Have you seen the new 'fire tornado' spell?

I saw those on firelines many times - they're not that rare, actually, but they're short-duration and you don't usually have a handy news crew to record them from a nearby highway.
 

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Anyone ever read Slaughterhouse Five?

Dresden firebombing, man. It's a situation too sad for me to use in D&D. Since I am a fan of blow-up-the-world plots, this means it is very sad, indeed.

Yeah...between the Nazi thing and that Germany carpet bombed and attacked civilian targets with their air forces in Britain first makes me feel...not terribly bad about that.

I find the fire bombing and atomic bombings of of Japan far more heinous, to each their own...

Carpet bombing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


[sblock]Dresden: "An independent investigation commissioned by the city council in 2010 reported a minimum of 22,700 victims with a maximum total number of fatalities of 25,000."

Japan: "Carpet bombing was used extensively against Japanese civilian population centers, such as Tokyo. On March 9 and 10 1945, B-29 Superfortresses were directed to bomb the most heavily populated civilian sectors of Tokyo. In just 2 days of bombing, over 100,000 men, women, and children burned to death from a heavy bombardment of incendiary bombs. Another 100,000 were left homeless. These attacks were followed by similar ones against Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya, as well as other sectors of Tokyo, where over 9,373 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on civilian and military targets. By the time of the dropping of the atomic bombs, light and medium bombers were being directed to bomb targets of convenience, as most urban areas had been already destroyed. In the 9-month long civilian bombing campaign, over 580,000 Japanese civilians died."[/sblock]
 

Yeah...between the Nazi thing and that Germany carpet bombed and attacked civilian targets with their air forces in Britain first makes me feel...not terribly bad about that.

Man, I just think when civilians are horrifically killed and burned, it's sad. Not tryin' to be all controversy about it. ;)
 



Holy hell. Surely that's photoshopped? That looks too surreal to be real. The site says it's legit, but that doesn't mean much. Anyone know if this is real?

It is real. Volcanic ash is a cloud of glass crystals banging around in the air, under the right circumstances it can produce a lot of static electricity.

Google image search "volcanic lightning" for other examples, but this is one of the more impressive ones.
 

Problem with the great fire raids is, both cases you mention, Tokyo and Dresden,there were many refugees in the area, and you can never tell how many died crushed under buildings, sucked into the hurricane fires, or such like
and in the German case they had to use flamethrowers to "clean out" shelters choked with bodies
ie no way in hell they know the REAL number of dead or ever will

plus the authorities on all sides lied to keep the numbers looking low, I'd bet one of the "big secrets" still kept of WW2 are the real casualty figures.
My Dad wasin the CLydbank BLitz fyi, their house got hit with 3 incendiaries and burned down

on firestorms, one serious worry is that back then, our grand/great gandparents had only about 1/4 or 1/5th the amount of flammable material in their homes than we do, because they were so poor comparatively, and there weren't the plastics etc then.
While mdoern building safety and fire fighting techiques are far superior, if a firestorm could be triggered it would be much more likely that an urban area would have sufficent fuel for such to be possible.
A firestorm requires sufficent fuel per area of ground AND/OR either right weather conditions (thermal inversion) or an enormous source of heat/flame

that's one often overlooked point about nuclear weapons nowadays.
Japanese cities had lots of wood and paper construction because it was safer due to earthquakes as well as cheap, so the two cities burned in a firestorm and that's what actually killed much of the victims.
Modern cities are much larger and have a hell of a lot more fuel in them.
Basing causalties on projections of Japanese cities ignores reality of difference 70 years of affluence etc have had on actual cities/towns.

No way you could put out a nuclear-triggered firestorm, it would expand and burn until the fuel density dropped sufficiently as little normal weather could stop it.
Firestorms also produce dry lighitng for similar reasons to volcanoes.

On more upbeat note, the recent Icelandic reuptions triggered fantastic electrical displays :)
 




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