#shadows of sorcery

[lyinginbedmon]

The benefit of playing any TTRPG character is you get a week or two inbetween sessions to figure out how they process new revelations in their narrative.

For my perfect best boy Dahren the dwarf dragonborn Rogue, last session dropped a doozy of a conversation on him and I'm steadily working out what implications that's going to have on his overall arc.

Let's run through the intro here. Dahren is a trans man, from a culture that barely has a concept of gender and even less of actually changing it. Dwarves in this setting are quite literally carved in stone, and then animated by their family in a magic ritual into flesh and blood.

So far as he knew, he was the only person remotely like him. So he spent the last 50 years stealthing his way through finding some magical ritual that would let him be who he always was, without even having a word for what he was. And since that goal seemed equally improbable regardless of exact destination, he naturally picked becoming a dragon, because nobody is going to argue with a dragon about its gender. Lest they become extra crispy anyway.

And to his credit, he's had a commendable degree of success! He's managed to study, research, and supply a ritual that permanently converted him into a cis male dragonborn. It's been a fun time for him getting accustomed to his new form and its differences, from a tail to a breath weapon to even the ability to fly. He's enjoyed it immensely, especially because it allows him to be very openly a dude with no fear whatsoever of being rejected as such. The first few sessions after that achievement were marked with an uncanny degree of confidence.

...

So anyway turns out he's been kinda wrong this entire damn time. We're over 60 sessions into this campaign and he just found out some very important information about his entire (previous) species.

Firstly, loads of people apparently know a bunch of trans dwarves. They're not commonplace, but they're common enough that the party paladin's temple has a bunch. So yay, he's not alone in all this, that's great right?

Well... secondly. Not only do transition options exist for other races, the dwarves have one all to themselves. Apparently it's even pretty effective, compared to how the other races go about things.

So the first thing that happens I guess is a kind of deflation. He's done so much, risked and lost so much, and the easy answer was probably just waiting in a temple in his hometown. Absolutely none of his rigorous study and dodging of death was actually necessary.

This would probably morph into a kind of depressive episode. He's not alone in his issues, he's just the dumbest sack of rocks from the local quarry. So he thinks anyways.

Does he even still want to be a dragon at this point? Hasn't he already done the main thing he wanted? Sure he had to sacrifice his species on the altar of achieving it, his own family will probably struggle to recognise him (and his mother didn't even live to see him), and apparently he could have just wandered into a cave and figured things out in under a year, but he did it, right? Why do anything more?

...

Then I think is the recapitulation in his hero's journey.

Because yes, he never actually had to go through everything he did, but when does anyone? What made him go through it all anyway? The answer to which is simply no-one ever told him there was another option. Dahren is one of the smartest people in the entire campaign setting at this point and he never had the slightest inkling that it existed. The guy has an unmodified Intelligence score of 22.

(if you don't play D&D, the "typical" score is 10, and very few effects let you go higher than 20. Dahren is very special.)

Maybe there's something special about the specific cave. Maybe it doesn't always work. Maybe there's special conditions or requirements. Maybe it's a religious thing that doesn't work if you follow one of the dwarven deities. He won't know for sure until he finds out more about it from the paladin's temple. There's any number of things that conceivably could have kept it out of the books he's poured over, but if it exists and there are others like him that need it then surely they deserve to know about it, right?

So how many other people like him are there? That will also never hear about it? How many die never knowing they had options?

Moreover, why is something as significant as that option so unheard of in his community? It was common knowledge to the paladin, and it's basically almost everything he was told was barely possible at all. Surely it should be a thing of renown? Surely it should be rigorously studied and documented, but he's trawled multiple libraries of magic and never found a single reference to it.

...

And thus we enter the anger stage.

Because if this is reasonably well-known outside of his society, then it suggests there's a factor inside of his society that has kept it suppressed. And that's going to be someone responsible not only for all of Dahren's struggles and misery, but presumably also those of countless others. Someone, intentionally or not, with a great deal of blood on their hands.

Now Dahren is freakishly persuasive. Without even trying he can roll 26 on Persuasion, and he's not even max level yet. In older versions of the game, 26 would be enough to turn someone from actively trying to murder you right this moment to "casual interaction in the office breakroom". The amount of rizz he has displayed since getting the confidence boost of transition is kinda breathtaking.

However, good persuasion doesn't get you everything, you can't just talk your way through every problem in life. Lord knows Dahren has encountered plenty of problems that diplomacy alone wasn't sufficient to resolve, the man has killed a Lot of people (as a D&D character it's kindof a given) and sometimes you just need a really big stick to back up your prose.

And if before he figured no-one would ever dispute a dragon's gender, then they probably won't argue with a dragon instituting a few social reforms either.

So maybe... maybe being a dragon can still mean something. Something very worthwhile.

As for how long it's going to take him to actually go through all of this in-game... well you're just gonna have to wait and see.

[queenofheartsdeservedbetter]

I really, REALLY, don't know what I would do without books.

[blueraimo]

[fortunaestalta]

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Rabid Bite

"You should have seen the look on *both* their faces." —Morkamp, Lambholt innkeeper

Artist: Karl Kopinski TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[alvareus-the-sorcerer-of-seals]

Y’all I’m cleaning out my junk because my dungeon got really fucking messy, I’m gonna be selling my old stuff at cheap prices, so if you have an apprentice that needs some equipment you can find some here

(Most of the stuff is untouched, I kinda bought it and forgor lmao)

I got:

Brooms(flying)~30 gold

Brooms(auto cleans your house for you)~30 silver, I don’t use them anyway

A shit ton of sceptres~15-20 gold each

Old wands~5 gold each

magical (gold)jewellery~50 gold each

Magical (silver)jewellery ~20 gold each

Wizard robes(didn’t wear them, I wanted to make copies of myself but scratched the idea)

Spell books beginnerlvl ~70 copper

Spell books intermediarylvl ~25 silver

Spell books advancedlvl ~50 gold

Magic rings(enhance magic power/stats/etc) ~20-40 gold

Magic swords(I killed a knight legion, they had OP shit but had no idea how to use it) ~60 gold

Enhanced magic knight armour~80 gold per set, I don’t sell pieces individually

Scrying glasses/black orbs ~90 copper each, I don’t scry often

Time seal scrolls(you throw it at stuff and it makes a barrier around it, stopping the time inside, good for food preservation) SINGLE USE~10 copper each

Time seal scrolls(same thing) 20 USES~ 20 silver each

Time seal scrolls(again same thing) INDEFINITE USE BUT CAN ONLY BE USED AT ONE OBJECT/LIVING THING IDK AT A TIME ~10 gold

A pran of cingles(really crispy chips, definitely not a can of Pringles)~1000 gold

NO REFUNDS

Hope y’all buy these, I have no idea where to put them

[themonsterp]

[spazzmatik]

Redraw (kind of?) (also individual pics)

[smolmilkling]

"Most people in Ravnica do not survive one Horror attack, let alone a whole swarm of them."

"I suppose I'm just lucky."

In our Ravnica campaign, Horrors are known to have some connection to the creation of Psychic Vampires, who are all but exclusively under the thumb of House Dimir.

Jacqueline, the Azorius officer with a bone to pick with the House, had some questions for Genevieve, who's undergone some drastic changes following her most recent (of multiple) encounter with the eldritch creatures.

But don't worry Genevieve is so normal guys.

[shyfurby]

Yeah I like the headcanon that the Carian sorcery sword was his. Have some sketches about it 🗡️✨

[lyinginbedmon]

A running joke about my D&D character Dahren is that he's a trans man but in dwarven society, gender doesn't work the same way that it does for regular humans. This is because everybody is hand-sculpted by their relatives and animated in a magical ritual, rather than conceived by luck of the draw.

So the question is how is Dahren even able to be trans?

And if we want to be very dull about it, we simply go with "Lying didn't know that about this campaign setting when they made the character", but let's dig into it a little more.

Firstly, we know dwarves don't "do" transgender, because Dahren is the only example. There are transgender characters from other races, but Dahren has studied and researched endlessly and so far as he knows he's the first and only one in dwarven history. He's not even entirely aware of what being transgender actually is because it's such an alien thing to his entire culture.

Secondly, we know dwarves do "do" gender, because there are men and women. Since dwarves don't reproduce sexually it's easier to think of these as being two roughly-standardised phenotypes more than sexes or genders. Milk first or cereal first.

Lastly, we know that which of those you are is important, at least to some people in dwarven society. We know that because Dahren's birth sex precluded him from doing things he wanted to do growing up. It's possible that this is a consequence of interactions with other societies, essentially importing foreign biases intentionally or otherwise, or it might just be that some of his relatives are jackasses. We know the Mohran family has a fair few eccentric black sheep.

So day one: Dahren is sculpted by his relatives. Maybe they're after a daughter, maybe they flipped a coin, but the person they sculpted and adorned with gems was Dahren's original dwarven form. A milk-first model. The instant he became self-aware, he knew something was wrong, though he didn't quite yet have the language to know what.

Then as he gets older, he notices the two phenotypes. Dahren was made to be a milk-first, but he wanted to do things the way cereal-firsters did them and there was a pang of heartache every time he had to do them milk-first instead. His friends and family and society keep prodding him to do things like a milk-firster but it always feels weird somehow.

And then, one day, home alone for once, he marches into the kitchen, grabs a bowl, and not entirely realising what he's doing... does it cereal-first. And suddenly it feels Correct.

Tradition plus culture over time equals expectations. Any population of sentient individuals invariably looks for patterns and establishes codes and protocols of behaviour and, ultimately, that extends to their social hierarchy and expectations. Dwarves lacked any reason to have gender the way humans do, but they still thought enough like humans to unintentionally invent one.

Essentially, as long as lines are drawn arbitrarily through a population, there's always going to be people on the wrong side of theirs. And whilst gender might not be as big a deal in dwarven society compared to ours, it was enough to rub Dahren the wrong way, resulting in dysphoria and an impulse to correct the problem.

That was all based on Dahren's perspective however. The benefit of getting out of your own hometown and seeing the world is it can give you new insight to things that seemed obvious before. So maybe this isn't typical of dwarven society overall, but it was certainly perfectly normal for Dahren.

[begin0end]

So the digital versions are taking a bit longer because work, so here are some attempts at the other two siblings instead! The one with red is the eldest of the three siblings, and the one with yellow is the youngest. I don't really have names for them yet...? The one I used before(for the red one, the yellow one didn't exist in the previous version) is waaay too edgy and no longer fits. So for now no names for them )=, only Nova is named.

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Ranni and the Tarnished's Children

So, I've been replaying Elden Ring, getting hyped for Shadow of the Erdtree, so I wanted to imagine what children Ranni and the Tarnished might have. If you believe they're physically incapable then just imagine they magicked them up with God-Powers or something.

ONTO THE KIDS!

-

-

Blaiddyd (pronounced: Bly-thid) (Translated: Wolf Lord).

Named for his uncle Blaidd the Half Wolf, Blaiddyd is the eldest Demigod child of Ranni and her Consort. Tall and blonde, he actually takes after his uncle Radahn quite a bit, being loud, friendly, and boisterous. In Build terms, he's an STR/Faith build, drawing on his faith in his parents rather than in any of the Gods like the Golden Order.

Blaiddyd has an intensely protective streak for his younger siblings and is generally an outgoing and friendly guy. But he does have a wolf's temper and can be a devil in the battlefield, entering something like a Berserker rage.

Blaiddyd fights with the Claymore and his Incantations, especially the Black Flame incantations of the Godskins using the Godslayer's Seal. Both his parents are a bit concerned about his interest in those arts. However, in serious situations, he uses the Sacred Relic Sword, entrusted to him by his parents as a show of trust and faith.

-

Rhiannon (pronounced: Ree-anne-on) (translated: Great Queen)

Named for her grandmother, Rennala of the Full Moon, Rhiannon is actually one of a set of twins. A quiet and reserved girl with pale skin and the red hair of her mother's true form, Rhiannon prefers her actions to speak over her words. She's a DEX/Faith build, relying on speed and incantations and her faith in her family to see her through.

While naturally taciturn, she is actually quite shy as well, and has a hard time speaking to other. She is a Demigod, like Blaiddyd, and often proves the more level headed one when she commands on the battlefield with her brother.

Rhiannon prefers spears and knives in combat, using Incantations only to bolster her already remarkable agility and dexterity. She prefers the Cross-Naginata if she had to choose, and also uses the Dragon Communion Seal as those are the incantations she prefers to use and is renown as something of a Dragon Hunter for it. But in dire circumstances she uses the Bolt of Gransax.

-

Idris (translated: Ardent Lord)

Named for his uncle Iji, Idris is a brilliant scholar of a Demigod, spending most of his time perusing ancient texts and tomes, seeking new and fascinating magics. He is the twin of Rhiannon, though his sister feels more kinship with Blaiddyd than Idris, though that suits him fine, as Idris enjoys his solitude.

A tall and lean brunette, Idris is fascinated by magic, especially Death Sorceries, and retains a frustration at his mother for her refusal to allow him to study the Rune of Death to further his research in the field, though he secretly relishes the challenge of working without it.

While not much of a fighter, Idris uses his grandmother's Regal Scepter for his casting, and a Carian Crystal Dagger is her really must get dirty with it.

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Mairwen (translated: Blessed Love)

Mairwen, named for the Kindling Maiden Melina who guided her father on his journey, Mairwen is not a Demigod.

She is an Empyrean. A candidate for Godhood. Her mother's heir.

Mairwen is an albino with white hair and eyes, and almost completely mute, save whispering to her parents and siblings when she feels she has something important to say. She's the youngest of the family, and yet perhaps the most powerful, as befitting a God in Bud. Her scarlet pure white eyes see to see everything and nothing at once.

Mairwen is a master of Faith and Intelligence, using sorcery and incantations in equal measure using Azur's Glintstone Staff and the Erdtree Seal, given to her by her father after a secret conversation. But should the occasion call for it, she unleashes the Sword of Night and Flame, and shows her foes true terror.

[eghostsofdeadchildren]

Glintstone Crown:

Witch // Twin Sage // Karolos // Lazuli // Olivinus // Haima // Hierodas.

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Traverse the Ulvenwald

Artist: Vincent Proce TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[occknow]