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imagine being an animal without a tail i'd be livid

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level up

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Cinderella, retold by C.S. Evans and illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1919)

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Konstantin Somov, Book of the Marquise. Illustration 1, 1918

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Inspiration: Pink Menswear

In the 18th Century pink was not a colour only for girls, it was quite fashion forward for men: suits, waistcoats, accessories, embroideries or buttons could go to the extreme of elegance of the whole range of pink, from pastel to bright and dark.

So boys, why not to try a little macaroni style and dress to impress?

Photos from top:

Detail of pink suit and photo of pink suit, lilac robe à la anglaise and grey suit, all from Chenilles et Papillons.

Pink satin suit (habit á la française), ca. 1775, National Gallery of Victoria.

Pink coat, Kioto Costume Institute.

Pink embroidered waistcoat, ca. 1760, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Portrait of Oliver Journu, 1756, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, pastel on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Pink suit, Colonial Williamsburg.

Pink rococo wedding portrait session, photo by Kenneth Benjamin Reed.

Dark pink suit, Museo del Traje.

Late 18th century fashion plate.

Bright pink waistcoat, ca. 1750, LACMA.

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love in the time of cholera, gabriel garcía márquez // carmilla, joseph sheridan le fanu // letter of testimony, octavio paz (trans. eliot weinburger) // planet of love, richard siken // the queen of carthage, louise glück // excerpt from a letter to fanny brawne, john keats // little weirds, jenny slate // clarification, franz wright // sonnet lxvi, pablo neruda (trans. ilan stavans) // gone: poems, fanny howe.

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Illustrations for Acts III - V from Shakespeare’s Hamlet by John Austen (1922)

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Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.

In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.

Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.

Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:

1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.

2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:

Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.

Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.

Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.

As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.

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Alternative to the tired old wizard-with-a-sugar-daddy interpretation of the patron/warlock relationship in Dungeons & Dragons:

Clueless boss and long-suffering employee, whose powers are basically the magical equivalent of pilfering office supplies for personal use  

Scheming master and duplicitous apprentice who are totally open about their loathing for each other and are keen to see who betrays whom first  

Bureaucratic devil and soul-peddling diabolist with a contract a mile long, each honestly believing they’re getting the better of the other  

Glowering quartermaster and loose-cannon operative, whose record for getting results just barely justifies the expense of employing them  

Indifferent parent who pays their estranged offspring’s allowance like clockwork but otherwise prefers to deal with them as little as possible  

Vast, slumbering god-monster and amoral parabiologist who knows which spots to poke with a stick to provoke particular autonomic responses

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Something saucy

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Football stadiums look like giant eyes when viewed from above

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Adventure prompt for my CoS group who have turned into helping this big bad vampire in doing some tasks for him.

Dungeon: The Crooked House

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile/ 

He found a crooked penny, and gave a crooked smile/ 

He bought a crooked cat, to hunt a crooked mouse/ 

and they all lived together in a little crooked house/ 

Setup: As nightmare dimensions go, The Crooked House is a relatively small one, a hungry sliver of the shadowfell that takes the form of a ramshackle cottage bent in on itself in odd, spiraling angles. 

The Crooked House might appear anywhere fallen into shadow, but unlike its country cousin, prefers rural or semi-urban environments, just close enough to haunt the dreams of passers by and insinuate itself into local folklore. 

This domain is ruled over by “The Crooked Man” , a rambling, shrouded figure that goes about on various “errands” in the most sinister way possible, seemingly with no other purpose than to creep his neighbors out. Such errands include: 

Chopping firewood in someone else’s back yard in the middle of the night, leaving before they have a chance to come out and question him 

Following behind a group of travelers on a lonely road for hours at a time, never answering any hails, wandering off if approached, only to appear at a later juncture

Circling through the market with a sack laden over his shoulder, alternatively wriggling, rattling, or dripping ominously. Never stopping to trade. 

Gently rapping at the windows of children who are up past their bed time, sometimes climbing walls or dangling down from rooves to do so if the window is hard to reach. 

Those that disturb the crooked man in these tasks face little consequence, though may be overwhelmed by a sensation of fear. Everyone knows rumors however of those that tested the crooked man’s patience, and ended up hacked along with the kindling, or stuffed into his bag and taken back to the crooked house. Every community that hosts the house develops such tales, almost as a necessity of dealing with this nightmarish neighbor. 

Adventure Hooks: 

While none actually want the crooked house around, there are a limited few with the powers to do anything about it: Religious authorities, concerned town councils, rival dark powers. Any of these groups may send the party in as their catspaw, looking to evict the crooked man or raise the structure to its shadowy foundations before his dark influence spreads any further. 

While the crooked man himself may pose only a minor threat, other strange creatures that live within the dark domicile can manifest as more of an active threat. Infestations of moonrats are known to spread from the building’s cellars into neighboring homesteads, and dire, predatory creatures with great black wings sometimes nest in its gutters or dangle from its eaves. While these threats can be contained, actually exterminating them may require some brave souls to venture into the house itself. 

Outlaws are well aware that those that enter the house seldom come back, and have given up on trying to steal from the place and turned this to their advantage. A party that runs afoul of the local rogue’s gallery may find themselves knocked out, only to awaken to the sound of squeaking wheels, the rumble of an unsteady road, and the rasp of burlap. Tied into sacks and left out for the crooked man to collect and load into a rickety cart, the party only has a limited amount of time to escape their bindings before their driver makes it back to his home. 

Its happened, a child has gone missing. Sick for weeks and bedridden, the youngster was apparently taken after days of the crooked man leaving noxious, unknown “medicines” at the family’s doorstep.  Whatever treatment this fiend has in mind... it can’t be good. 

Challenges & Complications

For actual stats for the Crooked Man, may I recommend using this excellent “snatcher” statblock by the ever amazing @dm-tuz ? 

The interior of the crooked house is of course, larger than the exterior would allow, and seems to be constructed entirely of uneven stairs, cluttered dusty attics, and dank cavernous basements. Many of these chambers are thematically “locked’, requiring some kind of solution before the party may progress onwards. Examples include the sooty sitting room that keeps increasing in temperature until the hearth is quenched,  or the hallway full of glass eyes that need to be matched to the brooding taxidermy that overlooks the door. 

Transitioning between rooms may require more climbing equipment than your average county hovel as the house seems to favor a vertical design. This is the perfect opportunity for flying creatures or drifting shadows to attack the party, potentially causing them to slip and hurdle into some unknown darkness. 

Doors within the Crooked house lead out to all manner of places, including previous haunts, ruins scattered across the land, and even the shadowfell itself. The only safe way to traverse many of these portals ( and to keep the house in some semblance of order) are a series of esoteric keys scattered about the structure, Each one forcing the doors they fit in ( though not all do) to a predetermined location. Collection, trial, and error will lead the party back to their destination...or drop them in some lightless wilderness and force them to hike back to the house itself. 

 Art source 

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I had a dream recently that I was getting all of my ingredients ready to make a delicious vegetable soup while the broth was being warmed on the stove on low. When I came back, there were TWO small capybaras in my soup pot bathing in the broth. In the dream, I was infuriated. But it’s a very cute image and someone should draw it.

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h. what if moomintrollen can pancake flatten?

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OK to make a font out of your own writing

go here

http://www.myscriptfont.com/

instead of printing it off just use this blank thing that way you dont have to scan it or anything

so fill that out by pasting it in any art program and whatnot

then save it and upload it to that site

and itll give you an option to download it

so do that and then install it BAM