evocationwriter

[evocationwriter]

Found myself a new resource for describing settings and characters in fiction: real estate sites.

I don't mean the flipped and professionally decorated listings, I mean the photos taken while people were still living there. You can learn SO much about a character by what is described in their home. Gender, politics, economic class, shopping habits, religion, culture, and sometimes morality of a character can be inferred from describing the inanimate items around them.

Sometimes you can even determine a family's reason for moving; divorce, old age, new baby, empty nest, debt, etc., from the visual indicators in a home.

How much more so could a writer use these details to create an authentic depiction of reality? Yes, you can simply entertain yourself by judging people for their bad pics, but the storytelling materials are right there.

[evocationwriter]

"What was I when you first knew me? Before you ever knew me? A madwoman, butchering prey in the name of a god who would discard me without a thought once I was no longer of use. Bhaal, Lolth, the Absolute... they do not have followers, they only have victims, and they reward devotion with death. It is only because of you that I did not meet the same fate as Orin, lost to madness and blood. If you had killed me when we first met, I would have been just one more casualty of your crusade against the Absolute... and nobody would remember me."

[evocationwriter]

tell me the appliance that is your best friend ever in the kitchen

[evocationwriter]

but i stay silly! *←said in the most world-weary voice you ever did hear*

[evocationwriter]

Wyll lighting study, because I adore him sm

[evocationwriter]

absolutely love abusing the power that comes with 3rd person limited pov and just ignoring things and being vague sometimes. does the character know all the details? no? then I don't have to either.

[evocationwriter]

Prompt #1175

"We're in trouble."

"Oh no. No, no, no! You're in trouble."

[evocationwriter]

something i see a lot of people coming up with characters for bg3/dnd/stories/whatever fall victim to is the old dnd alignment chart. you know the one. it is, for brevity's sake, an utter pile of shit. it's so bad that dnd itself has moved away from it, and implemented something in 5e i think is super useful, and i want to make sure more people know about it.

ideals, flaws, and bonds as an alternative to a shitty morality chart below the cut (this ended up being a VERY long post, but i think it's useful if you find yourself wondering how the fuck you're supposed to make an interesting character within the super tight constraints of the alignment chart. short answer: you're not.)

if you look at a dnd character sheet now, there are spaces for these three things, and they provide a great framework for roleplaying that allows a lot more flexibility than saying "lawful good" or "chaotic evil".

ideals: pretty easy! what are your character's strongest beliefs? what are the principles that guide their decisions? do they believe all life is sacred? or that evil should be vanquished at any cost? just remember that this is how a character says they live their life, or wants to live their life, not necessarily how they do.

flaws: also pretty easy, but the trap here is giving them something too fancy and unique (i know, your oc is special and nothing about them is boring--but i promise you boring is good sometimes). "they hate x guy so much they'll betray their beliefs." okay, great start (and something you should hold onto for the next section), but what if they never meet that guy? "they hate x guy so much they refuse to trust any paladins, or any dwarves" is much more likely to come up. going very mundane (they have a short temper, they're always giving their thoughts on something whether people want it or not, etc) are also good places to start. you just want it to be something that could actually, reasonably cause friction in your oc's world.

bonds: this one is the most fun, and also the one people struggle with ime. we tend to think of bonds as positive, but here it just means "a link between points." the important part is that it's strong, whether it's positive or negative. it could be with an item, like a ring a parent gave them on their death bed. it could be with another person, like an old friend they thought was dead, or the man they thought was the murderer. this is something that, like an ideal, guides how they live their life, but in a much more subtle, frequently unconscious, way. go nuts with this one, it's the kind of thing you can work up into a plot for a story, or give to your dm for drama.

here's good ol' brid, a character who ping pongs wildly between true neutral, chaotic good, lawful good, and lawful evil so often as to make that stupid chart entirely useless, as an example:

ideals: brid is a bard and a scholar through and through--art, history, and stories are what make us us. creating art, specifically music, and and recording stories, then spreading them far and wide, is the highest purpose to which one can aspire.

flaws: brid has a deep mistrust, if not outright hatred, of wizards, and will not discuss why. she also has an unpredictable temper, and tends to lash out with the most hurtful insults she can think of when set off. because she feels duty-bound to record stories, she can be intensely nosy.

bonds: a wizard from her youth in waterdeep, the unbreakable lute she carries, enchanted with magic she can't explain, her parents, one dead, one estranged.

this gives you a good idea of who brid would be and how she would behave at the start of a story, or campaign, or game. if we look at her through the lens of baldur's gate 3, we can see how she'd make lawful good decisions--save lae'zel because wow, a gith is rare, what a story she must have, even if she did try and kill me that one time. we can see how she'd make chaotic evil decisions--shove gale back in that fucking portal because he's a godsdamned stinking wizard, and he cannot be trusted. and there is also plenty of space for her to grow and change--shadowheart and astarion stop her from murdering gale in cold blood, and he ends up being so gosh darn affable she considers that some wizards, a very small, vanishingly tiny number of them, might be decent.

ideals, flaws, and bonds aren't perfect, but like i said, i think they're a great way to give yourself a good setup for a character, and good points of reference you can touch back on when their personality or behavior doesn't just flow out of you when writing or roleplaying. i did a very rough version of this before writing brid, and i feel like it helped keep her consistent, and the changes in her behavior as the story went on make more sense. give it a shot if you're feeling lost with a character!

[evocationwriter]

I'm curious--how do you guys go about creating your OCs?

[evocationwriter]

we've had one fuckable wizard, yes.

how could you do this to us larian

[evocationwriter]

✨Ramazith's Tower, and its master, are now your friends. And when the time comes, we will stand by you as allies.✨️

Card 13/15 of my Baldur's Gate Oracle Deck is ready!

[evocationwriter]

Post-game Lae’zel!! Ft baby Xan💚 (yes she’s married to Shart)

[evocationwriter]

Patreon reward go read their fic :) Nighthawks by velocitross

[evocationwriter]

what shar and the sharrans did to shadowheart is honestly one of the worst things you can do to a person. they tried to strip her of her identity, manipulated her, and erased her memories. memories are everything. they shape who we are, even the painful ones. that’s why something like alzheimer’s is so devastating: you lose more and more pieces of yourself until there’s almost nothing left of the person that used to be there. that’s basically what they did to her. they took her past, her choices, her sense of self, even then, her true nature still found a way through. she never fully became what they wanted her to be. she still loves animals, she’s still soft at heart, and she’s still capable of deep love, even if she struggles with trust and opening up. no matter how hard they tried to mold her into something else, they could never truly break her. that resilience, that quiet strength, is what makes her so compelling to me.

[evocationwriter]

Angsty LyreWeave comic ooooooh

Mizri isn’t coping well about her boyfriend reaching godhood lol

[evocationwriter]

The Daughter of Darkness 🌕🌑

[evocationwriter]

thank you for the bardic inspiration my darling 💜

Anytime my dear💜🎶✨