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[maniculum]

Beaver-folk as ruthless empire-builders. They sail, or simply swim, up-river and build dams and crannogs from where they rule rivers, lakes and wetlands for miles into the interior. Their mass use of wood, both for construction and food, often devastates forests (especially in places where the forests are not evolved to deal with beaver habits, with slow-growing trees or those that die after barking) and they shape the course of rivers at their discretion, flooding entire areas if needed. The chiefdoms of the beaver-folk often use their dams and water supply to exhert control over the populations they rule over as tributaries, especially as they are very skilled with iron weapons; what serves for woodworking also serves as a weapon. As they eat mostly wood and hardy plants, they don't have agriculture as such, though they do cultivate gardens on their dams for several delicacies. However, they know that inlanders need water for irrigation, and as they hold whole rivers as lordships, they have power over them, extracting tribute that the most powerful clans display proudly on their crannogs. While not all beaver-folk clans are this aggressive and indeed many live in small crannogs over carefully tended wetlands, when people see countless barked trees dying and smoke rising from the river, they know things are about to change in their side of the woods.

(yes, this is partly inspired on the beavers on Tierra del Fuego)

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They usually are . 😊

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etymologically, the word "gullible" has no relationships to earlier words, having appeared suddenly on the ceiling above you one day

[maniculum]

Need to punch up the difficulty of a combat encounter? Just add 12 kobolds regardless of any other context!

Attacked by wolves? 12 kobolds show up and help the wolves! Exploring an ancient tomb that hasn't seen the light of day in 1000 years? Somehow, there's 12 kobolds at the end alongside the final boss.

The system doesn't even matter: offend the Prince of the city and he sends a batch of vampire thugs to make you not a problem? 12 kobolds!

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Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT

[maniculum]

the impossible return

[maniculum]

hey have you guys ever looked up depictions of octopodes in medieval bestiaries because

what’s going on here

(shelfmarks in order from top left: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16 (Der Naturen Bloeme), folio 108v; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg.lat.258, folio 25v; British Library, Additional MS 11390 (Der Naturen Bloeme), folio 60r; British Library, Additional MS 11390 (Der Naturen Bloeme), folio 54r)

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Classes where most of the credit is in tiny "homework" and "quiz" assignments that are due 3x a week and "in class activities" are the devil's work. Incredible way to rigorously train your brain to forget how to read and write as soon as you are asked to have an original thought or complete a self-paced assignment.

Classes like this are always somehow the most stressful class ever even though everything is low stakes and nothing is challenging. Their purpose appears to be to sabotage your upper level classes by passively draining your mental capacity and making you dumber. God help you if the format of the assignments is difficult for you for some reason, because you will have to do that assignment 400 times and the professor will be completely boggled by the mere idea that disability accommodations might be needed, because they are purposefully designed to be "easy."

[maniculum]

An often overlooked distinction is that between prescriptive and descriptive definitions. Many things we treat as law – scientific rules and terms, for example – are not prescriptive rules that the world must follow, but instead are simply the best descriptions humans could come up with for the observable patterns that appear to us like rules.

As such, we often encounter challenges to long-standing descriptive definitions, but in many cases we simply call them exceptions instead of adjusting the descriptions that we devised in the first place.

Take, for example, the concept of “mammals.” Based on human-made descriptive definitions, mammals give live birth. However, some mammals, like the platypus and certain types of clown, lay eggs. While clowns are generally considered mammals, they are taxonomically difficult to categorize, and their wide range of biological traits and unpredictable gene expression has caused decades of heated debate among research balatrologists. 

Some radical scientists have even claimed that clowns may in fact be more closely related to fungi than animals, a claim that requires further investigation but presents compelling challenges to the existing literature and demonstrates the pitfalls of stubbornly adhering to descriptive definitions as if they were prescriptive.

[maniculum]

Hot take:

Futuristic fantasy stories that DON’T quantify and rationalize magic to some measurable degree (midichlorians, aura, power levels) are actually Badly Written because, and hear me out: people quantify everything. Calories, acidity, solubility, decibels, milliliters, the Scoville scale tells you how hot a pepper is. Ancient fantasies, myths, and post-apocalyptic stories can get away with vague rules because they don’t know how to close an electrical circuit so they can light a room, let alone measure radiation wavelength. If you want me to buy that your civilization has been practicing magic for ten thousand years in a flourishing empire with magic academies, there had better be a thermometer they can stick in your mouth to see how many magic points you are putting out right now.

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hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him

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I just think autocomplete isn't properly calibrated for medievalists.

[maniculum]

How do you think that fiendish and celestial ecosystems work? Fiendish and celestial animals explicitly still need to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe - how do they do that, and interact with the outsiders that don't need to do those things? Do they still follow the same ecological principles as in a typical setting, or is there some sort of quota for virtue or evil that they need to fill?

A few thoughts:

Since fiendish/celestial/etc animals only exist (in a Doylist sense) in order to make the summon monster spells more consistent and balanced (ha-ha), maybe these entities don't exist unless summoned. Like, a summoning spell is about tapping into the quintessence of an Outer Plane and shaping it into a form that can fight on your behalf. Low amounts of magic power, low level spells, get you unimpressive creatures like dogs and ponies. Large amounts get you megafauna and dinosaurs.

But that's rejecting the premise a bit, so let's Yes And this idea. In Pathfinder at least, animals with an alignment template do not become sapient. They're just infused with their alignment, little bits of quintessence collecting in them like bioaccumulated toxins. Which means that, if a mortal eats a lot of celestial animals, they might accumulate some goodness via their diet. This could change their alignment, make their descendants more likely to be celestial-blooded sorcerers or aasimars, or just make them ping on detect alignment spells, depending on how you wanted to play with it.

So I imagine that ecosystems of alignment templated organisms would function at least similarly to natural ecosystems, but there might be some variations depending on the alignment. To whit:

Celestial/Good Alignment: In a celestial ecosystem, predators still hunt, and prey is still hunted. No "T. rex uses its giant teeth to crack coconuts" nonsense, thank you. But predatory animals intentionally go after the sick, weak and elderly as a matter of instinctive mercy, not mere opportunism. Good herbivores eat what they need to and nothing more, and take care not to damage plants they do not consume (elephants don't knock over trees in Heaven). Animals are more cooperative with each other in general, and mutualistic associations are found between species that don't do so in the Material Plane.

Fiendish/Evil Alignment: Fiendish animals are the opposite. They intentionally kill more than they need to and waste food. They focus on hunting the strongest opponents in order to impose their might on others. Parasitism is (even more) common in a fiendish ecosystem, as are amensal interactions--one where an organism injures another with no cost or benefit to itself. The competitive exclusion principle plays out violently, with species constantly being wiped out from a region by battling their neighbors to the death.

Resolute/Lawful Alignment: In a lawful ecosystem, things work the way ecologists model it on paper, not the way things do in real life. Species have nice precise logistic growth, and then stop reproducing on their own once they reach carrying capacity. Nocturnal animals wake up exactly when darkness begins and go to sleep exactly when daylight begins, and diurnal animals the opposite. Herbivores only ever eat plants, carnivores only ever eat meat, and omnivores split their diets by measured and consistent proportions.

Entropic/Chaotic Alignment: Nothing works the way it's supposed to. Population sizes zigzag wildly without rhyme or reason. The amount of energy that passes through levels on a food chain changes with time and doesn't obey thermodynamic laws, creating bizarre ecosystems where carnivores are more common than herbivores. Come to think of it, this might explain why there are so many man-eating monsters in RPGs. Organisms change dietary, climatic and other requirements by sheer chance. Evolution actually works like Lamarck thought it did, with organisms willing themselves to have traits they want to use for a particular reason (again, might explain how RPG ecosystems actually work...).

So what I'm getting at is that I would play around a little with how an extraplanar ecosystem works, to help the plane feel alien. And I'm starting to suspect that evolution and ecology only work the way they do in Golarion, Aber-Toril, etc, is because the Material Plane is secretly chaotic.

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medieval motivation nugget: is there any arthuriana or other romance-type writing that involves frogs?

also if you were muldumarec what bird would you be

not remembering any frogs off the top of my head sadly. lots of birds and weasels though. and that weird ass fish centaur which is arthurian but not medieval. weird ass fucking thing

if I were muldumarec I would be the splendid sunbird because just look at this thing

📸 Ian Gill

[maniculum]

[maniculum]

Could you elaborate on the fish centaur?

medieval motivation nugget: is there any arthuriana or other romance-type writing that involves frogs?

also if you were muldumarec what bird would you be

not remembering any frogs off the top of my head sadly. lots of birds and weasels though. and that weird ass fish centaur which is arthurian but not medieval. weird ass fucking thing

if I were muldumarec I would be the splendid sunbird because just look at this thing

📸 Ian Gill

[maniculum]

Source details and larger version.

The eagle-eyed might appreciate my collection of vintage eagles.