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Look at these precious Diglet sandwiches.

🥪Lunch Time ☕

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Well well well, look who just found a delicious boss monster for a Kingmaker Companion Quest... Also OP if you see this, the link was just to the old Nethys page that is now taken down, yeah? Replaced by this?

Theme Finale: Chemnosit, the Monarch Worm

CR 23

Chaotic Evil Colossal Magical Beast

Inner Sea Bestiary, pg. 47

Welcome to the end of Worm Week, and we’re ending on a real strong note. Meet one of the children of Rovagug, God of Destruction, and the Tarrasque’s… Older? Younger??? It’s kind of unclear… But the Sibling of Unknown Age to the big, bad Tarrasque. Much like the Tarrasque, Chemnosit has a laundry list of immunities that prevents any battle with it from ending too quickly and many abilities unique to the Spawn of Rovagug, such as Regeneration that’s impossible to overcome through any means. This is a worm with some severe staying power.

On the defensive side, all of the Spawn of Rovagug are similar to the Great Old Ones–true defeat is impossible, but one can drive them off and keep them from accomplishing their goals, or even knock them out for an extended period of time. They’re impervious to methods that would damage them in ways they can’t recover from, such as ability damage and drain, petrification, and polymorphing. Chemnosit in particular has a simple trick to dissuade foes from attacking it too much in the form of its Spines. Anyone striking it with an unarmed, natural, melee, or melee touch attack takes 2d8+10 damage from the arm-length, obsidian spines that jut from every inch of the Monarch Worm’s flesh.

On the offensive side, Spawn of Rovagug all possess a 300-foot Frightful Presence to inspire supernatural fear in any being that witnesses them attacking or charging. And speaking of charging, Spawn also possess the Unstoppable Force ability, meaning they can always charge even when obstructed or restrained and get a titanic +20 bonus to their Strength score when overrunning a target or damaging an object by charging into it. Unstoppable Force also means that the Spawn’s natural attacks overcome hardness and all form of damage reduction. Chemnosit’s own lashing mouth-tendrils deal 2d10+13 damage each, and it can strike with six of them each round! Each tendrils threatens to grapple anyone they touch, and any poor fool grappled in this way has a chance to be yanked into the Monarch Worm’s gullet, where they take 2d10+13 damage each round, plus an additional 1d4 Str damage from the close proximity to its eye.

That eye, that awful, awful glow in Chemnosit’s maw, is perhaps the most horrible means of offense it has. It allows the Monarch Worm to use Disintegrate at will, which should make anyone reading this immediately seize up. If it doesn’t, perhaps this will: Chemnosit’s effective caster level is high enough to let its Disintegrate deal 40d6 damage if it connects and the victim fails their saving throw. On success the ray only manages to deal 5d6 damage, but Chemnosit can just try again next round. Disintegrate is a cantrip for this worm!  But obliterating the scenery isn’t all that eye can do, and when you see its true power, you’ll wish it was.

Before we get to that, though, have an interesting fact: Chemnosit is most famous among all the Spawn of Rovagug by how quiet it is. Aside from the earth-shattering arrival it makes each time it visits the surface world and the chaos it causes just by moving around, Chemnosit operates in utter silence. It doesn’t roar, scream, groan, or make any sort of vocalization at all. It also doesn’t really move so much unless it needs to, preferring to simply swivel about as it bathes a 120-foot cone in its Hungry Gaze. Anyone meeting Chemnosit’s Hungry Gaze instantly takes 3d6 nonlethal damage as they’re suddenly overcome with maddening hunger and must make a Fortitude saving throw or be struck with fatigue, which graduates to exhaustion if they fail again, which turns to a nigh-permanent stagger if they fail a third time. In addition, those who fail against the fatigue must make a second save, a Will save this time, or be overwhelmed by a compulsion to eat. The food Chemnosit makes them crave? Fresh, living flesh of one’s own kind… Including one’s own flesh, if they can’t sink their teeth into an ally fast enough.

When Chemnosit arrives, it typically destroys just enough scenery to attract the attention of an army or militia. Then, when a whole enemy force stands against it, the Monarch Worm unveils the power of its eye… And then just watches. It sits in utter silence, distressingly still, simply basking in the sight of an entire enemy force turning on one another in maddening hunger, ripping each other apart to sate the supernatural, hideous hunger that’s filled them. Notably, the Hungry Gaze doesn’t turn someone into a mindless monster or fill them with rage; It’s very possible that victims will be pleading with their allies for assistance or apologizing profusely even as they cut hunks of flesh from friends and family. Imagine only being able to watch in horror as your body went against every instinct it had to cut pieces of itself away and force those chunks into your mouth. It’s painful in every way you can imagine.

All the while, Chemnosit sits on the horizon, watching until only a handful of fighters are left. Only then does it enter combat itself, devouring the dead in droves and crushing the ‘victors’ of the profane ‘tournament’ it put into place. The destructive power of the Tarrasque can lay an entire country low, but the destruction Chemnosit wreaks is a grotesque, personal sort of pain and terror that very few other monsters can replicate. It doesn’t just crush a house, no–it rips the roof off, then forces the family inside to kill and consume each other as it quietly watches. And then it crushes the house.

You can read more about it here.

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Yes, I expect the shards to retain their identities as factions, but I would also like to see some cross-shard 4 color cards!

Is there any chance that we return to Alara soon? I really liked the aesthetic of the plane and would love to see it again

Would you all like to return to Alara? If yes, what would you expect the set to have?

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Always remember, kids. “I have a prior commitment.” Or “I have a prior obligation.” Never explain, never expound, simply make the statement and set the limits. Do not respond to attempts to pry into your personal life so they might suggest justifications for why you can ignore your prior obligation. As far as they know you are attending your mother’s funeral and they have to respect the schedule both of you had already agreed to.

Extra work or overtime should always be opt-in if you decide it serves YOU.

me when I wake up at six am for my five hour shift and my boss begs me to stay for nine hours instead

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Lucretia at D.A.B.'s bar, by @cookietastic

My friend cooked up a Supernatural Wild West campaign (Using the Savage Worlds system), our party is: Jack, an alcoholic gunslinger with a death wish Diaz, an old mechanic/inventor type dabbling in the occult Lucretia, my character, unknown to the other two characters is a Contract Devil who through a mishap/attempted assassination of her boss has wound up mortal with a human appearance

She has successfully bullied and terrorized the tutorial boss into being her minion and completely nullified the 3rd-to-last boss fight of Act 1 by convincing all the mooks to kill each other then having the main boss of the combat tag along as a subordinate.

Thanks again to @cookietastic for this spectacular art, just in time to commemorate our move into Act 2.

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My first anime was either Pokémon or My Neighbor Totoro.

Death Note was the first anime I saw where I was conscious of the distinction. Before that things like Pokémon, Digimon, YuGiOh, DragonBall Z, those were all just cartoons in my mind.

For Death Note to have actually been your first anime would have me assuming you weren’t that interested in animation when you were younger. It being broadcast on Adult Swim definitely got it eyeballs, but it wasn’t on during youth-oriented hours and other anime localized were.

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

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Gorgeous art and lovely story.

I do love that I can identify some of the hero forge outfit pieces, though without it being mentioned it would not have crossed my mind.

This was a Christmas gift to me and my husband from our GM of our very first characters that we ever TTRPG'ed (Pathfinder) who commissioned this from @cutetanuki-chan. (The picture is from me taking a picture and cropping at a weird angle - the whole thing in its frame is stunning.) These two characters (Chrissy and Odhran) met when our game night people were like... hey let's try pathfinder. So I made a character and so did my husband and after meeting them, I was like... oh god... we are gonna get divorced. Lol. We were struggling at the time. And we made these characters and god, they hated each other so much..... but eventually found their way to being friends. But they were our first characters EVER. The next character my husband rolled up in this campaign (we needed to double up to round out a playable campaign), my rogue eventually formed a romantic attachment with. Then I made a bard for a totally separate campaign, and now we're both determined that he meet Chrissy at some point b/c within MINUTES of meeting my bard in a totally unrelated campaign, we were like, okay he's soulmates with Chrissy! But that's the magic right? Finding the parts of ourselves unexpectedly that can be completely accepting of other parts of our partner... even the parts of them that we thought we didn't like, want to be around, or understand to begin with. (CAUTION WARNING: let the reader understand, do NOT use this story to excuse abuse or bad behavior to try to fix a partner! This is an exercise that can ONLY be done with a feeling of absolute safety and trust between partners. We were not there when we started TTRPGS but got to a better place of trust due to his own personal work with therapy. But there were MASSIVE strides before I even trusted it. ) We joked tonight after our friend gave us this picture that Odhran (my rogue) saw this picture and was like oh GOD, what hell-fan of Chrissy (actress) did this? Why do I look like I'm worshipping her? GAHHH nOoOo. But....Odhran can also shut all the way up. :) What ultimately makes me as the player love this picture so much is probably the underpinnings of a romanticism depiction. These two characters, while they never and will never fall in love, in a meta sense, they were the gateway for us into several characters who did help us rediscover love again after years in a very difficult marriage, find a adhd hack into new relationship energy through RPing, and just provide us an outlet for a lot of intense emotional energy. And this artist, despite knowing NONE of this, captured its essence in a two completely non-romantic character portrait. @cutetanuki-chan you knew none of this and still managed to capture it perfectly. This picture will hang proudly in our house and I will enjoy explaining it to anyone who walks through our doors. Your depiction of HERO FORGE characters being so accurate is stupid impressive. Also shout out to our GM, Grace, who actively sought this out for us. What a perfect present. We couldn't ask for a better GM or a better friend. You're family and we love you so much.

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Game Designer/Game Master creed.

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Ferrus Chen: Bandit, Mercenary, Trickster

Born and raised in Absalom, this playful scoundrel offers his unique bent to combat as a Magus to the highest bidder. A highway bandit with more of a taste for pranks than blood.

My brother's Kitsune Magus, drawn by the intensely talented Rowan "Cynotherium" Holloway as a combination birthday and start-of-new-campaign gift.

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Valuable missing context: this was originally done in Planar Chaos as a Plane-Shifted card with the Plane-Shift template to denote it as something the color COULD technically do, but is not something the color normally does due to how the mechanical color pie was currently divvied up at the time. So the original printing helps indicate there is something unusual about the card.

If WotC would have just kept reusing this template on reprints of Plane-Shifted cards they would have significantly less questions and confusion regarding cards like Harmonize. Of course for cards like Prodigal Pyromancer, simply stop using the unique template.

so I remember there being this thought experiment about how mechanically you could technically print serra angel as a golgari card, and it resulted in that play test card in a mystery booster, now that blue has access to vigilance, what are the chances that we ever get a blue shifted serra angel in a standard legal set?

We did it back in 2007:

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Love the hair and backdrop color!

Commission

commission info

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That these GenAI bots will absolutely make stuff up when they don’t have an actual answer or that their information is not vetted in Any way boggles my mind. Because how is this not an instant dealbreaker for the entire concept?

Imagine if Picard says “Computer!” While on the bridge of the Enterprise and asks, “On what Stardate did the Federation first encounter The Borg?” and the computer just gives a completely wrong answer. The futuristic fantasy of the Machine Intelligent Enough To Parse Casually Worded Questions and Provide Instant, Accurate Answers requires the information be rock solid! Otherwise you Cannot trust it! Like if someone sold you a parachute that functions 99% of the time. Means that is a parachute I will be using 0% of the time.

I can’t stand this google AI answers anymore either they’re 1000%, an opinion, or so stupid

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What I sent to my friend earlier today when told him the headlining news about 6 sets a year, half being UB:

“The Good: Universes Beyond (UB) sets bring in big influxes of players. Not just for that set, players who get into Magic as a Whole. New enfranchised players. That’s great! Any entry point is good from a hobby, game and business perspective. The quality of UB sets has always been high, no sign of that stopping.

The Bad: folks like me are uncomfortable with how this encroaches on Magic Story proper. UB as a side dish was one thing, but now it’s a Main Course in a major way. I personally am not tooo stressed, since I simply do not think they can or will maintain this for longer than like, 4 years. Which sounds long but for Magic it isn’t.

Depending: This is a huge push for growth. At some point, growth stops. Worst case scenario, Hasbro fails basic economics and axes The Entire Game over the first year Magic doesn’t Line Go Up. A massive growth push like this makes this scenario happen sooner than later.”

Set and Card design continues to be pretty dang good, plus art is still excellent and story is in one of the best spots it has been in since original Ixalan days. Once that all starts to slip I’ll get more worried.

The less I read the comments on Reddit and Mark Rosewater's blog, the more excited I am for what's coming up next year in Magic.

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A fascinating glimpse into the lives of people who change their icons or profile pictures. As opposed to my culture of using the same icon across all platforms consistently for over 14 years with no intention of stopping.

Being on call with your besties you haven’t talked to in a while is great cause you find out quick what they’ve been into fast by just looking at their icon

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I’ve been aware there are tricks to help weed it out, like time-gating your search to when it was far less rampant. It’s a joke to have to employ such methods at all, but such is life.

Not to sound too dour though, it is a good tip and these can always bear repeating, thank you Secrets.

If I see one more AI generate image of a hobbit while look for refs of the actual ones + concept art I'm going to go sicko mode

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It’s so obnoxious. I was gathering reference images for a commission of my new Minotaur Pathfinder character and just looking for pictures of Bulls would give me horrendous AI trash. You can’t look up animals without have to sift through the garbage!

If I see one more AI generate image of a hobbit while look for refs of the actual ones + concept art I'm going to go sicko mode

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When I think of people posing for reference, I always think of Jason Rainville making the art for Admiral Beckett Brass.

The pirates in the background were based on reference photos of Jason Rainville's Uncle, Sister and Himself swinging over a lake. Most importantly though, the Admiral herself is very directly the likeness of his mother, Valerie.

We so rarely see older women as significant, confident and powerful characters. Especially being the colors I love most (Blue/Black/Red) I already adored her. But if you have some time, I highly suggest you go read Jason Rainville's Process blog for this piece. Real love when into this artwork and I adore it all the more for it.

50% of being an artist is being passionate about what you love to draw

And the other 50% is getting friends family or yourself to do stupid ass poses for ref