, which takes place a year and three months after the events of Redemption
  • HD graphical update for the whole game.
  • Ability to restart the battle from the beginning if Haseo dies.
  • Movement speed on foot has somewhat increased.
  • The item stack size has increased from 50 to 99. The maximum number of item stacks in the inventory has increased from 30 to 90
  • Item menu shortcuts and sort features
  • When using an item in the field, pressing the X button repeatedly will cause the item to be used again without navigating the menu a second time.
  • The maximum number of Chim Spheres and Virus Cores the player can possess has increased from 99 to 999
  • Platforms now include the Platform Recovery feature, recovering a large portion of the party's HP and SP. It can only be used once per visit to a field.
  • Saku and Bo no longer switch the active player based on their level being even or odd. They can instead be selected as separate options in the Party screen.
  • Decreased the probability of allies selling the items the player give them.
  • Voice clips for returning characters and NPCs between games have been updated to use the Volume 3 clips from the beginning, except where said clips are unavailable.
  • Attack power has been increased and hit stops during attacks have been reduced to speed up the battle tempo.
  • Learning weapons proficiency increased and acquired experience points increased.
  • Awakening scenes can be skipped using the Option/Start button.
  • Some of the really tough enemies have been made a bit easier
  • Skeith’s general shot bullet speed has increased during Avatar Battles.
  • Enhanced battle balance and game pacing to provide an optimal experience.
  • Avatar battles now show a stun gauge over the enemy's head. Red diamonds have been added around attacks meant to be deflected using scythe slashes that are in range.
  • Added suspend feature during Avatar battle gameplay.
  • In Volume 3, the player is given 22 "Promise" greeting cards, meaning it is possible to do the "Forever in Love" / "Best Wishes" events with all party members in a single playthrough.
  • A new Cheat Mode allowing players who want to just enjoy the story to start the game with a large amount of items, best equipment, maximum money and chim spheres, and maximum level and affection for the respective volume.
  • Save files from Cheat Mode plays can be converted to the next volumes.
  • The videos from “The End of the World” Terminal Disc included with the limited edition PS2 release of Volume 1 are included in the collection
  • A New Job Form for Haseo with a new weapon.
  • A New Form for Skeith.
  • Ovan joins the party.

~ Final Fantasy 12 (PS2): vs FF 12: International Zodiac Job System PS2 (JP.ver only) vs FF12 Zodiac Age PS4/PC/Switch/Xbox One. ~

Final Fantasy 12: International Zodiac Job System PS2 (JP.ver only):

  • Addition of a "Zodiac Job System" featuring twelve jobs with individual License Boards corresponding to twelve zodiac signs
  • Addition of a 16:9 widescreen mode with menus and HUD at 4:3.
  • Addition of three new game modes: Trial Mode/New Game+ Strong Mode/New Game+ Weak Mode.
  • Pressing L1 will speed up gameplay. Conversations and events continue to play at normal speed.
  • Quickening doesn't consume MP. Now they use their own Mist gauge similarly to Limit Breaks from previous Final Fantasy titles.
  • UI Changes.
  • Playable characters' starting LP, consumables, gil, gambits, equipment, licenses, and base stats have been modified.
  • You have more control over Guests now, they also gain EXP/Item/Gold.
  • Many magick spells and technicks have been tweaked, renamed and recategorized.
  • Obtaining Quickenings no longer affects max MP and Mist charges do not diminish when MP is consumed (unless the player is affected by a reversed Elixir or Megalixir). The player's MP is also unaffected by the depletion of Mist charges. However, effects that recover the player's MP will also restore Mist charges. One Mist charge is granted each time the amount recovered totals the player's maximum MP. Effects that fully restore a player's MP recover all Mist charges.
  • You can now fully control Espers, they also require MP to cast magicks
  • Almost all attacks now break the 9999 damage limit from the original by default.
  • New items have been added, such as Cura Mote, Bubble Mote, Domaine Calvados, Baltoro Seed, Dark Energy and various Meteorites.
  • Bacchus's Wine now has 100% chance of inflicting Berserk (previously it was 50%).
  • Several equipment pieces were added, while some available in the original release were removed or tweaked.
  • New Weapons added.
  • Most shops had their assortments changed. Many weapons are now available from shops earlier because of the job system, and were thus made weaker.
  • Treasures respawn by moving just one area away as opposed to two. Treasures were moved around, changed the items they can give, or were removed altogether. The "forbidden chest" concept was removed, that in the original prevented the player from obtaining the Zodiac Spear in Necrohol of Nabudis if they opened a wrong treasure.
  • Dark Matter can no longer be acquired from the bazaar, and selling the ingredients needed to make it in the original will result in making the Dark Energy instead. The Dark Energy is an item that does not charge up with Knot of Rust or Devour Soul and always deals 50,000 damage to each enemy in range.
  • Treasure chests are now in different locations and contain different items.
  • There are more traps throughout the map.

Final Fantasy 12: Zodiac Age PS4/PC/Switch/Xbox One:

  • Remastered HD graphical upgrade.
  • English and Japanese voices (switch between them in the game configuration).
  • Original and newly re-recorded background music (switch between them in the game configuration).
  • Auto-save functionality added (game saves automatically when moving to each new screen, excepting boss arenas)
  • Improved high-speed mode and improved play time operability during high-speed mode
  • Ability to invert both the X and Y camera axes
  • The game balance has been overhauled to make it easier.
  • Each playable character can have two jobs at once.
  • Job Reset function added; talk to Montblanc in the Clan Hall to use.
  • The Effect Capacity system that limited spell-casting in the PlayStation 2 versions has been removed.
  • Fire, Thunder, Blizzard, and Cure only affect a single target again.
  • Espers' HP values have been doubled, but other stats kept the same as in Zodiac Job System.
  • The animation for summoning Espers is removed.
  • A glitch concerning Dyce's character model has been fixed.
  • New Game Plus and New Game Minus are now accessible from the beginning of the game.

~ Rune Factory 4 (3DS): vs Rune Factory 4 Special Switch. ~

Rune Factory 4 Special Switch:

  • HD Graphics.
  • Newlywed Mode.
  • Hell Difficulty.
  • Additional Movies.
  • Another Episode DLC.
  • Swimsuit Day DLC.
  • Many Town Events are now prioritized if requirements have been met. This includes Memories, which unlocks the last story arc and the events required for marriage.
  • The map has been moved to the main screen and can be removed and resized with the press of a button (the Switch has only one screen) or by using the touch screen icon.
  • The teleport spell has been mapped to a dedicated button. It can still be used from the touch screen.
  • You can now change the voice acting language between English and Japanese.
  • Many bug fixes.

This is just part 1, if you have any suggestions for titles to be in part 2, please post them here.

submitted by VashxShanks to JRPG [link] [comments]

A Big List of Challenges (Problems/Goals/Complications/Encounters) for your adventure (including Social, Exploration, Stealth, Mystery, and Combat).

Hi! I have compiled a big list of challenges your players can encounter during the adventure.
If you find this list useful - please help me to improve and extend it!

Action/Adventure Challenges

  • Defeat a villain and his minions.
  • Defeat a monstecreature/horde.
  • Obtain a McGuffin (item, vehicle, money, magic artifact, spell, your lost/stolen valuables, etc)
  • Obtain Information (an ancient book, a piece of gossip, a clue, secret codes, a way to break the curse).
  • Protect/Escort /Guard a person/creature (a rich merchant, a researcher, a young prince targeted for assassination, a last of its kind monster, tax collector, witness).
  • Deliver a person (make sure they don't escape).
  • Rescue a person/creature (rescue a hostage or a kidnapped person, break them out of captivity).
  • Track, Find, Chase, and Capture/Catch a person/creature/vehicle (a criminal, a runaway, a ship, a lost pet, an escaped experiment, the infected).
  • Find and save the missing person (lost kid, caravan, courier, spy.
  • Deliver a valuable/fragile item/cargo and protect it from danger (artwork, cursed artifact, mysterious crate, a treasure map, a message).
  • Destroy the target (an object, a cursed item, enemy weapon or infrastructure, the enemy base, a piece of blackmail on someone, a source of infection, close a portal).
  • Sabotage a plan (disrupt a ritual, prevent a prophecy, undermine the invasion, stop villain from achieving their goals).
  • Capture and secure the base/location (enemy city, friendly city under siege, a building, a military target).
  • Defend a location (protect a village from monsters, a city from the enemy army, prevent enemies from passing a bridge or a tunnel, protect a crime scene, meeting site, warehouse, protect a ritual to ensure it will get completed).
  • Your town/building/ship has been captured and overtaken by enemies. Survive under siege, liberate it.
  • Robbery/Heist (rob a train or a blimp, abduct a person, commandeer a ship, steal diamonds from the casino, steal wand from the mage tower).
  • Protect many innocent people (save people from a natural disaster for example, release the prisoners/slaves).
  • Win a competition (Complications: your team is bad, the other side cheats, you can only win by cheating, the event is more deadly than it was supposed to be. You are competing for other purpose than victory, such as to keep another contestant safe, to spy on someone, or to get into the place where the event goes down, to prevent villain from winning, to prove yourself, to impress someone).
  • Prepare for the mission. Get equipment/supplies/transportation/funding.
  • Deal with the consequences of a botched/evil magic ritual.
  • Distract the enemies. Act as bait for the ambush/trap.
  • Train a novice, keep a noble person safe while they go on adventure.
  • Build or repair an object (by collecting McGuffin ingredients).
  • Perform a Ritual.
  • Law Enforcement - act as a police for a town.
  • Intercept a delivery, escort, communications.
  • Prepare and execute an ambush.
  • Act as an experimental subject for a crazy scientist/wizard (for dangerous potions).

Exploration Challenges

  • Survive/avoid environmental dangers (think of the place itself as the “villain”, it is a monster without HP that "wants" to hurt players or drain their resources, and has certain powers to accomplish that. Traps, cave-ins, lava eruptions, rock-slides, avalanche, collapsing buildings, impenetrable mist, wild animals, dangerous/poisonous flora, falling into a pit, getting lost, etc).
  • Overcome environmental obstacles (a river on your way, a closed gate, climbing a mountain, a swamp, quick sand, slipping hazard above the abyss, thin ice, wild magic area. Retrieve an item from the bottom of the lake.).
  • Travel through multiple locations to reach the target.
  • Explore the location (to learn about it, to map it, to figure out what happened here. To find bandit camps, enemy encampments, monster nest, a way through, resources).
  • Find a lost location/person/item/treasure/clues.
  • Scout for information, survey the location/region (ahead of group, enemy territory, monster infested territory, uncharted wilderness).
  • Clear location of danger (creatures, traps, haunting ghosts, curses, infestation).
  • Track something/someone, find a trail.
  • Deal with a natural disaster (storm, earthquake, flood, meteor).
  • Survival (without food/water, deal with harsh weather, diseases. Find shelter. Repair a ship or a radio. Find a way to get back home.)
  • Enter a guarded area (overcome defenses, defeat security, sneak in unseen).
  • Escape guarded location (break out of prison).
  • Use environment to your advantage (start an avalanche to block a pass, assume the most optimal position for combat).

Social/Intrigue Challenges

  • Convince/Persuade a person to do/say/give you what you want.
  • Intimidate/Manipulate/Blackmail/Force someone to do what you want.
  • Befriend/Seduce someone, make allies.
  • Gain confidence or forgiveness of a person who doesn't like you.
  • Find a non-combat resolution.
  • Get caught lying/cheating/sneaking, and rectify the situation.
  • Persuade a group of people (an organization, an angry mob, snobby nobles. Persuade the army to take a route that will slow them down/lead them into an ambush, convince the bandits to raid the enemy, convince farmers to donate food).
  • Gain social status, power, political influence (prove your worth, gain respect, impress someone, get elected).
  • Change someone's social status (make them look good/bad, get them elected, overthrow a ruler).
  • Run a kingdom/village/team/organization/business, lead an army (build a new one, restore the failing one to former glory).
  • Change the society/group/organization (raise morale, lower the crime, stop witch hunts, deal with corruption).
  • Gain control over the territory (invade a country or repel the invasion).
  • Put down or incite rebellion/mutiny/conspiracy.
  • Negotiate a deal, bargain (political compromise, hostage negotiations, trade information, convince them to sign a document).
  • Resolve conflict, broker peace, unite rivaling factions, settle dispute.
  • Establish political/trade relationships .
  • Navigate a strange culture/customs (without offending anyone).
  • Cause conflict/rivalry/war, pit people/factions against each other (get enemy minions to mistrust each other).
  • Deceive a person.
  • Set someone up, shift the blame to someone else.
  • Infiltrate a group, conceal your identity (cult, bandits, enemy citadel, thieves guild).
  • Find the spy/traitomole.
  • Deal with being blackmailed, spied on, threatened, manipulated.
  • Deal with a nasty rumor or important information/secrets about yourself being out there.
  • Defend someone (or yourself) in the court.
  • Prosecute/judge someone in the court.
  • Put on a show, entertain.
  • Redeem or corrupt a person (teach someone a lesson, seduce someone to the dark/light side).
  • Recruit people to your cause.
  • Find a way to get someone to owe you a favor, find a way to repay the debt you owe to someone else.
  • Enforcement - apply pressure to a person to get them to do something or behave in a specific manner, without killing. (Calm down the rowdy gang, collect the debts).
  • Get enemy soldiers/minions to defect and switch sides.
  • Create a disinformation/propaganda campaign (feed it to the enemy spy, destroy someone's reputation, saw fear in the hearts of the enemy soldiers).
  • Perform a con.

Mystery/Investigation Challenges

  • Investigate a crime (murder, assault, theft, threats, blackmail, destruction of “x”, disappearances, corrupt law enforcer).
  • Spying/Surveillance, gather information on a person/creature/location without being noticed. (Are they up to something shady, are they who they claim to be, discover their secret techniques, how are they bypassing security, how do they create “x”, involvement in “x”, what secrets are they hiding, where are they hiding “x”, where do they keep disappearing to, enemy troops, ).
  • Search for clues and put them together to reach a conclusion.
  • Find and interview witnesses, interrogate suspects.
  • Figure out what's going on, unravel a plot.
  • Figure out what happened in this location.
  • Find evidence (proof of innocence or guilt, expose a corrupt official).
  • Find out if the person is lying or keeping secrets, and what they are.
  • Figure out someone's plot/motives.
  • Figure out who's behind the plot.
  • Do research (find and read ancient texts, talk to old wise people).

Stealth/Heist Challenges

  • Steal (or plant) an item/information (modify enemy maps, plant disinformation. Plant clues to frame a person).
  • Escape from danger (overwhelming force, ambush, pursuit of the law or criminals).
  • Hide, cover your tracks, lay low.
  • Sneak through undetected (sneak past enemy lines to deliver a message to allied forces, sneak past the bouncers into a party).
  • Assassinate stealthily (sneak into the king's chambers, lure them out, use poison, make it look like an accident).
  • Deal with getting noticed / drawing an unwanted attention.
  • Clean up evidence (yours, someone else's).
  • Exchange a real item for a fake or vice versa.
  • Return a (creature, item) before anyone notices it's missing.
  • Sabotage (device, ritual) without being noticed.
  • Smuggle (creature, person, item) into or out of a location.
  • Security Testing - breach the clients security unnoticed.
  • Frame a person/group/nation for a crime.
  • Fake someone's death.

Villain's Moves

  • Personally confront the players.
  • Send minions after the players.
  • Hire a rival team of adventurers or thugs to go after players..
  • Send an assassin.
  • Send a spy.
  • Set a bounty on their heads.
  • Set a trap.
  • Setup an ambush.
  • Take hostages.
  • Threaten an NPC players like.
  • Frame players for a crime, declare them traitors/outlaws.
  • Reveal player's secrets, crimes they have committed.
  • Bribe the authorities/police to act against players.
  • Convince authorities/police that players are evil.
  • Make the public dislike the heroes.
  • Have a "dead man switch" that will hurt people or destroy something valuable if the villain is killed.
  • Know some information valuable to the players (like where hostages are kept, where the treasure is hidden), so players can't kill them, and must negotiate.
  • Set a time-bomb. Something horrible will happen unless players do what they're told.
  • Possess/blackmail/threaten an innocent person into doing their bidding.
  • Pretend to be someone else to deceive the players.
  • Befriend players to use them and betray them later.
  • Kidnap one of the players.
  • Join forces with another enemy of the players.
  • Plant false clues, create decoy trails.
  • Frame someone else for their crimes.
  • Kill hero's mentoally.
  • Cause mistrust, disorder, confusion, infighting among players or general population.
  • Hire people to commit crimes while pretending to be someone else to create mistrust/conflict among two parties. (Example: the bandits "from another country" attacks "local merchants", Start a plague in an uneducated city and have the "foreign merchant" sell snake oil cures, "native patriot" kills a "alien anarchist, etc.)
  • Put difficult choices in front of the heroes (like forcing Batman to save one of the ferry boats, to save Harvey Dent or Rachel).
  • Take away resources from the players (steal their items).
  • Give people the wrong idea about his powers/weaknesses.
  • Push player's buttons, play on heroes' flaws, temptations, fears.
  • Develop a good public image, make friends in the government, be beloved by the public.
  • Seduce player's allies to the dark side, convince/threaten them into betraying players.

Complications

  • Do it under time pressure (before the ritual is complete, before people run out of air, before reinforcements arrive, before or during the event, in transit, while you still have the chance).
  • Do it while competing with the rival team.
  • Unrelated people are interfering with the objective.
  • Do it stealthily (don't attract attention, don't leave clues, no witnesses).
  • Do it while pretending to be someone else.
  • Do it without revealing that your client is involved.
  • Prevent collateral damage, protect the innocents who are around.
  • Avoid violence. Defeat/capture the villain/creature without it being harmed.
  • Mitigate the risk, there's a high probability of causing a lot of damage if you're not careful.
  • Two challenges conflict with each other (you must break your stealth to help someone in trouble, capture criminal or save people who are currently in danger).
  • Difficult choice. Choose lesser of two evils, choose which people to rescue. Requiring personal sacrifice, risk, compromise.
  • Opportunities that come with a difficulty, cost or have negative consequences.
  • Resolve moral dilemma (the creature is dangerous but doesn't deserve to die, you're working for a bad guy, both sides of the conflict have valid points, completing a quest will harm people/environment).
  • Do it with incomplete information.
  • Do it with limited resources or without preparation.
  • Do it without access to powers you're used to having (while sick/injured/debilitated, in an area where magic is outlawed/disabled, having lost your equipment).
  • Locals here are unhelpful/hostile to you. You have low social status.
  • You can't trust anyone.
  • Doing it is illegal, or against authorities best interests, or is threatening a powerful group.
  • There are regulations/restrictions on what you can do hindering your progress.
  • Do it while being supervised (the media is all over you, a brilliant detective is on your tail, you are under suspicion, the enemy knows you're coming, you have a spy/mole).
  • Do it despite your flaws/temptations/fears.
  • It causes conflict/infighting within the team (player characters will have opposite goals/reactions to it).
  • Do it while working together with antagonist or someone else you don't like.
  • The side you're working for turns out to be evil.
  • The villain is someone you know/like/respect.
  • The villain is a respected public figure, celebrity, is liked by people or has authority over you.
  • Bad guy has a dead man switch, if he dies the others will suffer or treasure will be lost. Bad guy is the only one who knows the valuable information.
  • The people you're helping don't want your help.
  • Vital information turns out to be wrong.
  • Deal with the betrayal.
  • Mission has been rigged to fail from the start (PCs may be used as a scapegoat).
  • Objective is stolen before the PCs arrive.
  • Objective must be undamaged.
  • The important item has been transmuted and needs to be changed back, locked in a safe and needs a code to unlock, is a mineral that needs to be refined by a specific process. A book or a message is written in a foreign language that requires a translator.
  • Only a bad/unpleasant person can provide the item/information/favor you need.
Please leave a comment and contribute to this project!
Edit:
I've had a few pretty huge epiphanies while writing this post:
  • Stories are fundamentally about problem solving. Roleplaying is fundamentally about problem solving. This is the fundamental "game loop" of RPGs - GM puts a problem in front of the players, and they find creative ways to solve it, that's what gives them fun stuff to do and feels satisfying to accomplish.
  • Adventure Ideas are fundamentally problems. They create an exciting, challenging, important goal for the players to accomplish.
  • Big problems are broken down into small challenges. But fundamentally, the big climactic adventure/campaign goals and the small challenges players encounter on their way are the same thing. Every scene the characters solve a small problem, and it drives them towards solving the big problem. That's what plot points are - players solving or failing to solve a problem, which moves them closer to or farther away from the goal. Which feels exciting/valuable/dramatic.
  • Conflict, obstacles, social/exploration/combat encounters are fundamentally just sources of problems. There probably are other sources that can generate problems.
  • It's all just nested challenges: Campaign Problem > Adventure Problem > Scene Problem. And any challenge can be used on any of these levels.
  • Therefore, the list above is a list of adventure ideas and plot points at the same time. Make any challenge very important/difficult/exciting to accomplish - and it becomes an idea for the adventure or a campaign. Make any adventure idea relatively small and simple - and it becomes a scene challenge (encounter). Put a number of smaller challenges in front of the players - and you've got your basic story structure (a list of encounters, the gameplay). Because goals and challenges are fundamentally the same, just the nested problems, they can be combined in any order to create any number of unique adventures.
  • Also, it means that you can take big story ideas from movies, TV episodes, published modules, and use them as ideas for small encounters. Shawshank Redemption, Alien, Jaws, Incredibles - they can be big campaign ideas, small adventure ideas, or just a thing characters do in a scene (escape from the prison, hide from a monster, defeat a big golem).
  • Game mechanics are also challenges. If there's an RPG system that gets players to do something awesome (GM moves in Dungeon World, Favors/Debts and Social Status mechanics from the Undying, Weak Moves from Dream Askew) - you can use those as challenges too.
  • Even a single challenge can create an unlimited number of unique stories - you just change the concrete details. McGuffins, NPCs, locations, etc.
Edit 2:
Wow, this is taking off. If you like this post, you will probably enjoy my posts on Adventure Writing Process, Adventure Template (a list of the most important questions to answer when designing an adventure), and Making Combat Awesome. If you want updates on my future posts - follow me here.
Edit 3:
Created a little "Story Generator App" that will pick the random challenges for you.
submitted by lumenwrites to DMAcademy [link] [comments]

Security Guard Officer

Understanding the Security Guard Officer
When hiring a security guard officer it is important to completely understand their specific job description, what type of services they can offer, and whether they work for a private or public company. APS is a private company, which means that we offer a range of security services to various corporations, events, and for personal protection. (Public companies are employed by the government and its agencies, and offer security to the public at large and include law enforcement personnel.) The number one objective of APS’s security officers is to protect people and their property, and to maintain a safe and secure environment.
Responsibilities of a Security Guard Officer
When working as a security guard officer it is important to completely understand your responsibilities, what qualifications are ideal in a security officer, and the accountability that comes with this position. There are many important factors when considering security officer responsibilities, and APS takes these responsibilities and your safety very seriously. Most importantly, the number one responsibility of our security officers is to ensure that the people and property we are responsible for are protected, and to maintain a safe and secure environment. Security guard officer responsibilities can include:
* Providing armed or unarmed protection for specific organizations
* Securing premises and personnel by patrolling the property
* Looking for irregularities and reporting incidents or problems
* Checking doors, gates, and windows for signs of unauthorized entry
* Monitoring surveillance equipment
* Inspecting buildings, equipment, and entrance points
* Informing violators of policy and procedures, and detaining when appropriate
* Controlling traffic by directing drivers
* Responding to alarms and ensuring that the alarm systems work properly
Different Types of Security Guard Officers and Job Locations
The actual security guard officer job description can vary quite a bit, depending on the type of security guard they are, whether they are armed or unarmed, and whether they are protecting personnel or property. APS offers several different types of security officers including personal protection, corporate security guard, event security guard, temporary security guards, etc. Work locations can vary quite a bit as well. APS Security officers may be hired to work at businesses such as schools, colleges, hospitals, banks, shopping centers, casinos, concert/sports venues, airports, train stations, etc. Security officers may also be hired on a personal level, or smaller scale, and provide one-on-one personal protection, or work surveillance at parties, weddings, babat mitzvahs, and other special events. In addition, security officers can be stationed at desks or in gatehouses, and others may patrol in vehicles, on foot, or even on a horse.
APS ensures that our Security Guard Officers understand their responsibilities and provide you, your organization, and/or your property the best service available so you feel safe and secure anytime you utilize our services. You never know when the need for security will arise, however, it is important to understand the security officer description to ensure you have the right type of security officer, in the right place at the right time. Please visit Security Officer Description or Security Officer Responsibilities for additional information.
submitted by tinadutta055 to u/tinadutta055 [link] [comments]

A Big List of Challenges (Problems, Goals, Complications, Encounters) for your adventure (including Action/Adventure, Exploration, Social/Intrigue, Mystery/Investigation, and Stealth/Heist).

Hi! I have compiled a big list of challenges your players can encounter during the adventure.

Action/Adventure Challenges

Exploration Challenges

  • Survive/avoid environmental dangers (think of the place itself as the “villain”, it is a monster without HP that "wants" to hurt players or drain their resources, and has certain powers to accomplish that. Traps, cave-ins, lava eruptions, rock-slides, avalanche, collapsing buildings, impenetrable mist, wild animals, dangerous/poisonous flora, falling into a pit, getting lost, etc).
  • Overcome environmental obstacles (a river on your way, a closed gate, climbing a mountain, a swamp, quick sand, slipping hazard above the abyss, thin ice, wild magic area. Retrieve an item from the bottom of the lake.).
  • Travel through multiple locations to reach the target.
  • Explore the location (to learn about it, to map it, to figure out what happened here. To find bandit camps, enemy encampments, monster nest, a way through, resources).
  • Find a lost location/person/item/treasure/clues.
  • Scout for information, survey the location/region (ahead of group, enemy territory, monster infested territory, uncharted wilderness).
  • Clear location of danger (creatures, traps, haunting ghosts, curses, infestation).
  • Track something/someone, find a trail.
  • Deal with a natural disaster (storm, earthquake, flood, meteor).
  • Survival (without food/water, deal with harsh weather, diseases. Find shelter. Repair a ship or a radio. Find a way to get back home.)
  • Enter a guarded area (overcome defenses, defeat security, sneak in unseen).
  • Escape guarded location (break out of prison).
  • Use environment to your advantage (start an avalanche to block a pass, assume the most optimal position for combat).

Social/Intrigue Challenges

  • Convince/Persuade a person to do/say/give you what you want.
  • Intimidate/Manipulate/Blackmail/Force someone to do what you want.
  • Befriend/Seduce someone, make allies.
  • Gain confidence or forgiveness of a person who doesn't like you.
  • Find a non-combat resolution.
  • Get caught lying/cheating/sneaking, and rectify the situation.
  • Persuade a group of people (an organization, an angry mob, snobby nobles. Persuade the army to take a route that will slow them down/lead them into an ambush, convince the bandits to raid the enemy, convince farmers to donate food).
  • Gain social status, power, political influence (prove your worth, gain respect, impress someone, get elected).
  • Change someone's social status (make them look good/bad, get them elected, overthrow a ruler).
  • Run a kingdom/village/team/organization/business, lead an army (build a new one, restore the failing one to former glory).
  • Change the society/group/organization (raise morale, lower the crime, stop witch hunts, deal with corruption).
  • Gain control over the territory (invade a country or repel the invasion).
  • Put down or incite rebellion/mutiny/conspiracy.
  • Negotiate a deal, bargain (political compromise, hostage negotiations, trade information, convince them to sign a document).
  • Resolve conflict, broker peace, unite rivaling factions, settle dispute.
  • Establish political/trade relationships .
  • Navigate a strange culture/customs (without offending anyone).
  • Cause conflict/rivalry/war, pit people/factions against each other (get enemy minions to mistrust each other).
  • Deceive a person.
  • Set someone up, shift the blame to someone else.
  • Infiltrate a group, conceal your identity (cult, bandits, enemy citadel, thieves guild).
  • Find the spy/traitomole.
  • Deal with being blackmailed, spied on, threatened, manipulated.
  • Deal with a nasty rumor or important information/secrets about yourself being out there.
  • Defend someone (or yourself) in the court.
  • Prosecute/judge someone in the court.
  • Put on a show, entertain.
  • Redeem or corrupt a person (teach someone a lesson, seduce someone to the dark/light side).
  • Recruit people to your cause.
  • Find a way to get someone to owe you a favor, find a way to repay the debt you owe to someone else.
  • Enforcement - apply pressure to a person to get them to do something or behave in a specific manner, without killing. (Calm down the rowdy gang, collect the debts).
  • Get enemy soldiers/minions to defect and switch sides.
  • Create a disinformation/propaganda campaign (feed it to the enemy spy, destroy someone's reputation, saw fear in the hearts of the enemy soldiers).
  • Perform a con.

Mystery/Investigation Challenges

  • Investigate a crime (murder, assault, theft, threats, blackmail, destruction of “x”, disappearances, corrupt law enforcer).
  • Spying/Surveillance, gather information on a person/creature/location without being noticed. (Are they up to something shady, are they who they claim to be, discover their secret techniques, how are they bypassing security, how do they create “x”, involvement in “x”, what secrets are they hiding, where are they hiding “x”, where do they keep disappearing to, enemy troops, ).
  • Search for clues and put them together to reach a conclusion.
  • Find and interview witnesses, interrogate suspects.
  • Figure out what's going on, unravel a plot.
  • Figure out what happened in this location.
  • Find evidence (proof of innocence or guilt, expose a corrupt official).
  • Find out if the person is lying or keeping secrets, and what they are.
  • Figure out someone's plot/motives.
  • Figure out who's behind the plot.
  • Do research (find and read ancient texts, talk to old wise people).

Stealth/Heist Challenges

  • Steal (or plant) an item/information (modify enemy maps, plant disinformation. Plant clues to frame a person).
  • Escape from danger (overwhelming force, ambush, pursuit of the law or criminals).
  • Hide, cover your tracks, lay low.
  • Sneak through undetected (sneak past enemy lines to deliver a message to allied forces, sneak past the bouncers into a party).
  • Assassinate stealthily (sneak into the king's chambers, lure them out, use poison, make it look like an accident).
  • Deal with getting noticed / drawing an unwanted attention.
  • Clean up evidence (yours, someone else's).
  • Exchange a real item for a fake or vice versa.
  • Return a (creature, item) before anyone notices it's missing.
  • Sabotage (device, ritual) without being noticed.
  • Smuggle (creature, person, item) into or out of a location.
  • Security Testing - breach the clients security unnoticed.
  • Frame a person/group/nation for a crime.
  • Fake someone's death.

Villain's Moves

  • Personally confront the players.
  • Send minions after the players.
  • Hire a rival team of adventurers or thugs to go after players..
  • Send an assassin.
  • Send a spy.
  • Set a bounty on their heads.
  • Set a trap.
  • Setup an ambush.
  • Take hostages.
  • Threaten an NPC players like.
  • Frame players for a crime, declare them traitors/outlaws.
  • Reveal player's secrets, crimes they have committed.
  • Bribe the authorities/police to act against players.
  • Convince authorities/police that players are evil.
  • Make the public dislike the heroes.
  • Have a "dead man switch" that will hurt people or destroy something valuable if the villain is killed.
  • Know some information valuable to the players (like where hostages are kept, where the treasure is hidden), so players can't kill them, and must negotiate.
  • Set a time-bomb. Something horrible will happen unless players do what they're told.
  • Possess/blackmail/threaten an innocent person into doing their bidding.
  • Pretend to be someone else to deceive the players.
  • Befriend players to use them and betray them later.
  • Kidnap one of the players.
  • Join forces with another enemy of the players.
  • Plant false clues, create decoy trails.
  • Frame someone else for their crimes.
  • Kill hero's mentoally.
  • Cause mistrust, disorder, confusion, infighting among players or general population.
  • Hire people to commit crimes while pretending to be someone else to create mistrust/conflict among two parties. (Example: the bandits "from another country" attacks "local merchants", Start a plague in an uneducated city and have the "foreign merchant" sell snake oil cures, "native patriot" kills a "alien anarchist, etc.)
  • Put difficult choices in front of the heroes (like forcing Batman to save one of the ferry boats, to save Harvey Dent or Rachel).
  • Take away resources from the players (steal their items).
  • Give people the wrong idea about his powers/weaknesses.
  • Push player's buttons, play on heroes' flaws, temptations, fears.
  • Develop a good public image, make friends in the government, be beloved by the public.
  • Seduce player's allies to the dark side, convince/threaten them into betraying players.

Complications

  • Do it under time pressure (before the ritual is complete, before people run out of air, before reinforcements arrive, before or during the event, in transit, while you still have the chance).
  • Do it while competing with the rival team.
  • Unrelated people are interfering with the objective.
  • Do it stealthily (don't attract attention, don't leave clues, no witnesses).
  • Do it while pretending to be someone else.
  • Do it without revealing that your client is involved.
  • Prevent collateral damage, protect the innocents who are around.
  • Avoid violence. Defeat/capture the villain/creature without it being harmed.
  • Mitigate the risk, there's a high probability of causing a lot of damage if you're not careful.
  • Two challenges conflict with each other (you must break your stealth to help someone in trouble, capture criminal or save people who are currently in danger).
  • Difficult choice. Choose lesser of two evils, choose which people to rescue. Requiring personal sacrifice, risk, compromise.
  • Opportunities that come with a difficulty, cost or have negative consequences.
  • Resolve moral dilemma (the creature is dangerous but doesn't deserve to die, you're working for a bad guy, both sides of the conflict have valid points, completing a quest will harm people/environment).
  • Do it with incomplete information.
  • Do it with limited resources or without preparation.
  • Do it without access to powers you're used to having (while sick/injured/debilitated, in an area where magic is outlawed/disabled, having lost your equipment).
  • Locals here are unhelpful/hostile to you. You have low social status.
  • You can't trust anyone.
  • Doing it is illegal, or against authorities best interests, or is threatening a powerful group.
  • There are regulations/restrictions on what you can do hindering your progress.
  • Do it while being supervised (the media is all over you, a brilliant detective is on your tail, you are under suspicion, the enemy knows you're coming, you have a spy/mole).
  • Do it despite your flaws/temptations/fears.
  • It causes conflict/infighting within the team (player characters will have opposite goals/reactions to it).
  • Do it while working together with antagonist or someone else you don't like.
  • The side you're working for turns out to be evil.
  • The villain is someone you know/like/respect.
  • The villain is a respected public figure, celebrity, is liked by people or has authority over you.
  • Bad guy has a dead man switch, if he dies the others will suffer or treasure will be lost. Bad guy is the only one who knows the valuable information.
  • The people you're helping don't want your help.
  • Vital information turns out to be wrong.
  • Deal with the betrayal.
  • Mission has been rigged to fail from the start (PCs may be used as a scapegoat).
  • Objective is stolen before the PCs arrive.
  • Objective must be undamaged.
  • The important item has been transmuted and needs to be changed back, locked in a safe and needs a code to unlock, is a mineral that needs to be refined by a specific process. A book or a message is written in a foreign language that requires a translator.
  • Only a bad/unpleasant person can provide the item/information/favor you need.

Using Challenges to create Adventures

  • These challenges can be used as sub-goals the players will need to achieve on the path to their main goal, as obstacles they need to overcome to get what they want.
  • Most of them can also be used as the primary goal, an idea for the whole adventure (just make the stakes higher, make it important/interesting/exciting to accomplish, make it more difficult, add sub-goals and obstacles players need to get through to achieve it).
  • Challenges can be mixed and matched. In one adventure, challenge A can be the big primary goal, and challenge B can be a step towards accomplishing this big goal. In another adventure, it can be the other way around. In one adventure, the players need to obtain an item (a powerful weapon) to slay a monster, in another, they need to slay a monster to get their hands on the valuable item. In one adventure they need to rescue someone who has a clue to the mystery, in another they need to solve a mystery to be able to rescue someone.
  • Use multiple challenges together to add more depth, make the adventure more difficult/interesting, get players to fight on several fronts. Combine challenges to make them complications for each other, or use conflicting challenges that are incompatible with each other to create difficult choices. Players need to protect a person while also being on the run from the law, they need to spy on someone while traveling through the dangerous environment, they need to fight for political power while pretending to be someone they're not, they need to slay a big monster in the middle of the city while protecting people and avoiding collateral damage.
This works because:
  • Stories are fundamentally about problem solving. Roleplaying is fundamentally about problem solving. This is the fundamental "game loop" of RPGs - GM puts a problem in front of the players, and they find creative ways to solve it, that's what gives them fun stuff to do and feels satisfying to accomplish.
  • Adventure Ideas are fundamentally problems. They create an exciting, challenging, important goal for the players to accomplish.
  • Big problems are broken down into small challenges. But fundamentally, the big climactic adventure/campaign goals and the small challenges players encounter on their way are the same thing. Every scene the characters solve a small problem, and it drives them towards solving the big problem. That's what plot points are - players solving or failing to solve a problem, which moves them closer to or farther away from the goal. Which feels exciting/valuable/dramatic.
  • Conflict, obstacles, social/exploration/combat encounters are fundamentally just sources of problems. There probably are other sources that can generate problems.
  • It's all just nested challenges: Campaign Problem > Adventure Problem > Scene Problem. And any challenge can be used on any of these levels.
  • Therefore, the list above is a list of adventure ideas and plot points at the same time. Make any challenge very important/difficult/exciting to accomplish - and it becomes an idea for the adventure or a campaign. Make any adventure idea relatively small and simple - and it becomes a scene challenge (encounter). Put a number of smaller challenges in front of the players - and you've got your basic story structure (a list of encounters, the gameplay). Because goals and challenges are fundamentally the same, just the nested problems, they can be combined in any order to create any number of unique adventures.
  • Also, it means that you can take big story ideas from movies, TV episodes, published modules, and use them as ideas for small encounters. Shawshank Redemption, Alien, Jaws, Incredibles - they can be big campaign ideas, small adventure ideas, or just a thing characters do in a scene (escape from the prison, hide from a monster, defeat a big golem).
  • Game mechanics are also challenges. If there's an RPG system that gets players to do something awesome (GM moves in Dungeon World, Favors/Debts and Social Status mechanics from the Undying, Weak Moves from Dream Askew) - you can use those as challenges too.
  • Even a single challenge can create an unlimited number of unique stories - you just change the concrete details. McGuffins, NPCs, locations, etc.
If you find this list useful - please help me to improve and extend it!
  • Share more challenge ideas, how can these challenge lists can be extended?
  • What other big challenge categories could I add? Please share a few challenge examples in those categories.
  • Share interesting examples for each kind of challenge.
  • Share interesting complications and combinations of challenges.
  • Share feedback/advice/ideas on improving this project.
  • Share good resources (books, random tables, articles) I can use to extend this list.
Use the Adventure Writing Template to help you develop these challenges into a complete adventure.
I have also made an "Adventure Prompts Tool" that will pick the random challenges for you (it also contains some prompts for settings and villains).
Also see the Big List of Adventure Ideas - the list of challenges that will work well as the main idea for the adventure (a goal for the Players or the Villain).
If you want updates on my future posts - follow me here.
submitted by lumenwrites to DnDBehindTheScreen [link] [comments]

A Deep Dive - Ghislaine Maxwell: Silver Spoons and Hard Times

A Deep Dive - Ghislaine Maxwell: Silver Spoons and Hard Times
This story was published in Frank's Report. Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist. Frank Report is one of the internet’s best destinations for true, unfiltered, hard-hitting journalism run by the acclaimed journalist Frank Parlato.
Since 2015, articles published on Frank Report have exposed major scandals and criminal enterprises (including the NXIVM Cult. Frank Parlato has been cited as a source by hundreds of major media outlets around the world, including the New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CNN, Fox News, Albany Times Union, New York Post, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, Oxygen, Hollywood Life, E! News, CBS Inside Edition, Televisa (Mexico, Stern (Germany, Brisbane Times (Australia, Sun (UK, Hamilton Spectator (Canada), Haaretz (Israel), Tibetan Journal (Tibet), Dnevnik (Croatia), New Zealand Herald, Sputnik News (Russia), Voici (France), Blich (Switzerland), Pour Femme (Italy), CM Journal (Portugal) and more. Frank Parlato was the lead investigator and coordinating producer of Investigation Discovery’s 2 hour blockbuster special ‘The Lost Women of NXIVM.’)))))
From sex trafficking cults disguised as self-empowerment groups to government cronyism depriving citizens of tax-funded programs, Frank Report doesn’t just turn stones – it outright obliterates them.
Welcome to Frank Report, one of the internet’s finest examples of real, unbridled journalism.
----

Ghislaine Maxwell – Silver Spoons and Hard Times

August 9, 2020
By Paul Serran
https://frankreport.com/2020/08/09/ghislaine-maxwell-silver-spoons-and-hard-times/
http://archive.is/by7md
Ghislaine Maxwell led much of her life under the world’s fascinated microscopic view, always enthralled by her – famous and infamous – as it watched her fortunes wax and wane.
From the celebrated miracle daughter of media tycoon Robert Maxwell; to the broken young woman who fled scandal in the UK to a small New York apartment, trying to launch a new life; the rebirth Jet-set Ghislaine, who was everywhere at once, longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein, a man even richer and more shady than her father; the sophisticated middle age woman, a runaway alleged criminal trying hard to avoid detection by her pursuers – finally, to the incarcerated, indicted suspected sex trafficker and perjurer.
Ghislaine was Robert and Betty Maxwell’s miracle baby, born on Christmas Day, 1961. Two days after that, their eldest son suffered a fatal car accident.
In 24 hours, it all had been somehow foretold: joy – and then tragedy.
During the Swinging Sixties, Robert Maxwell served two terms as a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham. He led a multimillionaire lifestyle, and was the host of star-studded parties at Headington Hill Hall, his baronial fifty-three-room Oxford mansion.
The Maxwells spent a million dollars redecorating the mansion. In a stained glass window scene for the imperial staircase, Israeli sculptor Nehemia Azaz depicted Robert Maxwell as the biblical hero Samson tearing down the gates of Gaza: “a titan of luck, impossible achievement, and unlimited wealth”.
They had the use of chauffeured luxury cars. They traveled the world in Robert’s Gulfstream IV Jet and his sleek 180-foot yacht, named Lady Ghislaine.
“If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him,” Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock celebrated the bombastic, demanding mogul who dined with kings and presidents and had a bottomless appetite for family, food, fortune, and fame.
The first brush with financial and professional hardship came at a age when young Ghislaine would have been mostly sheltered from it.
In the early seventies, after Robert Maxwell tried similar shenanigans in a failed attempt to swindle the American financier Saul Steinberg, who was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable.
At the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969 during the period of negotiations, leading to a suspension of dealing in Pergamon shares on the London stock markets.
It was found that Maxwell had contrived to maximize Pergamon’s share price through transactions between his private family companies. This was a criminal practice he would utilize again in the future.
Inspectors from Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry declared Maxwell unfit to run a public company: “Notwithstanding Mr. Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.”
‘Captain Bob’ established the Maxwell Foundation in tax haven Liechtenstein, in 1970. By the 1980s he come back roaring, prompted by money later said to have originated in the Soviet Union. He bought the Mirror Group built and a massive media conglomerate.
The good times were on: Ghislaine was nicknamed “The Shopper” because of her wild spending funded by Robert’s millions. He also bankrolled her failed corporate gifts business.
During this period, she reportedly had a VERY close relationship with her father and was widely credited with being her father’s favorite child.
In Oxford, Ghislaine led a student life of wealth and privilege. Her father would send Filipino servants to the college house she shared to clean, arrange the table and cook, in the event of a party.
Her career piggybacked on her father’s businesses. She was made director of the Oxford United, and later, put in charge of “special projects” of the New York Daily News.
With her father’s money, she found her way into society, especially in New York — a haven where she could escape his complete control.
But the good times were not to last. Overextended and over-leveraged, Maxwell’s empire was about to crumble.
At this time, Maxwell reportedly was a regular at London’s casinos, playing three tables at once, even dropping $2.5 million in a single night. For years, he had been an inveterate gambler, but this was the behavior of a desperate man whose time was running out.
“He was a very crude man,” said a female writer for Time magazine. “His polish was not very deep. If you were with him for any length of time, it peeled away. I was in his library in the Maxwell House penthouse—a beautiful apartment with marble and servants all over the place—and while I was admiring his books, his valet said to me, ‘You should see Mr. Maxwell’s collection of pornographic tapes’.”
Ghislaine visited her father in his office before he flew off to Gibraltar. “He was looking for an apartment in New York—a sort of pied-à-terre, where he could talk and have meetings—and he wanted me to help him,” she told Vanity Fair. “He asked me to go see a particular apartment. He said, ‘If you like it, I’ll make time to see it and come to New York.’ ” But the next time Ghislaine saw her father, he was dead.
”Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” her mother Betty told Vanity Press. ”The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed, and it will be very difficult for her to continue.”
When she finally appeared before the reporters, she had collected herself. “How did your father die?” a journalist shouted at Ghislaine Maxwell. “He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered. ”
Maxwell, it turned out, had debts of nearly $5 billion, and had stolen hundreds of millions from the Mirror Group’s pension funds to shore up his faltering companies. That left 32,000 employees exposed to retirement ruin.
The irony was not lost on the hard-hitting British press: Robert Maxwell, a socialist, stealing hundreds of millions of pounds from the Mirror’s pension fund!
He swindled money from two of his public companies, transferred millions in and out the secret family trusts in Liechtenstein, to manipulate the share price of his Corporation.
Robert was called “rogue,” “crook,” “bully,” “thief,” “megalomaniac,” and “gangster.” The press told lurid tales of his sex orgies with midget Filipino hookers.
He was seen as a 310-pound aberration gorging on spoonfuls of caviar. An erratic and cruel tyrant who used Turkish towels for toilet paper. Journalists wrote that he was a spy for the K.G.B. or Mossad or Czech intelligence—or all three.
“My daughter Ghislaine has no money, no trusts, no funds anywhere.” her mother Betty told Vanity Fair. “Neither of [my children] had any money. Their father never gave them any money.”
Their assets were frozen. His son Kevin’s house was put up for sale, as were the Lady Ghislaine and the Gulfstream IV Jet. Their passports were seized.
A friend told The Times of London, “[Ghislaine] had always been the life and soul of the party wherever she wanted to go in the world and never had to worry about money.” Now she was the broken child of a monster, his name forever synonymous to scandal. “She was catatonic,” the friend said.
Forced to vacate her huge company-provided residence, she moved into a small apartment. When a friend came to visit, Ghislaine told her, “They took everything—everything—even the cutlery.”
Little did she know how many more times things in her life would shift from silver spoons to hard times. A woman brought up in luxury, she had everything taken from her, before she came to the United States to begin again.
“He wasn’t a crook,” Ghislaine told Vanity Press. “A thief to me is somebody who steals money. (…) Did he put it in his own pocket? Did he run off with the money? No. And that’s my definition of a crook.”
“I’m surviving—just,” she said. “But I can’t just die quietly in a comer. I have to believe that something good will come out of this mess. It’s sad for my mother. It’s sad to have lost my dad. It’s sad for my brothers. But I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.”
Ghislaine Maxwell was also being hunted by the tabloids. The Maxwell name was so detested in London that she is said to have had to walk around in a blond wig so people wouldn’t recognize her.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s reinvention didn’t take long. Maxwell moved to the United States just after her father’s death. Her photograph boarding a Concorde to cross the Atlantic caused outrage – her father had just defrauded pensioners out of 750 Million Sterling Pounds.
According to the Mail on Sunday: “Unnoticed by almost everybody, traveling with her was a greying, plumpish, middle-aged American businessman who managed to avoid the photographers. It is to this man that 30-year-old Ghislaine has turned to ease the heartache of her father’s shame.”
“His name is Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Whose house is this, Ghislaine?” a friend asked her in the early 1990’s. “Who lives here?”
My friend,” Maxwell replied.
“Well, is he banging you?” the friend demanded. “What’s the scoop here?”
A trust fund is said to have provided her with an income of $145,000 a year. A far cry from her previous seemingly unending wealth. She “never, ever had any cash. Lots of credit, of course, but no cash”, one friend recalled to the press.
And yet, she lived the high life. She was known in New York as the “female Gatsby” for her lavish entertaining. Had a “reputation for being charming and funny, and a glittering lifestyle straight out of the pages of a society magazine”.
She was now “far from the ever watchful eye of the British press,” Hello! magazine wrote in 1997.
“She is proud of the fact that her new life is all down to her own hard work and has her elegant apartment to show for it,” the magazine mistakenly added. One day, she would “get married and have kids. But it has never been a focus: My focus is my business.”
Ghislaine’s presence added more fuel to the question: “How did Jeffrey Epstein amass his fortune?” For one of the most propagated theories is that Maxwell’s father Robert bankrolled him with funds hidden from the UK authorities.
Jeffrey Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a massive ranch in New Mexico, which – he boasted – made his New York townhouse “look like a shack”. He named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, with a specially built massage room.
She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.” All she had to do to keep it was to give ‘the monster’ what he wanted.
Maxwell was expected to drop everything to serve Epstein.
She had to keep everyone in line, because one misstep would unleash the wrath of Epstein, one of the few people who could make Maxwell cry. “He would be screaming over the phone,” recalled an Epstein victim, “and she would burst into tears.”
The New York townhouse became a social nexus; guests could have included members of the Kennedy and Rockefeller clans, “along with the requisite sprinkling of countesses and billionaires,” according to The Times of London.
She was “a modern-day geisha” in a “domain filled with the richest people in the planet. “It’s a world frequented by young half-naked girls in bikinis, billionaires and lavish lifestyles, but it borders on the grotesque. You are never really sure what is going on behind closed doors.”
Royalty was specially prized, which is why her friendship with Prince Andrew became so treasured. In 2000, Maxwell and Epstein attended a Prince Andrew’s party at the Queen’s Sandringham House estate in Norfolk, England. It has been reported that the event was in honor of Maxwell’s 39th birthday.
And yet, Ghislaine began trying to distance herself from Epstein long before he went to jail. In the early 2000s, she hooked up in California with a man much richer than Epstein: Ted Waitt.
Waitt lived in a seven-bedroom, 14-bath mansion in La Jolla, sailed the world aboard a 240-foot mega-yacht, the Plan B. It was equipped with a helipad, Jacuzzi, elevator, gym, and HAD AN ONBOARD SUBMARINE, which Maxwell soon was licensed to pilot.
After Epstein went to prison in Florida for a short period, Maxwell saw the silver spoons turned into hard times again.
Acquaintances that crossed her path reported how she was almost unrecognizable. She was not stylish and attention grabbing anymore, seemed determined to go unnoticed. Her face had no makeup. There was a hint of gray in her black hair, she put on some weight.
“I was so shocked by her look,” a friend recalled to the British press. “I didn’t recognize her.”
She even gave up her once proud name, sometimes introducing herself to new acquaintances only as “G.”
“Where are you living, Ghislaine?” the friend asked. “I lost touch with you.” Maxwell suddenly went blank. “Oh,” she replied, “a little bit everywhere.”
December 2014: Virginia Roberts Giuffre filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida describing Maxwell as Epstein’s “primary coconspirator and participant in his sexual abuse and sex trafficking scheme.”
Maxwell made a huge mistake, issuing an “urgent” statement to the media dismissing the claims as “obvious lies.” That allowed Giuffre, to sue Maxwell for defamation in federal court in New York, a lawsuit “widely viewed as a vessel for Epstein’s victims to expose the scope of Epstein’s crimes,” according to the Miami Herald.
Maxwell affirmed her innocence with fury, at one point of her testimony banging her fists on the table. She also, according to charges filed by the DOJ SDNY, committed two counts of perjury.
2019: when the SDNY reopened the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine was far away, living the high life.
She met with her friend Prince Andrew in Buckingham Palace, and participated in “Cash & Rocket”, an annual charity road rally. Between races of the rally, she joined the super rich in attending a Masquerade Ball in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as a White dinner at La Reserve in Geneva and the Red party at the Yacht Club de Monaco.
Those were to be her last reported events. Cash & Rocket scrub Maxwell’s photo from its website once Epstein was arrested and the scandal assaulted the headlines again.
On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested by federal agents at Teterboro Airport, arriving from Paris. The FBI raided his mansion, and charged him with sex trafficking of minors.
“Epstein’s pimp girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, a very well-connected Brit socialite cannot just walk free,” actress Ellen Barking tweeted the day after Epstein’s arrest. “This woman is his pimp. She pilots planes [sic] to and from the island. I know because she told me.”
Maxwell again went into hiding, unreachable during legal proceedings. It surfaced in December 2019 that Maxwell was among the people under FBI investigation for facilitating Epstein’s crimes.
She was faced with a tabloid frenzy even bigger than the one that accompanied the death of her father. She again uprooted herself and tried to start over in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a quiet village 30 miles north of Boston, she lived for a time in the $3 million, five-bedroom colonial home of Scott Borgerson, CEO of CargoMetrics, a hedge fund investment company involved in maritime data analytics.
Since Epstein was found dead in jail, last August, she is reported to have moved 36 times, out of fear for her safety. Credible Death threats arrived by social media, email, phone, text, and postal service. It began in earnest with Epstein’s arrest, multiplied with his death, and accelerated in the months that followed. They soon became a routine part of her life.
She hired a professional security firm, with operatives that are veterans of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
This photoshopped photo of Maxwell surfaced last year to mislead the public into thinking she was in Los Angeles. Frank Report was the first to report the photo a fake, a story that went viral.
“Where in the world was Ghislaine Maxwell? Everyone, it seemed, had a theory, each wilder than the last. She was said to be hiding deep beneath the sea in a submarine, which she was licensed to pilot. Or she was lying low in Israel, under the protection of the Mossad, the powerful intelligence agency with whom her late father supposedly tangled. Or she was in the FBI witness protection program, or ensconced in luxury in a villa in the South of France, or sunning herself naked on the coast of Spain, or holed up in a high-security doomsday bunker belonging to rich and powerful friends whose lives might implode should Maxwell ever reveal what she knows—all the dirty secrets of the dirty world that she and Epstein shared.”
(Vanity Fair – Jul 3, 2020)
Maxwell remained at large, beyond the reach of attorneys, tabloid reporters, and a 10,000-pound reward from The Sun in London.
“It’s a little bit like Elvis—you get lots of reports but they’re hard to verify,” a victim attorney said in May.
She was periodically said to have been spotted around the world, usually in places where she was not. Reporters scoured the globe. Some said she was in Russia trying to get a Oligarch to protect her. Others pointed to Israel or Brazil, China, Singapore, the Middle East, England.
She was “both everywhere and nowhere,” lamented UK’s The Guardian.
On August 2019, she was apparently photographed eating a burger and fries in the Cahuenga Boulevard, in the San Fernando Valley. She held The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. Given Ghislaine and her father Robert’s alleged ties to Intelligence Services, this choice does not seem accidental.
Papers were running out of incredible stories to account for her disappearance. A bizarre new theory emerged she could be hiding in a submarine which – as we saw – was not downright impossible, since she DID have a license to pilot underground vehicles.
On July 2nd 2020, Maxwell was arrested by the FBI and NYPD in the small New England town of Bradford, New Hampshire. It is situated at driving distance of the NYSD. They finally found her in a luxurious four-bedroom, 4,365-square-foot home on a wooded lot, called Tuckedaway.
Ghislaine Maxwell was charged with six federal crimes: luring and enticement of minors, sex trafficking of children and perjury.
The crimes took place between 1994 and 1997, the years of her “intimate relationship with Epstein,” when she “assisted, facilitated, and contributed to Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls.”
One of the three unnamed victims was “as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by Maxwell and Epstein, both of whom knew that certain victims were in fact under the age of 18.”
FBI assistant director William F. Sweeney Jr. described Maxwell as “one of the villains of this investigation,” who had “slithered away to a gorgeous property” in New Hampshire, where she was “continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago.”
“I am optimistic about my future,” she said in 1997, “and believe things will continue to improve for me as time passes.”
Now, according to sources close to her, “I don’t think [Ghislaine] sees there is a future,” came the reply.
If found guilty of all charges, Maxwell could face a prison sentence of 35 years. She denies the accusations, and has pleaded not guilty to all six charges.
She will await trial locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn. A dreadful prison that is as removed from her previous “silver spoon” upbringing as it’s possible in the US. Hard times.
She used to be a larger than life character, who once hosted a dinner for NY socialites on ‘the fine art of giving a blow job’. But then, she really blew it.
A report from a source familiar with the Metropolitan Detention Center gives a glum picture of Ghislaine Maxwell’s present conditions.
She is in the women’s section and believed to be confined to a solitary cell. Because of the past history of the MDC, it is not impossible to suspect that Ghislaine could be having sexual relations with one or more corrections officers, either male or female. Her available wealth would permit her to buy some privileges directly from the corrections officers who could smuggle in items for her.
MDC has a history of guards, male and female, enjoying sex with prisoners and smuggling in everything from alcohol to cell phones to drugs. While she is not enjoying what anyone would call a privileged life, and is most likely [because of Covid protocols] confined to her cell, dank and cold [in summer] perhaps as much as 23-24 hours per day and possibly getting only one hot meal per day, our source says, with her wealth and talent to charm, if there is any privilege, any opportunity, any luxury to enjoy at MDC, she is enjoying it.
Of course, she is probably under near-constant surveillance, for no guard wants to go to prison for letting her get murdered or commit suicide – as did her former lover Epstein. It is not known how frequently she is meeting with lawyers in special rooms set aside for the purpose. But an MDC source tells Frank Report that prison officials are known to eavesdrop on those conversations with lawyers and defendants and do so on high profile cases. Whether they report to the prosecution what they learn is unknown.
In the end, Maxwell has a hard road to hoe and will remain in the brutal and unsanitary MDC until she stands trial or makes a plea deal or dies. The possibility of additional charges other than those currently charged against her – for hebephilia crimes in the last century – remain a possibility.
The late Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted hebephile, a person who has urges for post pubescent but under the age of consent children. Is Ghislaine one also? And are there others, famous and prominent men of power who have indulged as Jeffrey and allegedly Ghislaine have done?
The ace in the hole for her, obviously, is, if she has info on other prominent hebephiles that the DOJ for its own partisan or PR reasons might like to selectively prosecute, she can trade that info for a lenient sentence and hopefully not be murdered for doing so.
Her former lover, Jeffrey Epstein, might have committed suicide, as the Mainstream Media and the US Govt. urges you to believe, but there are some who find the coincidences, cameras being off, bones broken indicating he was strangled, guards happening to fall asleep as they were assigned to watch the most famous prisoner in the world, such that that it just might cause reasonable people to doubt the official narrative a little more than the corporate media and prison officials would wants us to doubt.
The same fate might befall Ghislaine and we may never know just what she did. Whether her crimes were confined to herself and Epstein or whether there was a vast network of hebephiles joining in – or – in fairness to her – she is innocent as she claims, something that a trial, if she makes it to trial, might help us determine.


stretcher during the funeral service in Jerusalem’s main convention hall on Nov. 10, 1991. The body is laying on a stretcher, draped in a white Jewish prayer shawl with black stripes as is it tradition of Jewish burials in Israel. (AP Photo/Natik Harnik) Ghislaine is fourth from the left.


https://preview.redd.it/vnzmapdilrg51.png?width=432&format=png&auto=webp&s=bde723c918da88ce07aa1091b70c77baa76c0562

https://preview.redd.it/6v6qco3llrg51.png?width=509&format=png&auto=webp&s=7531e39667e4ee9f869b6c56ef8c53e118a8909f

https://preview.redd.it/xu6z62snlrg51.png?width=574&format=png&auto=webp&s=c96a9decc1af25e8adc0e31b9cdad1d51c67faee
submitted by ALiddleBiddle to Epstein [link] [comments]

hire casino equipment for party video

Casino Party Hire Email: [email protected] 01277 654236 / 07855 792756 (after 5pm) A casino party brings all the fun, excitement and glamour of Vegas to just about any type of event – from a small family party, granny’s 60th or a school prom. Casino Party Hire, The Souths number one specialist casino entertainment company. We supply full size fun casino equipment for hire, with fun experianced croupiers for all tables hired. We transport quality fun casino tables and gaming equipment to parties all over South East England and regularly in London. Our Casino Equipment Include: • Choice of the below fun gaming tables: Roulette Table Hire, Poker Table Hire, Blackjack Table Hire or Dice (American Craps) • Delivery and set up of our quality fun casino accessories • Casino quality gaming chips and fun play money • All fun casino equipments required for a fun packed party BEST BIRTHDAY PARTY! WOULD TALK ABOUT FOR LONG TIME! “Thanks Tim for hosting my hubbys 50th birthday the casino theme was such a hit with all our family and friends there still talking about what a fun and fabulous night they had. With years of experience in the industry, you can hire gaming tables, themed props, accessories and more for the ultimate casino-themed party! Our casino party hire services are suitable for all event types, so everyone can enjoy the thrill and anticipation as the wheel is spun or a card is dealt from the deck. Not only do we bring Casino Hire fun to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Adelaide, we can come to your party anywhere on the East Coast of Australia including regional NSW and Victoria. Call or email with your wherabouts and we can have a fully functional casino at your birthday party or event. Exclusive casino party hire theming options: Enhance your casino themed party setting with our original range of Paparazzi style Media Walls, designed to light up your photos. The Red Carpet Experience – lush red carpet lined by gold bollards with matching red ropes create the VIP entry into your casino event. Make your event stand out from all other events. Casino party hire is perfect for the following: Wedding Casino Hire; Christmas Parties; Fundraisers; Classic Casino Nights; Stag and Hen Parties; Example table packages below or the choice to mix and match as you wish: SILVER PACKAGE. Professional Casino tables of your choice; Professional Croupiers; Fun Money; Chips and Casino Equipment you would expect to see in a real casino; Bottle of bubbly; GOLD PACKAGE. Professional Casino tables of your choice Ace of Diamonds Fun Casino Hire has an extensive selection of casino games to hire such as Roulette Blackjack, Texas Holdem Poker, Casino Stud Poker, Craps (Dice), Wheel of Fortune and Chuck a Luck. Whatever your needs, we have a casino hire package to suit all types and sizes of events from a small house party to a major corporate event and everything in between. A Casino Themed event is always a hit among party goers as they have the opportunity to get all dressed up and try their luck at winning the jackpot! A Casino Theme will have your guests living the high life as they are experience the ‘High-Roller’, VIP experience. Talk to Feel Good Events to see how you can create your own themed party.

hire casino equipment for party top

[index] [2003] [883] [7111] [145] [5063] [2377] [3425] [7592] [8191] [3570]

hire casino equipment for party

Copyright © 2024 top.toprealmoneygames.xyz