Death is a natural part of the gameplay loop and economy of Realm of the Mad God. By dying, you lose gear and alive fame, and have to max a new character. This requires that you go back through the grinding process to get all of that back - motivating you to keep playing.
At least, this is what one would hope. However, due to some major unhealthy game mechanics, the last thing that many deaths do to players is encourage them to continue playing and earn back what they had.

Instapops

Let’s define instapops as attacks by one enemy that result in instant death, regardless of HP. This means we won’t be taking into account things like the Shatters stacked stone spike bug (although this does deserve to be addressed as well), huge stacks of medusa grenades, or other situations that would be generally too restrictive to design around. We’ll focus mainly on things like, to name one common example, sitting on one of Dr. Terrible’s green potions.
Instapops on their own aren’t necessarily bad design, but let’s look at the effect they have on a player’s mentality. Getting deleted by something - taken from healthy to 0% HP without a single frame to react - could be the result of a player’s own mistakes. Perhaps they positioned poorly and put themselves in a spot to get hit by something, or perhaps they missed a warning like the shots before the laser in High Tech Terror. I’ll discuss the importance of the perceptibility of these warnings further on.
Regardless of this potential warning, instapops fundamentally introduce an element of unforgivingness to the game. If you make a particular mistake, you die - no nexusing, no questions. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve played up to that point, you are dead. To some, they’re cool with letting go of a character and getting back on the grind. To others, especially if they’re wearing some of their most valuable gear, this creates immense frustration.

The Purpose of Instapops

Instapops served an important purpose in Realm for a very long time: continuing the gameplay loop. With divine pets preventing people from really getting killed in most situations, instapops prevented the overpowered level of regeneration they brought from keeping players alive. With the addition of the Vital Combat system, this justification is now in question - you can die to taking consistent hits no matter how good your pet is now.
Thus, the only purpose served by instapops is to frustrate players and drive them to either quit, hack, RWT, or dupe.

The Existence and Perceptibility of Warnings

Recently, we received an update which introduced a red warning flash to many enemies that feature instapopping attacks. This is a very welcome change to be sure, but it’s both incomplete and, in many cases, poorly implemented. Take, for example, yellow trains (Cavecrawler Maggots) in Fungal Cavern. At the time this update was released, their behavior was:
Follow the nearest player -> Flash red -> Jump to the nearest player.
This may seem like a totally reasonable pattern. It sure does to me. That is, until you realize that the aggro range is wider than player vision, and that that jump would always close most of the distance to the nearest player. This means you could just be peacefully clearing a room, only for a yellow train - an enemy infamous for its ability to pop even the beefiest maxed characters - to RKO you out of nowhere, yeeting itself onto you from an entire room over. So much for visible warning.
It is extremely important that deadly behaviors be telegraphed. Learning how a normal enemy works shouldn’t cost a character. Additionally, there shouldn’t be random, rare, unpredictable variations in behavior that can cost someone who’s faced the same enemy countless times to get popped by it once.
All this should go to show that instapops are very hard to design around. They require some amount of telegraphing, and have to require some kind of critical, literally fatal error on the part of the player in order to be anywhere close to reasonable.

Hidden Warnings

In the previous section, I mentioned yellow trains and their ability to jump into a player’s line of sight from outside of it without any visible warning. The problem with this is specifically that the warning is not visible to the player. This is similarly the case in O3’s exalted meteors - they’re capable of instapopping, and if you move too far, the meteors’ indicators on the ground can disappear and leave you liable to get popped without warning. Somewhat similarly, in the Mad Lab’s first boss, green potions can be hidden by various sprites, including the big ol’ capsule in the middle of the room that you might have to go near while fighting him. Normally, it’s trivial to avoid taking damage from green potions, but in cases where they are drawn underneath other sprites, that same trivial task suddenly becomes impossible. One could argue that being anywhere near sprites that could cover up a green potion is technically a mistake, and you’d be right - but there should not be conditions in which a warning is hidden from the player. When such a thing happens, there’s no real way to know you’ve made a mistake until you’re already dead - once again, an unforgiving and extremely frustrating way to die.

Inevitable Instapops

While in the previous section, I covered ways in which instapops are reasonable with warnings, and ways in which execution of this in the game falls short. However, I didn’t cover another, especially frustrating and unreasonable type of instapop: one without warning. Something that you can’t avoid and can’t prevent without kneecapping the way you play the game, or something that wasn't an intentional mechanic at all.
clip for context - a revive was promptly requested, but as always, support gave the same automated reply, so he (understandably) quit
Here, we see the split phase of 3-headed demon in the Cultist Hideout. In this picture, the pepperoni man is charging at a relatively low-speed wizard, but something unusual is happening: while pizza time is still 2.5-3ish tiles away, an entire sausage has spawned on top of the wizard, giving him 939 pounds of shmeat he didn’t ever want. How strange! Either the demon whipped out an uno reverse card and spellbombed the wizard, or it’s a time traveler. Either way, a number of issues exist here.
This instapop:
-is impossible to react to
-is misleading compared to the enemy’s usual behavior
-lacks any sort of warning
-follows a change in behavior that also happens without warning
-excessively punishes the player for something that is not the player’s fault
To call this a failure of design and execution would be too kind. Want to fix your hacker problem, DECA? Start here.
https://i.imgur.com/QyhgfX1.png
This image probably gave some of you Vietnam flashbacks. This is because this unique and wonderful enemy’s behavior involves going turbo mode onto the nearest player the second it gets activated and blasting out 3 lines of shots - depending on what direction you’re moving in, this is another unavoidable instapop with no warning. The only way not to have some unknown chance of getting forcibly torn from this plane of existence is not to go to Oryx’s Sanctuary at all.

Latency and Instapops

This section is just a very important footnote. Latency does play a big role in how possible it is to react to an instapop. It’s for this reason that it isn’t reliably consistent to design warnings for instapops in an online game - there will inevitably be times, especially with how shaky Realm’s servers almost always are, when avoidable pops become unavoidable.

Death’s Effect on Players

Dying was one of the best things to happen to me as a player for a while. I was a blue star with no positional or situational awareness and would just get steamrolled. However, I’d get back up, see what went wrong, and not die that way again.
With unavoidable instapops, this isn’t the case. There’s no way to avoid the clipped death without staying entirely outside of aggro range and not dealing damage - in other words, not progressing the bossfight. You get to choose to either sit in a stalemate waiting for nothing in particular to happen, or die. I personally like to play the game by dealing damage, dodging shots, and earning my loot, but stuff like this makes that a bit tough to do.
Dying this way doesn’t yield any lessons, nor any motivation to earn the stuff back and try again. Dying this way causes frustration, demotivation, and fear. Nothing else.

Instapops and Hacking

It’s no secret at all that hackers just can’t die. They can literally nexus at negative HP and be totally fine. To some of you, this is ridiculous - what’s the point in the game if there’s no risk? How is that any fun at all? And I’d be inclined to agree.
But to that I must also ask, how is it any fun at all to lose your characters and gear that you’re most proud of to factors completely outside of your control? I don’t hack. Years ago, I used to, but I never will again. I don’t enjoy it at all. That said, it’s easy to empathize with people who are pushed to hack by incidents like this. Imagine losing gear you grinded literal thousands of dungeons, hundreds of hours to get - to something like the clip above, with absolutely no recourse or way to prevent it. Among things I’d consider doing in response, “make a new character and get back at it” isn’t even in the top 3.
Now, imagine you can not only prevent yourself from ever losing the gear, you can even get copies of it. I mean, if you’re already breaking TOS, why not, right? - so you continue down the TOS-breaking rabbit hole.

Potential Solutions

Solving this problem could solve issues that have plagued Realm and DECA’s ownership of it for the entirety of the game’s recent history. The popularity of hacking, demand for RWT, and dwindling playerbase that is increasingly dissatisfied with the direction and experience of the game could all be mitigated by systems that improve the experience of death.
I’m not suggesting that DECA make death more forgiving (although loosening the ‘never revive’ policy of the support team in egregious cases of poor design or server issues would be a more than reasonable change, I feel). I’m saying to make deaths the player’s fault, not the game’s fault. Here are a few ways this could be done:

• Draw deadly items (e.g. UFO bombs, Shatters stone spikes, mad lab green potions) above EVERYTHING, and/or visually contrast them more heavily with their environment. Making these more perceptible makes deaths to them feel significantly less bullshit - it won’t have been hidden until suddenly you go from full HP to a boost in account fame.
• Cap damage to players. If someone, say, eats an entire bomb they didn’t see or gets run over by a deadly enemy that just charged in from out of line of sight, let their HP drop to 1 and give ~0.3 seconds of damage immunity and sick. This still punishes having been hit by it, but by essentially forcing them out of the dungeon instead of excessively forcing their character 6 feet under. It provides a minimal yet usable window to react to the unexpected damage and hit the nexus key while also not letting them just HP pot back to full and go on their merry way. Additionally, for consistent players, it removes the one appealing feature of autonexus. This should, of course, not apply to all damage taken - just huge amounts of damage taken at once - within a couple of frames, rather than from getting shredded by a bunch of shots lined up.
• Remove these mechanics from the game entirely. Change the behaviors of enemies who try to sit on players and delete them, remove instapops like UFO bombs, O3 meteors, and Beisa’s falcons, and challenge players in different, more reasonable ways than how lucky they are.

Each of these has merits and demerits. As I see it, option 1:

• Makes instapops more ‘reasonable’
• Provides a better window to react

But it also

• May be difficult to execute while also keeping the game visually appealing.

Option 2:

• Creates a way for players to keep their characters alive based on skill, not on 3rd party programs or luck
• Mitigates unreasonable and frustrating deaths while still allowing devs to explore design space that would otherwise necessitate instapops
• Gives players less reason to cheat, and reduces the advantages cheaters have over actual players

But it also:

• Would likely not be reliable, considering DECA’s track record with features in exalt meant to keep players alive (see: hp pots not working)
• May be too powerful, depending on its implementation

Option 3:

• Provides a chance for DECA to emphasize the bullet hell aspect of Realm
• Can modernize many of Realm’s dungeons and enemies

But it also:

• Implies an extremely labor-intensive rework of a ton of enemies and hazards
• Limits future design space for the game

Given all of these, to me, option 2 seems like the best. A game mechanic that allows some of the more absurd attacks enemies have to be survived makes actual deaths feel less bad, and ensures that people actually have a chance to react to the things killing them.
Personally, the last death I had that wasn’t an instapop was literally 3 months ago. A significant number of those deaths were due to other players intentionally killing me, inconsistent enemy behaviors, and missing or hidden indicators. This doesn’t come from a place of salt, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a personal stake in this.
I’m tired of dying in a bullet hell in ways that don’t feel like they fit the gameplay at all. To call instapops in RotMG's current state game-ruining is an understatement.
Thanks for reading through all this, but if you didn’t, tl;dr: instapops are and feel unfair, and are a major reason why hacking is such a big problem - they need to be changed especially now that vital combat is a thing.
What do you all make of this? Have you had less trouble with instapops? Any better solutions, or commentary on the ones suggested here? Personally, I think I’ll find some other game to play until this is fixed. Hades looks quite good.

So the new round of errata for the PF2 CRB is out, but unfortunately they kind of put it in a mixing bowl with the first round of errata and it's a bit hard to tell which is which. Given how much there is, that kind of makes things difficult, so I decided to sort through the new and the old and make a list.
Odds are I've accidentally included or excluded something I shouldn't have, or someone else has already done this and I couldn't find it, or it won't matter because Paizo will do it themselves in a few hours. Nevertheless:
​
· Page 52 and 59: Halfling and Orc Weapon Familiarity has the wrong language for how to treat weapons with the halfling or orc trait; all ancestries with Weapon Familiarity should only treat the weapons as a different category for the purpose of determining proficiency. Change the final sentence to "For the purpose of determining your proficiency, martial halfling/orc weapons are simple weapons and advanced halfling/orc weapons are martial weapons."
· Page 85: In the barbarian's greater juggernaut class feature, change the last sentence to read “When you roll a failure on a Fortitude save against an effect that deals damage, you halve the damage you take.” This removes confusion about how to handle critical failures on saves against damaging effects.
· Page 103: Remove the Requirement in the bard's Effortless Concentration to match all the other Effortless Concentration feats.
· Page 112: Add tenets of good to the Prerequisites of Smite Evil. We accidentally omitted it.
· Page 113: Blade of Justice should not be limited to paladins only. Remove the paladin prerequisite from Blade of Justice, and the last sentence becomes "Whether or not the target is evil, you can convert all the physical damage from the attack into good damage, and if you are a paladin, the Strike applies all effects that normally apply on a Retributive Strike (such as divine smite)."
· Page 121: Deadly Simplicity had a benefit for unarmed attack favored weapons, but such clerics did not actually qualify. Change the prerequisites to add unarmed attacks.
· Several classes were accidentally missing an important limitation for 10th level spells. In the following class features, add “You can’t use this spell slot for abilities that let you cast spells without expending spell slots or that give you more spell slots.”
Page 121: Miraculous Spell
Page 133: Primal Hierophant
Page 207: Archwizard's Spellcraft
· Page 125: Emblazon Antimagic has the wrong counteract level. Change it to "your counteract level is equal to half your level, rounded up"
· Page 129: Druid mistakenly was trained in a class DC, when it shouldn't have a class DC. Remove it.
· Page 138: In Plant Shape, the level of the plant form spell if you don't have Wild Shape wasn't clear. It should say it's " heightened to the same level as your highest druid spell slot"
· Page 139: Hierophant's Power wasn't supposed to have the prerequisite of legendary in Nature; it's a holdover from the playtest. Remove the prerequisite.
· Page 145: The adjustment to the Aid reaction after the playtest caused Assisting Shot not to do anything. Replace it with this version.
Assisting Shot [one-action] Feat 2
Fighter, Press
Requirements You are wielding a ranged weapon.
With a quick shot, you interfere with a foe in combat. Make a Strike with a ranged weapon. If the strike hits, the next creature other than you to attack the same target before the start of your next turn gains a +1 circumstance bonus on their roll, or a +2 circumstance bonus if your Strike was a critical hit.
· Page 152: Determination has the wrong counteract level. Change it to "your counteract level is equal to half your level, rounded up"
· Page 163: Sleeper Hold shouldn't have the attack trait, meaning it doesn't apply or increase your multiple attack penalty.
· Page 165: Master of Many Styles lists "Your turn begins" as a requirement, but it should be a trigger. Change it to a trigger.
· Page 177: In order to make it completely clear how the Manifold Edge feat works, change the second sentence to read "When you use Hunt Prey, you can gain a hunter’s edge benefit other than the one you selected at 1st level." With the previous wording, a few people thought you gained both benefits, rather than a substitution.
· Page 188: Blank Slate, like a few other entries, was still erroneously running on a level 1 to 20 scale for counteract levels. Replace "counteract level of 20" with "counteract level of 10."
· 189: Dispelling Slice should use the default counteract level of "half your level (rounded up)", in the final sentence.
· Page 205: In Drain Bonded Item, remove the unnecessary Requirement of "Your turn begins."
· Page 217: Familiars' level wasn't explicit. Add "A familiar has the same level you do." The description of familiars didn't define any Strikes but also wasn't explicit that they couldn't make them. Add "It can't make Strikes" to the beginning of the third sentence.
· Page 233: Clarifying the general rule on repeated skill training that gives you a replacement skill, add at the end of the second paragraph "though if the skill is a Lore skill, the new skill must also be a Lore skill"
· Page 242: In Grapple, the restrained condition doesn't technically also make a creature grabbed, so to make it clear, in the requirements of the action and at the end of the first paragraph about not needing a hand if you're already grabbing someone, change "grabbed" to "grabbed or restrained"
· 248: To reflect the clarification on healer's tools allowing you to draw them as part of the action if you're wearing them, change the Requirements to "You are holding healer's tools, or you are wearing them and have a hand free"
· Page 249: Add "Drop Prone" to the list of basic commands you can tell your animal friend to lie down.

• Page 258: In Battle Medicine, change the Requirements entry to “You are holding or wearing healer's tools.” Change the second sentence of the effect to “Attempt a Medicine check with the same DC as for Treat Wounds, and restore a corresponding amount of Hit Points; this does not remove the wounded condition.” This means you need to use your healer's tools for Battle Medicine, but you can draw and replace worn tools as part of the action due to the errata on wearing tools on page 287.

· Page 259: Bonded Animal didn't explain the logistics of bonding the animal directly, leading a small number of people to be unsure that it was necessary to locate and interact with the animal to bond with it. To make it explicit, change the second sentence to "You can spend 7 days of downtime regularly interacting with a normal animal (…) that is friendly or helpful to you."
· Page 260: The Cloud Jump feat referred to exceeding a "limit" without spelling out exactly which limit. It's supposed to be the limit of not being able to Leap farther than your Speed. To make it clear, change the second paragraph to read "You can jump a distance greater than your Speed by spending additional actions when you Long Jump or High Jump. For each additional action spent, add your Speed to the limit on how far you can Leap."
· Page 260: The Connections feat requires a great deal of improvisation and adjudication on the part of a GM, more in line with an option that has uncommon rarity due to the narrative load. Because of this, change the feat's rarity to uncommon.
· Page 260: Dubious Knowledge's effect should only happen on a failure, not a critical failure. Change the effect to explicitly state it doesn't occur on a critical failure.
· Page 268: Because the word "action" could have broad or narrow scopes, it wasn't clear exactly when you could use the Unified Theory feat to substitute Arcana for the other magical skills. Change the beginning of the second sentence to "Whenever you use a skill action or a skill feat" to make it clear you can use it with skill actions (such as the ones in Chapter 4) and skill feat, but not for other actions, such as when casting spells or rituals.
· Held, Worn, and Stowed Items
Page 271: We've simplified the way we're handling characters carrying their gear so that you can define all your carried items in one of three categories. Replace the carrying and using items section with this text: "A character carries items in three ways: held, worn, and stowed. Held items are in your hands; a character typically has two hands, allowing them to hold an item in each hand or a single two-handed item using both hands. Worn items are tucked into pockets, belt pouches, bandoliers, weapon sheaths, and so forth, and they can be retrieved and returned relatively quickly. Stowed items are in a backpack or a similar container, and they are more difficult to access. Drawing a worn item or changing how you’re carrying an item usually requires you to use an Interact action (though to drop an item, you use the Release action instead). Table 6–2: Changing Equipment on page 273 lists some ways that you might change the items you’re holding or carrying, and the number of hands you need to do so. Many ways of using items require you to spend multiple actions. For example, drinking a potion worn at your belt requires using an Interact action to draw it and then using a second action to drink it as described in its Activate entry (page 532)."
This change also removes several sorts of "container" items from the tables on 286-292, as they are no longer tracked separately from the items they store. These are: bandolier, belt pouch, satchel, scroll case, sheath, vial
Page 287 adds a paragraph on Wearing Tools: "You can make a set of tools (such as alchemist’s tools or healer’s tools) easier to use by wearing it. This allows you to draw and replace the tools as part of the action that uses them. You can wear up to 2 Bulk of tools in this manner; tools beyond this limit must be stowed or drawn with an Interact action to use." Fine clothing reduces that limit to light Bulk worth of tools.
· Page 278: In critical hits, "When you make an attack and roll a natural 20...or if the result of your attack exceeds the target's AC by 10" was too broad a brush and thus slightly inaccurate for how to determine a critical hit, in an attempt to state the conditions succinctly. Replace the first section with "When you make an attack and succeed with a natural 20" so that's it's clear the natural 20 must succeed based on the total result in order to get a critical success.
· Page 283: Weapon traits.
In the definition of the Parry weapon trait, change "spend an Interact action" to "spend a single action" to make it so setting up a parry doesn't trigger Attacks of Opportunity or similar reactions.
In the definition for the unarmed weapon trait, the sentence "a fist or other grasping appendage follows the same rules as a free-hand weapon" was worded in such a way it confused a few people, who thought that meant those unarmed attacks were weapons, despite statements to the contrary on page 278. To make it clear, change that section to read "a fist or other grasping appendage generally works like a free-hand weapon"
· Page 283: In Critical Specialization Effects, it uses the generic term attack but should specifically refer to Strikes. In the first sentence, change "when you make an attack with certain weapons" to "when you make a Strike with certain weapons"
· Page 288: Change the price of the the adventurer's pack to 15 sp and the bedroll to 2 cp.
· Page 289: Due to other changes (particularly the adventurer's pack, which was in all of the kits), the Bulk and cost of all of the class kits have changed. All kits are included in full in this entry so you don't have to cross-reference two places to use them.
Poster's note, I had to remove all the class kits because I went over the character limit after the update.
· Page 300: The text on cantrips was confusing and implied that they might use spell slots, even though they don't. Change the second to last sentence in the first paragraph to "If you're a prepared spellcaster, you can prepare a specific number of cantrips each day. You can't prepare a cantrip in a spell slot."
· Pages 316-407 and 573: Damaging spells and items meant to harm PCs do way too much damage for your gear to survive if it could be targeted, so such spells almost never are supposed to be able to damage objects. A few target lines slipped by with "creatures or objects." Remove the ability to target or damage objects from acid splash, acid arrow, eclipse burst, polar ray, sunburst, fire ray, moon beam, force bolt, and the horn of blasting. Limit hydraulic push to "creatures and unattended objects."
· Page 318 and 400: In antimagic field and storm lord, you can't exclude yourself from the emanation as you can for many other emanations, so change the area to explicitly states "which affects you."
· Page 330, 358, 377: Add the attack trait to disintegrate, polar ray, and tanglefoot.
· Page 338, 346, 379, 400: Several sustained spells are meant to provide once per turn benefits when they are sustained, not be used multiple times per turn. In flaming sphere, implosion, unfathomable song, impaling briars, and storm lord add "the first time you Sustain this Spell each round"
· Page 339: Once flesh to stone has completely petrified you, the spell ends but you still remain petrified, meaning you can't remove the effects with dispel magic or similar abilities that counteract active spells; you need stone to flesh. Change the last two sentences of the failure condition to read "When a creature is unable to act due to the slowed condition from flesh to stone, the creature is permanently non-magically petrified. The spell ends if the creature is petrified or the slowed condition is removed."
· Page 343: Even if you aren't a humanoid, you too can be a hero. In heroism, remove "humanoid" from the targets line so it just reads "1 creature"
· Page 345: Illusory disguise, a Perception check to disbelieve just happens, it isn't a free action, so change "attempt a Perception check to disbelieve the spell as a free action" to read "attempt an immediate Perception check to disbelieve the spell."
· Page 358: Polar ray left out what happened on a critical hit with your spell attack roll. It should double the damage (but not the drained value) on a critical hit.
· Page 362: Purple worm sting used to have both a spell attack roll and a Fortitude save, but in changing to only a save, some of the damage is now automatic and should be reduced. Reduce the piercing damage automatically taken from the spell to 3d6.
· Page 363: The regenerate spell had an incorrect interaction with the doomed condition that would cause a doomed character to still die while regenerating. To handle that, instead of preventing a creature from progressing to dying 3, change it to "its dying condition can't increase to a value that would kill it (this stops most creatures from going beyond dying 3)."
· Page 373: In spiritual weapon, you might not have a deity, particularly if you're an occult caster, so change it to manifest a "a club, a dagger, or your deity's favored weapon."
· Page 377: Telekinetic haul should work only on unattended objects, not objects in creatures' possessions.
· Page 377: In tangling creepers, instead of having the creepers make an unarmed attack using your spell attack modifier, change it to just say "Make a melee spell attack roll against the target."
· Page 379: In true target, the way the spell used its targets was confusing, and it wasn't clear it applied to more attacks. There are several changes to make this clear; here is the final text with changes in bold:
TRUE TARGET SPELL 7
DIVINATION FORTUNE PREDICTION
Traditions arcane, occult
Cast [one-action] verbal
Range 60 feet; Targets 4 creatures
Duration until the start of your next turn
You delve into the possible futures of the next few seconds to understand all the ways your foe might avoid harm, then cast out a vision of that future to your allies. Designate a creature. The first time each target makes an attack roll against that creature during true target’s duration, the attacker rolls twice and uses the better result. The attacker also ignores circumstance penalties to the attack roll and any flat check required due to the designated creature being concealed or hidden.
· Page 381: In visions of danger, there's no description of what the Will save does, other than the critical success allowing you to disbelieve. It should be a basic Will save against the mental damage.
· Page 385: In zealous conviction, add the emotion and mental traits.
· Page 390: In charming touch, remove "humanoid" from the target line so you can charm any kind of creature that could find you attractive.
· Page 393: In healer's blessing, boost the additional healing from the base spell from 1 to 2.
· Page 403: Angelic halo should scale based on the level of the heal spell, not based on angelic halo's level. Remove the heightened entry and instead, replace the status bonus to healing from the spell with "Allies in your halo’s emanation who are healed by a heal spell gain a status bonus to Hit Points regained equal to double the heal spell’s level."
· Page 446: Attack Rolls. There was some confusion as to whether skill checks with the attack trait (such as Grapple or Trip) are also attack rolls at the same time. They are not. To make this clear, add this sentence to the beginning of the definition of attack roll "When you use a Strike action or make a spell attack, you attempt a check called an attack roll."
· Page 452: At the end of the description of bleed damage, add "Bleed damage ends automatically if you’re healed to your full Hit Points."
· Page 453: Weaknesses like "salt" and "water" weren't fully explained. At the beginning of the second paragraph in weakness, add "If you have a weakness to something that doesn’t normally deal damage, such as water, you take damage equal to the weakness value when touched or affected by it."
· Page 453 and 634: In Nonlethal Attacks, nonlethal effects other than Strikes weren't explained directly, so at the end add "Spells and other effects with the nonlethal trait that reduce a creature to 0 Hit Points knock the creature out instead of killing them" On page 634, add the nonlethal trait "An effect with this trait is nonlethal. Damage from a nonlethal effect knocks a creature out rather than killing it."
· Page 481: Retraining. It wasn't clear how long it took to retrain spells in a spell repertoire, but it should take just 1 week. Add ". Some, like changing a spell in your spell repertoire, take a week." to retraining class features.
· Page 421: Disabling a Hazard. How to run disabling a hazard with skills other than Thievery wasn't completely clear. Add "Like using Disable a Device, using these skills to disable a trap is a 2-action activity with the same degrees of success, though the activity might have different traits determined by the GM."
· Page 535: Craft Requirements. Add text about upgrading an item from a lower-level version into a higher-level version. "The GM might allow you to Craft a permanent item from a lower-level version of the same item as an upgrade. For example, you might upgrade a bag of holding from a type I to a type II bag, but you couldn’t upgrade a clear spindle aeon stone into an orange prism aeon stone. The cost for this upgrade is the full difference in Price between the items, and the Crafting check uses a DC for the item’s new level."
· Page 537 and 583: Shadow and slick runes. Since a character can't actually use those runes unless they have a +1 armor first (a 5th level item), move the items from 3rd level to 5th level when they become usable (keeping the price from the original version, even though it's unusually low for a 5th level item).
· Page 542 and 548: The true elixir of life's price is incorrect. Change it to 8,000 gp.
· Page 544: The example in the splash trait is confusing. Replace it with this clearer version of the example "For example, if you throw a lesser acid flask and hit your target, that creature takes 1 acid damage, 1d6 persistent acid damage, and 1 acid splash damage. All other creatures within 5 feet of it take 1 acid splash damage. On a critical hit, the target takes 2 acid damage and 2d6 persistent acid damage, but the splash damage is still 1. If you miss, the target and all creatures within 5 feet take only 1 splash damage. If you critically fail, no one takes any damage."
· Page 548: To make it clearer that elixir of life only works on living creatures due to the healing trait, change the first sentence to "Elixirs of life accelerate a living creature’s natural healing processes and immune system."
· Page 549: Quicksilver mutagen's "ranged attack rolls" was meant to apply to ranged weapon attack rolls and ranged unarmed attack rolls, but it makes sense to apply to Dexterity-based melee attack rolls using finesse. Change "ranged attack rolls" to "Dexterity-based attack rolls."
· Page 551: Deathcap powder should be held in 1 hand, like other ingested poisons, not held in 2 hands.
· Page 573: In the decanter of endless water, add a usage entry of 2 hands and a Bulk entry of L.
· Page 574: Maestro's instrument should have DCs for the charm effects, DC 27 for the moderate version and DC 38 for the greater version.
· Page 587: Arrow-catching shield. This shield had a built in usage frequency based on being fairly fragile that worked in the playtest rules for shields, but switching from dents to HP, the shield became too easily destroyed and needs to offer more protection. Increase the basic shield statistics to Hardness 10, HP 60, BT 30 and add a frequency of once per minute on the activation.
· Page 588: Forge warden's durability is too low. Increase its basic shield statistics to Hardness 10, HP 40, BT 20.
· Page 594: Greater staff of necromancy has enervation, a spell that's in Advanced Player's Guide instead of this book. Replace it with a 4th level vampiric touch.
· Page 597: Wands become broken when you overcharge them and succeed at the flat check, and you need to know their statistics to Repair them. While they use the normal statistics for a thin item of their composition, it makes sense to call that out. At the end of Varying Statistics, add "A wand has the normal Hardness, BT, and HP of a thin item of its material (page 577)."
· Page 612: Healer's gloves' activation was unclear as to whether it was a healing effect. Change the activation effect to the following: "You can soothe the wounds of a willing, living, adjacent creature, restoring 2d6+7 Hit Points to that creature. This is a positive healing effect. You can’t harm undead with this healing."
· Page 620, 631, and 454: In the definition of fatigued, the intention is that it prevents the exploration tactics you take while traveling or exploring an area, but you can still stop and Refocus, Treat Wounds, and so on. Change the last sentence to "You can’t use exploration activities performed while traveling, such as those on pages 479–480."
· Page 621: The prone condition said you could Take Cover to gain cover against ranged attacks, but it should say you gain Greater Cover. When combined with still being flat-footed, it allows you to hunker down for a net of 2 more AC against ranged attacks.
· Page 621: Persistent damage sidebar. Clarifying Assisted Recovery, at the end of the first paragraph, change the last sentence to "This allows you to attempt an extra flat check immediately, but only once per round." and add the bullet point "• The action to help might require a skill check or another roll to determine its effectiveness." Remove Administer First Aid as an example of assisted recovery, as it's a separate action.
· Page 630: In curses, add "Effects with this trait can be removed only by effects that specifically target curses." This makes it clear that you need to use spells like remove curse to remove a curse, even one put in place by a spell, as opposed to dispel magic.
Pages 337, 403, 405: In feeblemind, celestial brand, and jealous hex, make it clear that they are applying a curse.
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Whoops, I made a mistake and forgot to include a bunch of it:

• Page 71: Alchemists should have proficiency in medium armor to make things easier for mutagenists who pursue higher Strength and lower Dexterity. Add training in medium armor to their initial proficiencies as well as to their 13th and 19th level armor expertise and mastery class features.
• Page 72-79: Alchemist DC scaling is highly dependent on the feat Powerful Alchemy, so we decided to make it an automatic class feature instead to free up more feats. Add powerful alchemy to the class features at 5th level, and remove it from the list of alchemist class feats.
• Page 73: Alchemists at low levels don't have enough reagents to make more than a very small number of items, whereas at higher levels they can make significantly more. To help make those reagents last longer at 1st through 4th levels, add a limited version of the Field Discovery class feature at 1st level. "Your research field adds a number of formulas to your formula book; these are your signature items. When using a batch of infused reagents to create your signature items using advanced alchemy, you create three items instead of two. Each time you gain a level, you can swap one of your signature items with another formula in your formula book. This new signature item must be on your research field’s list of possible signature items."
• Page 75: Alchemical Alacrity lets you make three alchemical items, but you can't hold all three, so it's unclear what happens to the third one. Add to the end "and you automatically stow one of these new items as you create them."
• Page 75: In perpetual infusions, "bullheaded mutagen" should say "serene mutagen."
• Page 89: Raging Athlete. The wording has been adjusted to prevent unintended interactions with other abilities while keeping the same benefits. Change the text to "Physical obstacles can’t hold back your fury. While you are raging, you gain a climb Speed and swim Speed equal to your land Speed and the DC of High Jumps and Long Jumps decreases by 10. Your distance for a vertical Leap increases to 5 feet vertically, and your distance for a horizontal Leap increases to 15 feet if your Speed is at least 15 feet and to 20 feet if your Speed is at least 30 feet."
• Page 91: Sudden Leap is missing the two-action icon from the fighter version, leaving the action cost unstated. Add in the two action icon.
• Pages 99-103: Various bard feats shouldn't have the "focus pool" prerequisite. If you somehow take them without a focus pool (typically via multiclassing), you gain a focus pool, as normal for taking your first feat that grants a focus spell.
• Pages 102, 201, 211: In Quickened Casting, change the restriction to "If your next action is to cast a cantrip or a spell that is at least 2 levels lower than the highest-level spell slot you have" inserting bard, sorcerer, or wizard as appropriate. This wording change makes it clear how to handle situations where you have a cantrip or focus spell at a different spell level than your highest spell slot.
• Class Chapter (all spellcasting classes): Change the definition of cantrips to say "A cantrip is automatically heightened to half your level rounded up, which equals the highest-level of spell slot you have." filling in the appropriate class name. This removes the ambiguities around the cantrip level of a non-spellcaster vs a multiclass spellcaster.
• Pages 222-231: In the multiclass spellcaster Breadth feats, change "for each spell level other than your two highest spell levels" to "for each spell level other than your two highest spell slots." inserting the appropriate class. This makes it clear what to do if you are a spellcaster multiclassing in another spellcasting class (or potentially multiclassing in multiple spellcasting classes).
• Page 634: Add the olfactory trait from the Bestiary to the Glossary and Index "An olfactory effect can affect only creatures that can smell it. This applies only to olfactory parts of the effect, as determined by the GM."
• Page 637: In the definition of the summoned trait, add this section to deal with summoned creatures creating more creatures without using summoning "A summoned creature can't control any spawn or other creatures generated from it, and such creatures return to their unaltered state (usually a corpse in the case of spawn) once the summoned creature is gone. If it's unclear what this state would be, the GM decides. "

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EDIT: now including battle medicine changes, which I accidentally cut.
Woah, hey, my first gold. Thanks!
Update: Alright, there's been a bit of an update to the FAQ to explain some of the errata and amend some gaps, which I will include here rather than up there.

1. Page 287, Worn Tools: Worn tools should only take 1 hand to use, as you only draw the things you need from the kit and not the entire kit... What this means for Battle Medicine is that you only need one free hand to perform it with worn healer's tools, you don't need both hands.
2. Attack rolls:
   1. An attack is any check that has the attack trait. It applies and increases the multiple attack penalty.
   2. An attack roll is one of the core types of checks in the game (along with saving throws, skill checks, and Perception checks). They are used for Strikes and spell attacks, and traditionally target Armor Class.
   3. Some skill actions have the attack trait, specifically Athletics actions such as Grapple and Trip. You still make a skill check with these skills, not an attack roll.
   4. The multiple attack penalty applies on those skill actions as well. As it says later on in the definition of attack roll "Striking multiple times in a turn has diminishing returns. The multiple attack penalty (detailed on page 446) applies to each attack after the first, whether those attacks are Strikes, special attacks like the Grapple action of the Athletics skill, or spell attack rolls." There is inaccurate language in the Multiple Attack Penalty section implying it applies only to attack rolls that will be receiving errata.

Someone also caught that I missed this:

Page 592: Under Staves... "Staves are also staff weapons (page 280). They can be etched with fundamental runes but not property runes. This doesn’t alter any of their spellcasting abilities." since staves are specific weapons, with the staff abilities as the additional abilities.

I would also like to give a very big thank you for the platinum, that's wild!

So first off I assume that you and your players have settled upon what you want your campaign to be about in the broadest sense. For the sake of this example, we’ll say that everyone has agreed to make the campaign about the players liberating a land from Realm oppression and work from there. There are obviously many other campaign concepts that you could work with such as nation building, world hopping adventures and even plunging into the depths of Malfeas but currently there is far more material in third edition for this style of play than any other, so it requires the least amount of work to implement for a storyteller.
The Central Conflict
As the storyteller you should start off by defining what the central conflict of your campaign is. You and your players have decided that your campaign will focus on the players liberating a satrapy from the imperial yoke. The obvious question here is what does the satrapy have that the Realm wants? Obviously, the ruling satrap demands tribute far in excess of what the people can or is willing to provide and that’s going to be at the heart of the narrative. But what specifically does the satrapy have that would be of use to the Realm? A staple crop, a natural resource, raw materials? Knowing what exactly the satrapy is expected to offer in tribute can color your campaign giving it context and depth well beyond the Realm simply demanding an arbitrary quantity of unspecified goods. It can also serve as story ideas both for you as a storyteller and the players.
Let’s say hypothetically speaking, you create your own satrapy rather than one detailed in the books. That gives you a lot of leeway in deciding what the fundamental points of tension are between the Realm and the satrapy in the story as well as were your campaign is taking place. Let us say a new jade deposit has been recently discovered in a satrapy we will call Amber. Well jade must be mined from the ground and mining is a very hazardous and arduous line of work. You’re talking about backbreaking labor, often in sweltering conditions that involves moving around tons of earth in a setting were advanced mechanical assistance is rare. One way to do mining cheaply is to force people to do the job for little or no money but what would help with that is a pretext to justify the abuse.
Let us say the local Satrap is cracking down on a heretical cult native to the land so that they can be sentenced to forced labor in the jade mines. This is consistent with the Realm’s policy of combating “heretical” cults which many of the locals as adherents of the Immaculate Philosophy may agree with and thus serves as a convenient excuse. But maybe not everyone being convicted is a member of this cult. Maybe the satrap is so desperate to find more people to work the mines that they are pressuring the local government to prosecute people on trumped up charges in order to meet a certain quota and/or replace laborers who’ve died due to the dismal conditions of the mines. To make matters worse there is a terrifying supernatural threat that plagues the mining operation.
The Primary Antagonist
The Realm is too general in my opinion to be a primary antagonist. You should probably narrow this down to a specific House and your choice of House should be meaningful and relevant to the central themes and goals of your campaign. Each House has its own flavor it’s own modus operandi as one might put it. Different Houses favor different tactics. Sesus and Ledaal emphasize espionage, Cynis often utilizes drugs and blackmail, Ragara uses finance to make sure everybody owes them money. These features are things you should keep in mind when deciding which House to pick as the primary antagonist and how to roleplay members of said House.
Lets say the satrap of Amber, is managed by House Cathak. I’m choosing House Cathak for a variety of reasons. First off Cathak is a very militant and faith-oriented House with many imperial legions that it must pay to maintain and it is deeply indebted to House Ragara. It is perfectly consistent with House Cathak’s motives, tactics, beliefs and political situation that they would force heretics into hard labor for purposes of paying off debt. Furthermore, because House Cathak is militarily powerful I can plausibly justify the placement of a strong military presence within or near the satrapy which complicates any attempts by players to rely on brute force solutions to liberate it. The players will have to gather allies, engage in guerilla warfare and sabotage Cathak operations in the region if they hope to best their enemy.
Campaign Setting
So obviously this story isn’t taking place on the Blessed Isle. I think we can also safely rule out the West as well. If I was going to tell a story in the West I’d almost certainly make House Peleps or maybe House V’neef the primary antagonists given their significant naval power relative to the other houses. Maybe Ledaal if the campaign was specifically taking place on the Caul. That leaves the North, the East, specifically the Scavenger Lands, the South and the areas in-between as the best options. You may wish to consult your players at this point before deciding on where to locate the Satrapy.
For the sake of this example, we’ll say Amber is located in the Scavenger Lands because of course. We’ll place it to the west of Sijan near the inner sea. That allows players to play characters from potentially any of the Scavenger Lands city states or even some parts of the North and gives the storyteller the option to smoothly transition the campaign in the outlying regions if desired.
Player Buy-in
So now you have a central conflict, a primary antagonist, and a setting. Now it is time for player buyin. Notice that up to this point we have been vague on the details. I haven’t for example given any details on the nature of the heretical cult that the Cathaks are oppressing or what dangers lie at the mines. This level of flexibility in your setting’s premise allows room for players to add details in a brainstorming session. Players should also come into this with a general concept to start rather than a specific character.
For the sake of brevity lets assume there are only two players Jane and Joe. Jane knows she wants to play a Full Moon Lunar who has an axe to grind against the Realm and has a solar mate that in their current incarnation is an abyssal. Joe on the other hand wants to play a Zenith Caste Solar who is a spiritual leader in his community.
As a storyteller I would suggest to Jane that maybe she specify the nature of her aggression towards the Realm to be against House Cathak or a specific member of it. Jane agrees and so we decide to write in her backstory that members of House Cathak led a Wyld Hunt against her that led to the destruction of her village. I’ll ask Jane whether or not any specific person from House Cathak was responsible for leading the Wyld Hunt. Based on her description I’ll try to find some way to integrate that character into the campaign. There’s a lot of ways I could do this. I could make them the satrap that oversees Amber but it doesn’t seem plausible that a satrap would have been involved in a Wyld Hunt that would have presumably taken place only a few years ago particularly if Jane’s character wasn’t within the immediate vicinity of Amber at the time. They would have had more important matters to attend to. Instead, I decide to make the character the head of the mining operations of the jade deposit. I don’t tell Jane I’m doing this. I want it to be surprise for her and the character when she finds this out.
I would also note that the nearest Deathlord to Amber is the Mask of Winters so we could make her mate an abyssal in his service. This has the added benefit of allowing me to add a secondary antagonist into the narrative.
As for Joe I would note to him that I’ve left the details on the nature of the heretical cult that the Cathaks are oppressing vague so it would be easy for his character to fill the roll of a spiritual leader within the cult and allow him to help define its exact nature in a way that makes sense for his character including what type of god they worship. Joe decides that since he’s going to be a survival supernal it makes since that the people worship some sort of nature deity and the deity in question identifies as female. We’ll call her Cetrion, a local fertility goddess, and yes I did take that name straight out of Mortal Kombat 11.
I’ll ask the players whether they have any other suggestions for the campaign. Jane says she wants to see the fair folk play a role so I note down that the fair folk will be the supernatural menace that threatens to minor, taking them captive and feeding off their dreams. Joe says he has invested points in Lore and War and would like to personally be involved in training a resistance, so I note that down as a plot point to pursue. So now both player’s characters have a strong motivation to boot the Realm from Amber and since both players played an active role in shaping how their characters interact with the narrative they are invested.
Scenarios
Scenarios are just situations that you place the player characters in that they will presumably resolve. It can be difficult coming up with them initially but for me at least this got easier with time. If possible, start the campaign with a good half dozen or more scenarios. Keep them broad enough that you could adjust and insert them in at any point that you find suitable. A good starting point is to come up with what I call a tone setter. This is a scene that should occur in the first session, possibly even the first scene that sets the tone for the rest of the campaign or at least the current story arc.
Since the central antagonist is House Cathak and they are forcing people into labor mines on accusations of heresy I have the player characters stumble across an incident where local government officials are trashing a family’s house in search evidence of heresy. Whether a Cathak dynast or other DB is present is up to you. Evidence is found in the form of some sort of trinket associated with the local cult of Cetrion. We will say it is an idol of the fertility goddess herself carved in wood. We will say in this case the evidence is fabricated and the government officials use this excuse to only arrest the eldest son in the family, claiming they found it amongst his things specifically. They are just looking to meet a quota for workers so there is not much point in them taking the whole family. The players could do something about the situation on the spot and Jane wants to but Joe notes that while they could easily take on these government officials it could make matters worse for the villagers especially if they are revealed to be anathema.
As I mentioned you want to keep the solution as broad as possible. The players could try to persuade the guards to let the young man go but that does not sound plausible. I would give the leader of the government officials a relevant major intimacy that would discourage such persuasion, a decent resolve and the option to spend a point of willpower if necessary, to prevent attempts by the players to convince him to just let the young man go but beyond that I wouldn’t put any restrictions on how the players approach the problem. Joe might suggest using her Larceny skills to bust the young man out of jail latter or Jane might try to steal the face of the government official to get the man out. Or the players may decide to do nothing at all. That’s an option too. Regardless of what they do you’ve set the tone and if the players decide to do nothing about the situation it could be because they are not interested. You should consider avoiding reproducing similar scenarios in the future if this happens again.
Another important type of scenario you need to come up with are ones that highlight the player characters either in terms of their abilities or their narrative. Joe’s character is a priest in the cult of Cetrion so it makes since that Cetrion would request Joe’s character to liberate the miners. I decide that the player characters are on their wait to meet Cetrion so she could make just such a request when they are walking through the village and encounter the scene of the young man being arrested. Cetrion explains once the player characters arrive that she has worked powerful sorcery on a nearby valley that will allow her to hide the minors from the Dragon Blooded and Amber government officials. They can be safely trained from their to build a resistance army. The player characters of course agree to help. Once they get to the mines Jane’s character soon discovers that the Cathak DB that led the Wyld Hunt against her is running the mining operation. In this particular case I managed to create a narrative highlight for both characters in one go. This is easier to do if the characters have related interests which we established in player buy-in earlier.
Other scenarios I could conceivably use include the players dealing with the fair folk raiders that are attacking the miners, attempts by House Sesus to undermine Cathak operations by causing mine collapses, the players revealing to the public that House Sesus is fabricating evidence of heresy for cheap labor and taking out Thorn operatives in Amber’s government who are trying to prepare the satrap for an invasion.
If you have any other suggestions that you feel might work for this guide please let me know.

Author's Note: This story contains graphic violence. Reader discretion is advised.
________________
Drug dealing is one gigantic occupational hazard.
I think I always knew that deep down. But in our youth, we feel invincible. It doesn't matter if you carry a Glock or a rocket launcher, the Grim Reaper eventually collects his dues. For drug dealers, death usually comes earlier rather than later. Still, it's natural to think the rules don't apply to you.
"That guy who got his head blown off in a drug deal gone bad"––couldn't possibly be me, I'm quick on the draw. "That one girl who wasn't hauling in the profits her boss wanted, then got switched to prostituting"––I'm not a woman, so I'm in the clear. "Those junkies who had their own little French Revolution, rose up, and decapitated their neighborhood dealer like he was King Louie the Sixteenth"––we work in twos now for that very reason. And the junkies responsible were skinned alive to make an example. No chance in hell that history will repeat itself.
But I was wrong. Like I said, drug dealing is one gigantic occupational hazard. Any number of things can happen. What happened to Faulk, though––I didn't see it coming. There's no way I could have.
Something like that is damn near impossible to wrap your head around.
***
Monday through Saturday, Faulk and I went to our alley on the harbor and dealt drugs. As Faulk's understudy, I was responsible for packing dinner. Faulk was responsible for teaching me the ins-and-outs of managing unruly Skells.
That's what Faulk called our junkie clientele. I looked it up once. Urban dictionary defines Skell as "a lowlife, non-bill paying, possibly crack or heroin-addicted being." We dealt a lot more than crack and heroin. But the lowlife, non-bill paying part summed up the people who Faulk and I sold to almost perfectly.
The rainy night that everything fell to shit––a Friday––Faulk had just finished beating a Skell within an inch of his life. Faulk was fucking huge. When he wasn't dealing, he was either lifting or pounding the heavy bag in his boxing gym. His arms looked like tree trunks.
The dude Faulk had just finished beating the shit out of now had a face that resembled raw hamburger. Faulk dragged him by the scruff of the neck to the mouth of the alley we dealt from. He called in The Hearse, and then he waited for them to pick the guy up.
That's what we called the black sedan that prowled our territory: The Hearse. On the other side of tinted windows were high-level lieutenants of the kingpin Faulk and I worked for. I'd never met the people inside The Hearse, nor had I met the dude who ran the whole operation. Faulk said I would eventually if I kept up the good work.
After the Hearse picked up the half-dead Skell, Faulk jogged back to our spot, excited as a kid at recess.
"Whadda we got, whadda we got?!" he asked, rubbing his hands together like he was warming them over a fire.
It was dinnertime. I grabbed my plastic lunch pail and pulled out that night's meal.
"You sneaky little devil," said Faulk, laying eyes on it. "My favorite."
I'd made two peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder bread. I'd also packed two snack-sized bags of Fritos, two Cokes, and a large ziplock bag full of apple slices sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.
"You remind me of my mom,” said Faulk. "I feel like a schoolboy all over again."
He took his sandwich and unwrapped the cellophane. He lifted one piece of bread, inspecting it. I noticed Faulk's knuckles––they were gummed up with the junkie's blood. Pink valleys were torn into the flesh thanks to repeated contact with the junkie's now-missing teeth.
"You know me too well," Faulk said, shooting me a coy smile. "Creamy peanut butter or bust."
"I cut the crust off too––"
"Hey, I was just about to mention that! I notice you, man! You think I don't!"
Although I'd warmed up to him over time, Faulk still scared the shit out of me. When he wasn't pissed off, he was gentle as a teddy bear. When he was mad, he was violent as a grizzly in heat. Every night before going out to the harbor, I said a little prayer that I wouldn't fuck up and end up on the wrong side of his boulder-sized fists.
Dudes who beat Skells half to death, then eat their crustless, white bread, creamy peanut butter sandwiches like nothing happened––suffice it to say they make an impression on you.
We ate dinner, sitting on the curb like we always did, talking about Netflix. Faulk had become a huge fan of Bridgerton. His favorite character was Eloise. He said she'd have been his choice if he lived in Regency-era England, during the season where debutantes are presented at court. I thought of telling Faulk that if somehow we managed to time travel across the pond to the early 1800s, we wouldn't have been royalty. There were dudes who fucked up Skells and dealt drugs back then, too. But I decided against ruining his little fantasy. I let him tell me more about how his type of chick was sarcastic, cheeky, and most importantly, brunette.
Various clientele came down the alley to pick up drugs. Every time, Faulk sent me jogging to the drop spot to grab their fixes. Heroin. Coke. Meth. We had it all.
But a few of them asked for the Special Sauce––or The Sauce, as it was called. It was a new drug on the street, a powerful hallucinogen that supposedly packed one hell of a body high. As the adage goes, a dealer never dips into his stash, so I'd never tried the shit myself. But I couldn't deny that I was intrigued by what people said about it.
The Sauce came in little zip-lock packets. It looked like the gooey gel inside cold packs, the kind they use in boxed dinner kits. Legend had it among the dealers in our network that a batshit oceanographer had discovered the Sauce. He'd found a new species of deep-sea jellyfish. Then, for some unknown reason, he licked the fucking thing. But he got high as balls, his body thrumming like a rogue vibrator, his mind transported to wonderous otherworldly vistas. Realizing The Sauce was the best thing since fried rice, he figured out a way to harvest the shit and sell it to the cartels who supplied drugs to the likes of Faulk and me.
Someone heard the legend from someone, who heard it from someone else. Dealers spend a lot of time talking. Standing in a cold, wet alley gets dull real quick. We're chatty as a group of cat-lovers in a sewing circle.
But business was booming. The Sauce––Skells fucking loved the stuff.
Faulk and I kept talking about Netflix shows long after we'd finished our cinnamon-sugar apple slice dessert. Given that Faulk was about to run out of Bridgerton episodes, I told him that The Crown was similar, if somewhat less steamy. Then two people showed up at the mouth of the alley, interrupting our conversation. Even at a distance of fifty yards, even through the buckets of rain dumping down from swollen clouds overhead, I could see that they were shaking.
"Oh Jesus-fucking-Christ," said Faulk. "I need these motherfuckers like I need a hole in the head."
We both had radars for addicts with the shakes. It meant they hadn't had a fix in a while. Could have been due to poor planning. Could have been due to not having any money. Desperate addicts, in my experience of dealing drugs, are almost always trouble.
As the Skells came closer, I noticed that it was a guy and girl, maybe in their mid-twenties. They were wearing raincoats with the hoods pulled up, but their faces were slick. It couldn't have been rainwater due to their hoods, so I chalked it up as sweat. But as they came closer, I saw that the shit on their faces was glassy, like their skin had been smeared in hair gel.
Faulk stood up. I stood up too. As the Skells came closer, I noticed a rotten stench about them. Their heads looked large and swollen, like sponges soaked in water overnight. I noticed that their eyes looked strange too—milky, almost blind, like the eyes of dead fish.
"That shit you gave me!" yelled the guy, his voice trembling. "The Sauce––it fucking fucked me up, man! You gotta help us!"
Faulk shook his head; then, he cracked his knuckles.
"Wrongo," he said. "I don't gotta do shit. You need to head back out the way you came."
The girl looked even sicker than the guy. Something was leaking through her pants. I thought it was piss at first. But then I noticed it was thicker. More of the gel shit that was covering their faces was trying to force its way through the stitches of her rain-soaked jeans, splitting the hem. She wasn't just shaking––she was convulsing. I heard a rumble in her guts. Then, a throatful of thick, viscous liquid poured out of her mouth, mixing in with the rivers of rain running across the pavement.
Faulk grimaced.
"What the fuck is wrong with you two?"
He reached for his phone. He was getting ready to call the Hearse. But the guy moved forward, almost drunkenly, and fell into him.
"Back up motherfucker! You're giving a rash!"
Faulk forgot about the phone and reached for his piece, which he always kept concealed in his jacket pocket. Suddenly, the guy started vomiting out the same sizzling goop the girl had. It spilled onto Faulk's Timberlands, eating through the yellow suede leather. I watched as Faulk's eyes went wide, his face contorted in pain. Looking down, I noticed that the vomit had eaten through the leather of his boots––now it was eating through his feet, skin peeling back from the bone like patches on a week old sunburn.
Steadying himself, Faulk pulled out his gun, pointed it at the guy's head, and pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening. It split the silence of the alley. A flash of light erupted from the end of the barrel, dissolving into the falling rain like a quick strike of lightning.
The guy's head vaporized into a misty pink cloud, but no handgun I'd ever seen did that kind of damage. I realized that the bullet had only popped the swelling balloon that had been the guy's head. Out of the tree stump of his neck, the goop he'd been vomiting out bloomed upward. He fell back due to the gunshot, but more of the goo continued pushing through his neck stump like a mushroom in time-lapse.
Faulk turned on the girl, but she was ready for him. And she'd begun changing. Her skin had stretched, like a garbage bag filled with a week's worth of unrefrigerated sludge. She was taking a new shape, similar to the guy Faulk had just shot in the head. Her clothes began to sizzle away as more of the goop forced its way out of her pores, her nostrils, her eyes, her ears, and any other orifice it could. An amniotic gush blasted from between her legs like a burst pipe.
Faulk's eyes were peeled in terror. What had formerly been a twenty-year-old girl had become a strange alien creature. It glowed in the darkness of the alley. It shot out two massive tentacles in a swift motion, a left and a right, and wrapped them around Faulk's body in opposite directions.
Puckpuckpuckpuckpuck–– the sound of suction cups making contact.
The tentacles constricted, snakes with a mind of their own. Faulk would have screamed if he could draw a breath, but he was being crushed, becoming blue, his eyes on the verge of popping out their sockets. His bones, still covered by skin and muscle, made a series of muffled snaps.
Faulk's clothes had sizzled away too––whatever the creature's arms were made of ate through the fabric and began sizzling through his skin like hydrochloric acid.
Suddenly, the creature's arms ripped away in opposite directions. In contrast to the suction cups' pucking sound, I heard a machine gun series of cracks as Faulk’s spine twisted, then broke. I watched in slow motion as his skin unstitched itself, busting at the seams around his eyes, the corners of his mouth, the pit of his belly button.
His frowning, crimson anatomy hung there for a moment, twin sheets of skin torn free from the ream of his body. Then the creature dropped him. The bottom and top hunks squelched onto the rain-slicked pavement.
Behind me, the guy whose head Faulk blew off––the creature he'd become––rose up, slithering over to its mate. I fell onto my ass, backing away on my hands. They came closer. I looked into their strange, dead eyes, into an alternate dimension a billion light-years from earth.
“Thazul moglash shahhh.”
"Azath iru naphtha."
"Wazak gazath mephala."
A strange language––something forbidden. Something human beings weren't meant to hear. The words dug into my brain like parasites, coating my synapses with the same strange substance of which the creatures were made. I felt suddenly aged, like a block of cheese past its prime. In a few short seconds, I learned secrets of the universe that human beings are simply not meant to know, ancient truths that shave time off your life just by knowing them.
But by some divine stroke of luck, my head didn't explode.
I waited for my death. And waited. And waited some more. But it didn't come. And when I finally opened my eyes, the creatures were gone. All that was left was the two halves of Faulk's body and a trail of slime leading to a gutter nearby, not far from where we'd eaten our dinner an hour before.
***
Reaching into the charred remains of Faulk's jacket, I grabbed his phone. I did my best to avoid looking at his gory skeleton, at the rags of flesh that still clung to the few undissolved bones. I found a contact: The Hearse. I called the number, and a man answered.
"What is it?"
"Faulk," I said. "He's––he's––"
"Be there in five."
Five minutes later on the dot, the Hearse pulled to a stop next to me, its headlights cutting through the dumping rain. The passenger window rolled down. A man stared out. He looked angry and inconvenienced, like I'd just taken a piss in his morning cereal.
He leaned out and looked at Faulk's body.
"What the fucked happened to him?"
"I––he––there were two Skells––"
The guy in the passenger seat nodded to whoever was sitting behind him. Doors on both sides of the Hearse opened. Two men got out. They opened the trunk of the car, got out some garbage bags, and quickly went about their work. Stuffing what remained of Faulk's body into the bags, they cinched them shut, loaded them into the trunk, and got back into the car.
"Go home for the night," said the guy in the passenger seat. "We'll be in touch."
***
They gave me Saturday off, but I didn't sleep a wink. My apartment wasn't far from the harbor. All I could do was stare out the window in the direction of the alley where Faulk had met his end.
The language of the creatures echoed in my head.
“Thazul moglash shahhh.”
"Azath iru naphtha."
"Wazak gazath mephala."
And as the words sounded, I experienced the same visions I’d had in the alley. Visions of faraway worlds, of horrifying truths, of the fate of humankind. I felt crushed under the weight of knowing.
By the time Sunday rolled around––by the time I got the call from my employer––I'd pissed my pants three times, sweat through a dozen sets of clothes, and cried so much that my tear ducts dried up. In the years I'd worked with Faulk, I'd seen a lot of scary shit. Junkies rotting in doorways. Calloused dealers murdering Skells without remorse. Dead prostitutes with slashed throats, stuffed into dumpsters like they were nothing more than errant trash.
You name it, I saw it. But before that fateful Friday night, I'd always been convinced we were alone in the universe. Denizens of a rock floating in the middle of space, the only intelligent life. A biological accident hellbent on killing itself and ruining the world in the process.
I was wrong, and seeing the other things that lurk in the dark corners of our universe taught me the true meaning of fear.
***
"You ready to go to work?"
The call had come from an unknown number. It was my employer, who I'd never met. A woman––I always assumed Faulk and I worked for a man.
"Go to work?"
"Those drugs aren't going to sell themselves."
"What about Faulk?"
"Who's Faulk?"
You know, the guy who was mentoring me. The one that got ripped in half in the alleyway by an alien creature. Despite all the things I wanted to say, I kept my mouth shut. I was scared by what I'd witnessed, but I also feared wronging the people in charge.
"Oh, right," said the woman. "Yeah, that was a real shame. But we need to keep up the supply. The harbor is one of our most popular locations."
The truth finally dawned on me: I was stuck in this line of work, maybe forever. What started as an innocent desire to earn a little extra money had turned into a career that would last until the day I died. Dealing drugs on behalf of powerful people wasn't the type of thing you retired from.
"Work starts tomorrow night," said the woman. "Oh, and if anyone asks for The Sauce, we stopped selling it. Pitch them on our China White. We just got a new batch in. From my understanding, it packs a pretty good punch."
***
I showed up at the alley a few hours later. Rain was dumping down, just like it had been on the night Faulk and I encountered the creatures. A kid was waiting for me, maybe fifteen or sixteen, standing almost exactly on the spot where Faulk had been ripped in half.
The kid had a plastic lunchbox in one hand and a big, excited smile on his face.
"My name's Richie," he said, sticking out his free hand. "Nice to meet you."
I shook it. It was either clammy or slicked with rain, maybe a combination of the two. In either case, past the excitement, I saw that the kid was nervous as hell.
"I'm ready to learn the ropes," said Richie. "I heard the other guy you worked with quit. I want to step in and do a good job."
Faulk quit––that's what they told the poor kid. They neglected to tell him that Faulk had been ripped in half and that they'd stuffed his body in garbage bags, which, I hazarded a guess, had since been submerged in concrete.
It was just like Faulk said. He'd told me that someday if I kept up the good work, I'd get a promotion. I never imagined it would happen the way it did.
That night, Skells came and went. A few of them asked for The Sauce. I told them we didn't sell it anymore. I pitched them on the China White like I'd been instructed. A few took the bait. Others inquired about the rest of our stash. Everyone went home happy.
It was like The Sauce never existed in the first place.
Dinner came around. The kid and I sat on the curb just like Faulk and I always had.
"Hope you like deli sandwiches," he said. "That's what’s on the menu tonight. But you just tell me what you want going forward. I'll make it happen."
As the kid chattered and I ate mouthfuls of turkey, butter lettuce, and too much mayo, I thought of Faulk. I thought about his love of peanut butter sandwiches, but I also thought about the gutter where the creatures had disappeared after killing him. I couldn't take my eyes off it.
"You know it’s not even true, right?" The kid had noticed me looking at the gutter.
"What's not true?"
"It's just hippies being hippies.”
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"The plaque," he said, "What it says––it's not true. Same as global warming being a hoax. Same as thinking recycling makes a difference. It's all bullshit that hippies come up with. They scare us into believing. They want to take over the world, that's what I heard."
The kid must have sensed that I still didn't know what the hell he was talking about because he stood up and beckoned me to follow him. I did. We came closer to the gutter. My pulse was pounding. I wanted to be as far away from it as possible, fearing what I'd see inside. But I couldn't help my curiosity.
When we got close, I saw the metal plaque above the gutter the kid had told me about.
"Like I said," repeated the kid, smiling smugly. "It doesn't actually."
Oh, but it did. If you only knew, kid.
The creatures had jumped in and headed home. Not to some far corner of the universe. No, they stayed right here on Planet Earth.
I saw that the plaque was etched with the image of a fish. It was also chiseled with five words:
No Dumping––Drains to Ocean

Poster's Preface

I go into more detail in my youtube video, but you'll find the meat of theory in this. I’ll do my best to add the most vital info. I rewrote the whole theory so it would be a better read, but I would highly recommend the video to get the best experience. It's a video essay that is completely voiced over and has better visual aid. This theory uses support from other theoriesof mine to help explain it. I'll be sure to link those references. I also have this written in Google Docs if you'd prefer to read there.
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This is farfetched as hell, but one piece isn't a bland story. You have to think outside the box to predict what is to come.

What a Dragon could teach Luffy.

Before I go into the why and how I believe Luffy will acquire the ability to use flame clouds let’s go over what Flame Clouds are. The term(Viz translation) Flame Clouds was introduced in chapter 997 title “Flames”. We have seen this ability back on punk hazard when Momonosuke used it in his dragon form. Yamato who tells us the ability by name confirms this is an ability used by dragons which makes sense why we have seen both Kaido and Momonosuke use the ability. Momonosuke shows us that the clouds can be used as platforms and can even used to reach great heights if the dragon climbs up the clouds. Kaido has shown that not only can he use the clouds to hold him up, but he can even use them to cause himself even other objects(such as an entire island) to levitate and move in the direction he wants them to. With that out of the way how is it possible for Luffy AKA a non-dragon to use flame clouds. Before you consider it impossible I want to point out two things. First off when Kaido is using flame clouds to lift Onigashima he is not in his dragon form. Obviously he is doing this with the powers of a Devil Fruit(that luffy doesn’t have), but I point this out to say that it doesn’t require the dragon anatomy specifically to use flame clouds. So despite it being an ability used by dragons, a humanoid being can use it under the right conditions. Second thing to keep in mind is that the precedent has been set for non-native species users to learn how to use techniques of another species. Koala may not be a fishman but she can use Fishman Karate. We have covered the What, so now we have to go into How is it possible Luffy could learn how to use flame clouds.
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https://preview.redd.it/6unq0ipibqe61.png?width=692&format=png&auto=webp&s=226080c931c4d1ff2e081deeb6631b2f14a89eb5

Dragons aren't the only ones who can ride flames or clouds.

In order to figure out how Luffy could use flame clouds we’ll break down the “ingredients” of how to make flame clouds. The name is self explanatory. It’s a cloud that also shares the property of fire. So is it as simple as just mixing a cloud with fire? No that’s ridiculous. Any one would be able to use flame clouds if it was that simple to put together. Fortunately we know of someone that is not a dragon but uses an ability that is eerily similar. Big Mom can ride on a cloud(Zues) and even a flame(prometheus). Like dragons she can somehow stand on platforms that aren’t solid. It’s much easier to understand when we look at the origin of her abilities.
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Literally flying atop a flame next to a cloud. Also keep in mind her Fire hair it will be relevant later.

Flame + Cloud + ??? = Flame Clouds

She uses the Soul Soul fruit so this would mean that it is the power of soul that allows her to stand on flames and clouds. So this means that in order for luffy to use Flame Clouds he must first eat the Soul Soul Fruit. Ok not really. However this is a big clue. The Soul Soul Fruit isn’t the only way to utilize the power of one’s soul. Haki is another way and is exactly the missing ingredient that Luffy needs to use flame clouds. A rough translation of Haki is Spirit(more in depth with a literal translation later in this theory). I can go really deep into the relationship between the spirit/soul and Haki. Even about the correlations between Haki and Big Mom’s powers. However that is a whole other theory(on Youtube) in itself that requires alot of explaining(with alot of research and references behind it), so I won’t for the sake of this theory not being too long. Please bear with me and follow along with the notion of haki being a spiritual ability for the sake of this theory.
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This is Part 3 of my Understanding Haki Series. It's a deep dive into the topic so there is no way I can give a surface level explanation.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it is just the mastering of haki that is required to use flame clouds. There is a specific reason why luffy especially would be able to use flame clouds. First off let’s talk about the possible relationship between Haki and Fire. There have been many characters seen using fire abilities without an explanation(Such as Kinemon or King). Luffy has an ability known as red hawk and contrary to popular belief it has not been explained how he uses fire in that attack.
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I made this video a year ago and even before I knew about flame clouds I was saying luffy would get a fire form.
Many assume that it is like the way Diable Jambe was introduced in impel down i.e. friction. However I have debunked this notion in another theory(that I will go into later.) The TLDR version is that it can’t be friction because he used it underwater & if it really was friction and speed then it would only stand to reason that other attacks that are just as fast and even faster like Jet Gatlin or Snakeman should also have fire.
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In ch 1002 Zoro used a flame based attack. So many fire themes in one place. Wouldn't it make sense for the main character to learn a flame based form here.
Months ago I have made a reddit post and video in which I pointed out the similarities between Red Hawk and Ryou.That theory is more relevant than ever now. The very first move that Luffy uses after learning Ryou is Red Roc.
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What we refer to as Armament haki is Bosushoku Haki in Japanese. This direcly translates as \"Color\" of Arms Supreme Chi
I have a multi part theory that goes extremely in depth into understanding haki. I have an introductory Reddit post. I unfortunately have been so busy I haven’t been able to fully release the subsequent parts. However I do have majority of the theory on Youtube. I’ll summarize the relevant part here.
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One day I'll bring the theories here to Reddit, I just don't want to half ass it. I could just copy and paste the script for my video, but it wouldn't look. I usually re-write 80%.
First we must go over the etymology of Haki. It mean Supreme Chi. Chi is a source of energy in constant vibration. The frequencies of the vibrations can vary. The vibrations at which that energy vibrates will cause Chi aka Haki to take different forms. These forms are known to use as Armament, Observation, and Conquerors Haki. And even those 3 different types of haki have different levels to them. Armament has 3 levels while both observation and conquers have 2 each. This makes for a total of 7 frequencies that Haki vibrates at. The 7 forms of haki can be correlated to The 7 Chakras. Each Chakra has an element. The 3rd chakra is known as the Solar Plexus(AKA Manipura AKA Navel). The Solar chakra has the element of fire and correlates to the 3rd form of armament.
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The 4th chakra is the heart chakra and has the element of Air. It correlates to the first form of observation and utilizes the power of empathy.
The glaring question is when and how did Luffy learn to use the third form of Armament. Well he has been using red hawk since he entered the new world so does that mean he learned to use advanced armament haki over the time skip? Yes and No. Again I don’t want this theory to be too long so I’ll give the TL;DR version. No I don’t believe luffy intentionally/consciously is using the third form of armament when he was using red hawk before his training in Wano. Yes I believe Luffy was subconsciously using the third form of [A] haki.
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He may not be in his prime and may not even be able to use his fire attacks anymore, but he could still point Luffy in the right direction atleast.
The ability to use haki is inherent. The purpose of training haki is in order to properly use it. Before Wano we only saw luffy use fire with red hawk but with the proper training Luffy could learn how to use it in other ways(Such as Red Roc). Wano is just the perfect place to learn Fire Haki. I say this because of the people and maybe even the environment. First of Kinemon could give Luffy advice. However I don’t find that likely. Kinemone hasn’t shown skill in teaching and if anything Kine would teach Zoro. He does have Hyorgoro to teach him. Hyogoro probably got rusty due to being imprisoned for so long. While his body may be out of shape Luffy did revitalize his willpower. This is important because Hyo may have access to a level of haki he once had in his prime. His hair is flames. I wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume he could use fire at one point in his life.
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This theory could also explain how Fishman naturally learn FM Karate and Minks learn Electro.
Also have you noticed that many of the animals in wano also have flame patterns.I have a theory that the environment could influence the development of Haki. I will expand upon it in the future, it’s just worth pointing out now.
The ingredients to flame clouds are spirit, flame, and cloud. fire and spirit is covered with the 3rd form of [A] Haki. So then where does the Cloud come into play? This one is alot more simple. First let’s look at the way kaido “wears” his flame clouds. He wears it like a sash. This is eerily similar to how Luffy wears a sash made of steam around him. This steam would be the surrogate cloud needed as the final ingredient. I mean just look at Gear fourth’s design in its entirety. He not only has “clouds'' around him, but his haki patterns form flames. Foreshadow?
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There might be more to Luffy's steam and gears than first assumed. Brook's devil fruit can conjure ice despite his fruit focusing on his \"soul\". Water can effect devil fruits. Devil fruits are defined by the soul inside the fruit. Ice, Water, and Steam.
BTW the term Chi(more properly known as Qi) translates to english as Breath. This helps to show how the steam surrounding Luffy may be more than just steam. Luffy’s gear techniques are born from luffy’s breath aka chi. I doubt this is a coincidence. This could mean that steam around luffy contains some of Luffy’s Haki. Similar to how Ki(Japanese translation of Qi) Auras work in Dragon ball. If the steam around Luffy already has luffy’s haki in it then it would make sense that his 3rd form of armament can ignite it. Voila! Luffy has produced flame clouds.
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Now let’s move onto why. Why would luffy have a fire based form. What is the significance?
This is an easy one to answer. His brothers Ace and Sabo. Both have fire powers and Luffy’s use of a fire powers will strengthens his bonds to Ace’s legacy, and kinship with Sabo. We’ve already seen this with Red Hawk and Red Roc as it is clearly an homage to Fire Fist Ace. This arc in particular is significant to luffy carrying on Ace’s will because Ace never got to rescue Wano from Kaido like he promised. Not only would he have fire powers similar to Sabo but possibly even a similar fighting style based on dragons. This leads into the next segment of this theory. The possible names of this gear fourth.
Dragonman
This is the first name I came up with. It should be obvious why. He is essentially copying a dragon to make this form. In fact it may have been his fight with kaido that inspired this form. Luffy has learned from his foes before. Luffy developed gear 2nd and learned how to use Soru not long after fighting with CP9. The precedent is set so it isn’t unlikely that he could have learned the secret of Kaido’s flying abilities and tried to emulate them. He also has Momo to help him understand how flame clouds work. Makes even more sense if his attacks in this form are fire based considering fire is the element most associated with dragons. Because snakes are similar to dragon this new form maybe be a direct upgrade to Snakeman. Monkey D Luffy's father is Dragon so who know he may even be able to learn a thing or two from his dad or bro in the future.
If this were the case I'd hope there would be a Double Dragon case.
Just for the fun of it I'll even speculate how these forms could fight.
Hypothetical attack: Gum Gum Hot Air Balloon. With this attack he takes a deep breath and then breathes out fire like a dragon. Also I imagine he would have more Electric based attacks since similar to how Kaido can roar lighting. More moves like Thor elephant gun. His snake man attacks could use dragon claws which seem to go well with ryou because we have seen Sabo use it to directly destroy things from the inside out.
Monkeyman
The way Flame clouds play a role in this is the fact that the ability to fly on clouds is something the Monkey King can do as well. All the more reason for luffy to use it given how much Oda admire’s Goku from Dragonball. Luffy’s name is Monkey D Luffy after all, would it really be all that surprising for him to have a monkey form. In SBS One Piece Manga,Vol. 20 (p. 26), Luffy's animal resemblance is revealed to be Monkey. Because King Kong is an ape this new form maybe be a direct upgrade to Boundman.
Sun Wukong and Son Goku
Hypothetical attack. I Imagine because the monkey king is famous for wielding a staff that can grow he would really emphasize extended attacks that uses his limbs as weapons. As well as using flames clouds as a platform to swing around in the sky with. He could learn a sound based/conquerors haki attack that involves him roaring and beating his chest. Something that could do physical and spiritual damage.
Lionman
I am aware of the popular theory that Luffy named his gears after the animals he fought during the time skip. That makes some sense but I’m not completely sold. Because none of gears are actually named after the animals he fought there. I’m surprised how many give this theory credit when you could just look at the names of his gears and see that it is a moot point. However he does have specific techniques that you could argue are inspired by the animals he fought. Such as gear third elephant man or king kong gun. Heck even Snake man and Culverin could be inspired by the Boa Sisters. In 2 videos I talked about how Culverin is like Life Return. A rokushiki technique used by Kumadori and the Boa Sister. My point is that while I do think it is true that Luffy develops techniques based on past battles It is not the cornerstone of why I believe Luffy’s new form could be Lionman. Could the lion on Ruskina possibly have something to do with it? Maybe but my main reasoning has to with my chakra theory. Recall that I correlate the SolarPlexus chakra to the 3rd form of armament haki. The solar plexus is not only associated with fire, but the sun & pride as well. What else is associated with the Sun and Pride?(my fellow fans of Escanor should know the answer to this.)
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The lion just so happens to be on Holdem's navel. Just like the Solar Plexus. Coincidence? Probably. Does it line up perfectly with my Theory? Definitely
Lions resemble the sun due to their manes, they would then also be attributed to the element of fire. Also let’s look at luffy’s character in general. He is Straw Hat Luffy and if you look at him wearing the straw hat from the right angle it looks like it could be a lion’s mane. Ok that might be a stretch but let’s not forget about the Straw Hat’s ship. The Thousand Sunny. It literally is Lion and Sun themed. Even Luffy’s laugh is ShiShiShi and it’s common to find a relationship between a character and their laughter style. For example when WB laughs he says Gurara and he just so happens to have the Gura Gura no mi. Shishi in japanese can be translated as Lion.
Hypothetical attacks: Lionman may even get not just flame clouds around him, but even fire hair. Like Big mom and Hyogoro have. I say this for two reasons. One it would make him look more like he has a lion’s mane. Also do you remember Kumadori? He often referred to himself as a lion specifically because of what he could do with his hair. Luffy may have short hair but he is also a rubber man with the power to stretch. So it would make sense for him to grow a luscious mane.
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I guess you could say the strawhat could be symbol for the sun aswell.
Sunman
This is the name I’m most sold on. Boundman, Tankman and Snakeman. All3 forms are 2 syllables long. At Least in english they are. And even though the story is written in japanese the names are meant to be pronounced in engirish. So like for example instead of Hebiman it is sunakuman. So if this 2 syllable rule is real then sunman passes. The Sun is super symbolic when it comes to the story of one piece. The very first chapter is called romance dawn. There are a whole bunch of theories you can find about how the will of D is related to Dawn. I won’t go into it, for the sake of this theory let’s focus on the word Dawn. The dawn of the day is in reference to the first moment the sun emerges over the horizon.
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This isn't exactly what I think it would look like. Just conceptual.
Every one knows that Wano Kuni is the One Piece equivalent of Japan. Japan is also known as Land of the Rising Sun, this because in Japan they actually refer to their country in their native language as Nippon. Nippon can be translated as Origin of the Sun. So with all that being said if there was any place Luffy would use Sunman for the first time it would be here. The two fire attacks Luffy have made use of the word red. And the japanese flag actually has a red sun on it. So he could even call the new form Redman and it still is relevant to the sun theme. I think the name sunman works and sounds better, but who knows maybe Oda is a big fan of the Wutang Clan.
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His hair looks kinda super saiyan here lol. I image him having a more orange or red color but I didn't want it to blend with the red of his haki.
Besides sun man having fiery hair and flame clouds around luffy. I could see some special things done in regards to the haki patterns on his body. First off he would have flame patterns. That’s a given considering that all of gear fourth has those flame patterns. However we would see them in new places. Sawyer7mage pointed out that the habu port symbol looks like the eyes of gear fourth and this is the perfect form to have them. Also I can Imagine Sunman having the same sun symbol as the sun pirates logo.
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This would be very poetic to me personally since this theory originally started with me referring to Luffy’s form as Dragonman and after some I thought of Sunman.
I have talked about the link between Luffy and the sun enough for you to have a good idea as to why the name Sunman fits. In SBS One Piece Manga — Vol. 95 (p. 22), Luffy's flower resemblance is revealed to be a Sunflower. In fact much of what I said about Dragonman, monkeyman, and lionman can still apply to sunman. First of all Boundman has a bunch of animal themed attacks, so Sunman for example could have attacks named after dragons or monkeys. Also thematically it can cover all 3 hypothetical names. It is obvious how Lionman and Sunman can be interchangeable. He can still have fire hair because it would not only just make him look like he has a lion’s mane but he'd resemble the sun as well. A Dragon theme works for Sunman because if this form let’s luffy use flame clouds then that would mean Sunman allows him to use a dragon technique. The second reason requires thinking out of the box. In fact it requires you to think outside of OP. Because if Sun allowed luffy to use flame clouds perhaps he would ride the cloud similar to the main character of Dragon ball. Get it Dragon ball. Ok that might be a stretch, but you what wouldn’t be? Sunman working perfectly for the Monkey King theme. Many of you know Goku or should I say Son Goku, but do you know of Sun Wukong? That is the original name of the famous monkey king that inspired the character of Goku. It can be a double entendre. Not only would the sun in sunman refer to the star in the middle of the solar system, but to Wukong as well. Also the name that works best for my chakra theory. The solar plexus chakra would be the reason for luffy developing sunman. And recall when I used Big Mom’s soul soul powers correlation with haki. Well when that power is used to attach a soul to fire it will turn into a sun.
Hypothetical attacks: What if Luffy was ever in a situation that he needed to defend against Boro breath and didn’t have the option to evade(such as needing to protect someone behind him). The saying is that the best defense is a great offence. Luffy could counterattack with a technique similar to Boro breath. A technique similar to the Dragon Kaido and even “Monkey King” Son Goku. This move could even be named after Lions. I say this because there have been similarities drawn between Leo Bazooka and Rokugan. There are also similarities drawn between Rokugan, Ryou, and Red Hawk. Put it all together and you can get an attack that is a fire based shockwave that even is in a stance similar to that of Kamehameha. This attack could be used to clash with Boro Breath.
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In this scene the DBZ sfx was literally used. Not saying this as point I just thought it was a cool coincidence.

Why not Gear 5th?

To finish off this theory I'll address why I don't think this new form would be Gear 5th. Each gear aibreath in a different way. Gear second pumps his blood with more oxygen. Gear third is air blown into bone, and gear 4th is air blown in muscles. This hypothetical fire form isn't really introducing a new application of luffy changing his body. It's more like a haki technique added onto gear 4th. It's like this difference between a sequel and a dlc expansion. I do have my own theory on what G5 would be that I'll go over briefly. Chi is anything and everything. Think about the "breath of all things". I believe that G5 will be Luffy incorporating the Chi(breath) of his surround to his body somehow. There is another ability that we know effects the environment that luffy is expected to use in the future. His mastery of haki and devil fruit awakening will get him in ouch with to breath of all that is around him which will be used to create G5.

Maybe it started when Dick Cheney won the presidency in 2008, or maybe when Al Gore led the country to war against Saudi Arabia six years earlier, or maybe the beginning of it all went unnoticed by the general public when a Cuban boy drowned en route to Florida in 1999, his death not more than a footnote in the local news. It is impossible to say for sure. But what is certain is that, at some point, a clock began ticking in America, counting down unstoppably, inevitably, to the day when revolution would come to the republic once thought indivisible.
Between the time the clock began ticking and the time its alarm bells rang, there were numerous false alarms, smaller tremors that shook American society before the earthquake that finally split it in two. Here are the three largest of those tremors, the ones which very nearly brought that earthquake on the country prematurely. Here are the three revolutions that weren’t.

2011: The Great Transport Strike

The Great Transport Strike of 2011 was the single largest mobilization of labor in US history.
The roots of the strike go back to the financial crash of 2008, though of course it would not have been possible without the smaller-scale labor unrest that dotted the 2000s. In response to the crash, the newly elected Cheney spent his first year in office slashing regulations and welfare programs. With pressure from his administration, Congress lowered the top marginal tax rate and very nearly defunded social security (the bill failed to pass the House or Representatives), and with lobbyists from the finance sector commanding the Labor and Commerce departments, his cabinet reduced employer-provided healthcare standards. Most relevant to the Great Transport Strike was Cheney’s assault on the minimum wage. One of his first acts as president was to sign a bill into law which halted the third stage of a procedural minimum wage adjustment put into motion near the end of the Gore administration. Had it gone into effect, the third stage would have raised the minimum wage to $7.50, but the new legislation stalled it at $6.71. Another bill he signed in November of 2009 took things a step further by undoing the other two stages, cutting the minimum wage back down to $5.15 even as millions of Americans faced financial ruin or worse. There was much uproar over the second bill in particular, but it went unchallenged at the state level.
What began the chain of events that led to the Great Transport Strike was actually a relatively small affair. In June, UPS drivers in New Mexico went on strike to protest the lack of air conditioning in their vans when a driver in Albuquerque died of heat exhaustion on the 5th. The strike spread to southern California and then Mississippi the following week, involving around 20,000 people altogether—a large strike, but by no means a record-breaking one. At this stage, the Teamsters union leadership was on board with the demonstrations.
Around the same time, FedEx drivers in Michigan went on a single-day strike to drum up public support for a lawsuit they intended to levy against their employers for deducting the cost of replacing damaged goods from their wages, which they claimed constituted wage theft to the point that many of them were making well below minimum wage. The strike, which involved only a handful of small local unions, came and went with little attention from the major media outlets, and had things ended there, the Great Transport Strike likely never would have happened. But of course, they didn’t, and it did. Cheney directed his Department of Labor to refuse to prosecute the wage theft case, which immediately drew national attention to the conflict. Thousands of unorganized workers in Michigan went out on strike on the 12th of June, just as the UPS strike was taking off in California and Missouri. Forming a coordinating committee to organize the actions of roughly three thousand nonunion FedEx workers, which included warehouse staff as well as drivers, the strikers in Michigan set up lines of communication with the striking UPS drivers in the south despite discouragement from the Teamsters leadership.
Alarmed at the apparent cooperation between the two strikes, president Cheney issued an injunction against both strikes, arguing that by showing intent to coordinate their actions they were violating the solidarity strike clause of the Taft-Hartley Act. The Teamsters ordered the striking UPS workers to withdraw from communication with the FedEx strikers, but they ignored both this and the injunction, planning instead to sue to overturn the injunction order. With the strike now out of their hands, the Teamsters leadership withdrew and ordered its members to return to work. Many remained on the picket line, engaging in the first major wildcat strike since the 1940s.
Naturally, the IWW pounced on the opportunity to agitate. As soon as the second FedEx strike began, IWW organizers began firing on all cylinders trying to get workers in other states to go on strike. It worked—by the last week of June, more than 30,000 additional FedEx and UPS workers were on strike across the nation.
On June 28th, the 10th circuit court struck down Cheney’s first injunction order, but he immediately (less than an hour after the ruling was publicized) issued another, this time on the grounds that the UPS strike had become a wildcat strike, and the FedEx one had been one from the beginning. This one would be impossible to overturn, being essentially correct in its assertion and its interpretation of Taft-Hartley. Ignoring the injunction yet again, the strikers persisted, their ranks continuing to swell in the first week of July. With unemployment at an outrageous 12% at this point in time, there was no shortage of labor for FedEx and UPS to bring in as strikebreakers once they were certain they would face no backlash now that the strike was illegal. Violent clashes erupted between strikers and police as the latter attempted to disperse picket lines; occasionally the violence spilled over to the scabs when striking workers tried to block them from entering truck yards and warehouses.
It was only a matter of time before the kindling that was being heaped up encountered a spark. On July 16th, it happened. Police trying to clear out a mass of strikers in St. Louis so a procession of strikebreakers could get to work fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing seven people, two of whom were scabs. The picket line erupted into a riot which was forcibly dispersed in a flurry of tear gas and rubber bullets. More than fifty people were arrested. In the aftermath of the shooting, tens of thousands of workers, many of whom had been brought in as strikebreakers, joined the strike to protest the brutal attempts to suppress it, bringing their total manpower up from about 80,000 to about 200,000 by the end of July. It was already one of the largest strikes in American history, and it was far from over.
On August 1st, usually considered the date the Great Transport Strike began, 70,000 or more workers in the railroad industry went on strike all at once. After a failed month-long struggle to get their respective unions to call one through official channels, this was yet another wildcat strike. With the railway companies unable to replace many of the workers on short notice due to the training their jobs required, the entire American rail system shut down almost overnight. The remaining workers had little work left to do with rail lines inoperable across the country, so before long the number of railroad workers alone who were participating in the strike neared 100,000.
By this point, the character of the strike had radically changed, and its demands changed with it. What began as a strike with narrow purposes--to recover stolen wages, to get AC units put in delivery trucks--morphed into a general uprising against the conditions imposed on the working class in the wake of the recession. Among the new list of demands were calls for higher wages, welfare reform, an end to right to work laws, and better unemployment benefits at the national level. The specifics varied from one picket line to the next, but the nominally powerful organizing committee kept it simple: a fifteen-dollar federal minimum wage, $400 federal unemployment stipends, and the repeal of Taft-Hartley, along with terms specific to the strike like a general amnesty for those involved and the original demands of the striking UPS and FedEx workers. Some of the more radical participants went further. The IWW pushed for a twenty-dollar minimum wage; CPUSA and the Workers World Party wanted the housing industry to be nationalized to put an end to the burgeoning homelessness crisis. Many local cadres of striking workers wished to see Cheney’s Secretary of Labor resign.
Violence continued to break out on an increasingly large scale. In Detroit, two to three hundred strikers stormed a FedEx warehouse, ransacked it, and burned it to the ground. Intense street fighting with the police persisted for the next three days as local authorities cracked down. In San Diego, The police fatally shot a speaker at an otherwise peaceful rally. An epidemic of attacks on police erupted throughout the city in retaliation, culminating in the siege, abandonment, and destruction of a local precinct. In Atlanta, rail workers occupied a train station for eight days, rendering the locomotives inoperable through sabotage and trading gunfire with the state troopers sent to clear them out. By August 14th, the national guard was mobilized in eleven states.
The strike reached its zenith near the end of August. From the fifth to the eighth, representatives from the strike’s central committee and the IWW met with the leadership of the nation’s biggest unions—the AFL-CIO and its constituent unions, the Teamsters, the USW, the UAW, and the UFCW chief among them—with the goal of convincing the most influential unions in the country to call a general strike. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka offered a sympathetic ear, but when all was said and done the executive councils of every union present rejected the proposal out of hand. Upset by the outcome, Trumka resigned from his post the following day. With Trumka’s endorsement and the involvement of the IWW, a coalition of AFL-CIO and Teamsters locals split off from the herd to begin organizing a single-day general strike scheduled for the 26th.
When the 26th came, an estimated three million laborers across all sectors stopped working. Roughly 1.3 million people converged on Washington, DC for a march intended to be the centerpiece of the strike, making it by far the largest protest event in American history. Descending on the Lincoln memorial, the marchers heard speeches from a roster of radical voices including people like former vice-presidential candidate Cornel West, IWW organizer Salvador Gutierrez, and renegade AFL-CIO officer Jorge Carreón. That evening, as the behemoth of a match dissipated, impromptu rallies materialized in front of the White House, the Capitol building and the offices of the Department of Labor. These were considerably smaller than the daytime protest, but more frenzied. Bouts of arson elicited brutal crackdowns from the police and the national guard, who were already on edge from the near impossibility of containing a mass of more than a million people in a city of barely half that. Just after midnight, around 80,000 protestors marched west across the Potomac, overwhelming a mass of riot police gathered on the Arlington Memorial Bridge and pushing their way to the Pentagon, which they encircled. For about an hour they chanted “jobs not bombs!”, echoing the slogan of an earlier protest movement, and, more ominously, “burn it down!” At around two in the morning, the DC national guard cleared the area with extreme prejudice. Nine protestors were killed, an unknown number badly wounded.
The theatrics of the 26th kicked off a weekend of protest in DC. Several large demonstrations were held in solidarity with the strikers, accompanied by anti-war and anti-austerity rallies. The first major explicitly communist event was held on the afternoon of Saturday the 27th, when around three thousand members of the Workers World Party and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization marched from the headquarters of the World Bank to join a larger gathering in front of the White House, red banners in hand.
Despite some speculation that the general strike would carry over unprompted into the next work week, most of the three million who had left their jobs on Friday were back at them on Monday—except for the truckers. Nearly 600,000 truckers who hadn’t taken part in the original strike either remained off the job after Friday’s general strike or joined the picket line anew. Several thousand went on strike mid-haul, stopping their trucks in traffic and using them to block off highways. Inspired by this display, thousands of other drivers broke into company lots and commandeered their trucks, driving them to strategic locations on interstates and state highways to clog up the nation’s roadways like clots cutting off an organ’s bloodflow. Several of these mass truck robberies turned into chaotic melees, with workers plowing through police lines in stolen semis as they attempted to flee the scene. Most of this was loosely organized, coordinated over the radio among groups of several dozen drivers apiece making decisions on the fly.
This was the final straw. Within hours of the first mass truck robbery, Cheney declared a state of national emergency. The Department of Justice deployed federal law enforcement officers to assist state forces, with orders to have every picket line shut down and every street cleared before the end of the week, by any means necessary. The army and the marine corps were sent into the hardest-hit cities à la the Los Angeles riots of 1992. On the 31st, Cheney signed an executive order authorizing employers to fire any worker refusing to return to work by noon on September 2nd without regard for existing union contracts and labor regulations. He then signed a second one temporarily permitting the termination of workers for “workplace disobedience,” which the order broadly defined as including any attempt to organize outside of recognized union contracts, encouraging strikes, sit-downs, slow-downs, or boycotts through speech or action, or “defying workplace protocol with the intention of diminishing productivity or causing a work stoppage of any kind.” This second order was set to expire at the end of September, but Cheney remarked to the White House press corps that nothing was off the table when it came to restoring order.
The strike was already faltering by the time Cheney delivered a one-two punch with his executive orders. Just before the general strike on the 26th, UPS had agreed to install air conditioners in its delivery vans and incorporate hazard pay into its drivers’ wages in the meantime. The following day, FedEx, having already agreed to stop docking pay for damaged packages in mid-August, offered substantial raises in a final attempt to lure the Michigan strikers back to work. With funds running low, many of the workers taking part in the original two strikes (which, together, were the core of the entire movement) returned to work after the 26th, deciding they could only hold out for so long and it was better to go home with their original demands met than to stick it out in the face of starvation, eviction, and escalating state violence for a more abstract goal. Demoralized, battered, and hungry, many other workers followed suit. While the weekend of protest raged in DC, the strike was withering away elsewhere in the country. When Cheney made his ultimatum, the strike crumbled.
A few stubborn holdouts remained on strike well into September, including enough of the insurgent truck thieves to keep the interstate system completely shut down in some areas for more than a week. In this period alone, twenty-plus people were killed in armed standoffs between state troopers and truckers. By mid-September, however, the movement was dead.
The Great Transport Strike of 2011 left tremors in its wake which were felt long after the last striker abandoned the picket line. In late September, freshman senator Bernie Sanders wrote a bill to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, citing Cheney’s use of the act to try to suppress a strike with legitimate grievances during his oral arguments. In the House of Representatives, Barbara Lee motioned to begin impeachment procedures against Cheney’s Secretary of Labor. Sanders’ bill was voted down by a bipartisan supermajority; Lee’s never made it to the floor. The strike was a huge talking point in the 2012 election, but the DNC’s refusal to muster any real resistance to Cheney’s crackdown neutered nominee Hillary Clinton’s ability to go on the offensive in that department. Still, the popular vote swung hard against Cheney, even though he managed to hold on to the electoral college by the skin of his teeth.
The big unions that refused to join in on the strike suffered internal crises in the months that followed. The renegades in the AFL-CIO who helped organize the general strike on the 26th struggled for power with the liberal leadership, which was more concerned with securing and protecting contracts than the kind of fluid militancy the IWW was preaching. Facing pressure from below, the new president resigned in November, triggering new leadership elections which the renegades promptly swept, re-installing Trumka as president in the process. In the years between the strike and the start of the war, the AFL-CIO would grow increasingly radical, and Trumka with it. The Teamsters were not so lucky. Their leadership refused to budge, and rather than waiting around for the next round of elections, their militant faction began defecting to the IWW en masse, causing the latter’s membership to skyrocket during the 2010s.
In the longer term, the events of the strike set in motion a trend of large-scale cooperation between different currents of the American left. The temporary alliance between the WWP and the FRSO during their August 27th march foreshadowed their role as founding members of the United American Reds three years later, and the demonstration of solidarity between militant unions and socialist parties throughout the strike was a precursor to the formation of the Fifth International in 2013.

2015: The Rent Riots

In the three years between the Great Transport Strike and the autumn of 2014, class tensions deteriorated even further. Unemployment never fell below eight percent, the minimum wage was stagnant at just over five dollars, and the homeless population remained at a fairly constant 700,000. Following the 2012 election, Congress was deadlocked between the two major parties, unable to agree on anything except the military budget. Polling showed that confidence in the American political system, already at record lows, plummeted during this period. But while the country was breaking down, the left was bulking up—the Fifth International was founded in early 2013, bringing together some of the most prominent radicals in the nation, and indeed the world, and its member organizations began experimenting with Liam Sutton’s concept of “preventative weaponization” later that year, putting up huge communal stockpiles of arms and ammunition in the hands of the most militant unions and parties in America. It was only a matter of time before this confluence of events proved disastrous for the establishment.
Political turmoil was at an all-time high in mid-to-late 2014. Responding to the Fifth International’s entrance to the scene, a microcosm of the Red Scare sprang up, and at the same time a partisan realignment was underway as many Republicans and the leftmost Democrats reversed their respective positions on gun control. Of course, all of this was happening during the midterm elections, which were turning out to be the most chaotic in recent memory.
As the deadline for the annual appropriations drew nearer, the left wing of the Democratic Party threatened to stage a coup within the party if their policy demands, among them a reduced military budget and expanded Medicare access, were not addressed in the new budget. The progressives had grown into a formidable force since the Blue Movement in 2010, so the prospect of them withholding their votes from Nancy Pelosi in the next Speaker election, or worse yet, breaking off from the Democratic caucus to vote as an autonomous faction of the party, was concerning enough to the party’s higher-ups to give them real leverage. The party yielded and let the progressives include provisions in the proposed bill which would reduce the $750 billion military budget by 20% and expand Medicare to cover those aged 50 and up.
Of course, these provisions were unacceptable to the Republicans, who immediately voted the bill down in the Senate. The one they sent back made no revisions to Cheney’s agenda. The Democrats attempted to get the progressives to work with the Republican bill as a starting point to introduce more limited versions of their demands—a 10% budget cut for the military, for example, or lowering the Medicare age to 55 instead of 50—but they wouldn’t have it. They argued that people were suffering at home and abroad, and the least they could do was put up a decent fight. So the House Democrats sent over another bill, essentially the same one but with minor changes to the infrastructure and education budgets, and it too was voted down by the Senate. With time running out, the conservative wing of the DNC abandoned the military cuts over the outcry of the most staunch progressives, sending over a weaker version of the bill without them. Miraculously, the bill made it through the Senate, but instead of accepting the compromise, Cheney vetoed it. He didn’t just want the military budget to remain high, he wanted it to be higher. The parties remained at an impasse, and on December 22nd, the government shut down. It would turn out to be the longest government shutdown in history, clocking in at seventy-nine days.
The new Congress took office on January 6th, handing a few House seats to the Democrats and a Senate seat to the Republicans. Neither party gained a substantial advantage, and the freshman congresspeople were no more willing to compromise than their veteran colleagues. When another token attempt to pass a bill failed, the two sides finally settled in for the longest game of political chicken ever played.
With funds frozen, the Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped renewing contracts with public housing landlords. Most had advance payments for January, but as the shutdown stretched into February, contracts started expiring, landlords were left with a choice: start charging their tenants full rent, or go broke. Naturally, most chose the former. Near the end of February, more than two thousand landlords had stopped receiving payments, and a large majority of them intended to charge rent at the beginning of March.
This presented a problem. The tenants in these public housing complexes were there because they couldn’t afford to pay full rent elsewhere. For obvious reasons, few, if any, would be able to cover rent when it came due.
Word of the looming wave of evictions spread around the country in the waning days of February. Mass protests were held in DC demanding an end to the government shutdown, none quite as large as the central march on the day of the August 2011 general strike, but several pulling in crowds of over ten thousand. Tenant unions organized rent strikes. Socialists stirred anti-landlord sentiments with rallies in and around public housing complexes, leading to the first arrests of the riots as organizers were jailed on trespassing charges.
The backlash on March 1st was visceral. Angry crowds gathered in front of the nation’s courthouses blocked the handful of landlords who had begun charging rent in February from filing eviction paperwork until the authorities forced them to retreat with salvos of tear gas. In Boston, the crowd at one courthouse returned with a vengeance after sundown and burned it to the ground. Dozens of instances of tenants occupying their buildings, refusing to pay rent or comply with evictions, popped up.
On the third day of unrest, police began violently enforcing evictions. With nothing to lose, some of the more dedicated tenants fought tooth and nail to keep control of their buildings, turning the occupations into sieges and then the sieges into bloodbaths when the police abandoned the last of their restraint. Horror stories of police brutality filled the nightly news. The Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, New York became the site of particularly vicious fighting as the tenants engaged in what amounted to building-to-building guerrilla warfare with the officers sent to evict them. The following night, thousands of evictees swarmed housing projects in a dozen major cities, overwhelmed law enforcement, and seized the properties from their landlords, forcing them to flee (or worse, in a few cases). The chaos spread from the housing complexes to the perceived root causes of the tenants’ housing insecurity. Looting sprees broke out in gentrified neighborhoods. An unfinished high-income apartment building was razed to the ground in Philadelphia, another in Seattle. Banks were up next: two dozen were ransacked on the fourth and fifth nights of March, three of them completely destroyed by arson. An improvised explosive device was detonated in the lobby of a bank on Wall Street, killing none but injuring fifteen. The degree of violence in the tenant occupations rose. In some clashes, deadly firefights broke out when the tenants got ahold of smuggled-in firearms.
In one of the few displays of political self-preservation instincts of his career, Cheney ordered a thirty-day moratorium on evictions on the sixth to stop the flames from being fanned any further. Three days later, the desperate House Democrats caved and passed the Republican bill unaltered. The Senate hurriedly passed it on to Cheney, who signed it that afternoon. HUD money was flowing again shortly, and the riots subsisted in the days that followed.
Like the Great Transport Strike, the Rent Riots of 2015 had far-reaching implications for the left and the country as a whole. Conservative media was ablaze with conspiracy theories that the Fifth International had provoked the riots, or that progressives in Congress had purposely caused the government shutdown knowing it would lead to unrest. In May, senators Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill which would make it illegal for American labor unions to join the Fifth International or engage in mass buyouts of firearms. In what is often described as the low point for Cheney’s reputation, Bernie Sanders was arrested on the steps of the capitol building after an impassioned six-hour filibuster of the deal, allegedly for advocating violence against the government when he said that “the poor must remain armed at all costs in today’s society” in the face of police brutality. Though he was released shortly thereafter, the incident turned him into a national icon, which put powerful momentum behind his presidential campaign when he declared his intent to run immediately after his release.
The rampant fearmongering about the Fifth International (some of which, to be fair, turned out to be quite accurate) contributed to the rancor of the 2016 election, and is partly responsible for the Secession Crisis of 2017 and the resulting civil war.

2016: The Bezos Riots

That the February Revolt happened so quick on the heels of the Bezos riots makes it debatable whether the latter even qualify as a “revolution that wasn’t” or if they were just the beginning of a revolution that was. Nevertheless, they had a distinct beginning and end, so it’s worth examining them separately.
The 2016 election, of course, was a disaster. More information about it can be found elsewhere, but what is of particular importance here is Jeff Bezos and his independent campaign. Bezos announced the start of his campaign in January of 2016, immediately creating a media sensation as people speculated what the richest man on Earth wanted the office of the presidency for. There was outrage on the left, of course. Many accused him of trying to buy the election, or of running with the intent of spoiling it for Democratic front runner Bernie Sanders if he clinched the nomination, as was projected at the time.
Sanders ran a successful insurgent campaign, heading into the convention in July with an outright majority of pledged delegates. But his popularity was not enough to ward off the machinations of an anxious establishment. All 716 of the party’s superdelegates cast their votes for the conservative Eric Holder, handing him the nomination despite the disapproval of the majority of the party’s base. Like the convention of 1968, rioting quickly broke out. This was but a preview of what was yet to come.
On October 6th, a lone gunman fatally shot Bezos at a rally in New York.
For some, it was a day to mourn, but for many others, it was one to celebrate. That night, throngs of people unashamedly took to the streets to cheer on Bezos’ death. Naturally, the police tried to disperse these impromptu street parties, but as the night wore on they grew more crazed and slipped out of the realm of what the authorities could contain. The biggest conflagration sprouted up in Times Square, where the ground floor of the NASDAQ building was vandalized, its windows bashed in and its lobby scorched by Molotov cocktails. A small group of the most frenzied revelers scaled the Times Tower and toppled several of its billboards, sending them crashing into the street below where the mob, moving as one, dragged them into a massive bonfire in the center of the square. The party-turned-riot finally petered out around four in the morning.
The upwellings of the sixth were the beginning of a longer period of unrest, most of it concentrated in the two weeks following the assassination. Though most of the unrest occurred in New York, there were flashpoints all across the country. An Amazon warehouse in Alabama reported that more than half of the staff failed to show up to work on the seventh, provoking rumors that a strike was underway, but no large-scale revolt of labor ever materialized. A mob in Los Angeles had to be kept at bay with rubber bullets when they marched on Beverly Hills chanting “kill the rich.” In the Bay Area, multiple reports alleged that roving bands of youths dressed in black bloc gear had begun terrorizing rich Silicon Valley neighborhoods, burglarizing their homes, setting fire to their cars, and tearing down the walls of their gated communities. In Chicago, police severely overreacted to a block party coincidentally being held on the night Bezos was shot, teargassing the partygoers in response to a mundane noise complaint. Over the following week, anti-police protests shook the city in tandem with the chaos happening around the country.
The unrest, quickly christened the “Bezos riots,” reached its peak on the night of the tenth, when another mob that had gathered in Times Square was forced to retreat under heavy fire from the NYPD. At loose ends, the mob turned its attention south and marched towards the financial district. It grew in size and fury as it moved south, lashing out against office buildings along the way until it reached Wall Street, where the police were kept on the outer edges of the crowd, giving the rioters near the center free reign over the financial capital of the world. Financiers working late that night were left at the mercy of the masses. The one building with any police protection when the rioters descended on it was the New York Stock Exchange, though the officers were quickly beaten back into the lobby. A number of unguarded buildings, including the Trump building at 40 Wall Street and the American headquarters of Deutsche Bank, saw their lower floors occupied for several hours. Some of the defining photographs of the prewar years were taken that night—a mob parading a prop guillotine down Wall Street, the south end of Manhattan aglow with fires as seen from the Statue of Liberty, and the graffiti-covered NYSE building the morning after, still sporting a banner hung across its facade by vandals the night before reading “PANDEMONIUM - PLACE OF ALL DEMONS”.
These images and others like them dominated the news cycle that week. The whole nation descended into a state of madness for a time. On the twelfth, the Fifth International called an emergency congress, which remains the only one of its kind to this day. Unlike the previous four congresses, this one was conducted entirely out of the public eye, something the press was keen to take note of. Some of the delegates present at the congress wanted International’s member organizations to seize the riots as an opportunity to begin an armed insurrection, holding up the highly spontaneous nature of the unrest as proof that the American people were ready for a revolution. Others feared that any attempt at a revolution would be far more likely to fail and result in a withering reactionary backlash than to actually overthrow the government. Then there were some, though they were an increasingly small minority in the International, who were against the idea of an armed revolution on principle. Ultimately, these latter factions won out, and the fifth congress resolved to merely issue a vague statement in support of the working class. Behind the scenes, however, Liam Sutton led a clandestine effort to organize the Fifth International’s many disparate gun clubs and munitions stockpiles into the skeleton of a revolutionary force. Between the end of the Bezos riots and the beginning of the February Revolt, he and his comrades would craft what would come to be known as the American Worker’s Army.
While Sutton set to work laying the groundwork for the revolution yet to come, the fetal revolution underway was coming to an end before it had a chance to truly begin. Curfews and national guard deployments in a handful of cities put an end to the nightly mayhem not long after the Fifth International held its secret congress, but the working class, still delirious with anger, was not ready to go quiet into that good night. On the 19th, a waiter serving Mark Zuckerberg at a restaurant in Palo Alto pulled out a handgun and shot him twice in the chest at point blank range. He miraculously survived, but the message to the wealthy was clear: there are people in this country who hate you enough to kill you, even at the expense of their own lives. Already uneasy from the killing of Bezos and the gleeful rampage against capitalism that had occurred in its wake, the attempted murder of Zuckerberg was the last straw for many of America’s wealthy elite. From late October through to the end of the year, twenty-seven of the top 100 richest people in the US moved abroad permanently, along with dozens of people lower on the list. This mass exodus of capitalists has since come to be known as the “Great Cash Migration.”
Four months after the Bezos riots, the specter of class conflict would return to haunt America one final time. And the rest is history.