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Silly little sketch as I was listening to episode 10 (my handwriting is shit so just in case, Nott asks Caleb to buy her earmuffs xD)

Btw I am loving their character dynamic, by far my favorites✨️

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☀

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#this is such a good point and weirdly something I think Matt started to have a problem with in mid C2#cause while you could chalk the reduction in reaction Nott gets in Rexxentrum to him not wanting to rehash older beats#with a high level party#that’s also when Travis was fishing for a reaction to Fjord’s Wildmother worship and Matt downplayed the Empire’s religious oppression#which was weird because earlier in the story we’d seen the Schusters imprisoned for worshiping the Changebringer#it’s like he lost confidence in telling that kind of story#and that’s why any backstory hardship in C3 flops when it hits the actual campaign#because the NPCs are so bland and accommodating and non-reactive#no one has reactive biases or prejudices#it’s like every NPC interaction for BH is a therapy session of#‘see your bad past experiences won’t be repeated by everyone you meet!’#but having understanding and accepting NPCs as a default just defangs so many of the stories set up by the characters’ backstories#not just Laudna but Ashton too!#Taliesin talked extensively about the difficulty of making a punk character in Exandria#because why are they that angry at the world?#and it increasingly felt like Matt gave him nothing to work with#and even undermined the attempts he made to have shitty people in Ashton’s backstory#to the point where the more people from their past we met the more the PC just looked like an asshole#which wasn’t the intent but was down to Matt not committing to playing small minded and reactive assholes *to his players*

@luckthebard hope you don’t mind me responding to these tags but I think this ties into a lot of thoughts I’ve had about Exandria as a setting and actual play fandom both in terms of how they perceive the cast and how they perceive characters and stories about discrimination.

For what it’s worth I’m not terribly bothered by the Mighty Nein experiencing little discrimination in Rexxentrum, at least from officials, since they’re now useful to the Empire. Fjord’s scene in particular is with Ludinus, who ultimately hates the Wildmother as much as the (legal) Raven Queen anyway, plus detaining a foreign national from a allied country during wartime is probably unwise. What did strike me though is that discrimination against tieflings virtually vanished in the narrative once Molly was gone, in part because that wasn’t something Laura particularly wished to play. And it wasn’t that big a deal specifically because Jester’s backstory was not rooted in any sort of discrimination (vs. Fjord’s, or Veth’s-as-Nott); and it was already not a consistent form of discrimination anyway, ie, it seemed to mostly be concentrated among the wealthy of Zadash and in Shady Creek) but I don’t recall it ever appearing again. It’s not narratively that important, to the point that it’s one of those things I was happy to handwave until Campaign 3 showed that this was part of a larger pattern. I also think it’s noteworthy that Age of Umbra unfailingly showed Aetherweavers and Clanks being singled out - Idyl had to leave his home and experiences suspicion from Ghosthook even in Desperloch, Misty’s presence is why the party is denied access to Volkoru and she ultimately disguises herself, the family they find in the Cinnabar Quarter starved to death to protect a divinely touched child, and Brixton is treated dramatically differently when people believe her to have powers.

I think there are a few problems here and I think they come down to needing traditional session zeroes for the main campaigns, and that it might make sense to step away from Exandria - not because there aren’t still stories to be told, but because I feel Matt is unwilling to paint Exandria in an unflattering light.

A clear session zero will clarify what picking your character means. I think a lot of DMs (and certainly Matt) are reluctant to tell players “I know you are attached to this concept, but in this world, playing a goblin means you will face discrimination” (to give an example) but the fact is, some people want to tell those stories and want to play characters for whom that is important, and you have to be consistent in your worldbuilding for the sake of the story. It is not, as discussed, kinder to those players to have everyone be nice to their character, because that’s not the story they wanted to tell. This is also why I discourage the idea of being very attached to a specific character race or class until you have a game in which to play them. If you really want to play a tiefling and are in a setting where tieflings experience discrimination and you don’t want that aspect…sorry, but you need to play a different character race, or your DM needs to change the entire world, and the former is much easier and the DM needs to say “well you can’t play a tiefling who doesn’t experience discrimination.” (I also think players and certainly fans want the backstory of oppression and not the continuing consequences, ie, unless something has happened or said discrimination was highly localized to a specific place such as the twins in Syngorn, the discrimination will exist throughout the narrative. The failure to make Ruidusborn feel actually discriminated against unfairly was pretty egregious, because every Ruidusborn in the story was shown either invading people’s privacy or straight up joining a cult and murdering people, and there were no responses to them that were anything other than pretty reasonable responses to someone invading one’s privacy or trying to murder people.)

This ties into a discussion that you can see in the replies on this post - player comfort is very important! And again, that's fine and very reasonable! It's just that if you don't want NPCs to be an asshole to you because that makes you uncomfortable, then you will need to play a character for whom that makes sense. Like, I won't have fun if my character doesn't know what the fuck is going on in-world, and I won't have fun if I'm overly squishy, so I tend to play characters with decent INT and CON. It's no different than that: if you won't have fun as a player if your character experiences discrimination, you need to express that to the DM and choose to play a character who won't experience discrimination.

I also think as mentioned that at least a portion of the cast is just sort of precious about Exandria at this point, and it’s not a bad thing, but it stands in the way of them telling stories. I said as much regarding Catatheosis - it can’t actually do much of note other than make the gods slightly harder to talk to directly, which was always kind of hit or miss, because there are too many beloved characters with divine powers whom no one in the cast wants to nerf. I don’t know if the answer to Laudna should have been “okay, so, cool aesthetic, but just to be clear you’re going to have to either disguise yourself all the time or hide or accept most people are going to hate you - your charisma score is going to be entirely on the basis of intimidation and fear” or if it should have been “this doesn’t really fit in the world as I envision it, can we rework this” and the same goes for Ashton and their difficulty finding things to truly rebel against in Exandria. I don’t know if the answer should be “this is how we make it work, and it’s going to make playing the game as this character harder: are you okay with that?” or if it should be “this concept doesn’t really work in this setting as I envision it, so let's find something else you're excited to play” but it had to be one or the other and making it neither weakened both setting and character and remains, in my opinion, the biggest reason why Campaign 3 fell flat. I think about how for Candela, there was a clear decision outlined by Rowan Hall regarding Newfaire being without queerphobia, or misogyny, and I don’t mind this as a choice, and the Candela series never relied on those forms of bigotry to drive the story (and did tell some good stories about class) - but it does mean that if you want to tell a story about queerphobia, you can’t use this setting. I think the cast may want to play with concepts and themes that simply don’t fit within Exandria, particularly not an Exandria where their existing characters are still major players. As Age of Umbra shows they absolutely can pull this off, at least in short form; but they might need to go to another setting to do so. And regardless of how they address this, they definitely need to have more conversations about how their characters fit into that setting and into the narrative they want to tell.

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Caleb and Jester's waltz really is just a lovely little moment and an excellent time to seed information about Astrid and Caleb's past with her. It's sweet and has this air of heartbreaking nostalgia for a version of Caleb that no longer exists, in another place, with another woman. Really lovely moment

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u/lUDOVIC102893

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committing war crimes with teal eyeliner

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Felt like this too

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Eadwulf’s life is a series of hilarious mistakes.

Confused? Here’s the first comic.

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a foe turned friend

prints

lucien ver.

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"It's not your fault. It's not your fault. I know you don't realize that now, but you will. This pain that you have, that you wear all over you like a mask, it's just that, and you can take it off someday. I know it hurts, but it wasn't your fault. I'm going to keep telling you that until you believe me."

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For a D&D party to be well-rounded, it needs exactly one (1) character who's just a Freaky Little Monster. Which is maybe why VM doesn't really do it for me (no freaky little monsters, everyone pretty normal looking) and neither does BH (too many freaky little monsters, literally what the hell is going on)

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WHAT’S SEXIER THAN WIZARDS?? NOTHING.

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M9 fans like "I can't wait to see this moment animated!!" no. I will simply pass away the moment I see the concept art for Caleb. I don't even need to watch the show at that point, I can leave the fandom entirely and die in peace

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