I usually run The Delian Tomb from Matt Colville.

Its got all the classic tropes - meeting in a tavern, travelling through a dangerous forest, crawling ancient tomb turned into a dungeon and fighting goblins. There’s also a lot of great community-supported resources out there for maps and stuff. Here’s a PDF of the adventure

For beginners you’re right, but once you’ve done that one time and understand how it works, it no longer provides value and often results in slower productivity.

I was forced to use it because its the default web server framework at my mega-corp. I’ve been using it for almost 7 years now, and I think one of the reasons Spring is popular is because you can pick it up pretty easily if you’ve got an existing app with some examples to work in.

I think the only three core concepts you have to understand for Spring to make sense are (1) MVC architecture, (2) server-side templating and (3) dependency injection. If you have a reasonable idea of how these things work, you can muddle your way through the rest.

I’m a senior at a large tech company - I push all the teams I work with to automate the review process as much as possible. At minimum, teams must have a CI hook on their pull request process that runs a remote dryrun build of the changed packages. The dryrun makes sure the packages compile, pass unit tests and meet linter rules. A failed build blocks the pull request from being merged.

I try to encourage developers to turn the outcome of every code style discussion into a lint rule that fails the dryrun build when its violated. It saves time by automating something devs were doing manually anyway (reading every line of code to look for their code style pet peeves) and it also makes the dialogue healthier - devs can talk about the team standards and whether the code meets them, instead of making subjective comments about one another’s code style.

I’ve played 7 sessions in a 13th Age campaign, and I love it so far. It has all the core familiar d20 mechanics, but throws away D&D’s skill system in favor of explicit mechanics that incorporate PC backstory directly into success and failure in the game.

In 13th Age instead of skills, PCs have “Backgrounds”. Backgrounds are rolled like skills, but instead of picking from a list, PCs make up their own.

For example, if your PC’s backstory involves being abandoned as a child and growing up on the mean city streets, you might have the background: “Resourceful Urchin”. During the session, if your party is tracking down a bad guy in the slums, you could ask your DM: “could I use my Resourceful Urchin background to tap into my contacts and find out if anyone has seen the bad guy recently?” Your DM says “give me a roll” and if you succeed, you advance in your pursuit without negative consequence.

13th Age takes a bit more good faith from both the players and the GM to be fun, but its so great for making the PCs feel special and important in the world in a way D&D doesn’t support.

I’m running a homebrew level 11-20 campaign in Ancient Netheril from the Forgotten Realms. We’re currently at level 17.

Netheril is a “once great empire of magic that fell 4000 years ago”. It exists to create the backdrop for why the “modern” Forgotten Realms are, well, forgotten. I’m running it as a sequel to WOTC’s “Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden”.

Its taken a lot of work to flesh out the setting since most of the published content about it is from AD&D, but its been a great high-level backdrop. Netheril’s powerful mage hegemony gives me endless opportunities for high-level encounters, and the empire’s divide between floating magical Enclave cities and the non-magical people who live on the ground creates for some great tension and quest hooks.

How has the transition been? I’ve played Dragon Heist, but Mad Mage is a megadungeon, right? It seems like a completely different gaming style, has your group adapted well? Do you see them finishing the megadungeon, or do you think their travel back to the surface means the campaign is going towards homebrew?

beer on cutting board for size because i ate it already

it was smol but tasty.

Cooked it on a steel preheated 30mins at 525F in a standard electric home oven. 2mins with just the sauce (to compensate for the low temp), then topped it and did another ~4 mins. The crust is a very high moisture dough that I cold-fermented for 2 days, so it was super stretchy which allowed for the huge oven spring and the bubbles.

The sauce is just pureed San Marzano tomatos, tomato paste, sugar and salt, and the toppings are full fat low moisture mozarella, basil leaves, olive oil and my favorite ingredient, the white stuff, shaved parmigiano reggiano ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qU7nRd9fiU is a good starting point for this style of pizza.

the three things i did to go from average homemade crust to this were:

1. high moisture, cold fermented dough - 65% moisture or above, combine and let rise in the fridge for at least two days, folding it every once in a while
2. “oven spring” - a ripping hot oven and bake surface are required to create spring and bubbles. turn up your home oven as hot as it will go (525-550F) and let the steel, stone or cast iron pan preheat until its burning hot metal. you will get a subpar result if the pan goes in room temperature
3. pre-bake the crust - NYC pizza ovens are 800-900 degrees, much hotter than a home oven. in a home oven, the amount of time required to fully cook the crust will burn the cheese. restaurant recipes have to be adapted for home tools. at home, shape your crust and add just the sauce, then bake for a few mins. THEN remove to add your cheese and toppings, before baking fully. otherwise you’ll either have undercooked crust or burned cheese every time

there’s a million ways to make pizza but this is what helped me.