lolday-n-lolnight - Tumblr blog

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[lolday-n-lolnight]

mall rats

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“focus less on race and more on societies” -- very important!

some of my family and friends and I are going to play The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan from Tales of the Yawning Portal next week when I go home to visit, but after reading through the adventure i wasn’t happy with the strong imperialist/colonialist implications: the Olman people who built the shrine are clearly derived from Aztec and other central american cultures, their civilization was wiped out centuries ago, and the PCs are assumed to have no cultural or genetic connection to them. i didn’t want to completely re-write the adventure, so a quick fix was to make it so that the Olman people WEREN’T wiped out and the PCs come from the same area and are genetically related to the people who built the temple. the reason the shrine was destroyed? it was built by a weird cult, who twisted the teachings of the Olman people’s religion into something gross, and they were defeated by a popular uprising of farmers, laborers, and servants.

about half my players ended up making new characters to take advantage of the cool new setting, and the others spent some time thinking about why their characters would visit this new place -- one person decided her gnome had decided to go back to school to get a phd in geology and the shrine was near an important area for her research! honestly much more exciting and fun than “mysterious old man told you there was treasure and monsters there”

my point is, it’s worth taking the time to think critically about your d&d setting, because even small changes can make a big difference in the inclusiveness of your game

on the topic of rewriting racist d&d narratives

it takes work, yes!

it’s worth it. for both you and your players, but especially for new players who can see the game in different ways than you

examples I’ve written that you should feel free to use:

-orcs: rather than give in to the weird “tribal savages who fight all the time,” consider connecting orcs and their inate strength/constitution to the earth. in my most recent campaign setting, orcs are descended from a human champion who bested an earth primordial; the primordial, impressed with their strength, blessed them and their descendents with powerful tusks and a greater constitution.

-drow: instead of the entire drow narrative being “they’re dark skinned and bad because they betrayed the fair skinned elves and their gods,” consider playing up their connection to spiders. perhaps they worshiped a spider God who gave them the ability to blend into their darkened surroundings. if you’re married to their current aesthetic appearance, take care to present multiple drow societies that have different outlooks; not a homogenous race of black skinned slavers. consider pigmentless drow, who’ve lost all skin color because they never see the light of day. drow who use echolocation? distancing your drow from the bad connotations carried by the current zeitgeist is a useful endeavor

-include. colored. elves. in. your. game

-drop the ‘tribal’ aesthetic and the connotations that goblins and other monstrous races have. it’s lazy

-focus less on race and more on societies; a society can be evil or good, but a race cannot

-consider that fantasy races have no reason to conform to any gendered structures (especially our current human binary). dwarvish societies who express their varied and fluid genders through beard braiding. elvish societies who reproduce asexually. don’t limit yourself to what you can relate to from a 21st century human perspective

it takes a bit of elbow grease to decolonize your d&d, and the process is never done, but in my own experience, it’s only ever lead to more innovative and engaging experiences!

[lolday-n-lolnight]

“Here’s a clue: Don’t kill a sentient creature except in absolute self-defense, try not to wipe out endangered species, and if you’re going to raise animals for food, treat them as well as you possibly can.”

- Cassie, Book #25: The Extreme, pg. 96 (by K.A. Applegate)

[lolday-n-lolnight]

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Yes, I’ll try to participate in Inktober as much as I can.

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Wanted to give them a side-by-side post. I LOVE the composition of Tobias’ cover. Also you can now see that Jake and Rachel do share a translator while Tobias gets one of his own.

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really i need more excuses to use my inks and watercolors together

which is to say i just need to sit and do it

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tired: giving your dwarves scottish accents like in everything else

wired: giving your dwarves australian accents because they live down under

[lolday-n-lolnight]

Patreon Request: Design a Fakemon!

[lolday-n-lolnight]

warnings about toxic shock syndrome on the packaging of tampons scared the shit out of me when i was a kid. then when I was 18 i learned one of my teachers actually knew a girl who had died of TSS

also i literally do not care whether you prefer pads or tampons but the fact that in almost every situation where free period supplies are available, they’re tampons, and this is just assumed to be fine (or people like campaigning for “free tampons” rather than “free menstrual products”) upsets me bc there are a lot of people who use pads who cannot use tampons and i don’t understand why tampons are considered not just the default but the only option worth mentioning

[lolday-n-lolnight]

⛵The ship pokémon. Lapras uses their hard shell to break the ice when navigating through the cold arctic waters. Once they reach adult age, Lapras will leave the arctic and travel to warmer waters. They give rides on their back to any ceature they trust.⛵ ☠‍Lapras was often adopted by pirate crews on the Golden Age of Piracy since every well-knowned Captain owned one. ‍☠

[lolday-n-lolnight]

a comic about growing up a queer filipino artist in america

(notes: please click to view in full res; reblogs are totally okay but reposts without credit are not; you may delete the caption, idgaf- thank you all for your kind words!)

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does the existence of redwall abbey imply that there is a mouse pope? more at 11

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i know this is a hellsite

but i went to a “social listening” training session at the advertising media company i work at today and the guy said he usually just leaves tumblr out of his data collection because nearly every post about a specific brand is “too weird” to categorize properly, and that was honestly the best part of the training session

[lolday-n-lolnight]

Quite a bit of peepin out of this lil one today, I have to yell with her but she’s definitely perking up

[lolday-n-lolnight]

there’s a reason not to want this

(but i forgot)