Putting it here because I don’t see it in the list:

Girl Genius by Kaja and Phil Foglio

Steam punk and she does get twitterpatted about some boys but the whole story is about her making her way in the world.

Not sure if you’ve already read Discworld but the Witch series fits a lot of your requirements. Maskerade would by my first for it’s hilarity.

italian tomatoes have entered the chat and agree with their golden apples.

True though the disguise kit would take more time. I am so far. part of my GMs annoyance is that a lot of the names of the NPCs are clear hints as to their purpose and if you speak German and some Latin it makes it VERY obvious what the next plot point will be so I have been banned from translating the names from now on.

Let the players as a group have agency in your narrative. It sounds like a stupid joke about the pet goblin but it isn’t. Our favorite campaign ever was a mage campaign where the players spent the whole campaign focus on one guy (Sir ben kingsley in Lucky number slevin) and they went after him with all they had. But on the side they made friends with some of the factions. Especially this one Sons of Ether, Lucy Monk. They confided in her and had her help them with plans. it was great.

Then the twist came.

Yeah, you figured it out.

But the look on their faces when they had to travel back in time to get the guy they thought was the BBEG and he turned around and showed them who it really was still makes the DM giggle to himself.

Any game you play matters if the players feel they are moving things along and making a difference, even a small one.

If you are the DM, be the rest of the world but let them move you.

Use and abuse prestidigitation. Annoying dog? here puppy, the best steak you ever tasted. need to ask the guards again? Change my clothes. plot exposition? minor cube of illusion. Between that and mending I have my GM debating firing my bard after only 3 sessions of curse of the crimson throne.

you’re thinking about it wrong. She tries as hard as she can to never use magic. her one spell she uses is a fancy Magic soul jar spell and maybe detect magic. For what she does you probably want a psionic.

Yeah, logical volumes has a teeny bit of overhead, same with RAID. both together means you can run older things but things that have a lot of textures loading you will see some drop.

So many.

Curse of Strahd in 3.5: Who knew Con damage to a mostly spell caster group could be dangerous not just once but 4 times. In comparison both fights were Strahd were a f**ing walk in the park.

More of a test game than an actual campaign: We were testing if a CR appropriate group of goblins with levels vs a group of players would play out for the players: Well as it turns out I suck at calculating CR so our first fight was 5 players vs 5 goblins level 15 (Same as players) plus 10 starting goblins. We adjusted it for a correct CR and it was still a massacre. Ambush is a HELL of an advantage.

Anything goes campaign. Well turns out anything goes for the DM too so Level 3 half colossal half minotaur barbarian opponent with a posse of gobs with a ballista safely away means players die every other round or so.

Logical volumes. it slows down IO on this setup but i don’t run IO intensive games. It allow me to just repartition and add drives as needed.

Oooooooh, I have one:

https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-759-its-evolutionary-my-dear-washington-post/

It’s like a 5 page spread for the whole spiel but this is the most relevant page.

The one thing i will add it that the eye thing primarily is super true and backed up by science as 20% of our brain is dedicated to visual functions and adding a third would make our heads very very hard to handle for almost 0 benefits.

I was given a Razer with blue because the guy who owned work in a small office with multiple people. I Got hooked but not bad enough i have more than i have computers to use them on.

Now I use the retro 9bit do for everyday and I have a 36% for when my kids force me to use only one hand.

Drew Hayes: Anything he wrote but Superpowereds are about 30 hours on average and there’s 4. Phil and Kaja Folio: Girl Genius.

I also don’t see The Martian on this page so adding it as a suggestion.

Well now, I’m not offended or anything, you asked a question and I’m answering it with my opinion. That’s just it, where do we draw the line? What about travel books? On the origin of species was written on the other side of the world in a time where that kind of travel was crazy dangerous. is that an isekai? What about Woman marrying against her will and going to another city far enough away she know no one or anything and especially not the local customers? What about Rabbit the great and powerful? He travels from one kingdom rules by necromancers to a world where magic itself is different. is that enough travel? Your question is valid. The answer is no, not because you asked a bad question but because the more you stretch the definition the less it means anything. Pride and prejudice isn’t an isekai. If you broaden isekai to cover it than you just made it into the word: Book.

I’d ask first and foremost WHAT did you like about it and which part. Leaving my personal crazy theories out There is a HUGE tonal shift at the end of book 4. Did you like it more before that? After that? Did you like the magic? Did you prefer the sorta mysteries?

Did you love reading about those people growing and changing?

Personally i cannot recommend enough Superpowereds by Drew Hayes. 4 books and a few side stories, set in college and has that adventure and fantasy feel with a serious mystery woven through the whole series.

BUT i pretty much have never reread any of the HP books after 4 once the 7th came out.

If you liked the later books and the coming of age than Yes, Percy Jackson, the first few books at least capture a lot of that grim dark coming of age in a world that was messed up by the previous generation.

I would also recommend the Books of magic. The novels have no mystery but they “inspired” HP a lot.

The first is just multiverse fantasy and not an isekai amd the second is a time travel story that has its own subgenres like “Connecticut yankee in king Arthur’s court” and are not isekai either. You’re over broadening a term and loosing it’s meaning.

“It was a Unicorn in the same way nanny Ogg was a Unident.”

Is it a hot swappable switch? If it is, pop it out and take it apart, you’ll need to push the stems from the holes but once it’s apart it’s fairly trivial to do. If it is not hot swappable you can probably pry it apart but it will be considerably harder.

I suspect part of it is protagonist. I, as a kid saw Luke as the character I was supposed to see the movie through. In EBS he’s barely there and he is at the lowest by the end.

In ROTJ you see his bitter sweet triumph but triumph never the less.

Pretty much exactly that. I needed to cut back on news browsing anyway so this helped a lot.