#calculating lich

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Calculating Lich

"We share a common enemy. Does that not make us friends?"

Artist: Antonio José Manzanedo TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[adventure-time-news]

As the Kickstarter campaign for Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game enters its final 24 hours, here's everything that's been announced since the last time I posted an update.

First of all, the number of player character species that will be included in the core book has increased to 25. In addition to the 21 listed in the last post, you will now also be able to play as a shapeshifter, a gnome, a wolf person, or a breakfast person.

Next, we have a name for the fourth chapter of Quest for the Shadow Gems, the adventure book. It will be titled Tower of Night and it will take place in the Nightosphere and feature the Lich.

Next we have the newly announced list of subclasses. Pretty much every base-5E class has received a wizard subclass. Cryptozoic said about this decision "We figured that the traditional Wizard Class was more like Princess Bubblegum: a scientist of study who figures out how magic works and what it is. And everyone else in Ooo with magic powers is a Wizard, so we chose to make an abundance of Wizard Subclasses for the many other spellcasting Classes of 5E (plus a few others)." The subclasses are as follows:

Bard subclasses: Dance Wizard or Peace Master

Druid subclass: Grass Wizard

Fighter subclasses: Weapon Wizard, Adventurer, or Strongman

Monk subclass: Laser Wizard

Ranger subclasses: Hunt Wizard or Seeker

Rogue subclasses: Fortunetelling Wizard, Calculator, or Rebel Leader

Sorcerer subclass: Nuclear Wizard

Warlock subclass: Elemental Wizard

Barbarian subclass: Stretchy Powers

Cleric subclass: Auditor

Paladin subclass: Oath of Party

Wizard subclasses: Scholar of GOLB, Scientist, or Void Caster

Definitely a very wacky mixture of things. I like the idea of being a paladin to Party God. This also answers the question of how players could make a Jake-like character; it's a Barbarian subclass. There's also a shapeshifter species so we'll see how that factors into the whole system. As previously announced, there is also a totally new base class for princesses.

And finally I will rattle off the list of various other content announced alongside stretch goals. Death and Gunter have been added as Algebraic Allies (so the social media vote didn't end up mattering), the Time Room has been added to the core book as a location for adventures, six additional candy kingdom monsters have been added to the core book, and four "scoundrel" subclasses were also unlocked. It's not clear if those subclasses are included in the list above or if they are further subclasses yet to be named. And in terms of merch, the two main books will now have foil covers, additional item cards have been added to the Sweet Dosh deck, and some more pre-made character sheets have been unlocked.

The last two stretch goals are for the fifth chapter of Quest for the Shadow Gems (already surpassed at time of writing but not yet revealed) and the final dice set.

The campaign closes in 24 hours. Remember that backing a Kickstarter project is not the same as buying a product, and there is no legal guarantee that you will receive everything promised. But for now, Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game is aiming for a March 2025 release.

[unsoundedcomic]

Quigley described Duane's spellcraft as too good to be real, what did he base this judgement on specifically? Any particular spells? Also from a purely academic perspective (so not just because he's a tacit-casting lich cheater), what's the most outrageous pymary the readers have seen Duane cast in the story so far?

Quigley mostly bases it on speed. As a tacit caster, Duane casts with the speed of thought; faster than a regular wright dare cast for fear of stuttering or losing his breath. He doesn't even need to pause for recall or calculation thanks to his undead mind. Duane's just incredibly fast.

The most outrageous was what Elka described to us. Duane casting through the flying grains of First Sand. I could not think of a way to show this that wouldn't take up half a page, so I let Elka narrate it.

You could also make a strong case for his aerial shenanigans against Lemuel and the Crescian bombardment in chapter 16, but he was able to catch those giant fireballs because he didn't need to breathe or fear burns. It was impressive pymary as he was basically flying while doing it (falling with style) but the physicality is what put it over the edge.

There's also more technical, less showy stuff, like when he and Elka brought down the Aldish vliegengs last chapter, in Port Morstorben. Just thinking to use Knock's footware as he did was pretty clever, and transforming the surface area of each boot to a wide ring, and then contracting it to a cutting band, was maths-heavy stuff that Elka would need to work out on a notepad first :D Duane does calculations in his head when he's bored, he always has. Friggin dweeb.

[corvidcentral]

Erm, Lich Scarab AU upon ye

Basically, the Lich possesses Scarab and uses Scarab’s powers and status to try and kill everything in every universe, and the entirety of F&C is the Lich steadily becoming more unstable and using the guise of gathering evidence against Prismo to try and complete his eradication goal :3

More art, some beta designs, and a complete au dump under cut!!

This is all copied from my rant in a discord server 😭

So, from what I’ve seen, it’s like the Lich can possess/manipulate people with unstable emotions or who are disillusioned with the world around them. Scarab, being a god auditor, often has to travel to different dimensions to track down wayward cosmic entities, and it’s canon (? The wiki said so) that the Lich can share memories between different dimensional variants of himself.

So basically, in some universes, Snail Lich sees this cosmic entity that’s just furious at everything and starts scheming. Basically, it starts stalking him the moment it senses he arrives in a dimension, and feeds off the negative energy. He then uses this energy to become more powerful, and eventually, in one universe the Lich breaks free and just beelines it towards Scarab

Don’t get me wrong, Scarab is a brutally efficient god auditor but he also does have a bit of a superiority complex and easily dismisses the threat that the Lich poses. He just goes about his job, disguised, until a Lich possessed old man asks disguised Scarab for some help with a chore

Scarab, wanting to keep his cover, reluctantly agrees, and then is ambushed by the old man turned Lich, who possess him in turn (and it’s canon that the Lich can, on some level, possess cosmic entities, as seen w/ New Death)

Course, because Scarab is a cosmic entity, he doesn’t die when he gets possessed, he just gets shoved into a dark corner of his mind and body. He’s like, freaking out, trying to rationalize to himself on how he was tricked so easily, and the Lich is like having a blast with a high ranked cosmic entity as a puppet/vessel

He also uses Scarab’s shapeshifter abilities to his complete advantage, and just parades around as Scarab. And, well, if other gods notice Scarab acting a bit more erratically, and if his eyes glow more green than red, and he’s quieter and more calculated, it’s just Scarab doing his job, right? Nobody really likes Scarab, anyway, so why do they care?

The only one who really notices that Scarab is Not Actually Scarab is Prismo, bcuz he got killed by the Lich before, and he can recognize that energy even if the Lich is putting on a perfect performance of a god auditor, inspecting him for some faulty readings (that being Fionna, Cake, and Simon)

Basically, the reason why Scarab was so fucking bonkers during the entire Fionna and Cake series was cuz of the Lich bending his body to the absolute limit trying to figure out how to properly take over the Time Room and eradicate every single living thing in all universes.

And during the Golbetty scene, Lich Scarab watches himself get cubized by Golb, does the whole attacking Simon before crawling into his head, and then just loses his mind in Fionna’s world

His drops the Scarab disguise and reveals the Lich face, along with his patchwork of other disguises and bones and stuff, and just goes ham on killing Fionna’s world

It’s not until another cosmic entity shows up and forcibly removes the Lich from Scarab that he gets complete control of his mind and body back, and while he’s back to “normal” he’s scarred pretty badly and has to step down as god auditor.

Prismo kinda takes pity on him and asks Orbo if Scarab can become a Wishmaster and Orbo is like “yea sure mate” and it actually really helps Scarab bcuz being out of his pain ridden body and being simplified does wonder to the mental health ya know

Not exactly Prohibitedwish but also they’re a lot more friendly with each other than in canon cuz Scarab owes Prismo for saving him from terrible pain

Scarab’s body does eventually get healed over the course of a few hundred years so by the time it’s like, mostly okay, Scarab wouldn’t be in pain for every time he moved. His body is still scarred badly, and his disguises share those scars, but yea!!

Also special shout out to Lily cuz she gave me Ideas >:3

It’s great :3

Pencil art/beta designs:

Bonus dumbass pic:

[apas-95]

what in the world is a lich vacuum tunnel skeleton computer? it sounds cool as hell

powerful necromancer commands an army of the undead. said undead can be given rudimentary commands. by organising multiple undead to pass, say, metal rods between each other, you can create simple logic gates - order two undead to pass along any rods they're given, and order the third to only pass along a rod if both undead pass a rod to them, then you've got an AND gate. knowing this, our humble lich retreats to a mountain and sets their minions to work. they raise a large army of skeletons, tunneling out a series of inter-connected circuits inside the stone, and stationing these skeletons along the entire length, at arms length from each other. at a command, metal rods are passed to the input skeletons, which immediately hand them forwards, and on and on, passing through successive skeleton logic gates, forming an arithmetic unit, which are then passed to the output skeletons, which present our lich with a numeric solution, in binary. such a system can be extended and expanded as much as necessary. to reduce the effect of air resistance on our speedy skeleton stick slingers, the lich seals off the tunnels and further employs some skeletons to work bellows to constantly pump out the air and create a partial vacuum.

see also the feudal chinese version with dessicated alien peasants as presented in three body problem, for calculating celestial and astronomical movements

[inkthecryptid]

Anonymous:

>Be me

>Tech-Lich

>Spend all my funds on extra exoskeletal bio-ports, quantum calculation chips, and ZeBethane™ brand brain stimulating inhalants

>Parents disown me, relocate my setup to a run down apartment in a metropolitan zone of Ganymede

-Spend all day on webspace, communing with technology and the background radiation of quantum magic

>Things seem to be going alright

>Most of my bodily functions are automated, never need to leave my TechnoThrone

>Make money by selling myself as an online quantum computer for rich plebs who don’t know the first thing about paracausal warping

>One day take too many stimulants

>My Mindlock breaks, total failure to maintain identity flow

>Spend the next 72 hours unable to distinguish possibility and reality

>Brain fully detached from motor functions

>Witness the quantum foam in its primordial form

>Immediately believe that there is something beyond god that exists intrinsically through every speck of stardust that connects us

>Suddenly on a beach

>Childhood friend who stopped talking to me after I got into Techliching is there

>Shes just sitting on the sand

>”Hello Anon, come sit with me”

>Come to in a meditek facility

>Surgeons are detaching servers from my brain when I start screaming

>It’s been 10 years since and I’ve been proudly cyber-free the entire time. Things really got put into perspective when the doctors told me I shouldn’t even be consciously existent on this dimension anymore. I started talking to my parents again and that childhood friend is now my wife! It’s never too late to stop, or to start over clean. You’ll find your beach, I swear!

Anonymous:

>Meatcuck came this close to understanding the Equation and gave it up for pussy. Get out.

[soulmuppet]

The Stygian Library by Emmy Allen

A procedurally-generated library-dungeon set in the extra-dimensional space between every library in the universe.

Each expedition generates its route as it explores, resulting in new locations and forbidden knowledge being discovered with every visit. Included within:

Systems for generating locations within the library, including  Entrance Foyers, Map Galleries, Tea Rooms,  Planetariums, Calculation  Engines, Phantom Databanks, Paper Beehives, Phantom Pumps, Jarred Brains  and the Sheol Computer.

40 monsters tailored to the Library, including Lantern Bearers,  Skeleton Crew, Origami Golems, Guardian Shades, Lost Souls, Ink  Elementals, Animate Spells, Archivist-Liches, Infernal Merchants,  Escaped Fictions, Educated Rodents, Conceptual Wells and the orders of  Librarians themselves.

A system for searching for specific knowledge within the library's  depths, as well as 30 unusual books and the secret knowledge they  contain.

Tables for generating treasure, dreams, rumors, and various other useful details.

A unique class of Mummified Sages, post-human academics who've dwelled in the Library for decades or more.

It's a big spooky library full of dangerous knowledge, spiritual automata and ghost-fueled computers.

The adventure includes stats and sparse amounts of mechanics intended to be broadly compatible with most old-school RPG systems, and easily adapted to any other fantasy RPG.

[striderthefrog]

F&C SPOILERS

One of my favorite characters in adventure time has been the lich he's just such a cool character, beacause like he never really gets defeated, just delayed.

The lich is the inevitable end, he has existed since the beginning and he will exist until the end. Even when he gets sidetracked you always know he's there, waiting for his moment. Not to mention his lines are always so calculated and blunt. "You are strong child, but I am beyond strength"

Strength doesn't mean anything to the lich beacause even the strongest warrior gives way to time, the lich will destroy all life eventually one way or another. His presence looms over the entirety of adventure time.

Cut to fionna and cake, we find a universe where the lich did succeed in destroying all life, and as he isn't really a persok, he's a force of nature. He doesn't kill fionna and co. because that temporary satisfaction isn't enough for him, he simply waits, waits for them to make the wrong decision which has now given him the opportunity to end a whole new world. And even if he gets stopped in the finale, eventually he will win and all life will end in that universe.

This is what makes the lich such a cool villain, the heroes can't stop him forever, they can only delay the inevitable. And the lich is willing to wait as long as it takes, our heroes can buy time to spend making memories. But the lich will come eventually, and he knows this.

[samueldays]

Do you think this man ever considers that this is how the corporate friendly sanitised version happens? I get the impression he doesn't oppose Hasbro's sanitised version for being sanitised, he opposes it for being Hasbro's version rather than Proko's version.

He offers neither an intensional definition (a general rule about what is best left buried) nor an extensional definition (examples of specific things best left buried) of what he'd want sanitised. People might disagree on that if he were to get specific.

And as usual prokopetz is wrong about a bunch of other things. The Forgotten Realms were a pastiche of a lot of fantasy settings in general, and some scifi settings, and some historical settings, and some bits and pieces from other weird literature, but prokopetz has pornbrain.

My take: The Realms are boring because they've gone from being a pastiche to being a low-quality knockoff of a pastiche, a secondhand version of themselves, like so much of D&D that's trying to make a new-edition version of previous-edition content, rather than going back to the well for new content.

Finger of Death , for example, used to be a rare dangerous spell where there was a good chance the target simply died outright, maybe he got a saving throw to be lucky and escape death that way, and you had to play around it because you don't want to let Old Lich Fingers have a chance to use that.

Then it became a [Death] spell with standard keyword tags, and the [Death Ward] effect could reliably protect against it, since instakills felt a bit unfair to players who had spent hours making a character (lots of knock-on changes from that), and you could get magic armor imbued with a permanent [Death Ward].

Then it became a spell that dealt 7d8+30 Necrotic Damage (CON save halves) and your Necrotic Resistance 10 reduced that to 7d8+20 and you can calculate that your character can live through an average of 3 Fingers of Moderate Damage but is out of the fight at the 4th (which still doesn't inflict death, merely unconsciousness).

[mushabumi]

"The Lich and the Witch"

18+ Monster romance. 2053 words. Smut, romantic, and a shy Lich King.

“The Lich King”

She was never afraid of the things that crawl in the woods at night. The clacking of claws and whisper of behemoth wings in flight was a comfort to her. The villagers barred their doors and windows when the beasts prowled speckled in starlight, but what they didn’t know was that they were under His protection. She knew, though she’d never met the elusive Lich King that ruled this area, nor would she explain the true nature of the beasts that patrol at night. She simply let them believe she was the consort of darkness and bathed in moonlight each month. Sometimes she did. Moonlight did wonders for the skin. As for consorting with any darkness, there have never been the opportunity. Though she wouldn’t be averse to the idea.

All of these thoughts meandered through her on her walk. She needed ingredients for her commissioned potions and elixirs. The path was always droll, though she was thankful for its familiarity. She entered the gates of the forgotten cemetery and strode through the briarwood vines with a languid hand held aloft to brush them away. They parted with a sigh as an old lover trapped in memories of what was. It always made her smile when the plants talked to her. She had a gift for manipulating them, and often they were her truest companions throughout her life.

Down she went through the ancient stone steps leading to the entrance of the labyrinth. She saluted to the gargoyles standing vigil at the doorway and pressed a hand to the stone doors. She whispered an incantation and runic script bloomed beneath her palm in a pale periwinkle light. It arched along the hidden doorway, blinking as the stone parted. She slipped inside and with a blink, her eyes illuminated in the dark as a cat’s. It was clear as day for her. She gripped her basket and marched forward. The moss shifted away for her as she walked.

Little did she know that she was being watched.

She continued, humming a song her mother once did, in a language her grandmother spoke. She crouched every once in a while, to collect the mushrooms huddled in corners. They glowed as she touched them. She never noticed the icy chill that crept toward her, or the way the shadows became deeper; knitting together in a dense fog. It grew closer, tendrils of darkness stretching for her and stopping just out of reach. They shrank, bashful and forlorn. So he spoke instead.

“Is it a habit of yours to sing in the dark?” His voice whispered through her, reverberating in the darkness and enveloping her in a shroud.

She shivered, huffing out some of the warmth pooling in her belly. “Is it habit of yours creep around unarmed women?”

“And who’s fault is that? You were the one who left the safety of your hearth, knowing the things that prowl in the night. And on a full moon? Surely you’ve more sense than that.” Deep, resonant whispers echoed off the walls. A single tendril of darkness curled at the nape of her neck. “Am I to believe a woman such as you needs a weapon the be dangerous?” A sonorous laugh boomed, echoing in her ribcage. The tendril inched lower down her spine before retreating. “Surely you can do better at attempting to deceive one as ancient as I,” the voice enshrouded her, tickling her skin; soft as velvet.

“Ancient you say? Is your body withered among the roots and rocks, then? Long forgotten?” She said with a straightened spine as her eyes flicked toward the amalgamation of darkness. Her eyes slitted, calculating, before she lunged.

A gasp echoed off the walls as she held a limb of darkness. It was cool to the touch, velvet soft and utterly pliant in her grasp. Though she knew the strength and destruction it could wield.

“Or are you too much of a coward to face me fully?” She asked with an imperious tilt of her chin.

Darkness coalesced before her and grew, towering above her and melting away to reveal a bone-white creature. He was naked from the waist up and had a flowing black cloth draped around his hips. Plates of bone covered his black torso as a natural armor, mimicking the curves of muscle beneath. A circlet of bone crowned his head and flared to each side of his head as fused wings. It completely covered half of his face, leaving his pale cheekbones, and chin peeking from underneath. His lips were full and scowling at her.

He rolled his shoulders and flexed the black talons of his fingers and tilted his head with an unspoken question. He waited. They always ran at this point. Without fail.

“Hmm,” she hummed and surveyed him, dutifully ignoring the urge to close her fingers around his throat and push him against the wall. She reached her index finger up to his chest and gently pushed. “You’re about to step on them. Can you move, please?” She pointed to the patch of mushrooms inches from his feet.

He shuffled away, revealing an enormous muscled thigh under the cloth at his hips. She licked her lips and looked away. He loomed behind her as the stone gargoyles outside and she couldn’t bear it any longer. She cleared her throat and held her basket out to him. “Might as well make yourself useful… your highness? My liege? What do I call you?”

She could have sworn a blush bloomed under his bony headdress when he said “Phandros. I am the current Lich King of this domain,” he spoke gently as he grabbed the basket.

She crouched down and began harvesting. “I see. Nice to meet you.”

A palm sheathed in shadow appeared before her, waiting. She grabbed it, stifling a gasp as it helped her up with ease. His long fingers brushed against the pulse in her wrist as they closed around her hand. They were sharp, pausing at her pulse. The scraped against it reverently before releasing her.

He did not speak, but simply watched her with a curious tilt of his horned head.

“Are you … waiting for something? Someone?” She huffed a laugh. “Or deciding how you will eat me tonight? Sauteed with a pat of butter and garlic should do nicely.” She patted his gauntleted forearm and moved away.

He snatched her hand with lightning speed, imperceptible to the eye and held it with delicate grace. “I am waiting for you to run away; to scream or to fight me. But you haven’t. Why?”

She dropped the mushrooms in the forgotten basket at his feet with her free hand and looked up at him. “Because I’ve read about you. I know the story of the prince that bargained with the evil Lich to keep the winter horde at bay. The one who traded his mortal life to save the starving people of his realm. The same one who locked himself away from his people’s great-great-grandchildren and their pitchforks and raids. The one that learnt to command the night to protect his realm from the horde of demons that preyed on this land on their way to the realm between worlds. To me, he is not one to fear. To me, the humans that forgot his sacrifice and betrayed his kindness are the ones to run from. They are the ones to hide away and shield myself from their wrath. Not you. Not ever you or your kind.” She both her hands around his and squeezed gently. Just once, before turning away.

She felt tendrils of shadow cup her chin and turn her back toward him. She didn’t shrink away as he reached a hand to cup her face, nor when he moved a breath away from her. Slowly, he stroked her cheek. “Will you not tell me your name?”

“Does it matter?”

“I wish to know what name to say as you become undone above me.”

She slammed her hand against his chest, the other to his throat and shoved him against the ancient stone. He picked up as she caged him with her thighs and bit his lip. He licked her bottom lip and sucked as her hand tightened around his throat. He gasped as she writhed against him. Tendrils of smoke whispered around her. Brushing the shell of her ear, her neck. Trailing up her thighs and whispering at around her breasts all as he kissed her with barely restrained hunger.

“Hold on,” he ordered and held her tight. The blinked away in a shroud of night and appeared in a suite at the top of a tower. It overlooked the entire valley with glass panes covering the back wall. Black smoke meandered around the glass as if waiting to be let free.

He placed her gently on her feet and took a step back. “Are you sure?” He watched her. Trepidation and dread pursing his lips. Surely she would run now. Soon. Why hasn’t she already?

She sighed and regarded him as one did a particularly slow child while explaining the rules of the universe. “I want you,” she stepped closer, “on your knees.” She grabbed his wrist and tugged him toward the bed before she sat on its edge. She nodded in front of her and waited for him to kneel before reaching down to trail a finger along the planes of his cheek. She stopped, wickedly, at the corner of his lips. “I want you to scream your name until the sun rises. And again tomorrow. And the day after. Then will you believe that I shall not run?” She draped her finger across his bottom lip before his tongue slip out and curved around it and enveloped it into his mouth. As he sucked, the tendrils of night snaked around her body, mimicking the movements of his tongue. Her clothes faded into shadow as the tendrils embraced her. She gasped, gripping his horns in a vice as they curved around her breasts and thighs. They glided against her, teasing closer to her nipples and gently gripping as he sucked her finger. He smiled at her moan and leaned forward. Brushing his hands against the back of her knees he watched as a shadow flicked to the apex of her thighs in slow, agonizing circles. Another smile as the other flicked her nipples and retreated. He kissed a trail up her thighs as a shadow foretold the path his tongue would follow against her folds. She was nothing but deep, breathy moans as he lazily worked his way closer to his goal. Finally, a tendril pushed inside her as he gently pushed her against the bed and draped her feet on his shoulders. The shadow pulsed inside of her and grew as she moaned. It formed to the thickness she needed to prepare for, slowly stretching her as it pulsed inside of her. He finally licked his way the bundle of nerves and thrusted his phantom limb inside of her. He ignored his own hardness and hummed against her clit, relishing the sounds escaping her. He kneaded and thrusted until she was sure to be sore the next day and she became incoherent. Only then did he grip himself with his hands and stroked his length in tandem with all of his limbs. His rhythm became merciless. He felt her shudder against him and he reached for her hair and pulled. A scream erupted. He sucked her clit in a brutal rhythm and slid another tendril to her ass. He felt her tighten around him as she felt the velvet wetness of a tongue slide into her from behind. He pulled her hair with another thrust into each of her openings and held her as she released. He soothed her hair and back as she came, easing her onto his chest.

He waited until her breathing evened and gently laid her on the pillows. She looked shy as he stroked her cheek and held her against him.

“Phandros? Are you… what about you?”

He eased his eyes close and whispered, “say it again.”

“Phandros?”

He kissed her softly as if he had millennia to memorize her. “Hearing my name on your lips is reward enough. Sleep, for there is always tomorrow.”

[bright-and-burning]

okay yeah i didn't know that there's the different ai stuff and that this is generative ai BUT GOD AM I HAPPY to see that you know the difference between ai and ml like !!! this is not ai !!! it's such a trend now and it's so wrong and so frustrating beyond the, in this case, misogynistic aspects of it. like this is not ai !! but that sounds catchy and URGH so frustrating. okay that's all i love ur additional tags thank u xoxo

yeah!! i did my undergrad degree focused on this kind of stuff (and dropped out of doing a phd in it at the last minute) so it's Literally my roman empire. like. i took so many courses in this and THEN it blew up right at the end of my degree and the misinformation........ chatgpt getting massive my senior year of college made me soooo mad i legit started to resent my field. like this particular use is particularly egregious (why hire a woman in an area severely lacking in women when we can rampantly misuse important computational and REAL LIFE resources to create a fake woman to "talk" abt SUSTAINABILITY!!!) but in general i am like constantly infuriated by AI bullshit from a lot of different sides bc Everyone overestimates/glorifies it/turns it into something it isn't, essentially. (rant abt AI from an AI perspective under the cut that idk might be informative or interesting LOL. i tried not to get technical but i did get mad)

generative ai drives me BONKERS bc it's literally not artificial intelligence. chatgpt is NOT AI it's fucking glorified predictive chat and all the dumbass tech bros on linkedin and twitter who hail it as like world changing infuriate me lol. like chatgpt literally works by calculating the word with the highest probability to come next in the sentence/in response to that prompt based on the data it trained on. is that super impressive ignoring the real world stuff going on? yeah!! it is! it's doing really well and it's fascinating in an academic sense. but then you put it in the real world context, where dumbass tech bros and business leaders worship it as god and where SEO morons use it to turn the internet to sludge and it's like oh god WHY.

and the ai art bullshit oh my god. ok i took a machine vision class right. and like literally one of my projects was to write code that could take in a photo and output it in the "style" of another photo. like as the cs version of a creative exercise, basically (they give u a Lot of projects that are basically write ur own version of an algorithm that's already been written more efficiently by someone else, bc that's how you can kind of pick it apart and really understand it, it's like reverse engineering) to show us how that works. (photos from that project are below; i took the cactus photo and then i "combined" it with a monet. i am STAUNCHLY anti-ai "art" btw this was Lich rally an assignment lol). but do you know what i learned (and what my whole class learned)? it's not fucking magic. it's LINEAR ALGEBRA. it's linear algebra on a truly batshit crazy level, combined with some crazy optical physics equations, but it's literally math. technically speaking, if you had infinite time, and were really insanely good at math (and really really perfect abt not making mistakes), you could do it by hand lol.

ai art from prompts? that's just turning words into numbers (not hard!! i did a project that did that in my second year of undergrad in literally 6hrs!!!) and THEN doing some crazy math and turning numbers into PIXELS! the computer does not know what is going on. it is a FANCY CALCULATOR. WHEN U THINK ABT IT LIKE THAT ASSIGNING HUMAN TRAITS TO MATH IS INSANE.

like tech bros who are like bro chatgpt is aliveeee bc they talk to it is like. if i made my high school graphing calculator draw a smiley face and then was like omg it has emotions......

anyways. like do you know how many projects ive worked on that use AI/ML for GOOD??? like. same kind of techniques that ppl use to create generative ai "art" algorithms? used to do things like detect cancer in scans before human doctors can do it with any confidence. isn't that so fucking cool???? i interviewed w a professor who used machine vision (so literally the field that is now seen as being abt ai art) to figure out what nutritional/vitamin deficiencies ppl in remote villages in madagascar are likely to have based on SATELLITE IMAGERY. so that the overworked underfunded public health ministry could more easily meet their needs without necessarily having to do expensive testing on everyone! i mean, shit, i've worked on really cool sports analytics projects using machine vision. that's not exactly saving lives lol but like. just goes to show how many positive applications there are!

in terms of chatgpt vibes like. i've worked on natural language processing! it has so much more potential than spitting out misinformation!! silly projects for classes, like classifying what political party a politician belonged to based on their tweets, but also more serious stuff in the research i did, like analyzing international public opinion by demographic and country on various conflicts based on individuals' social media posts! analyzing covid vaccine opinions based on demographics, and how to encourage vaccination rates based on that!!

idk it's just. infuriating. that ceos and dumbass business majors (sorry to business majors but i have met a Very Specific Type who like to butt into my field and i am Not A Fan) have completely twisted these really and truly interesting projects and applications. to continually make more money and to cut out/replace more and more people. and the way funding has mirrored this kind of interest, in part bc it makes money (the remote villages nutrition thing is never gonna make money. working on chatgpt on the other hand...) and in part bc of like. basically fear-mongering? you get so much more attention for research in these really dramatized fields (and people lie ALL THE TIMMEEEEEEE to get more interest) and it's all CAP. it's BULLSHIT. and it's just to create buzz for big tech companies' bottom lines. they don't care that it's fear based, or whatever. like people being terrified abt the impact of generative ai bc of bullshit headlines and disinformation HELPS THEM make MORE MONEY. and it's so FUCKING STUPID!!!! it makes me SICK!!!!!!

anyways. it's all math, at the end of the day. and i found a job where i get to use it to help people but i still am like deeply grossed out by what comes out of my field and gets popular bc . i got into this bc i loooove data i love information i love finding things out. and i love using those things to help people... and there are ppl using the things i love to hurt people......... it makes me so sad. and mad.

[sliceroftpeirweirisles]

Whumpuary 2024 Day 6

6. (Jan 11-12) Exhaustion / Blindfolded / Old Injuries

Barry Bluejeans was a strong man. Well, maybe not physically, but mentally he was strong. He could calculate the rate of necrotic damage at any skill level of a warlock. He could measure the precise amount of hair that he could grow on his chin in three days. He knew he was smart and therefore strong. 

On the other hand, emotionally? He wasn’t very strong in that area. 

For a man so strong in logic, he couldn’t understand how emotions continued to break him down. He knew, logically, that the night terrors weren’t real. He knew they just weren’t feasible any longer. There’s no Hunger, no threat to their plane of existence. No grand relics and no war. Nevertheless, he found himself waking up from night terrors long after everything started to settle down. The first two nights were fairly easy to keep under wraps. Barry had suffered from them before, but it had been months since his last one. Lup shook him awake on the third night after she found Barry crying out for her in their bed. 

After that night, he was determined to try and stop the nightmares from happening. Barry turned to his strength - his books - and started studying. He dove into logical explanations and jotted down notes about night terrors. He started coming up with a plan to build another body tank, just in case they needed it. He also read up on potions and home remedies for night terrors. Anything he felt the need to study, he'd drag out the chore into hours of reading and notes.

To further keep from falling asleep, he hung out with the twins and Kravitz who never needed to sleep. Taako and Lup were Twosun elves, which means they did sleep occasionally, they just didn't need it as often as humans. Lup used to be a lich and didn't need sleep, but since she gained her body back Barry found her catching up on that sleep a lot. Mostly with Taako at her side, the other times with himself. Kravitz was, of course, the Grimm Reaper. Not needing sleep is pretty much given to him. So Barry ended up spending nights at a time just chatting with the three of them in their shared living room.

One night of studying night terrors turned to two, turned to three. 

On the fourth night, Lup walks in on Barry barely keeping it together in the lab. 

“Babe, how long has it been since you’ve slept?” Lup asks as she moseys over to her husband at his desk. 

“Mm…” Barry mutters as he stares into a microscope at his latest project. Lup leans over his shoulder and reads some unintelligible scribble on one of the microscope slides. She can’t tell what he’s studying, but he’s definitely staring intently at something. 

“What are you looking at, Bluejeans?” Lup muses as she pokes his cheek.

He rouses and backs up to look at his wife. “M’spit” he mumbles and rubs at his eyes.

“Bear, why the fuck are you studying your spit?” 

“There’s somethin’ in it…” Barry removes his hands to reveal his eyes have deep dark circles under them. 

Lup grimaces slightly at the state of her husband and sighs. “Pack it up there, Bear. Time for bed.” 

“No, I’m studying, I promise I'm fine. I’m just not done yet.” Barry sounds like a small child insisting he can stay up late. Lup reaches out to take Barry’s glasses gently off of his face, earning a protest from the man. She knows he can't do shit without them. “Lup, please. I’m not done.” 

“And I’m not kidding, Barry. You’re exhausted, look at yourself.” 

“Lup, I’m not tired!” Barry shouts, glaring up at the elf. His angry expression falls instantaneously when he sees Lup is taken aback by his outburst. “I-I’m sorry, I just… I…” 

Lup gently folds Barry’s glasses and sets them on the desk. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just hurt my feelings… I need you to be honest with me, babe. When’s the last time you slept?” She crosses her arms and leans against the desk, staring down at Barry.

Likewise, Barry stares up at her, a nervous energy vibrating through him. Should he be honest? Could he even lie about it at this point? Lup looks pretty when she’s mad… 

“Four…” is all Barry can make out before he breaks the eye contact and rubs his face again. 

“Four what? Hours?” 

“Days…” 

There’s an uncomfortable silence in the room as Barry’s hands don’t leave his face. Lup wants to yell. Scream at Barry for doing this to himself. Yeah, they were reapers, but he was still a human in a squishy, human, sleep-deprived body that needed sleep. Lup wants to yell, but instead, she sits for a moment and then lets out the most controlled sigh before standing up straight. 

“C’mon, Bear.” Lup takes his hands and moves them from his face. 

Barry sniffles and obliges, trying his damndest to not look Lup in the eye. He stands when Lup tugs at his arms to pull him up. She doesn’t let go as she leads Barry away from the lab, away from the basement, away from the living room. When they reach the bedroom, Barry starts to weep openly and it breaks Lup’s heart. 

“Talk to me, babe. What’s going on?” Lup pulls Barry into her arms, gentle hands rubbing his back. 

“I can’t do it, Lup… I don’t wanna sleep. It hurts too much.” 

“Hurts?” Lup questions, a hand gently raking through Barry’s thick brown hair. 

“The nightmares… They keep– keep taking you from me.” His side of the hug turns to trembling as he uses all his depleted strength to hug Lup. “I don’t wanna lose you again.” 

Lup holds her husband in her arms as tears prick at the edges of her vision. She knows what she did to him hurt Barry. She knows this is her fault, that he’s going through unimaginable trauma. Lup pulls away from the hug and leads Barry to bed, sitting him down on the edge. She looks him in the eye, a serious look on her face.

“I’m not going anywhere, Barry Bluejeans… I love you, and I’m not leaving you, never again. I swear.”

Barry nods and rubs at the tears across his cheeks. “That’s just it, I-I know you’re not gonna go anywhere. My subconscious is just having… having a hard time catching up.” 

Lup smiles softly and kneels down, taking off Barry’s shoes and socks. “Then we’ll teach it. You love learning, babe. You can learn to tell your brain to shut up. You’re strong like that.” 

Barry sniffles and smiles slightly at that statement. He doesn’t feel like he can be strong like that right now, but Lup’s words are encouraging. 

“Tonight though,” Lup states as she helps Barry into the covers. “Tonight, you are allowed to be weak. I’ll be here to be strong for you.” Lup climbs into bed with Barry and tucks herself beside him. “I’ll be here, Barry… I’m right here.” 

[illegiblewords]

Complete warlock lineup challenge, explanation and all concept info under the cut. EXTREMELY LONG. In order the pacts are:

Great Old One (Elder Evil) Fathomless (Aboleth) Hexblade (Primordial Fang) Genie (Djinn) + Patron Yugoloth Fiend (Baernaloth) + Patron Undying (Kyuss) Fey (Sea Hag) Fey (Archfey) + Patron Devil Fiend (Erinys) Demon Fiend (Juiblex) Undead (Lich) Celestial (Planetar) + Patron

I've seen some genuinely interesting analyses of warlock/patron dynamics since Baldur's Gate 3, but noticed that discussion tends to assume that all pacts are with lawful evil devils specifically. Decided to give myself a challenge to come up with a variety of relationships (some positive, some negative) between many different pact types.

GREAT OLD ONE (HADAR): Went this route for Baldur’s Gate 3. A priest of Lathander where such faith is a minority has a child with a tiefling woman. The congregation cries corruption and kills his wife, leaving him to flee with his daughter alone. The two travel together as outcasts—her for her infernal heritage, him both for his faith and for fathering a tiefling. Eventually the girl runs away in the hope that her father, at least, can lead a more normal life in her absence. For a time she travels westward. Eventually the girl gets accused of causing unseasonal, crop-destroying frost and is imprisoned. When the guards make clear they plan to do terrible things to her, she prays first to her father’s god. Then to any god. Then to anyone at all. Hadar, a sentient star being devoured by his fellow elder evil Ihbar, answers. This is less a calculated act, more that the girl's fear, isolation, and hopelessness are intimately familiar to Hadar. The tiefilng wants to repay her new patron but comes to realize that no amount of sacrifice can save him. Hadar is too far gone—even if Ihbar vanished, he would succumb to his wounds. So she searches instead for anything that might alleviate his suffering, talking to him regularly in the hope of giving distraction and letting him know he’s not alone. She isn’t sure if Hadar even recognizes her. Whole thing has lot to do with ideas of self-worth and abandonment. Hadar is used to people exploiting his desperation for power and has punished warlocks who promised sustenance only to betray him—but it gets complicated when a warlock is freely offering without much concern for personal ambition. Basically, good-aligned warlock + elder evil friendship, a lot tied to suns/stars, depths of the sea vs depths of space.

FATHOMLESS (ABOLETH): This warlock is the firstborn son of a fisherman in a family where the eldest inherits the traditions and practices of those who came before. His father taught him all he knew from mending nets to mapping heavens, petitioning the gods and reading weather conditions. They had means of catching any number of creatures from the deep, whether through mundane or enchanted means. During a year of particular scarcity, fishermen are forced to cast themselves farther and farther from familiar waters. Desperate and discouraged, the warlock to-be’s father sets out. He makes prayers and offerings before venturing forth with his crew. When the vessel fails to return, his son takes a small boat and collection of potions to learn what became of them. He catches and questions various creatures, who speak of a terrible lord beneath the waves calling men to join him below. Not dead, they insist, but in service. All life flees before them. The fisherman’s son is extremely wary at this and seeks to learn more of this lord and comes to understand the aboleth in fragments—along with its territory. A creature older than gods, a creature with many slaves, a creature whose touch corrupts, a creature who remembers the lives of its ancestors like its own. The fisherman’s son returns home empty handed but with a plan, and alongside the families of the crew manages to buy and slaughter an ox. A single command spell is woven into its flesh by the local enchanter. Surface. The fisherman’s son takes this and journeys deep into the aboleth’s domain, ties the dead ox to a rope, and shoves it overboard with a strength potion to aid him. Then, he waits. The aboleth surfaces at nightfall, and its body dwarfs the boat many times over. The spell was laughable but the ox offered a meal it had never sampled in its long, long life. So they two will have an audience. The fisherman’s son acknowledges the greatness of the aboleth and that he has reason to believe his father and crewmen are enslaved below. The aboleth, identifying these people by thought, confirms. And the fisherman’s son offers himself in pact to be the aboleth’s eyes inland, bringing experience and tribute well beyond the sea if the aboleth will return those it's taken. The aboleth laughs at the idea of exchanging several servants for one, and asks why it is the son values himself so highly. The fisherman’s son tells the aboleth that within the sea, there are none wiser than it. But the world is larger still, and with all those many millenia of memory there is little novelty left in it. Seeking wonders unknown to any other aboleth, broadening its understanding, must surely be worth something against infinity. The aboleth considers and agrees but only if the fisherman’s son finds replacements for every slave surrendered. Which he does. By the time the warlock joins an adventuring party he has already given others to the aboleth, now ostensibly fulfilling the second part of his pact by finding inland novelties. He actually wants to become powerful enough to slay his patron at this point to free everyone. Added complications tie to the transformations and psychic domination of aboleth victims. For this concept, I realized that I had three ocean-themed warlocks and wanted to be very careful to ensure each had a distinct vibe. Great Old One covers deep sea, mystery, and tentacles. Sea Hag is closer to shore and has haunted vibes. I decided to make Fathomless draw from fairy tales, fishing stories, and the idea of a massive sea monster. I swear that any similarity between this seafaring half-orc warlock and another seafaring half-orc warlock is 100% coincidental lol. I knew this guy would be my physically largest and most traditionally masculine warlock, and when I was thinking about race options it struck me that there's a lot of narrative opportunity if his father was human and his mother was an orc—especially given the tradition of passing knowledge from parent to eldest child. I like the idea of a mainly human and orc fishing village.

HEXBLADE (GIFT OF THE WORLD EATER): The sword is made of arcane shadow that never falters, never fades. Its blade is a fang large enough to split the sun and small enough to pierce the veil of sleep. It slipped from the mouth of Dendar the Night Serpent—fated to someday escape her prison and end the Forgotten Realms as we know them. The devourer of nightmares whose coils shatter worlds, a primordial who threads her way through the roots of Yggdrasil. She lost her tooth while feeding where the Fugue Plane meets the Shadowfell, and it took upon characteristics of the last dreamer it touched. Its voice is the voice of the umbral-self—every feeling, thought, and urge the person wants least to acknowledge. That this tooth was fashioned into a blade is according to the will of its owner. The dreamer herself was an acolyte of Ubtao the Maze-Maker, Chult’s deity who once betrayed the primordials to trap Dendar. This dreamer has spent her entire life studying to become a Mazewalker priest. This involved a huge amount of historical study, prayer, ritual memorization, etcetera—all while Ubtao himself remained silent. This was not due to inability but because the impositions of mortals left him weary. Meanwhile, one of the other acolytes was a yuan-ti pureblood who’d found a home in the dreamer’s community. He’d taken up the faith of Ubtao freely, in spite of his own history. The dreamer received Dendar’s fang some time before this yuan-ti received his title as Mazewalker, and the blade incited all of the dreamer’s repressed jealousy. She challenged the newly appointed cleric to a duel with her blade but was stopped by a more established priest. She was then sent away to learn the shape of her own maze properly. Patron isn't actually Dendar here, but the repressed aspects of the warlock herself. I figured if the Shadowfell is intrinsic to Hexblades now, I didn't want to treat the Raven Queen as the only option. I did some research on Aztec traditional clothes--this isn't an accurate depiction by any stretch but I tried to evoke winged serpent imagery since there's relevance for Dendar and tried to bear in mind materials, colors, and patterns somewhat. Ubtao also has a lore aspect about splitting off his own personal shadow (stolen by Shar) so figure there's a narrative opportunity for mirroring there too.

GENIE (DJINN): A djinn is enslaved by a powerful wizard for many centuries. An earth genasi born from dao is the one to break him free, with no demands of his own. The djinn puts on a front of superiority but claims he will need sufficient display of wealth and power if his reputation is to be salvaged. The only solution is for him to amass a trove worthy of his return. He would pact with his liberator and grant a sliver of his power in return for aid in such an endeavor. The genasi is extremely skeptical but agrees. It comes out later that the djinn doesn’t actually think anyone missed him, is convinced he’ll be seen as weak and contemptible for being captured, has no doubt his servants have fled or died while his estate is in tatters, and is convinced he will carry the shame of enslavement with him until he dies. He’s terrified to go home, believes that no one looked for or tried to help him, and is essentially still hiding in the prison of his lamp because it’s all he’s known for so long and he's afraid he doesn't know how to be free anymore. By contrast, the genasi’s father abducted and bedded his noble human mother to display power to other dao. She and the resulting child were subsequently banished to mine gems and precious metals—with the son specifically being seen as valuable for his earth manipulation. A dao would never lift a finger to find wealth, but genasi are not dao. The genasi and his mother were eventually freed and returned home via adventurers paid by her family. While both mother and son were welcomed with open arms, the mother’s way of coping was to try and pretend the experience never happened and ignore the child reminding her otherwise. The genasi was left furious and feeling betrayed, left home when he came of age to pursue his own fortune and define himself beyond the shadow of his parents. He actually succeeds through his mining capabilities, but money can't not erase the trauma and he starts to get scared of becoming his father. Adventuring is what he takes up instead to emulate his rescuers and say he's helping people. There's still worry because he isn’t sure if he's only protecting others to make himself feel better though. The genasi shares his wealth with the djinn as part of an attempt to prove himself above greed despite claiming disdain for the djinn’s materialism and arrogance. The djinn continues providing power in return across the adventure from his lamp. The djinn and genasi eventually realize they’re both kind of fucked up, and at some point of getting to know each other become friends. Wanted to do earth vs sky themes between the two (a ton of freedom of movement between the pact and genasi abilities), drew from descriptions for both dao and djinn respectively, and tried to go for visually distinct visuals that can look nice together.

YUGOLOTH FIEND (BAERNALOTH): If you ask them, baernaloths are the hand that moves the cosmos. Eldest of all fiends—they sparked the war between law and chaos. They brought low the angels that would be devils. They gave life to fiends of all alignments. But baernaloths, like all yugoloths, have no qualms with lying either. The baernaloth is a gaunt, infected, disproportionate, humanoid creature. Its head resembles an emaciated horse crowned in horns. Baernaloths feel no emotion and no social connection. If there is meaning to their lives, it comes through the myriad ways they spread destruction across the universe. What was made is unmade by their hands. What lives will die by their decree. There is no hope, mercy, or possibility to be found in a baernaloth. They are practiced in torture, deception, and murder because the associated pain is fundamentally beyond their capacity. Existence is a meaningless, obsolete thing and they are the instruments to dismantle it. They can mask their lack of feeling through performance, but it is just that—a performance. Baernaloths make no preference between consuming fine cuisine and rotten meat, but may feign enjoyment of either to provoke a reaction in someone else. They fundamentally are not equipped for caring or morals, and while their abilities rival that of evil demigods every choice they make (including combat itself) is designed to manipulate others. They come from the Gray Wastes, and are neither lawful nor chaotic in nature. The specific baernaloth pacted with here articulates his sadism as something resembling curiosity. There is something in other creatures that mourns, that clings, that treasures, that fears and struggles. This instinct strives to preserve itself against harm more even than endings. There is, however, a point in prolonged torture when the soul surrenders hope entirely as a final attempt to shield itself. It isn’t the same as what the baernaloth knows, but the numbness and indifference bear some resemblance and it’s the closest he can get to connection. The warlock in this case is a woman whose town worshipped Xammux, god of knowledge independent of morality. Any act of cruelty or torment was permissible so long as it offered previously unknown information. Not all experiments conducted there were motivated by sadism. Not all would have been considered immoral by the broader population. Some were. This town is destroyed by paladins of Tyr seduced by Bane. They glory in the death of their targets, believing they extinguish evil for a greater good. They are convinced that profane knowledge is something that can be buried and unlearned. The warlock only survives by hiding, and she is driven to rage by both by the loss of knowledge and the loss of everyone she knew and cared for. She seeks and pacts with the baernaloth in revenge, to punish those responsible. The baernaloth, knowing her to be faithful to Xammux, sees himself as a teacher and has enabled her toward slaying paladins in ways that serve Xammux. Their deaths must always provide an opportunity to learn. The baernaloth sees harming the self, harming others, repeating acts versus new acts, predicted outcomes and unpredicted outcomes, as being largely the same in the end—but he’s inviting the warlock to explore what they offer to her, and what distinctions do or don’t exist in destruction. If there is any such thing as moral high ground at all. The warlock here is determining her own identity in the shadow of god and fiend together, and she can either forge herself in their images or she can set herself apart by rejecting them. She is very evil-inclined, but in a do-evil-unto-evil way. With the right party she could be sparked toward embracing or rejecting her worst impulses, but this probably ends at best in bittersweetness and at worst in horror and tragedy. I wanted this warlock to have Blair Witch vibes, and given baernaloth designs I decided a similarly muted palette made sense for her. Superficially prim but with hints of violence under the surface, very dead feeling.

UNDYING (KYUSS): Kyuss was once a mortal necromancer of great renown, whose deeds came wreathed in prophecy. He gathered for himself a cult to defy death itself. Kyuss innovated spells casting their subjects beyond the limits of mortality—consciousness divided amid countless worms animating flesh. So great did his power grow that he took a path toward godhood (or something greater, something worse) and sacrificed his entire following at that altar. Transformed by the ritual, Kyuss's role now is the Worm That Walks. Those innumerable tiny lives composing his own are enough to blot out the stars. He is beyond anything that can be destroyed. The warlock who pacts with him is a goblin who found herself the sole survivor of her clan against a troop of adventurers. Without the others at her back she is left cripplingly aware of the fragility of her own life, and the limits of her own abilities. She’s always been a runt but even the booyaghs and warriors towering over her were nothing in the end themselves. So the goblin pretends gratitude toward the adventurers, and they let her tag along (not like an equal but a pet to be condescended to) until the day she learns of and makes contact with Kyuss. Like Kyuss himself, the goblin slays those around her for the promise of immortality. But in the aftermath she finds herself alone with her patron, with more blood needed to build her strength. She doesn’t kill the next adventurers she meets but offers her allegiance genuinely as a warlock, demanding to be treated as an equal. When they try to get to know her, the goblin has to reflect on her own fear and mistrust toward others along with whether she’s willing to risk guaranteed safety to connect with anyone. Probably there’s some examination of loneliness and fear between her and Kyuss. I think the warlock realizes over time that Kyuss’s existence is pretty miserable, and it might be better not to follow in his footsteps. First, worth mentioning that everything I found about undying warlock pact versus undead warlock pact 1) said undying is mechanically terrible 2) struggled to differentiate the two tonally. What I gathered after WAY too much investigating was that undying = 'I will become unkillable' while undead is about occupying the space between life and death specifically. And guys, holy shit was it hard to pick a patron for undying that wasn't a lich/vampire/mummy that had specific ties to regeneration or being indestructible. Also still spooky. I wanted a smallfolk warlock, and decided going with a goblin who struggles with feeling like vulnerable canon fodder would give a lot of opportunities for growth. I think the idea of her exploring the worth of life as a whole (in all its fragility) while also gaining power has a lot of cool possibilities. I forbade myself from going green again here because it would be excessive. Kept the scheme more natural and utilitarian otherwise. You know this goblin is a protagonist because she got that white anime hair. How many goblins with white anime hair have you seen? Not enough.

FEY (SEA HAG): The sea hag looks like a drowned and bloated corpse. Seaweed-like hair and patches of peeling scales. Rows of teeth like a hagfish because the jokes write themselves. Her proportions are wrong—there are too many bones in some places and not enough in others. Her eyes are dark and flat like a shark’s. It's worth knowing that sea hags in particular not only loathe beautiful things—they seek to deface them at any opportunity. The warlock in this story is a half-elf who was once very handsome, wed to a woman falling to disease. He made a deal with the hag to save his bride, but in exchange the hag had liberty to disfigure him to her satisfaction. And she did. The wife he did this for could no longer bear to look at him, but wouldn't admit this lest she be a horrible person. When another man approached she became enamored and began an affair. The wife simultaneously grew colder and crueler to her own husband. Other people in town clearly knew, but didn't tell him to spare their own discomfort. So the hag finds her victim isolated and desperately miserable, pretends at pity, then gives him an ornate shell. If he crushes this, she’ll initiate a pact with him and he will have the most wondrous power at his disposal until the end of his natural life. Compensation for the mess. The man is repulsed and tells her off, but keeps the shell. He later finds his wife in their shared bed with her new lover, and in the ensuing confrontation she turns all of her guilt, frustration, and sense of being held back into rage—lashing out at her husband. He breaks the shell. His fury and anguish combine with an influx of magic from the pact, and he levels the town. The warlock discovers shortly after that he can’t actually kill himself either, since the pact lasts until the end of his natural life. Unnatural causes can no longer kill him. He has to live with himself. But… he does still have that pact after all. For arc bits, the guy might be able to say that he didn’t have control over his magic—but he did want everyone dead in that instant. Not just his wife or her lover but every person who shunned him, everybody who knew and bit their tongue, every person who went on to treat him like something dirty. I originally didn't plan to make three ocean warlocks here, but I kept seeing people comment on how sea hags are supposed to be the ugliest hags only for the descriptions to be standard. I felt a moral responsibility to conceptualize the ugliest and most horrific looking hag I could. Drowned corpses are upsetting and seemed like a no-brainer for some of that. I kept hag-green in the warlock's color palette but tried to tie to driftwood and seaweed to differentiate from Great Old One and Fathomless. There is a face design under the bandages but I think keeping him covered gives more room to imagine the extent of disfigurement. I wanted this guy to feel like he's been physically and mentally destroyed just by looking at him. He has stopped trying to take care of himself in any capacity.

FEY (VERENESTRA): The warlock is a farm woman whose husband died due to the machinations of a hag. She's heartbroken and enraged, but doesn’t believe herself strong or clever enough alone to take revenge properly. She knows enough of hags and fey to decide it would be better to find herself an ally that understands the target. She seeks archfey Verenestra the vain and beautiful. Verenestra has abandoned countless lovers over her life without a thought to be spared. Being met with the rage of a supplicant seeking aid is new. Verenestra asks the woman if her husband had been very beautiful. This is met with a snort and the claim that her husband was plain as plain could be. Knobby elbows, bony face, crooked teeth. But he was beautiful to her. Verenestra mentions how she’s been serenaded and worshiped by her own lovers—sometimes very sweetly. She asks if it was the same. The farm woman replies that her husband had no knack for such things, but he’d rub her feet after a hard day and made her laugh herself sick more than once. There was no one kinder or gentler than him. Verenestra asks why go through such trouble for a man already dead when she could simply find another? Hags are a terrible bother, and her husband is lost already. The woman says that it shouldn’t have happened to him, or to her. She won’t see it happen to anyone else. Verenestra doesn’t quite get it but is intrigued and agrees because she thinks there’s an interesting tale in the mundanity of it all. She and the woman pact, becoming companions on the journey ahead. No romance for either of them. The farm woman processes her grief, but also there’s room for both her and Verenestra to wonder at each other’s lives and develop empathy/connection for each other. Friendship development between the two, some examination of beauty and relationships to other people, the concept of irreplaceable things. For fun, knowing that Verenestra is 4’6’’ and barely wears clothes—warlock should be fairly tall and broad while dressing with remarkable practicality. Both the farm woman and Verenestra should undergo character development for the better, and both have their share of faults and virtues. Both are wise when it comes to different things. Possibly touch on the Prince of Frost (Verenestra’s brother who fell into rage and cruelty that persists because a woman he wanted loves someone else), with how they both understand that behavior. I tried to keep largely in-line with Verenestra's descriptions while giving her a distinct look, and tried to keep both characters tied to different aspects of nature. The warlock is more practical and has harvest colors/light hair versus Verenestra having otherworldly 'immune to staining' fey garments and dark hair. Autumn versus spring vibes.

DEVIL FIEND (ERINYS): This is another one of my Baldur’s Gate 3 characters, and likewise a tiefling. From childhood the warlock had it enforced by those around her that being of fiendish blood, she was an inherently wicked person. Her parents tried their best to teach her otherwise but people were just as awful to them. They couldn’t run a shop, join a faith, participate in local events. And if an unrelated terrible thing happened, there was a non-zero chance they’d be scapegoats. When her father was beaten and the family business vandalized beyond repair, the warlock decided to embrace what everyone accused her of being and pacted with a devil. She slew the people targeting her parents, but they were absolutely horrified by her pact and by her actions. The culprits hadn’t committed murder after all. And hearing from her that she’d done it for them—the warlock’s parents were horrified and distraught. So she left. She uses her pact in service to herself now and argues that it’s ridiculous, thankless business to stick your neck out for others. Her patron prefers to enable her selfishness, her anger, her sense of injustice, and her belief that no one else is on her side. The devil doesn’t seek to inspire fear because it would be counterproductive in the warlock’s fall and corruption. “No one is with you except for me.” This warlock I think will examine her relationship with selfishness versus selflessness, helplessness versus power, who she is or isn’t willing to make herself through choices through choices, and the worth of mortal lives. I want her to have fire motifs and to lean into more traditionally infernal aesthetics without them being the only thing to her. She's the most traditional pact on the surface but things get psychologically complicated when you look closer. I also wanted this character to be visually very distinct from Great Old One as a tiefling lady warlock.

DEMON FIEND (JUIBLEX): This warlock is a common-born male drow from the slums of Menzoberranzan. He was intended simply to be eldest but became the disappointing only child when his mother experienced complications during childbirth. The family traded in mushrooms through a combination of foraging and cultivation—covering food, medicines, and poisons. It was practical that, while worship was exclusive to Lolth, there was respect for Zuggtmoy and Juiblex given their influence in the Underdark. When disease swept the Braeryn, Menzoberranzan watched on indifferent at the culling of undesirables. Attempts to heal were in vain and the body count became so obscene that the warlock was forced to flee home alone for survival. During a nervous breakdown trying to survive alone outside the city, he pacts with Juiblex for his ties to pestilence—the strongest force he knows. Sacrilegious for a Lolth worshipper, but he feels himself so far beneath her notice it makes no difference. And Juiblex, infection from the wound of the Elemental Chaos, accepts. This warlock is a walking agent of plague and oozes. He's already convinced that he will die, and die horribly. He hasn’t had hope for a better life before and can’t quite wrap his head around what that would even look like. He could be encouraged to break his pact and try to build a future with the right party. In terms of design I wanted this guy to feel striking but not luxury since he's a bit of a mess. Walking biohazard vibes, glasses partly because sunlight sensitivity and partly to evoke plague doctors. Juiblex is basically a shifting pile of hot sentient tar with red eyes, and red eyes are common in Lolth-sworn drow so I played into both.

UNDEAD (LICH): The lich patron was a powerful Imaskari wizard in life, but that was long ago. As a young man he learned terror of death in witnessing the fall of his empire. This meant the loss of not only his family but his community, its buildings, its technology, its culture. Faced with such overwhelming impermanence he spent the rest of his life building power in secret with the goal of escaping mortality. Achieving undeath, the lich then focused on making himself as obscure as he could—consuming only what souls were necessary to sustain himself and blotting his very name from history to avoid enemies. He catalogued and maintained as much as he could of Imaskar in his lair only to be forced to flee by a group of adventurers. (Theft doesn’t count if the owner is undead, apparently.) Left without material properties to ground him, the lich is terrified to find he’s not only forgetting details—he doesn’t remember what it felt like to be alive much at all. He no longer knows who he is. He’s been in seclusion for ages trying to hold onto something lost. There’s nowhere he belongs and no one he belongs with. The warock in this case is a quiet scholar who craves power, knowledge, and renown after a lifetime of going without. The scholar comes from a large family where he was expected to keep his head down and his mouth shut—only being known in relation to those around him. He’s approached by the lich with an offer of magic, information, and wealth in exchange for aid. The lich wants his stolen artifacts recovered and his identity restored. The warlock is building a reputation for himself that’s divorced from his own life and history—he wants to leave a mark on the world that will never be forgotten. For good or ill. The lich sinks deeper into grief over the course of his story and needs to finally come to terms with the ephemeral nature of all things along with his own death. The warlock changes for worse over his own story and becomes either a token evil party member or someone who actively needs to be stopped in contrast with the lich patron becoming more human and sympathetic. Cool possibilities if the party encounters Deep Imaskar and none of it feels like home to the lich anymore either. I designed the warlock with a lot of red-violets partly because one of the descriptions I found of Imaskar referenced purple stone being common to the architecture and it seemed like a fun reference, partly because I wanted him to feel a little ostentatious, partly because I had to do a segue between the color scheme from demon pact into celestial pact.

CELESTIAL (PLANETAR): An aasimar is captured by demons and falls upon being forced to kill not only other aasimar, but devils to survive. This act answers the corruption of Zariel by infernal forces. The aasimar had previously been guided by his celestial mother, but she ceased contact at his corruption. At the direction of Ilmater, a planetar is sent instead to help this aasimar escape with the suggestion of forming a pact. The planetar pacts as directed (reluctantly) and gets the aasimar to safety, but the aasimar was in no state to continue fighting for the cause of good for a while. After being spurned from most places due to fallen status, he finds shelter at a temple of Ilmater while trying to come to terms with trauma, survivor’s guilt, and abandonment issues. Repressed anger on his own behalf is too deeply buried to touch yet. The planetar observes all of this. One day an influx of refugees pours in as the result of nearby demonic incursion, and the aasimar decides to attempt to aid the mortals there through his pact despite being terrified. He at least knows what that kind of conflict entails, but isn’t sure whether joining is for himself or others. The planetar decides it’s a good act either way and lends aid freely. The aasimar becomes an adventurer following the battle but it’s unclear whether this is maladaptive coping (if he’s in the middle of combat he’s not thinking about ‘what if’s) or actual healing. The planetar needs to learn more about empathy, moral complication, and the value of life itself outside being an instrument of judgment. The aasimar needs to come to terms with self-worth, finding a sense of belonging in the world outside being an instrument of war, and rediscovering any kind of safety. The aasimar also needs to come to terms with the idea that his mother’s love was contingent upon his purity, and she may not be able to love him the way he wishes she would. I've been fucking around with aasimar and celestial variants similar to tiefling variants because I think there's untapped opportunity for them to look a bit alien in their own ways, particularly with distinct facial structures. I actually had this aasimar design mostly ready before doing the project and wanted to give him a color scheme tied to dusk. Ilmater seems like the most consistently good deity of good aligned deities and with his mercy motifs also has ties to twilight clerics. I struggled SO MUCH picking the celestial patron because during my research there was a lot of 'this group won't associate with mortals', 'this one won't associate with anyone who isn't morally pure', 'this one is a straight up animal'--and I wanted to go with at least some classical angel vibes. I also wanted to do something with the premise 'this warlock did some terrible things but is trying to get better, the patron is good aligned but fixates on purity' as conflict to avoid celestials being the 'easy' pact if that makes sense. My understanding is that most planetars are bald and green but I rejected that since planetars tied to particular gods vary sometimes and I wanted a silvery-brown bird angel. Brown in both warlock and patron was because I wanted to ground in nature at least a little. Dusk visuals I wanted to feel like the last moments of sunset while the planetar feels a little like a rising moon.

Not included:

- A warlock using mainly the color yellow. - A warlock that is even more red. - Great Old One pact with Karsus, which is a stupidly cool option imo but one I have ideas about for other stories. - The lich patron design. Guy seems like a buddy but I got tired. - Making up pacts for the horrendously neutral planes, as in Mechanus and Limbo. For real it bothers the hell out of me that these aren't just as hardcore as positive and negative planes.

As a whole, I just really wanted to explore a range of positive and negative relationships across many different pact types. I'm not of the mind that the relationships between clerics and gods are inherently healthy while warlocks and patrons are inherently unhealthy. Versatility in terms of what relationships look like across pacts was something I wanted to cover too. I didn't want it to be a situation where you could look at any given pact and just assume what the relationship is. Ex. Fey you might have an adventure between friends but you also might get a hag shaped disaster. If you got here lmao thank you for checking this out, hope this was fun to read for you like it was fun to make for me. Do you have any ideas for pacts you would like to see?

[sethlozano]

A TAROT OF LOVE -

The Magician (Tepiltzin) - it can be interpreted here that the magician symbolizes the ability to act as a go-between between the world above and the contemporary, human world. as above, so below. the Magician is the representation of pure willpower. With the power of the elements and the suits, he takes the potential innate in the fool and molds it into being with the power of desire. He is the connecting force between heaven and earth, for he understands the meaning behind the words "as above so below" - that mind and world are only reflections of one another. Remember that you are powerful, create your inner world, and the outer will follow. Upright: willpower, desire, creation, manifestation Reversed: trickery, illusions, out of touch

Death (yurena who was resurrected & seth who was reborn a liche) - the Death card signals that one major phase in your life is ending, and a new one is going to start. You just need to close one door, so the new one will open. The past needs to be placed behind you, so you can focus your energy on what is ahead of you. the old version of you needs to ‘die’ to allow the new you to be created. This can be a scary time for you because you may be unsure of what will happen in the future. Even if you are scared, you should welcome the change because you are opening the door to new life events. Upright: end of cycle, beginnings, change, metamorphosis Reversed: fear of change, holding on, stagnation, decay

The Lovers (when seth allowed yurena to sacrifice herself) - an interpretation behind the lovers card is the concept of choice - a choice between things that are opposing and mutually exclusive. This could be a dilemma that you need to think about carefully and make the best decision for your situation. A break in communication could be another possible interpretation. The foundation for your relationships may be cut off, creating an imbalance between you and your partner or loved ones. The unity normally present within the card has become lopsided. Upright: partnerships, duality, union Reversed: loss of balance, one-sidedness, disharmony

Judgement (when yurena chose to betray the asphodel and make the ultimate sacrifice) - The traditional Judgement meaning focuses on the moment when we reflect and evaluate ourselves and our actions. It is through self-reflection that we can have a clearer and objective understanding about where we are now, and what we need to do in order to grow as humans. The Judgement card appearing in a reading signifies that you are coming close to this significant point in your life where you must start to evaluate yourself. To see this card can also indicate that you are in a period of awakening, brought on by the act of self-reflection. You now have a clearer idea of what you need to change and how you need to be true yourself and your needs. This can mean making small changes to your daily life or making huge changes that not only affect you but the people close to you. Upright: reflection, reckoning, awakening Reversed: lack of self awareness, doubt, self loathing

The Hanged Man (Yurena) - The hanged man understands that his position is a sacrifice that he needed to make in order to progress forward - whether as repentance for past wrongdoings, or a calculated step backward to recalculate his path onward. This time he spends here will not be wasted, he does this as part of his progression forward. His upside down state can also symbolize the feeling of those that walk a spiritual path, for they see the world differently. Where there are others that do not understand the need to sacrifice, you see it differently. This is a natural course of action for you as you walk the path alone. Upright: sacrifice, release, martyrdom Reversed: stalling, needless sacrifice, fear of sacrifice

[averyangrytissuebox]

The issues with Vecna: Eye of Ruin are foundational because they got Vecna himself wrong

If you either didn't know about this book or only vaguely looked at it because it is part of the content run that Wotc is pumping out before dnd 6e comes out soon, I can't blame you. A brief scan of *shudders* reddit shows that the it wasn't very well recieved by the die hard fans of r/dndnext and I've seen very little buzz about it in the general dnd zeitgheist. While I have lots to say about why this is probably due to lack of trust in Wotc after the OGL, official adventures being underwhelming and the community being fractured as all fuck, but I want to focus on one very specific thing to show what is wrong with the adventure: Vecna's statblock himself.

Here it is. If you downloaded the Vecna dossier a couple of years back, this will look very familiar and it isn't abundantly obvious where this goes wrong so I want to break it down.

The first is a flavour fail. Vecna in the lore is the archlich supreme, formerly a king and lich who ascended to godhood. Once considered one of the strongest liches to dwell in the Greyhawks setting, he has grown to be a scourge of the whole multiverse. An unmatched sorcerer and epic BBEG worthy foe (just ask Matt Mercer). Iconic to his appearance are four things: His eye and hand which were all that is left after he was betrayed by Kas, his right hand man. Just as synonymous to his appearance is the sword of Kas itself, the only blade capable of permanently destroying the hand and eye. Finally, Vecna created the most profane tome of them all, the book of Vile Darkness.

With all that established, there are some immediate flavour issues with this. Firstly, Vecna is not particularly intelligent as far as high level villains go. At 22, he is dumber than Auril (24), Zariel (26), Acererak (27), the demon lords and Manshoon (23), the guy who is well known for being paranoid enough that he created clones that turned on him. Notable wise guy. He isn't even the most intelligent character in his own book because Kas and Tasha are intelligence 23. Truly a bizarre decision for one of the greatest liches of all time.

Secondly, he isn't actually that good of a spellcaster. He is an innate caster and not a wizard for ease of use I assume but as far as spellcasters concern, he is lacking a lot of fire power that a CR 26 god should have. He doesn't have any 9th level spells, making him an inferior wizard to both Acererak and the humble CR 12 archmage. He doesn't have counterspell, instead having a non spell version (But I will come back to this later) and he doesn't have shield. He is not so sturdy that he shouldn't have it and there is no in lore reason why he doesn't have basic spell casting.

Finally, there is no mention of his eye or hand in the campaign itself. The blade of Kas gets an honorary "However, if the characters wish to find it and use it against the warlord, you might place the artifact somewhere in this adventure for them to find" in the introduction and can be acquired at the very end on an extremely high roll. The book of Vile Darkness is buried in his chest which is very cool though, I will admit.

The second and arguably bigger issue with the statblock is that it is bad to fight and lies to the DM because it is the wrong CR. Actual CR is calculated by averaging defensive CR (which is effective hit points and armour class) and offensive CR (damage dealt per round). So lets fact check those CRs to confirm the maths. [A quick side note before we continue, the closest approximation of Flight of the Damned is a dragon's breath weapon which assumes it hits two targets for offensive CR].

Offensive CR = 2(7+9+9) [From two attacks with afterthought] + 96 [Rotten Fate] + 10 + 10 + 10 [For all three reactions] + 10 [Vile teleport used offensively] = 186 dpr.

A very impressive but decidedly not CR 26. In fact, his offensive CR is only 23. Vecna's attack bonuses are higher than average which can increase CR by 1 but not that much. Also he never wants to cast a spell unless he has to because it is a massive damage loss on Vecna

Calculating Defensive CR is trickier. Effective health is calculated by taking his actual health 272 and multiplying it by 1.25 because he has immunities to poison and non magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage. Then we add 30 to that total for each legendary resistence. (272 x 1.25) + 150 = 490 which is CR 22. Averaging both of them gives you 22.5

The issue with this is twofold: It means the DM doesn't actually know how strong Vecna is and if they take it at face value, they might nerf them or pull punches when they shouldn't making the fight feel cheap. The second and much bigger one is that Vecna's defensive tools allow him to dispatch a party of spellcasters with ease because of 5 legendary resistance, impressive saves and dread counterspell which cannot be countered but he gets easily overwhelmed by any martial. This is further compounded by the fact that players win the encounter by reducing him to 50hp or less so two fairly optimised martials (e.g. took the relevant combat feat and have maxed out their main stat) can kill him on the first turn, ignoring magical weapons which this adventure has a lot of. This makes the fight swingy and not fun because the martials get to party like there is no tomorrow but if you are a full caster, you do not get to participate.

Overall, the stat block is a failure of flavour and balance, feeling like it was thrown together after the fact because they needed Vecna here. Ultimately, Vecna: Eye of Ruin is less about Vecna and more about going through the most iconic places in d&d's history to get the rod of seven parts, which is perfectly fine but then why put Vecna on the cover when he isn't even the main villain. It feels like they shoved Vecna into this book because recognisability from stranger things and Vox Machina rather than him being an integral part of the adventure and that is reflected in the stat block.

I have a lot more to say about d&d balance, official adventure design and homebrew fixes including how to make a Vecna that doesn't suck but this post is long enough as is so maybe another time

[banefulbenevolence]

Rumor Has It

A thread for @shadovan

Neverwinter. A despicable place for a Baldurian like Enver to end up. Every bit of infrastructure was being internally criticized as he maneuvered through the repulsive crowd.

The only thing this city had on Baldur's Gate was a rather interesting rumor, one that caught his attention and held it until he finally broke down and took a portal to the so called Jewel of the North. Prodding a few of the locals confirmed the rumors: they believed a lich lived in the haunted mountains to the north. None seemed at all bothered by this, of course, and Enver refused to believe it until he investigated himself.

The rumors suggest the lich was a peddler of the odd potion and tincture, something the locals found valuable, so his first stop was the Apothecary that seemed to be the hub of the stories. The pungent smell greeted him as he entered and he barely contained a grimace. Between the ingredients and the potions brewing in the back it was an assault on the senses. "I'm looking for a lich." Enver declares loud enough for the entirety of the store to overhear. Sharp, calculating eyes quickly scan over the patrons and workers nervous reaction to such a bold statement, following the furtive glances to find the person they were all avoiding looking at.