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I promise im working on the three posts that won the poll they all require visual aid and junk

Get delusional gang. Lose your absolute mind and follow your dreams. It might just save your life one day.

Yeah its gonna be hard and scary and you’ll fail sometimes but its better than being miserable and dysregulated for the rest of your life!

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Alright! You know the drill:

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I throw around a lot of advice on this page but i wanted to offer this piece of advice without an attached essay.

Make the art you want to see

Write a book youd want to read

Make a song youd want to hear

And settle for nothing less.

If you want to engage with said art, others want to engage with it too. We’re all weirdos looking for the perfect post apocalypse fantasy or vibrant jrpg world and it wont exist unless you make it.

Happy crafting!

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Alright! Lets do this. If you read to the end you can see my cat.

Mechanics as a Narrative Tool (TTRPGs)

This post is gonna be divided into 3 sections, one for Players, one for Game Masters, and one for Game Developers working on their own TTRPGs. Im going to preface this post with 3 important facts about myself.

I have been a player of TTRPGs for 10 years, I have been a GM for 9 years and I’ve run about 11 different systems that I did not make, i have been building my own TTRPGS for 8 years and have made very small amounts of money off my games and my friends would say my games are mid. That said

I WILL NOT BE 100% RIGHT

TTRPGs are a collaborative experience and what i am offering here may not be 100% accepted, functional, or even good at your table with your friends. Please, for the love of all that is media, ask your friends, talk to your table, see what works for your game.

Ill be giving one piece of advice per section but let me know if you want me to make another post because i could go on about this for days.

Players

Ask your GM for elaboration on your character class/occupation affects perception in the world around you. if you are playing a Warlock in 5e, you are officially the bad guy in the eyes of every peasant you meet. Dont be honest about your magic, try to solve problems without it because the world should interact with your narrative choice to play the cool Cthulhu wizard. This also goes for playing a fighter: are soldiers welcome in this town? Does your uniform scare people here? Will you have an easier time finding work here? Your class isnt just how you do damage, its your occupation and your lens on the world.

Another thing you can do is talk to your GM about ways your abilities can be used outside of combat. Some TTRPGs will overtly tell you what abilities your character has outside of a fight, however 5e and many other TTRPGS dont really account for your abilities out of the context of combat. Get creative with it and talk with your GM. Deflect Missiles as a Monk ability is really cool in combat, but if you have that reaction speed in a fight it goes to reason that you have it out of combat.

Maybe youre walking on a mountain pass and an ally slips, you catch their shirt before they die.

All classes have abilities you can find ways to incorporate into standard roleplay and noncombat encounters. Discuss them with your GM and see what you can come up with.

Game masters

The first thing i always recommend is learning your player characters skills. I dont think you need a deep working memory of their every stat but i find having a sticky note with your players proficiencies in 5e or some of a kindreds interests in vtm can change the way you develop a scene.

One of my biggest pet peeves in rpgs is the “what she said” moment because it doesnt allow a character their moment to shine in something theyre supposed to be knowledgable about. So, i try to handle this by keeping track of my player characters interests.

In Call of Cthulhu if one of your investigators has a massive history score, take note of it. When they go to a new area text them a spoiler free paragraph about the history of the area, it doesnt have to tell them where the cult is probably hanging out, so that they can tell their friends the facts they find interesting or important. This makes higher level history checks still require a dice roll but it allows your player to know stuff that should be basic knowledge for a person with a background in history.

The same goes for Nature in D&D, Culture in Starfinder, and any other non physical skill a character may have invested in.

You can use this inherent knowledge to set up subversions of expectation. In Starfinder a character with high Culture may assume this new alien species eats babies because of something their company told them years ago. This allows surface level information to be informative (i.e. your company sucked) while also being wrong or in character for your players to have.

Game devs

Like what i said for Players, try to create skills and abilities that function outside of combat. Give interesting persuasion and intellect abilities that allow players to have uses when they arent going head first into danger.

Another suggestion i have for game devs in this camp is to make sure you incentivize roleplaying in your mechanics. A good GM can homebrew rules and encounters that make effective character play worth it, but its always nice to see a game that contains those rules already built in. My personal favorite is to have players write out their characters idealized version of themself or their story and everytime they act in accordance to those goals or ideals they get xp or buffs.

Hope this helps

Heres my cat

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I started a silly project and forgot to post my poll for what you guys wanna see next, so… here it is!

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Multimedia storytelling!

Although it sounds like some nonsense corporate jargon designed to sell more AI waifu apps to kids, its kind of my main deal and what i intend to one day make my full time job. This post is going to roughly explain what it is, how i do it, some ways you can apply it to your own work, and some cool examples of multimedia stories that i really like.

So: multimedia storytelling is exactly what it says on the complicated non-euclidian tin. It is a method of storytelling in which the author combines multiple mediums of art to tell the same story. I tend to apply this mostly in the form of a single setting in which multiple stories of different mediums (podcasts, roleplaying games, short, short stories, books, drawings, ect.) take place. The most common multimedia stories are a bit less complicated than that: a comic book that goes along the story of a video game and adds some details, augmented reality games that follow analog horror series, and movies or shows that take place in the universe of a video game or book are decently common these days and are pretty solid examples of multimedia stories.

Infamous (2011) was a video game that had a comic series along side it that added details and expounded on empty moments in the games.

Payday 2 (2013) was a video game that had a live action trailer series that basically became a small tv show for awhile

Uuuh five nights at freddys? Has books? I think that counts

Dungeons and Dragons (please hear me out) has the TTRPG, the MMO, the movie (Honor Among Thieves), and several video games in its setting

The Magnus Archives (2016) is a podcast with a tabletop roleplaying game

The way i put together multimedia stories is very much the D&D way of things. I read a bunch of the Dragonlace books at a super young age and it got me into the whole “one world, one hundred stories” way of thinking, from that point on all of my writing followed that sort of path, multiple narratives in the same setting, occasionally these stories crossed over or took place regarding the same events and sometimes they didnt.

Then ARGs happened. I love the sort of interactive storytelling ARGs employ, websites, videos, phone numbers you can actually call in some cases its just so fun and engaging.

So! What I do is as follows:

I build my setting, writing pages and pages of world building so that all of my stories have a setting bible to cling to.

I start planning stories, if one would do better in an audio format i go grab my microphone and write the script, if it would do better as a short film i grab a shitty camera and a group of friends and go film something.

I always, ALWAYS, build a tabletop roleplaying game that fits my setting, i dont change my setting to benefit game design, i simply make the game fit my world. If i like how the game came out i force my friends to play it.

I then write as many short stories as i can, small stories about simple boring characters and large narratives about important events. If i like how one turned out i keep expanding on it until i cant anymore.

Now! The part you guys actually care about; doing it for yourself can be really hard, but only if you stretch yourself too thin. I only engage in art forms that i actively want to do if an idea feels like it would make a great podcast episode but i hate my voice that day im gonna just move on for the day.

If you want to draw something in your story draw it, dont force yourself to write it if drawing is what feels best that day.

Your art is at its best when you let it be what it wants to be.

If im only in the mood to write about merchants im just gonna write about merchants otherwise i could crush my love for the art entirely.

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Ok! My last post did way better than I had anticipated, thank you guys so much!

That said:

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All humans are born slightly claustrophobic and agoraphobic. We are all born with an understanding that too many things, too close together, is dangerous.

Anyways my favorite library was really busy today and I had a panic attack.

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Effective horror is not easy to write. Horror and comedy are very similar in how they are executed however written horror can be far harder to land than written comedy.

In theory they both work in the same way:

Set up: a situation occurs in which the reader needs to begin to feel an emotion.

Tension: that feeling is held and elongated until youre ready to pay off those emotions.

Punchline: something big happens in which the reader feels the fullest extent of the emotion intended. This is the section where written horror will always suffer.

With comedy you can easily make a reader audibly laugh, with horror in a written form you will not be able to make a reader jump with fear. Writers cant rely on jump scares and a consistent ambient soundtrack like you can with a horror game.

So to write good horror you need to turn elsewhere, as you are rarely going to “scare” a reader. I learned this while running horror tabletop roleplaying games, specifically Call of Cthulhu, as players and readers are very similar concepts.

To scare a reader, your goal is to unnerve them and make them remember something that made them uncomfortable, uneasy, or anxious. They arent going to jump and scream, instead theyre going to second guess themself the next time they see a shadow move in their room.

To set up good horror I follow 3 simple steps:

Change your voice: the moment I begin to set up a scare I change my authorial voice, I use shorter more visceral words replacing “she wandered down the hall, her eyes drifting from place to place” with “she walked, quickly. Her legs shaking, her eyes running around the shadows”. This change tells the reader that something is amiss and they will unconsciously notice it.

Darkening word choice: this ones rather simple, I change my descriptions from standard to uneasy. “The couch was burgundy leather with pillows at each arm” to “the couch was a red leather, dark as blood”

Remember your theme: whatever the main monster, killer, or general spooky of your text is needs to be given credence in every scare. This drills the pattern of fear forward. If your killer uses a knife, describe the glint of moonlight as blade like. If your monster eats flesh, describe food in detail and relate your characters emotions to grotesque foods.

Remember, you arent going to get a scream. Your goal is to make your reader anxious, uncomfortable, and make them look at their day to day life differently

After all

Meat is Meat

If you want some examples, check out my horror rp blog @research-duck

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Character design is something I tend to struggle with, not character writing but design. I’m not an especially visual person, I tend to prefer the other senses for descriptive writing. I can describe people, their faces, their movements, their body shape, all of those things however to get to the point of description I need to first have a person to describe.

I figured I’d drop my process for how I design characters just in case anyone struggles in the same department.

Take your character concept and run it through these metrics:

• Think about your characters role and what you picture those traits looking like. Do you think Knights should have strong jaws and sunken eyes? Do you think a Journalist should have a kind smile? Look around for people with those facial traits and seek to mimic the rest of that persons features. A close friend recommended this to me.

• Tell your character concept to a friend and ask them to tell you what they think the character looks like. Not only will this give you a new perspective but it could also give you an entirely new lens on the character thats frankly better than what you had planned.

• Find an actor. Thats it. Just do a face rip. Maybe add a feature or two but its easy to just use one of the hundreds of millions of theatrical professionals in Hollywood and beyond.

Remember there are no rules. Anyone can be anything and they can look however you want them to.

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Ok! Sorry for the delay but you guys voted for Deep World Building for my next post topic so lets get into it.

The first thing you’ll inevitably hear when getting in to world building is “dont go too deep”, I hear this a lot especially regarding TTRPGs and to an extent I agree but I think the sentiment is phrased wrong. I think when people tell you to avoid going too deep, saying things along the line of “you dont need that information”, they’re missing a crucial detail that only you have access too.

Only you know what information you need.

Its easy for others to say that you dont need an indepth guide to the economic values of certain resources or the exact trade routes between locations because they simply dont know why you want it.

My general rule of thumb for world building on a micro scale is, “if I’m excited to write it, i deserve to write it”.

Now for some tips and tricks!

I use an app called Obsidian to manage all of my settings and their details, think of it like personal Wikis for your concepts that can be connected to other concepts via links. I think it helps me find spots that aren’t filled in, if I made a link and it doesnt contain anything yet, I try to fill it out before the days over.

Obsidian is helpful because you can use it to make sure certain concepts remain connected in a way thats convenient and visual.

Remember that in a world of interconnected concepts not everything will connect to something else but when things do connect try to make sure that that connection is mutual.

For example:

• iron is worth more in a city with only farm land, what does the city do to get iron? How expensive is it? How is that price effecting the citizens?

• minority communities in a city often have close relationships to one another, and are often over policed. What does that over policing look like? How does it affect the economy, crime rate, and outside perspective on the city and those communities

• why does the nation youre writing prefer horse travel over ships? How does that effect their merchants abilities to make money quickly? What goods are sold out of this country now that their travel takes far longer than it would by boat?

• you’re magic system requires consistent use of a consumable resource, like a potion. How does this effect the economic profile of magic users? How does it affect the forests where those resources are harvested? How did people discover this potion and what was it originally meant for?

(Here is Obsidians graph for one of my settings)

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baby dragons whose scales are much more shiny and iridescent in order to hide in their parents' hoards

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reblog if you support:

• pre- or non-hrt trans people

• genderfluid/non-binary people who want hrt

• genderfluid/non-binary people who don't want hrt

• pre- or non-op trans people

• tall transfems

• short transmascs

• fat/plus size trans people

• fem trans men

• masc trans women

• transmascs who don't/can't/won't bind

• transfems who don't/can't/won't tuck

• transfems with wide shoulders

• transmascs with wide hips

• genderfluid/non-binary people with facial hair or tits

• genderfluid people whose presentation is static but their gender is not

• non-binary people whose desired presentation is how society says their agab should present

• transmascs who bind but still have a visible chest

• non- conventionally-attractive trans people

• non-conforming trans people

• non-"passing" trans people

• non-stereotypical trans people

We don't all fit into cisnormative society's bullshit stereotypes!

I'm trying to prove a point to some transphobic relatives. Back me up tumblr.

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I dont know what to write my next post about, help me out?

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shoutout to flags that look like landscapes fr gotta be one of my favorite genders