#is it even possible to end a dnd campaign without crying???

[varjopeura]

.

[radicalreliablerandomness]

Podcast Rec Masterpost

I've been asked a couple times for podcast recommendations so I thought I'd post a compilation of some shows and a bit of info about them. Most shows I talk about are tagged below (I ran out of tags) so you can look through fan content as well if you're not one to care about spoilers. My asks are still open for personalized recs if you send me some others that you've listened to just because I love you, yes that's right! You. The person reading this right now!

Here goes!

Dungeons And Daddies *not a BDSM podcast

This show is a dnd actual play podcast. The first season is about four dads from our world lost in the Forgotten Realms in search of their lost sons. It’s a comedy but as with all comedies, you will cry by the end of it. It's super easy to get into with great chemistry between all the cast players and the dm, no prior knowledge of dnd is necessary. They do invoke slight horror sometimes so do keep an eye out for content warnings. Season 1 has 68.5 episodes along with bonus content and a mini campaign in between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 is currently ongoing. Transcripts available.

The Bright Sessions

This is a science fiction podcast. The premise is a collection of clinical recordings of superpowered people's therapy sessions. The plot gets more interesting and convoluted as you get further in. Incredible voice acting filled with emotion. Does have some heavier discussions so be on the lookout for content warnings. It has 7 seasons (the last two are technically not part of the first five seasons' plot) and is completed. Transcripts available.

Hello From the Hallowoods

A post-apocalyptic fiction podcast. A beautifully written and preformed podcast that explores identity, religion, and other themes in vignettes throughout this haunted world narrated by an omniscient being. Some heavier topics are included so check the content warning before each episode. Seasons 1 and 2 are completed and season 3 will be done soon. Transcripts available.

The Magnus Archives

A horror fiction podcast. A well written chronological story told through anthology which seem to be tape recordings from a paranormal investigation institute. Incredible writing and actors that really bring it to life. This is horror so make sure to check the content warnings. The show is completed at 5 seasons. Transcripts available.

Neighbourly

Another horror fiction podcast! An interesting look into all the houses on Little Street and their peculiarities. Some more peculiar than others. The podcast is absolutely delightful with a horribly fun narrator. I would suggest checking the content warnings as some episodes are more intense than others. The show has 2 completed seasons. Transcripts available.

The Fall of the House of Sunshine

A musical mystery fiction podcast. The first season is about an investigation on the murder of a beloved host of a children's tooth-themed show. That's all I can say without spoilers. There are 3 incredible seasons along with short stories in between each season. Transcripts available until halfway through season 2.

Welcome to Nightvale

Possibly the most well known science fiction podcast, it really speaks for itself but I'll do my spiel anyways. Recorded as snippets of a daily radio broadcast, the show details the weird goings on in this strange desert town of Nightvale. Narrated almost completely by the radio host's smooth voice. It's ongoing and is currently sitting at 233 episodes. Transcripts available.

The Two Princes

A fictional queer romance podcast. It takes place in that special part of fiction that always starts with "once upon a time," it feels like a story book almost. The show is based around two boys meeting in the woods. Spoiler alert: they fall in love. It's just a cute feel good show. The podcast is complete at 3 seasons. Spotify auto-generated transcripts available.

What's the Frequency?

A self described psychedelic noir podcast. It's an absolute blast even if it is a bit hard to follow. Takes place in the 1940s in LA when all radio broadcasts were turned to static. You kind of just have to go with it until you get to the end. Completed at 12 episodes. Transcripts available.

Story Break

A writer's room podcast. The basic concept behind Story Break is 3 Hollywood writers in a room together take a prompt and try to make a story for it in an hour. There are many laughs in this podcast and just all around good humor and vibes. The show is complete at 169 episodes plus two full movie scripts. No transcript.

Who Killed Avril Lavigne

A science fiction podcast. It's about a time traveling pop punk loser and that's all you need to know. It's a podmusical so you'll be getting great nostalgic pop punk type songs along with crying from laughing so hard. Completed at 8 episodes. No transcript.

The Behemoth

A fiction podcast. Based around an unexplainable creature emerging from the ocean and how the world, and one girl in particular, deal with this phenomenon. It is pretty short with the longest episode being about 12 minutes. Completed at 20 episodes. No transcript.

Rude Tales of Magic

A dnd actual play podcast. It is mainly focused on the actual roleplay and story telling as opposed to the actual play. A handful of college students from Polaris University fuck the world up by completing a hazing ritual which in this case is a supposedly demon summoning. Obviously now they need to fix the world. Currently 64 episodes and ongoing. No transcript.

Midnight Burger

A very well written fiction podcast. It’s about a time/space traveling diner where the employees try to help solve a problem every place they land. Think Doctor Who adjacent vibes but with more drama. There is an overarching plot that comes together so look out for that. It has incredible characters that are really nicely fleshed out. You’ll somehow like and hate all of them as much as possible in the best way. Currently has 29 episodes of the main feed and a 9 episode mini-series. Transcript available.

Monstrous Agonies

A fiction podcast. It’s an radio advice segment on a station for “liminal Britain” aka the monstrous world to put it plainly. It’s really chill and comforting. There’s very good advice there and the intermittent ad reads will have you giggling to yourself. Episodes are on the shorter side, averaging about 15 minutes each. It does have some heavier discussions so make sure to check the content warnings. The show is completed at 111 episodes through 3 seasons. Transcripts available.

Desert Skies

A fiction podcast. The voice acting in this one is incredible, it’s the same person the whole time. The show as a whole is also just super well done. The premise is that when you die you show up on a highway and get to this astral pit stop. I’m not going to spoil it anymore you just have to experience it. There is an additional show, Desert Skies FM that's a buddy to this one. I recommend listening to both. Season 1 was completed at 12 episodes. Transcripts available.

Wooden Overcoats

A sitcom dramedy podcast. The show is about two siblings that run a funeral home on an island. It used to be the only one, it isn’t anymore. It has a wacky cast of characters and even wackier plot points. The dialogue can be a little hard to get used to at the beginning but once you get into it it flows easily. The show is completed at 4 seasons. Transcripts available.

Greater Boston

An audio drama podcast. It's set in Boston if you couldn't tell from the title and starts with the death of a man on a rollercoaster. It blends real life with some subtle (and at times not-so-subtle) fantasy elements. It's currently at 4 completed seasons. Transcript available.

Gay Future

A science fiction podcast. In a world where everyone is gay in the future we focus on this one straight kid. Following his journey to destroy the government who are making everyone gay. This is a satire by the way. 1 season completed at 6 episodes. No transcripts.

Death by Dying

A dark comedy podcast. The show follows an obituary writer while he does things that are totally under the jurisdiction of his job. A well written and preformed show. There are a lot of laughs and obviously some heartbreaks as well. Currently 1 completed season with season 2 sitting at 2 episodes for a bit now. Transcript available.

Not Another D&D Podcast

An actual play dnd podcast. This one's more mainstream than my other podcasts so I don't talk about it as much but that doesn't mean it's not incredible. The first campaign is about 3 adventurers off to save the world. Obviously. It can be a bit slow in the beginning but anything past the second half of the first season is incredible. There's humor, drama, love, and much more. The DM is also just incredible. 1 completed season, a couple mini campaigns, and the second season is currently at 43 episodes. No transcripts.

Forgive Me!

A fiction podcast. It starts based around vignettes of confessionals in this small town taken by a new father in the local church. An overarching plot is present but it's generally a feel good, sweet and simple show. They have 2 complete seasons with season 3 currently at 9 episodes. Transcripts available.

Real Housewives of D&D

An actual play dnd podcast. This show is based around the concept of a "Real Housewives..." type show but you don't need to know anything about those to listen to this. It's about 4 reality TV stars thrown into a magical fantasy world with no knowledge of how to get home. There's drama, excitement, danger, and lots more. The first season was just completed at 16 episodes. Transcripts available.

The Silt Verses

A horror fiction podcast. Two people who worship a banned god travel together up a river in a pilgrimage. There is incredible worldbuilding in this show along with acting and sound design. This is horror and a very good one at that so make sure you check content warnings. Season 1 and 2 are completed and season 3 is at 2 episodes so far. Transcripts available.

The Land Whale Murders

A comedy fiction podcast. It takes place in the year 1899 and is about a pair of friends? maybe not, that metaphorically explore the world they're living in. It is a commentary on the world we live in and the problems in it through a hilarious and wacky cast. There are currently 17 episodes between both seasons 1 and 2. Transcripts available.

Elaine's Cooking for the Soul

A post-apocalyptic cooking podcast. The show is about a dentist who makes her way through the fallout of an apocalypse while also making a cooking podcast. It does have depictions of violence, war, and dentistry so check out the content warnings. There are 2 completed seasons. No transcripts.

Fawx and Stallion

A mystery podcast. If you hate Sherlock Holmes you'll love this podcast. Also if you love Sherlock Holmes you'll love this podcast. It's based around the detectives who live across the street from Holmes at 224B Baker street. It's pretty goofy. Season 1 is completed. Transcripts available.

The Amelia Project

A fiction podcast. Follow the shenanigans of this death-faking organization as they take in new clients and hear their stories. It does develop an actual overarching plot later on but every second is fun. Seasons 1-4 have been completed and season 5 is in progress. Transcripts available.

A Voice From Darkness

A horror podcast. It's centered around a radio show hosted by Dr. Malcolm Ryder, Parapsychologist. He helps people who call into his show with supernatural problems, gives PSAs and warnings about strange happenings, and more. Season 1 is completed and season 2 is at 9 episodes. Transcripts available.

Station Arcadia

A dystopian fiction podcast. Formatted through a radio show, it tells the story of a world that's slowly dying. There are vignettes of different characters through different areas of the world. Season 1 is completed at 25 episodes. Transcripts available.

Margaret's Garden

A science fiction podcast. It has two plots running at the same time which keeps you on your toes but makes for an intriguing story line. In one plot line, two agents are sent to investigate the strange happenings of a weird little long abandoned town. Simultaneously, we hear from the past of that town as it catches up to the agents. Completed at 10 episodes. Transcripts available.

Camp Here & There

A horror comedy podcast. It's recorded as a set of daily announcements over a loudspeaker at a totally normal summer camp. The announcements are made by the camp nurse and he's also totally normal. I promise. Make sure to check in with the content warnings as some topics are a little mature or graphic. There are currently 34 episodes. Transcripts available.

Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye

A companion horror podcast. This is actually a bit meta because it is the result of a youtube series. This show is the one the podcast hosts in the series release, it's definitely worth both the watch and the listen though. It's got werewolves and drama. Completed at 10 episodes of video and 10 of the podcast. No transcripts.

I am in Eskew

A horror podcast. It's about a man who's trapped in a city where the buildings always change and the rain never stops. There's a weird monotonous creeping horror in this show that just draws you in. Check for content warnings definitely. Completed at 30 episodes. Transcripts available.

Traveling Light

A comfy cozy fiction podcast. It follows The Traveller on their exploration through space, visiting alien planets and collecting stories to send back to their community. For supporters of the show, it almost functions as a choose-your-own-adventure with choices to vote on and listener submissions. It's made by the same people as Monstrous Agonies so if you enjoyed that, you'd enjoy this and vice versa. There are currently 16 episodes. Transcripts available.

Not yet described but still recommended:

Eeler’s Choice

The Secret of St Kilda

The Endless Ocean

The Department of Variance of Somewhere, Ohio

The Sword & The Stoner

World Gone Wrong: a fictional chat show about friendship at the end of the world

Travelling Light

Waterlogged

[drmaddict]

Dear Diary

Summary: Jason got his hands on (y/n)s diary. Of course, nothing good can come of this... or maybe it can?

Word count: 850

Warnings: angst, but lots of fluff after

Authors note (Warning: looong Authors note):

When I was about 13 or 14, my then best friend tricked me.

She had sent me a link through a chat. It was one of those online fortune-telling sites. Ask a question about your future and I'll give you an answer.

Complete bullshit, of course, but I always found them funny. What do you do when you're 14? You ask if you have a chance with your crush, or possibly that cute guy who's always in guitar class.

What I didn't know was that on the other side, my friend was sitting with one of her friends, laughing her ass off.

They went on and on about it. I always valued my privacy. I was very shy and insecure.

When they made fun of it in front of me, my confidence and trust was broken. It has never really gotten back together since.

The whole thing still weighs on me in my mid-twenties. I never talked about it until now.

Unfortunately, my story didn't have a happy ending, but what are fanfictions for?

I was sitting in the cafeteria, listlessly looking at my food.

The guys were euphorically talking about the next DnD campaign when all of a sudden Jason Carver appeared at our table.

The grin on his face did not mean anything good.

"King and Queen of Freakland."

"Get out of here ball boy." growled Eddie.

"Why so hostile? I've got some good news after all. At least you finally got a chance to get laid. The way I see it, nothing more than languishing has happened yet."

Jason pulled out a small, green book from behind his back. My book. My journal. My chest tightened so violently I should have imploded. I felt sick to my stomach. Stiff as a board, I sat there. I should have knocked it out of his hand, but I was just a useless statue.

He flipped open the book and began reading aloud so loudly that the entire cafeteria could hear.

He strolled through the rows and read out my thoughts. Thoughts I never told anyone.

"He always listens to me. Even when I'm interrupted, which is really all the time, he asks again and listens to me. For someone who likes to talk so much, he's a really good listener."

He flipped a few more pages. I wanted to dissolve.

"I wonder what his lips feel like."

Turning pages.

"His eyes are beautiful. Like chocolate or coffee. He's never been this close to me before."

He put on a stilted sugary-sweet voice.

"And for all of you wondering who it is that turned dear (y/n)'s head - You shouldn't have a crush on Eddie Munson, but of course I'm an idiot who does."

The crowd laughed and silent tears ran down my eyes. Since Jason was still the center of attention, I quickly and silently slipped outside.

I heard Jason groan painfully, but I just kept running.

Now, if I was quick, I could just sign out at the secretary's office and say I was sick. It wouldn't even be a lie. I'd be gone before anybody saw me again.

"(Y/n). (Y/N)!" shouted Eddie from behind me. I heard his shoes hit the linoleum in quick strides. "Now wait."

A hand grabbed mach my shoulder and turned me around. I tried to wriggle away, but alas, Eddie was stronger than he looked.

"Here." He held my journal out to me.

I grabbed it without looking him in the face. I quickly wiped away the tears, but I wasn't fooling anyone.

I felt small and stupid and humiliated. "Thank you.", I whispered in a broken voice.

"Don't cry over this idiot."

I shook my head and tried to turn back around, but he didn't move away from me.

"I hate it when you're miserable."

"It's okay."

"No it's not okay!" He turned my head with his big hands that I practically had to look at him. "I don't want the girl I have a crush on to feel bad. I don't want her to cry."

I looked at him out of wide eyes. What?

"You always listen to me too and you're always nice to everyone and you have beautiful eyes and you smell insanely good. Do you even know that?"

His warm eyes looked at me as gently as I've ever seen him.

"Don't listen to that idiot! He has no right to do something like that, even though he might think he does." He grew quieter and sadness was in his eyes. "I'm sorry he's going off on you like this because of me."

I shook my head. "Eddie... No... Jason goes after everyone when he can, doesn't he?"

I looked down at my feet again. "Are you serious?"

"With every word."

"It doesn't feel real."

He laughed. "Come on we're going to math. Then the harsh reality will have us back.... Besides, I need motivation to go, and it's really always you." He smiled at me. "You look cute when you think... And a little hot how quickly you solve this tangled mess of numbers." He grinned. I blushed.

"You don't have the homework, do you?"

"Well, I was thinking I could possibly copy it off you.... I'd offer you dinner for it too.... Friday at 8?"

"Are you trading math homework for a date right now?", I laughed, still tearful.

"To be honest, the date's free.... You could also kick me in the balls and it would still be standing." He grinned at me, but uncertainty was in his eyes.

"Friday at 8.", I said and pressed my assignments into his hand.

He gave me a tight squeeze. "If I hadn't just broken Jason's jaw, I'd almost have to thank him."

"You broke Jason's jaw?", I asked in shock.

"Edward Munson to the principal's office immediately!", an angry voice rang over the loudspeakers.

He sighed and handed me back my notepad.

"I'll see you around. Don't forget about me while I'm in prison.", he grinned.

Quick as a flash, he pressed a kiss to my cheek. A glow of red settled over his skin.

"See you?"

"See you."

[renon4224]

Find The Word Tag

Tagged By: @gummybugg

My Words:

Smell

Drop

Lip(s)

Snippets:

WIP 2: Fire On Fire (MHA fanfic, background info, Chapters 1 and 2 are out)

“I don’t have Bakugou’s number, and she wouldn’t stop throwing up and gagging and-” Tears pricked her eyes, “I didn’t know what to do, she needed someone other than me. I-I failed.” She bit her lip, a sign of intense resentment.

“Do I? He keeps looking at you like that, it’s a surprise I’m not the only one to notice.” Her voice was sharp, lips tight and eyes narrowed at the quickly fading figure of Katsuki.

WIP 6: In The Woods (Unpublished)

When Milly opened the door she could smell something foul before tripping and landing on someone.

WIP 9: Angel Wings (Unpublished, but I'll try to post chapter one soon. MHA FANFIC)

“You don’t know me, we haven’t even met until six days ago,” Her voice was small, she was scared, she was trying to remember the night she was saved, “You don’t smell like caramel.”

“Actually, he does,” Uraraka piped, wait, how does she know what I smell like?

The messed-up Bakugou let go, The smell of caramel returned, I was being crushed, but it was a soft embrace, I still saw the messed-up Bakugou, but he couldn’t hurt me anymore.

I woke up to feel rather than see Bakugou, my head was on his shoulder, and Uraraka was right, he did smell like caramel.

“I smell like caramel.” I cringed, it was the only thing I could think of, it was the thing that bothered her most.

He was letting me rest on him, my head in the crook of his neck, he really did smell like caramel.

His hair was soaking wet, a drop went down his shirt, “Ow!” I accidentally bit my finger.

Her lips were lightly touching my bare neck, her head tilted into me, but she was crying.

“I’m sorry for causing problems with your friends.” I bit my lip and closed my eyes, expecting Bakugou to leave.

“.......What if the girl I want, doesn’t want me….?” I bit my lip, what if she hates me now?

I bit the inside of my lip, it was just like what I had drawn in therapy, a girl being carried in someone’s arms, they had wings drawn, one was draped across the savior’s back and the other was on fire.

I bit my lip and looked around, was nobody even gonna comment on this, no one gonna tell him to knock it off? 

WIP 12: Darkness (Unpublished)

He let the link drop, inducing more pain in his head, if I kept at this he’d end up with a killer migraine which could distract his driving, so I stopped trying, he could feel exactly how I felt about this whole situation, he knew I hated it.

WIP 17: Blood Is Fun (Chapter one is published, TOH fanfic)

“Uh, no, stop overthinking.” I smoothed her brows with my thumb, a light kiss on the cheek, barely missing her lips.

WIP 23 (Dnd campaign, unpublished. Dm is @fakegingerrights and it's the prequel to Love Letters, my other dndcampaign fanfiction)

“Hmm, a safeword is Dragon, and we drop the act when we’re alone and nobody is listening. We need a game plan, too. Like how to tell them about the ‘joke.’”

“Yeah, I kinda did, didn’t I?” She didn’t notice how tense Caleb was, or that he only had one arm wrapped around her when he used to drop everything to hold her as tight as possible without breaking her ribs.

WIP 25 (Sirius fanfic, unpublished)

“Yes, but,” This time, he sniffed the air, “You smell like a Sirius and a vampire, why?

WIP 26: Spies Can't Fall In Love (Spy x Family fanfic, AGED UP, unpublished)

"Do I smell?" It was so sudden I didn't know he even said something until he started thinking about why I didn't answer.

You'd only be able to smell it if you were very close to him.

He liked how she said his name, the way it came so naturally to her lips, "Why not?" He saw her blush, her eyes were a deep brown, tints of yellow flickered throughout.

WIP 28: Midnight (unpublished)

I awoke to the faces of my Father and our Luna, Ninurta, the smell of blood suffocating. 

If they were searching for a wolf, they'd only smell gross semi-solid water. The wolf went father and farther until I couldn't smell it anymore, so I got out and walked towards the waterfall, munching on a strip of rabbit I had caught yesterday.

I drop all pretenses and ask why he’s here, he tells me that he wanted to pay his respects, he looks like he’s talking about a dead relative.

I'm too tired to do the rest...

My tags: @conquerius37 @fakegingerrights @justanauthorwannabe21 @justanauthor17

My words:

Blood

Death/dead/died

Hope

[lynndoublelegacy]

just a cool dnd meme i saw

Yook so it’s less a meme and more like. a big ol questionare but hey, might as well do it. originally saw it on @/probablyottrpgideas, go check them out

1. Game Master, Player, or both? Why?

Ok so technically I’ve DMed twice but I really don’t find it fun? and don’t ever want to do it again. so. Player. I like building characters and their connections with fellow PCs more than building worlds

2. When did you start roleplaying? How old were you?

oh god, if we’re talking about roleplaying in general? I’ve been doing it basically as long as I can remember. As a kid I would play House, and then once I got older in like 5th grade I actually started making characters and playing out their stories with friends. Google+ is what made me realize this was actually like, a THING, though, and I got into some roleplaying groups there, then on DevaintArt. Dungeons and Dragons is a newer development? I got into it in late 2018 when my sister’s friend invited us to a one-shot, and... well, yea, I got hooked lol

3. What was the first roleplaying book you ever owned?

dude, bold of you to assume I really own any. I don’t have that kind of money and literally only own the Guide to Wildemount, and that was a gift

4. Describe the first game you ever ran or played in.

I mean... it’s not a game but ima describe the one shot, bc my first campaign was a hot mess without a true storyline and I used the same character for it anyway. I played a tiefling bard called Aisling Kai (I didn’t know this was a cliche combo at this point, and I honestly played her like a rogue with a music motif but Whatever) and we were a little group tasked to figure out why the hell anyone who goes into this cave never comes out. So we go in, make our way through the dungeon, fight some frog people (I made one of their ears bleed just by getting a nat 20 on a performance check to play a high f# on flute, that was fun, FWEET), and turns out yep, theres a hill giant down here. We kicked his ass and collapsed the cave on top of us (dw I think we were fine but my memory is a little screwy)

5. What system did you grow up with? / 6. Which system do you play now?

i learned on and currently play dnd 5e. I don’t really know anything else, but I’m debating checking out Vampire of the Masquerade.

7. Longest campaign you’ve run or played in?

That would be my Tal’Dorei campaign group, aka The Fatefallen! Started in the Fall of 2019 and still going to this day, just played our 45th session last week. I play Ilia Liadon, the drow grave cleric, and the only member of our party who has been there for every single session since the beginning.

8. Where did you meet your current gaming group?

...well first I feel the need to mention that I have 3 different groups (2 of them are on hiatus now for pandemic related reasons but! we’re still groups). My first group (with Aisling) was formed slowly over time as friends adopted friends into the group, I think it started as a school club? but that didn’t last long. The other two started from a different school club as well, though one has since branched out into other people as well. 

9. Strategic combat or dramatic plotlines?

I am a roleplayer first and a gamer second. Give me all of the backstories and dramatic plotlines. Don’t get me wrong, I still like combat, but story takes precedent for me.

10. Favorite RPG genre?

I don’t tend to define myself by genre? But I tend to fall into more of a fantasy, at most arcanapunk style. Give me all of the magic, and magic powered tech.

11. Your first character.

I got into her a little bit earlier, but my first character was Aisling, aka Calypso Kai. She was a homebrew subclass bard with a criminal background, who honestly? should’ve been a rogue. I’ve since rebuilt her into an Assassin Rogue/College of Eloguence Bard multiclasser, but this iteration was like. Baby her, baby me new to dnd, I did not know what I was doing. She tried to be edgy, but my mom energy came through HARD and she just. Never really had a set characterization. She deserves better and I plan on playing her better sometime in the future.

12. Your favorite character.

You are making me choose between my children. BUT, if I had to pick, either Ilia Liadon, or! Ashe Wednesday, a protector aasimar drunken master monk and my profile picture. Ashe also deserved a lot better from their campaign, so I have a massive soft spot for them, they were made during a really tough time in my life (as was Ilia) and was going through an equally rough time in-game, since I made them for a Curse of Strahd campaign without understanding what I was getting into. They’re my little rebellious asshole and I love them dearly, someone get this kid therapy. Ilia, on the other hand, is just... she’s a comfort character for me at this point. mostly soft edges, such a mom- while Ashe was me yelling “come at me” at the world while crying, Ilia was just... embracing it. Making it better. basically, if they actually existed, I would die for both of them.

13. Your most ridiculous character.

I don’t usually play super ridiculous characters, but! I would say Keothi “Bookfinder” Vaimeil counts. She was basically me looking all of the goliath barbarian stereotypes in the eye, and going “nah. she’s a nerd.” She’s literally a massive puppy dog, just the sweetest big old thing, sitting in her house and reading all the books she can get her hands on in order to make up for her amnesia. Oh, and did I mention that she’s a zombie? ...yea. She’s wacky, but I love her.

14. The best in-character line you’ve ever had.

“I need sleep. I don’t even sleep and I need sleep.”

~Ilia, after a particularly tough fight and an emotionally draining day

15. Your most epic death.

Ok so... none of my characters in game have ever actually died during the storyline? Keothi obviously has in her backstory, and Ilia might have in hers as well, it was never explicitly stated, but during the game? Nope. Ashe got stupid close, but nope. Since Keothi is my only death period, and her death was pretty epic, I’m just gonna describe that. Her parents and siblings in her Goliath tribe had all fallen ill, so she decided to go searching for a possible cure, and ended up getting conned into helping this cult, since they said they would cure her family. Turns out, yea, they were lying, they just needed a goliath willing to sacrifice themselves with a cursed sword. They made the mistake of revealing this before Keothi was actually dead, so as she was dying, she brought the entire goddamn cultist temple down to the bottom of the sea and took the cultists with her. The sword was why she was undead, in the Shadowfell, and couldn’t remember anything.

16. Your most disappointing death. 

As mentioned, I’ve never died in campaign, but I feel like I have to mention this one that happened to our party in Curse of Strahd. We were in the death house, all 5 of us, still level 1, and our barbarian falls into a pit trap with spikes. None of us realize she’s actually dead, so we send out paladin down to get her... with the monk, the bard, and the warlock holding the rope. ....yea both of them died.

17. Something that shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

I’m stuck between two options for this one. First one was the time our water genasi paladin/rogue bloodbended our gnome cleric into a bridge to keep her from falling all the way down a ravine. The second time was when our party managed to defend a small seaside town from a pirate raid with just an NPC with Control Water, a ballista, ourselves, and some explosives. Neither should’ve worked, but both did. Having a triton in your party can really come in clutch in a seaside campaign.

18. Something that went hilariously awry.

I have one that’s hilarious and one that’s horrifying. Hilarious one: in my first ever campaign, someone from Aisling’s backstory popped up and our sorcerer went “that’s shady” (to be fair, he was) and then went to investigate BY HIMSELF. He obviously got kidnapped by the mafia, and then we went all stealth mission to break him out. Stealth was immediately abandoned after our other bard used a SCREAMING SWORD to break open the locks, then we proceeded to go out the way we came, setting everything on fire on the way out, and with our bard lying their way out the front door (with the rest of us in tow as “prisoners”) by pretending to be a fellow mafia member. It was great. Horrifying one: Ilia tries to Send to a member of the party who left in order to let him know that a fellow party member had died. Forgot that he left bc his mind was invaded by a previously dead, very evil old god, and ends up trapped there with him for a while. Ended up with all of our main spellcasters trapped in their own heads while the barbarian paced around worriedly and the rogue decided he was going to get smashed instead of worrying himself silly.

19. Your most memorable in-character moment.

There are a LOT in Ilia’s campaign, but! If I had to pick one, it would actually be a pretty recent one involving Ilia and our party’s wizard, Liara. They’re basically the embodiment of head vs heart? Anyway, Liara is currently suffering from something called magic corruption, though idk if suffering is the right word. Anyway! It basically resulted in her getting... possessed? by her own magic during the night during Ilia’s watch, and they had a really, really interesting conversation regarding guilt, death, and grief, and yea basically I love them. Honorable mention to our druid’s death (he’s back and better now, but that was my first long-time death in a game, we didn’t know he was coming back) and also the moment that Ilia realized that her childhood bff/crush had been revived in a new body and that this NPC was her best friend. That was a trip.

20. The coolest item you ever got and how you came to possess it.

I got this item in the revamp of my first ever campaign and nothing has topped it since which is Sad but hey. Anyway! I got this really cool, possibly cursed dagger after I threw a knife at an absolutely eldritch being and it got stuck in him as he transformed. It looked really badass, and allowed me to cast Inflict Wounds on occasion when I stabbed someone with it. So yea, we love that. Honorable mention to my paladin/bloodhunter’s Helm of the Aberrant Gladiator which allows you to basically do a bunch of fear based affects and psychic stuff.

Numbers 21 through 30 don’t apply to me but. yea. enjoy this summary of my dnd history I guess

[titan-mom]

I spent last night and this morning thinking VERY in depth about my last campaign's DnD character and her dragonborn wife and the fact that aasimar have a lifespan of about 120/150 years and dragonborn have a lifespan of 70 and what it would be like to outlive the love of your life by like, a solid half a century and made myself actually ugly cry over it.

I’m dumping all these feelings here where my fellow players cannot find them and especially not my DM who played her wife no need to make them sad. Feel free to keep scrolling.

---

They discovered their feelings in a very dangerous time when the world was ending and Eon (my character) prefaced admitting hers with totally understanding no as an answer due to circumstance. She didn’t want to pressure her with “be my girlfriend before we maybe die.” She always braced for the worst.

And Verthica said “yes, I like you too, and we will not die, we will stop this and we will win.” Because she is eternally and fiercely an optimist. Enough that she raised the 25,000 gold over the past decade to resurrect her lost brother. She perseveres as a way of life.

So they compromised that night, since the world was on a countdown, fourteen weeks to apocalypse day. They promised to spend as much time together as possible while trying to survive this. And when it was over, they would re-evaluate how they felt, and plan how to move forward together.

They did that, allotted as much time as they could. And then the party was kidnapped by a god for a couple months, and left Verthica alone to lead the world against this incoming threat, assuming her girlfriend was dead. And when they escaped the reunion was tearful and painful and Eon was livid that time had been taken from them, the one thing they had promised, knowing either of them may die any day, was time. She was so angry that her love was forced to live and mourn for two agonizing months without her during an apocalypse.

And they did save the world, they even pressed the ‘put it back’ button and averted all the damage of the fourteen weeks of destruction. And then they just carried on as they had been, spending every waking moment together and no longer interrupted by annoying things like trips to hell and eldritch abominations and dark rituals. They got a house and a boat and hobbies together.

(Every Saturday night for those fourteen weeks the sky fell as an outer plane was destroyed. And every night they all watched to mark which one it was. When it was over and the planes were repaired, Eon stopped stargazing, she quietly refused to ever look at the sky again. Until her girlfriend began to learn navigation, so the pair of them could sail the coast together on a two-manned sloop. Then she looked up at the stars again, and by the time they were married she was in love with them again, enough to wear a dress with falling stars embroidered as her wedding gown.)

And so her wife growing old, peacefully, and passing quietly at home with her would be so beautifully sad. They promised each other all the time they could, and she delivered all the way. And Eon couldn’t be more grateful.

And she would just see this as her turn to live alone, regardless of fifty or more years being significantly longer than two months. She knows they’ll be reunited when it’s her time. Being world-saving adventurers gives you a bit of an in with the gods. Her godmother lives on the plane her soul is destined for, and is sure she will make sure they will be together again.

[jordanrosenburg]

Stranger Things 3

Okay, many spoilers ahead, but honestly if you haven’t binged the season yet???? That’s a you problem. 

I wasn’t sure what I wanted out of this season, well actually there was one thing I wanted and that was for Steve to find love, and I guess he found it...he has a beautiful new friendship with Robin, who was the perfect female addition to the season. It was refreshing to have the kids on summer break, and not have another thing happen during the school year. I love this show and I want it to go on and on, but at the same time, how much more can these kids go through? 

The thing about Stranger Things, is that we are now used to its formula, a formula that works great. We have usually have three different stories happening, the adults, the teens, and the kids. They each are going through their version of a scary movie, and when they all finally come together, they get the job done. This season had a real slasher film vibe to it. Way more guts and gore, and honestly a little too much CGI? It was like watching Teen Wold amirite?

It was kind of cool finally seeing this monster come to life, and not just an image in Will’s head. And it was cool seeing the kids sort of start to become teenagers themselves, and the teens cross slowly into adulthood. I can’t tell what vibe I like more with the pacing of this show. Last season felt really slow, and this season almost felt rushed? We really just dove right in. I’m not a big fan of time skips, I really like knowing how characters get to certain places in their lives. Was Steve so distraught over Nancy that he couldn’t get his grades up? Thus not getting into college? Will he go to community college? I JUST WANT WHAT IS BEST FOR MY SON!

Billy...I just...I feel like I’m still grieving. We knew the season was about him, but I feel like his screen time wasn’t enough, I wanted more. Why was the monster able to possess more so than Will? We got barely an episode in before he was taken over. I thought it would have been a couple episodes in. Dacre did an incredible job, his acting was incredible. The only thing that creeped me out were all of the moms gawking at him at the pool. He is a teenage boy, I don’t care how attractive he is. If the roles were reversed, if that had been a bunch of dads looking at a teenage girl like that, there would have been hell to pay. Billy wanted Mrs. Wheeler, and he is suave, but she should not have even entertained the idea. 

A truly crushing moment was when El saw Billy’s memories of his mother. I think what happened to him happens all too often. A victim of abuse is finally able to escape, but leaves the child behind. She knew what kind of monster Billy would be left with, and it clearly seems like she never did anything to try to get him out of that toxic environment. And in spite of all of this, she was STILL his happiest memories! RIP MY HEART OUT WHY DONTCHA! The other thing that really fucked me up is that Max and Billy must have mended whatever tension or issues they may have had between season 2 and 3. She didn’t seem afraid of him anymore, and she really grieved for him. That shot of her sitting in his room killed me. And I wonder how his fucking shit ass father dealt with it??? 

El and Mike were so adorable the entire time. I truly love a young love. It is so innocent and sweet. I feel like for that moment they got to just be normal tweens without a care in the world. I was surprised to see Lucas and Max still together, but there must be something good there if they keep making it work. Dustin and Suzie were so cute, HOWEVER HAD SHE NOT MADE HIM SING BILLY AND HOPPER WOULD HAVE SURVIVED, OR YOU KNOW IF JOYCE HADN’T HESITATED!!!! I’m just really not a fan of character death until it means something. I feel like these deaths were purely shock value. Hopper went down a hero sure, but HIM AND JOYCE WERE FINALLY GOING TO GET DINNER! And after everything Billy went through? They could have tried harder to save him. Nancy was ready to fucking shoot him. 

Nancy, as usual, just really pissed me off. She is one of the most inconsiderate people I’ve ever seen. I get it, it’s the 80′s, she’s trying to be an equal, that I can respect! What I don’t respect is how impulsive she is. She never thinks about the consequences of her actions. From little things like ruining Jonathan’s pictures, to immediately trying to kill Billy. I get it, you’re all sick of the bullshit, but he was still a person. They didn’t immediately try to kill Will. 

AND POOR WILL JUST WANTED TO PLAY DND! I think it can be so hard at that age. Some people grow up at different rates than others, and he felt out. I also think he knew he was going to be moving, and just wanted to complete one more campaign with his friends before he broke the news. It also made me sad that we didn’t get much time with all four boys together. It was great to see how close Dustin and Steve had gotten, but they should have learned by now that they all work better when they’re together, not separated. 

How about Steve coming in clutch with the car to save Nancy and the kids??? NOT EVEN A THANK YOU FROM HER! Okay, maybe there wasn’t time for a thank you, but their interactions just felt awkward, and there’s not need for it. I will say I was happy there was no love triangle. My heart did get sad when Robin asked Steve if he still loved Nancy, and when he said no it was basically because he found this love for Robin. My poor baby was still hurt! And when he said that she really wasn’t a priss. There had to have been a conversation about her hooking up with Jonathan at some point that had to have solidified that they were over. I still don’t care for the way she treated Steven, could ya tell???

A theory I have about El: are her powers starting wear off because the effects of what she went through at the lab wearing off? Think about it, she hasn’t been contained and tested on for over a year. Maybe her body is finally regulating. This does mean that if this thing comes back, which it seems like it will since there is one in Russia being used for testing, she herself will be defenseless. Luckily the other kids are good at protecting her. 

At the end we see the subtitles, “No, not the America”. Does this mean Hopper somehow survived? I don’t know how possible this is since everyone else in the lab fucking melted, but he could have been on high enough ground to escape, but may not have escaped fast enough for the American troops to come in. The Russians may have captured him as one final fuck you. I think I started tearing up when he gave one last smile to Joyce. He annoyed me at the beginning of the season with him being overprotective with El, but his letter, which made me sob, helped drive his point home. Also, him shooting off the machine gun while screaming EVERYONE OUT was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. 

The kids all saying goodbye made me cry as well. I wonder how far away Joyce will take them. Something tells me their troubles will follow. I hope we don’t have to wait three years to figure out what happens next. My prediction is that season 4 will be the final season because again, how much can these kids go through. 

One final thing, the soundtrack, yet again, was killer. Moving in Stereo is the song I have on repeat. Season 1 it was Sunglasses at Night and some of the original synth music. Hearing Hero again at the end of this season also made me cry. It really felt like a lot was wrapping up. 

Alright, I’m done rambling for now. 

[imaginefanganronpas]

You are really nice 👀👀... How about some Seishi Hc? Just in general really...

Heya ^^ And aaaaawwww, that’s so nice of you to say! I always try my best that everyone feels valid, because everyone IS hecking valid! *Sheds a tear*, ahem, anywaym let’s get on with it! I wrote down everything that raced into my head and I hope you like these! ^^

Seishi Headcanons

-He’s a chill guy that just enjoys a good book or some relaxing movie while drinking tea

-Absolutely despises horror movies and curling up at the end of the couch like a scaredy cat. If it’s too bad he might even get a panic attack

-Polite to everyone, but very very gay

-Always needs 4 hours to fall asleep

-Is indeed very jealous and concerned because Marin can fall asleep without a problem and even standing up while doing so

-Is actually a bit afraid of getting too close to people, which is why he keeps his distance and is a gentleman. He’s just a bit shy

-Didn’t believe in ghosts at first, but after Kasumi demonstrated her powers, he now very much believes and is low-key terrified

-Didn’t have the best childhood and now tries to make the best of it, even if he doesn’t know how

-Quite protective of his friends and would probably take a bullet for his best friends

-Doesn’t really listen to modern music and prefers classical or movie tracks

-Still cries over disney movies

-Gets delusional and has a lot of nightmares when sick or even just sleep-drunk

-Talks a lot in his sleep

-Even sleepwalks sometimes (And lowkey terrifying everyone he runs into, he sleep-walked to the roof at some point and everyone was screaming because “NO, SEISHI, HOE, DONT DO IT!”

-Bases his characters on actual people he knows

-Is the type of person to cry in a shower for 3 hours because all of his creative juices left him and now he can’t write, even though he has a very important scene in mind, which is why he is in the shower, because all the ideas come in the shower

-Has a waterproof notepad in the shower, just in case an idea hits him, because he knows it’s gone as soon as he puts on clothes

-He tries to function like a normal human being, but surrounded by ultimates, that’s just not possible

-He gets easily queasy, when eating too much, when the rollercoaster is too wild, when Narumi forces him to eat another piece of cake, even though he doesn’t even really like sweets

-He doesn’t even realize how people swoon over his deep and smooth voice

-Don’t give him sugar or he will jump in triangles and you won’t catch him in the next 6 hours

-Acts very much like a cat and can be a little gremlin if he wants to

-Like, at one point he drops face first onto the couch, in Ayumu’s lap and is like: “Ayumu… attention, please…” And  he just pats him and he goes: “Thank you…”

-Master detective in certain things but oblivious dumbass in everything else

-Has big existential crises every single day

-Has a tamagotchi and WILL defend it with his life if it ever came to that because it’s his best friend since childhood

-Cat person and really wants to get one

-Has a DnD group with Ayumu, Maiko, Saiji and Kego. He is the DM and WILL make everyone suffer with his campaigns

-Just wants friends and to beloved and appreciated

-He is a very cuddly and affectionate person,even if it doesn’t look like that and even if he  is very shy about that and only does it with people he is very close to

-He’s a good boy

[zippdementia]

Part 67 Alignment May Vary: Welcome to Hell

The players awaken and everything is messed up.

You all wake up to the sound of a repetitive blaring horn. Each of you is in a tube whose purpose is not immediately clear. Behind you is soft padding and in front of you is a see through cover made of some kind of hard glass. The world beyond this cover is darkness punctuated by frequent bursts of light that seem to come in time with the blaring horns. The light illuminates a large room.

It takes a moment for them to remember where they are. Once they do, they realize a very long time has passed and the spaceship is in trouble, about to crash land on a mysterious red planet and currently being bombarded by asteroids in an asteroid belt a computer tells them is “The River Styx.” Bob and Fiona are broken and rusted, and there’s no time to figure out what went wrong here. The players flee to the ship’s escape pods, only to have the hull of the ship breached and Aldric almost sucked out when he fails his saving throw. He makes it, but Blackrazor is ripped from his back and spins into space, lost.

All of you are tossed back and forth against the walls of the escape pod as it tumbles and twists and turns, spinning incessantly until you think your body will be crushed from the force of it. You can hear a roar and outside of the pod’s single window you can see heat and flame building up around the outside of your small circular craft. Then there is a mighty, sickening jolt and you are thrown one more time against the wall as everything finally goes still. The door to the pod slides open and a mechanical voice brokenly states “Thank you and have a safe journey” before an explosion of static cuts it short.

You emerge from the broken pod and clamber out onto red rock. The pod has come to rest on a high shelf overlooking a vast red landscape, a maze of dry canyons and valleys that stretches to the horizon. And on that horizon is a massive city scape, so large you cannot see where it ends. It literally encompasses the entire line of the horizon from left to right and though it is very far away, you can already see it is constructed of massive towering structures, like no city you’ve ever come across in your life or heard tell of before. A wind blasts across the landscape, stirring up red dust clouds and pulling at the fabric of your clothes.

At this point in the campaign, we are off book and running my own material. I’ve always wanted to do a planar adventure in Dungeons and Dragons. The possibilities such a campaign offers are exciting, though I have not found many official (or even unofficial) adventures set in the planes. And the ones I have always feel a little... I don’t know... standard. Like they just took the same kind of adventure you’d see in a normal campaign and themed it with different creatures.

For my planar campaign (which I am working on releasing on DMs Guild), I wanted something far more outside the box. Just as the characters are having the boundaries of their worlds stretched, I think the players need to have the boundaries of what they think of as a DND game stretched, too.

So the first thing I’ve changed is that these planes are literally planets, not planes. That lets me throw in a touch of sci fi for a nice spelljammer element. And the first of those planets to be explored is Planet Hell.

Encounter: The Hell’s Angels

The first big encounter here is against four biker devils, a Bone Devil (named Bones), a Bearded Devil (named Beards), a Barbed Devil (named... Cisco, which was supposed to be funny, but now I wish I’d just kept it Barbs, so let’s call him Barbs), and an Imp (Larry). These guys are straight out of Easy Rider, leather jackets and all, and they ride hovering jet bikes. The set up here is that they will attack the players and this will result in a jet bike chase through a maze like canyon full of dangers and driving challenges. While all this is going on, a meteor storm that hits Hell every day is about to start and the players will literally have to outrace the storm to make it to the safety of the world city of the Nine Circles (which is protected by a magic/science shield. Helping them in this endeavor is Alyss, a young blonde punk rocker looking chick who rides in on her own jetbike and warns the players that the biker gang is coming to investigate their crash site.

This encounter ends up being so much fun in so many ways.

First of all, the players don’t want to meet the biker’s head on. So Imoaza decides to use disguise self to look like a devil herself and pretend like she’s captured Carrick, who will then launch a surprise attack. She rolls a high success on her disguise and ends up looking like a classic red satan devil you’d get at a costume store, goatee and all. She also speaks Fiendish, as it happens, so she is able to really complete the disguise. It works and she doesn’t discard the disguise for the whole encounter. This ends up being absolutely ridiculous. Read on.

Beards tries to insult Carrick by peeing on him with a devil’s penis that looks like a living lobster and pisses acid and this is when Carrick launches his surprise attack, the other players joining him shortly.

Early on in the fight, Barbs and Bones escape, Bones dragging Imoaza’s red devil face along the ground until she is too dazed to fight him. He then blasts into the canyon, closely pursued by Alyss on her own personalized jet bike with Aldric riding shotgun and wielding a grenade launcher Alyss tosses him. Imoaza steals Larry’s tiny bike and rides after them, but for the life of her, she cannot roll well enough to figure out how to use the bike well. And while all this is going on, a meteor storm has begun to crash down around them. So what you end up getting is this ridiculous red satan devil (who is really Imoaza) cruising backwards on a hoverbike, screaming in terror as she races into the canyon just barely outrunning a meteor storm.

We honestly think this is the end of Imoaza. I’ve set up challenges the players must face to navigate the canyon and hers ends up being a leap over a wide chasm. With the way she’s been rolling... but then, against all odds, she rolls a critical success on this jump, and it looks a little like this...

The silence surrounding the chasm is broken suddenly by a shrill cry, like a plea for help, and rocketing into view comes a tiny hoverbike, clinged to by a tall red devil with a jet black goatee hanging beneath a mouth open in a wide scream. The Devil is ridiculously large a top the miniscule bike and Every part of his body that can grip something is gripping the bike: knees, buttucks, hands clenched on the seat of the motorcycle, his tall shape crouched low and terrified... and backwards... over the bike as it speeds its way without stopping towards the chasm. This is the end for the devil for sure. Except just before the bike takes its fatal dive, it hits a rock and is tilted upwards and suddenly the screaming devil man is flying, not falling, as the bike soars like an angel across the huge chasm, spinning around in the process, knocking the devil free from his perch, whereupon in his mad scrabbling he gets himself turned the right way around, grabs the handlebars and successfully lands on solid safe ground.

Then there’s Larry. Oh my god, Larry. I initially threw him in just so there would be an easily accessible bike for the players to use during the jet bike chase. But the minute I start voicing him and he keeps hilariously failing to injure Carrick while the Paladin (have I ever mentioned Carrick is a Paladin before?) fights Beards, using his fiery whip to smack away Beard’s attacks, Larry becomes a crowd favorite. Carrick especially loves him, finding the imp’s futile attempts to harm him more cute than anything else, to the degree that once Carrick defeats Beards, Larry takes a liking to him, calling him “Chuck” and determining they are going to be a new gang. He grabs Beard’s bike, tells Chuck to get on, and he rides him away from the Meteor Swarm, saying how cool it is that they’ve met and how they are going to be friends forever.

Well, by the time this happens, Aldric’s launching of grenades in the canyon has caused landslides and certain passages have been blocked off by piles of rock. Larry gets to one of these just in time to see Aldric and Alyss soaring over it in a marvelous display of driving skill and defying gravity, intent on continuing their chase of Bones and Barbs.

Larry looks at the rock wall and takes a deep breath. “Do you believe, Chuck?” He says in his small, hopeful, tremulous voice. Carrick slaps him on the shoulder. “I believe in you, buddy.” Larry then guns the bike, heading for the rock wall, about to perform the same stunt as Alyss. His eyes closed, his legs flailing out behind him (he’s too small for even his own bike), he drives a top speed for the wall.

And rolls a critical failure.

Carrick sees what is about to happen and does what any true friend would. He bails off the back of the bike, misty stepping off to witness Larry drive into the cliff wall, the bike upending itself to smash him into pulp against the rocks before exploding in a ball of fire.

And that’s the end of Larry, short lived favorite familiar.

The rest of the chase has too many crazy moments to list: Aldric finally catches up with Bones, jumping off his bike and impaling the devil, then stealing his leather jacket. Aldric and Alyss outrun a horrible cave monster a little bit like a gaping dragon from Dark Souls. Imoaza has to outrun the meteor storm on the way to the shielded city, and almost doesn’t make it. And Carrick finds Blackrazor in the desert.

This last moment is a defining one. Carrick initially is hesitant to retrieve the blade, knowing it is evil. But he also knows it may not be his call to make: this is Aldric’s burden to bear. The player is so torn, he literally has to toss a coin to figure out the answer. It tells him what to do... he picks up the sword, and Blackrazor is less than grateful, berating him for having let Aldric drop him in the first place. He does finally thank him and tells him that Carrick will play a nice role in his final plans, then makes a joke about eating the souls of children. This last one is too much for Carrick. Not sure whether Blackrazor is being crass or honest leads Carrick to realize he cannot trust the sword’s actual intentions. And in a moment of decision, he drops the sword back in the desert and rides away (he traded his exploded jet bike for a summoned horse... which here in Hell turns out to be a Nightmare). Blackrazor screams profanities at him as he goes, promising that one day he’ll cut off his head and drink his insides.

Eventually the party synch back up on the edge of the city, which this close up they see is actually just a ruined sprawl of ghettos. This is in fact an illusion, created by Alyss to protect them, but they won’t find that out for a while. For now, they wander the dead city with Alyss, who tells them to abandon the bikes except her own, which she hits a button on to cause it to shrink down to pocket size, and which she drops in her back pack. She explains a little about their situation while they walk.

Hell, it turns out, used to be involved in an eternal war with the Demons of the Abyss, in a conflict dubbed the Blood War that mostly took place in the River Styx, the asteroid field right outside of Hell. Some centuries ago, Asmodeus traveled to the Abyss himself at the head of a huge army to finally bring the fight back to the Demons. His plan was successful and he used a magic so powerful that the Abyss was sealed away into between reality, unable to manifest and interact with the real world. But Asmodeus himself did not survive the magic and Hell was left for the first time in its history without a leader.

With the war against the demons over, the devils turned on themselves, waging a war that began as a physical conflict but slowly became more political. Out of this war emerged the Nine Cities, a sprawling conglomerate of nine separate cities, all ruled by different Arch Devils. Hell also became a tense democracy, with the leader of Hell voted into office to serve a fifty year term. The current president is Mammon, devil of greed and pride, who rules from his vast casino-ridden city of Messmiter, the Golden City.

While different presidents have pushed different agendas and together have turned Hell into a technological leader in the universe, one thing they all agree on: Hell’s borders should remain closed, its warships destroyed and grounded. No one comes into Hell except in death. No one leaves Hell. Ever.

Alyss tells them that there are crystals here on Hell which call souls to them when those souls pass around the universe. It’s uncertain why a soul may be called by a crystal to end up reborn on Hell, but it is known that Devils used to be able to make this happen as a contract. Now with Devils forced to stay in Hell forever, the influx of new souls has slowed, leading to a lot of anger and unrest. Devils desire souls, they need them to grow in power. Without them, they feel starved and restless.

Also restless are the few unfortunates who end up being called to Hell. Not only are their souls almost always drained for a devil’s personal gain, but Hell used to operate on one basic principal: Hope. There was hope that with enough penance, one could leave for a better place. This actually used to be true. But no longer, not with the borders closed. So Alyss has joined a group known as the Hell’s Rebels, led by who she says is an incredible leader of men, a visionary. Their goal is to escape Hell.

This gives many reasons as to why the player’s presence is so disruptive and yet so important. One, they’ve broken the closed border rule, albeit unintentionally. Two, somewhere on Hell their working spaceship has landed, which could be the rebel’s ticket out of here. And three, they have fresh, living, souls. That makes them a target. And because Barbs escaped them in the canyon, she is sure word has reached Hell that they are here.

And with this set up, we enter my next planned scenario in Hell, hideout.

Rooftop Showdown

I want this part of the adventure to feel a little like Blade Runner, or Dark City. I am aiming for mystery and a touch of uncertainty and I want to create a daring escape.

So the set up becomes that Alyss brings them to a decrepit hotel room and leaves them, telling them she’ll be back in a few hours but under NO CIRCUMSTANCES are they to leave or open the door. They aren’t even to speak if someone calls to them. Alyss has her own way of getting back in. Don’t speak to anyone, she warns them again, before leaving. The players settle down for a much needed long rest, but when they finish it, Alyss hasn’t returned.

Three days pass. The players stay alive by Carrick casting “Create Food and Drink” and summoning a bunch of random Fiendish foods. They eat them all (except for a summoned plate of fried Bearded Devil Penis, which they leave in a corner of the room, where it begins to acquire a greasy acrid odor). Imoaza passes the time by reading various tomes she’s collected over the course of their adventures, especially the journals of her people taken from the Yuan Ti temple. Aldric digs through Alyss’ left behind backpack, eventually finding the shrunken motorcycle and blithely pocketing it for later study. He also finds an energy capsule which they use to recharge Carrick’s rifle. And he detoxes, not from drugs but from Blackrazor’s influence, slowly wresting his mind free from the blade’s evil influence, which he can still feel reaching for him and calling to him. Carrick finds a cellphone (of course, they don’t know this is what it is) and is able to pull out of his distant other-life memories that this is a communication device. He leaves it alone.

On the fourth day, a knock comes at the door. The players ignore it, and then Alyss’ voice calls to them, saying she lost the key and is being chased and needs to get inside. The group is nervous and anxious, not sure whether this is really her or not. As they hesitate, she becomes more desperate, saying that she will die if they don’t help her. They stay silent. Some time later, her voice returns, only this time she says she’s been caught and will be executed if they do not open the door immediately. She tells them that she will work something out with the Devils to keep them all safe, but they need to open the door now. Again, the players do nothing, and Alyss sobs and cries before there is a horrible crunching sound and her voice goes silent. Completely unnerved, Carrick uses a detection spell to try to sense anything outside the door. He senses a presence so large and evil that it almost makes him sick and he whispers to the others that he hopes they did the right thing by doing nothing.

It is not long after that the cellphone rings, jarring them all. Carrick picks it up and a male voice tells them he’s coming to get them, they have to trust him, that Alyss’ illusion is wearing off (it was never meant to last this long), that something has happened to her, and that they need to go. They decide to trust this voice and it (naming itself as “Jacobs”) instructs them to climb out of the window of the hotel and up to the roof.

Here is where things get crazy. Opening the window shatters Alyss’ illusion and for the first time, the players get a true look at the city they are in. It is not decrepit at all, but rather a bustling metropolis filled with flying vehicles, loud noises, and bright lights. It is night time right now but the city is brighter than day with all of its neon and LEDs. The players climb out of the window and Imoaza casts fly so that they can avoid a difficult climb. Just in the nick of time, too: behind them, the door to the apartment shatters and a Pit Fiend forces its bulk inside the room. But the players are already gone.

I think the sign that this section was a success was the players later asking whether that was really Alyss on the other side of the door. It wasn’t. In fact, it was the devils trying to break through her illusion and find them, but the fact that the question was left in their minds is exactly what I was trying to achieve, that uncomfortable feeling of “maybe we did the wrong thing.”

They end up having to wait on a rooftop while Jacobs makes his way to them. While they wait, they are accosted by a group of 12 Spined Devils and an Erinyes. Imoaza and Carrick face off against the devil’s in ranged combat from the roof, while Aldric flies up to meet the Erinyes, who taunts his bravery as base male bravado while ripping into him with her whip, spear, and arrows. The battle is intense, with spines falling all over the roof while Carrick and Imoaza use their eldritch blasts to fire back at the Spined Devils. Maybe the most intense moment comes when the Erinyes restrains Aldric with her whip and then throws him down into the river of traffic below them.

Damn that Larry, thought Harry as he steered his shiny new hovercraft down Risen Street, taking time to shake his fist at an old van as it puttered along in the lane he wanted to be in. If Larry would just start acting like an adult and less like a child then Harry’s life would be a lot simpler. Larry was supposed to have been back in town after the weekend to watch Harry’s kids (inexplicably, the little Implings loved their uncle Larry) but instead he was nowhere to be found. Harry wasn’t concerned, he knew Larry was most likely off with his gangster buddies and thinking of himself as much cooler than he in fact was. How many times did Harry have to tell his brother to get a real job before it was too late and no company would have him? How many times had Harry had to bail out Larry from some misadventure or another? Despite his anger, Harry couldn’t stop his lips from curling into a small smile as he thought of those misadventures. That was Larry’s one gift: no matter how much frustration Harry felt at him, his damnable brother was just so happy-go-lucky he couldn’t stay mad for long. As the frustration left him, Harry felt a sudden tinge of worry. Where was his brother? It wasn’t like him to just disappear without a trace. To be halfway around the world asking for help, yes, and inconveniencing his dutiful and responsible older brother, sure, but just disappearing was odd.

Harry didn’t have much time to consider the thought. There was a sudden jolt as a man fell from the sky and smashed against his windshield with the force of a dropped boulder. The shiny new hovercraft that Harry had spent nine years saving up for (it could fit all three of his kids and his wife besides) spun madly out of control, being ping ponged around by the other speeding traffic. Harry meanwhile, was flailing against the sudden release of the air bags, unable to see anything past their white bulk. He desperately tried to steer the car into safety, but only succeeded in pointing its nose directly at that old van that he had shook a fist at earlier. The two cars collided and Harry’s shiny new car was chucked aside into a building, Imp and vehicle alike exploding against its side in a fireball not unlike the one that had claimed his brother Larry only a few days earlier.

Eventually this battle comes to a halt. It is on a timer, with me rolling a die each round with an increasingly easy to hit goal number. When I roll that number, Jacobs arrives. There is one last mad dash as the players try to figure out what side of the roof Jacobs has pulled up to, failing all of their perception rolls, and leaping off of three different sides (all of them wrong). This results in Carrick being knocked unconscious and almost killed by traffic, Imoaza having to dodge madly through cars to save him, and Aldric (who got a haste spell from Carrick during the fight) whipping around in traffic like a car himself, madly looking for them.

They eventually all are pulled inside Jacobs’ vehicle and he flies them off to meet the leader of the Hell’s Rebels. Their hideout is a moving target, a giant airship that looks like a cross between a mighty galleon and a blimp, with a huge air bag suspended over the main deck and keeping the whole ship aloft, and giant jet engine pipes coming off the back of the ship to propel it forward.

They are taken on board the massive vessel and brought to see the commander. He stands in a long throne room, decked in an impressive robe and commander’s outfit. He turns as they arrive and eyes them all with a scrutinizing eye.

“Jacobs!” he shouts at last in a quick voice a little bit like a speeding racecar. “If I have tried to teach you one thing while being on board my ship, it is... well, it is my name. And you’ve actually done a great job of learning that. But if there was a second thing, it would be manners! And by all the devils in the nine hells, we do not leave people to bleed on our carpet. It’s not civilized! Did you even offer them something to drink? Get them a bath and a bed and whatever else they desire. Maybe a bowl of my famous cereal. That would perk them right up! Greetings, this is my ship the Jolly Roger Mark II and I’m Captain Krisp, Captain Roger Krisp, at your service. No, I won’t shake. I don’t know where you’ve been.”

And we stop there, with all of us laughing at the return of a favorite character. It’s a huge moment, actually, one I’ve been wanting to get to for a long time. Captain Krisp was one of those NPCs who became so quickly memorable that I’ve long wanted to bring him back into the campaign in a role that felt worthy of him. Being the captain of Hell’s Rebels is perfect. It also keeps alive the feeling of world-spanning that I’ve so valued in this long long long campaign. The fact that an entirely new group of adventurers is dealing with characters and plots left over from other groups of adventurers just makes the whole story feel epic. And of course, the players are the glue tying it all together.

By the way, for anyone ever wondering what Captain Krisp sounds like or how he thinks, I have taken massive inspiration from Varrick from Legend of Kora. Which is a wonderful show for many reasons, but maybe most memorably for Varrick.

Next time, we’ll get deeper into Hell and more crazy scenarios for the players to work through.

[grapesodatozier]

I’m a Ruin

some nice, sad wheelzier angst lol. title from the song of the same title by marina and the diamonds. also there are some small references to past mileven, byeler, and reddie, all of which are implied to have ended badly bc apparently it’s angst hours for all of my favorite ships lol

warning: this is about drug addiction. it’s told from Richie's POV, and as we know Richie Tozier hates himself a lot sometimes, so he blames himself for a lot of stuff, but I would just like to make it clear that addiction is a disease that many people go through, and it's something that can be different for different people. It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it does not make you a bad person. Recovery is always possible and happens at different speeds for different people. <3

words: 2,306

read on ao3 or below

Richie came home already exhausted. Work had been hell, and his entire body felt simultaneously like it was a live wire and full of cement. He was planning on bypassing Mike and heading straight for the bedroom to take a long fucking nap. However, he couldn’t do that without walking through the living room, where Mike was standing with his arms crossed behind the coffee table, which had a bag of cocaine on it.

“You wanna explain this?” Richie rolled his eyes at the question. His head was already starting to pound from the sanctimonious tone his boyfriend had immediately broken into.

“It’s powdered sugar, borrowed a cup from the neighbors,” Richie grinned humorlessly as he headed for the bedroom.

“You’re really just gonna walk away from me right now?” Mike’s voice was strained, almost a screech, trying to sound indignant through the obvious pain he was feeling. Richie’s shoulders sagged, his chest suddenly heavy. He hated hearing that pain in Mike’s voice, he hated being a disappointment to him. Mike had only ever been good to him, and he kept fucking up, kept proving to him that he didn’t deserve Mike’s signature undying faith. Richie turned to face Mike and shrugged weakly.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he sighed.

“I want you to throw it out,” Mike said plainly. “Burn it, toss it in the Hudson, I don’t fucking care how you do it, just get this shit out of my house.”

“Your house?” Richie scoffed, a bitterly unamused grin on his face. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your fan fiction and DnD campaigns were paying for this place.” Mike always did this, always acted all high and mighty and made Richie feel like shit for needing a way to unwind or have a laugh from time to time. Richie knew that it came from a well-meaning place, that Mike was just trying to convince Richie to quit his bad habits, but the way he went about it kind of pissed Richie off. There was also the disappointment again, the reminder that Mike deserved better than Richie. Richie really didn’t know why his boyfriend tried so hard; Richie clearly wore him down.  

“Don’t start that,” Mike shook his head. “We both live here. We both pay rent and bills. If we get caught with this shit I’m taking the fall too. Don’t you care about that? Don’t you care what happens to me?” Richie rolled his eyes despite the guilt dragging his stomach down to his feet. Of course he cared, how could Mike not see that? And how could Mike not see what Richie needed? “We agreed you wouldn’t bring this here anymore. I just don’t understand why you’d lie to me.”

“Because you never hear any fucking side other than your own!” Richie exploded. “We don’t discuss, you just tell me what to do and assume I’ll follow every order you give me!”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize that ‘Please don’t bring illegal drugs into the house and then hide them from me, honey’ was such a controversial request!” The hurt Richie was feeling must’ve shown, because Mike sighed, his anger fizzling out a bit. “I’m just worried, Rich. This clearly isn’t just about having a good time every now and then. This keeps happening, and I think it’s a serious problem.”

“Why does it have to be a problem?” Richie challenged. “I’m functional. I shower and go to work and make money and eat food and drink water. I’m fine.”

“If you’re lying about it you know it’s wrong.”

“No, I know you think it’s wrong. That doesn’t make it wrong.”

“Are you happy without it?” Mike asked. His voice was so sincere, his eyes wide and brown and heartbroken. Mike was awful at hiding what he was feeling, so the sadness and pain in his voice and his eyes and his posture tore Richie up pretty bad. He hated himself for hurting Mike like that. It was selfish. But there were certain things Richie needed, and if those things hurt the ones he loved… then maybe the only way to stop hurting them was to leave them. But Richie had to make sure that wouldn’t hurt Mike, he had to make it Mike’s choice. He had to show Mike he wasn’t worth the effort or the pain he was putting himself through to stay with Richie.

“I can go without it,” was all he said, forcing an edge into his voice.

“Then why don’t you?” Richie was pleased to see that Mike was becoming irritated again. Good. He wanted Mike to see that he was better off without Richie dragging him down.

“Because I like it. That’s who I am, Mike,” Richie said helplessly, deflated. “You can take it or leave it, but stop trying to change it.”

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to change it! You can get better, Richie. I can help you get better.” Mike put a hand on Richie’s shoulder, which Richie shrugged off with an exasperated groan.

“I’m not something for you to fucking fix, okay? I know you wanna fix everything that you don’t like, but you can’t fix me! You can’t fix people!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry for wanting you help you,” Mike replied snidely.

“You don’t wanna help me, all you’re worried about is having a perfect boyfriend, or working on me like I’m a project to be accomplished and finished so you can feel good about yoursel. When are you gonna realize that I’m not a project? I’m a fucking person, and I’m never gonna be the person you want me to be.”

“I don’t treat people like projects!” Mike said defensively, his arms crossed.

“Yes, you do! You always have! You did the same thing to El and Will!” Richie watched all of the momentum of Mike’s anger drain from his body at Richie’s accusation. It made his blood run cold, the way Mike clenched his jaw, but he knew he was doing the right thing. Even if it felt awful for both of them, it was for the best in the long run.

“This isn’t about El or Will,” Mike said, his voice low and strained, trying to be measured. Richie felt a pang in his chest; he wondered if Mike had ever loved him as much as he clearly still loved both of them. “This is about you-”

“Do you think that’s why they both left you?” Richie urged on, stepping closer into Mike’s space. “Do you think they got sick of being your little projects?” Richie’s stomach dropped as he saw Mike’s lower lip start to quiver. No, he thought, nonononono. He could deal with Mike angry, he wanted him angry, but he couldn’t deal with tears. There was no way Richie could just stand there and watch him cry, he couldn’t walk away from that.

Thankfully, Mike’s misty eyes steeled then, and the coldness in them strengthened the coldness in Richie’s own chest. “I know that this,” Mike said, looking Richie up and down, almost in disgust, “is why Eddie left you.” And yeah, that hurt, but it was exactly what Richie needed to hear. And he was so glad Mike said it. It was the final push he needed to really walk away, to really push Mike far enough way that he could stop hurting him. “Maybe he had the right idea. He seems pretty happy these days.”

“Then leave,” Richie replied, his voice deep, almost threatening. None of the pain that was aching in every bone in his body showed through. “Fucking leave if you think it’ll make you happy. I don’t need your goddamn pity.” He swallowed thickly before forcing himself to say, “I don’t need you.” And god, the lie tasted bitter on his tongue, but Richie knew he would do anything he had to in order to save Mike the pain and disappointment.

Mike looked at Richie like he had slapped him. He wrapped his arms around himself as his lips quivered, searching for the right words. “Do you want me?” he asked eventually, his voice trembling. Richie clenched his jaw; he focused on the tears welling in Mike’s eyes, on the way he curled in on himself, as if he was afraid to be so close to Richie. He reminded himself that he did that, that he would continue to do that if he tried to make things better, if he kept holding onto someone he would only drag down.

“Not if you’re gonna try to control me like this,” he forced himself to say, his stomach churning at how easy and true he was able to make the words sound.

“You don’t mean that,” Mike said, shaking his head, his voice as thin as air.

“I do.” Richie’s heart sunk to his feet; he couldn’t help imagining a reality where he was saying that at an altar, where Mike still had tears in his eyes but a smile on his face.

The dam broke then, and Mike’s tears flowed freely. His body wracked with sobs, but he stayed put, not moving in any direction but further into himself. Richie couldn’t take that.

“Baby,” he whispered, taking a step toward Mike and reaching to pull him in.

“Baby?” Mike exploded, smacking Richie’s arm away as his head whipped up in fury. “Are you fucking kidding me right now? You’re breaking up with me for, for fucking drugs, and you’re trying to comfort me? You just told me you don’t want me and now you’re calling me baby?” Richie’s mouth opened and closed silently, the only part of his body he could move as the pain and anger and heartbreak in Mike’s watery eyes struck him like daggers. He grabbed the bag from the table and nearly threw it at Richie as he shoved him in the chest. “Fuck you. You can have this, since it makes you so much happier than I do.” Richie flinched. Mike stormed away toward the bedroom, shouting over his shoulder as he went. “I hope you shove it up your ass!” Mike slammed the bedroom door then, not giving Richie room to reply even if he could’ve thought of something to say.

Richie left the bag on the floor and collapsed onto the couch. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, one of which was bouncing incessantly. He eyed the bag, which sat on the floor where it had fallen at his feet. He hated how much he wanted to get his credit card out just then, how badly he wanted to feel that rush, to ignore all the bad feelings clawing at his heart. He just needed a distraction, needed to stop feeling the way he did. He heard muffled banging and talking coming from down the hall. He lay back on the couch, staring at the ceiling and picking at his hangnails. He resolved to not look at the bag while Mike was still home, but its very presence weighed down on his chest, had him itching for it. He’d been saving it for his day off, when Mike would be at work, but it sounded like he was gonna have the house to himself a lot sooner than that. Good, he thought, but he didn’t feel good at all.

Richie really didn’t know how much time had passed by the time Mike came storming out of the bedroom and began making a racket in the bathroom. A few minutes later he burst back into the living room, a nearly bursting backpack over one shoulder and a duffel bag over the other. Richie’s chest seized at the sight. He sat up, but didn’t move from the couch. “Going somewhere?” he asked, his voice rough. Mike turned to him, his face splotchy and eyes red.

“I’m gonna go stay with Nancy and Jonathan,” he said, his voice raw but steady. Richie blinked, trying to hold himself together.

“For how long?” His voice sounded much stronger than he felt, almost uncaring. He sounded like an asshole, which he supposed was appropriate.

“Until I find my own place, I guess,” Mike shrugged. Richie felt like he turned to stone just then. Mike looked at him then, and his eyes said it all. His wide, brown, red rimmed eyes. They were near pleading, and in that moment Richie knew Mike was giving him one last chance. Richie just had to get rid of the bag, he just had to swear it off. If he asked Mike to stay he would.

But he couldn’t do that to Mike. He loved him too much.

“Think there’s anything in your price range?” he smirked. “Or are you gonna have daddy pay for it?” He saw fire try to flash behind Mike’s eyes, but it died almost immediately. He shook his head, tired and disappointed in a way that made Richie want to melt into the floor.

“I really hope you get better, Richie.” He looked around the living room for a moment before finally meeting Richie’s eyes. “I really did love you.”

That nearly broke Richie. He screamed at himself internally in the breathless moment Mike took before turning toward the door. Don’t let him walk out that door, he told himself. Don’t let him go. You know you need him, you love him. Get on your fucking knees, beg, burn that shit, anything you have to do, just don’t let him leave you. Then, one silent plea to Mike before the door closed, Please don’t leave me.

Then he was gone.

Richie swallowed thickly. He thought he should feel tears, thought he should be crying, but he just felt a bone-deep, aching emptiness. He sighed and eyed the bag on the floor. He cleared the table and got his credit card out.

a/n:  I know this ending was very bleak and not promising, but that's just because it's a small snippet of this (fictional) universe. Like I said before, recovery is always possible! Help is out there, and it's okay if it takes some people longer than others to recover.<3

taglist: @clouded-eyes-and-salty-tears @reddie4thesinbin @deadlighturis @constantreaderfool @reddieloserz @jessicaheartsderry @vegetarian-avocado @tinyarmedtrex @sml1104 @chocolatemangoose

@reddie-for-anything

[consilium-games]

A Rambling and Brain-Fried Post on Hermeneutics

It's a godless and blighted hour (11AM) as I write this, and scheduling heartache has left me swirly-eyed and sleep-deprived. Lately I've absorbed a pretty specific combination of media that's led me to think dazedly about hermeneutics, basically "systems of interpretation of a work of media" such as stories. And in light of my past couple games, and a game whose premise I haven't finished chewing on, I think getting some thoughts down (and maybe even some discussion?!) might help someone. I don't know, maybe me?

Inciting Events

By now anyone reading this has heard of Undertale. Spoilers happen here. The creator of Undertale recently released a . . . possibly-related videogame called Deltarune. I say possibly related with good reason, and I don't intend to directly spoil the game as it just came out, but it gave me interesting questions about narrative interpretation--hermeneutics--more generally. I also will probably talk a bit about Doki Doki Literature Club! which you might not have encountered or played. Some high-level spoilers will occur. This post will contain zero 'fan theories', as that has nothing to do with my game-design beat--rather, academic theories on "how do people approach interpreting stories" has a lot to do with my pretentious narrativist game-design ethos!

Also of note, I've watched a playthrough of a videogame called Witch's House, and without spoiling that, it struck me that one of the puzzles will behave drastically differently, depending on whether the player reads one of the ubiquitous hints. Meaning, not only do the hints constitute a mechanic, but discerning how to trust hints becomes a game objective. And further, since "reading a hint" is an in-game action, but recalling a hint is not, the game may behave unpredictably to the player who reads a hint, doesn't save, dies, and reloads--and doesn't read the hint again.

Lastly, I've revisited some analyses of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, and it put me in mind of discussions about This House Has People In It and The Cry of Mann, and in particular: discussions about those discussions, arguments about how presenting interpretations can color people's formed interpretations. And last warning, I'm still pretty brain-fried, I'll blame that if I end up rambling incoherently.

Setting Out

There's a lot of literature about literature, and literature about literature about literature. Perhaps some day people will spill ink about ink than anything else. Fortunately, we haven't yet entered a boundless singularity of self-referentiality. So I can afford to stake out a couple terms I expect I'll mutter:

hermeneutic: a specific approach, strategy, or philosophy to understanding a work. This can be totally informal ("Christian songs are easy to write, just take a pop song and replace 'baby' with 'Jesus'") or very rigorous ("Derrida's analysis of identity puts it to blame for religious and nationalist fanaticism"), but just treat it as technical shorthand for "approach to understanding a thing".

auteur theory: mostly used in film analysis, in our backyard it means "the author of a work arbitrates its meaning". So, eg Stephen King can definitively and canonically say "Leland Gaunt is an extradimensional alien, not Satan, the Adversary and the Prince of Darkness, from orthodox Christianity". And if King says this, that makes it true and the audience should understand Needful Things in light of this fact King told us with his mouth but not with his story.

Death of the Author: by contrast, 'Death of the Author' means that once a work has an audience (the creator published it, or put it on Steam, or hit Send on Twitter, or just played a song on their porch), the audience has liberty to interpret it however they please, and the creator's word about What It Means has no more weight than the audience. Which would mean that if King tells us Leland Gaunt is an alien, and Needful Things is closer to Lovecraft than King James, that's cool--it's a neat theory, Steve, but I think it's about . . . (Note: I don't know if King has made this claim, but Needful Things does have a few weird neat textual indications that Gaunt is some kind of Cthulhu and not the Lightbringer.)

code-switching: technically from linguistics, borrowed into social sciences, in this post it means a creator of a work putting something into the work that implicitly or explicitly prompts the audience to consciously alter or monitor their interpretation. As a very simple example, suppose someone says with a straight face and deadpan delivery, "I'm a law-abiding citizen who supports truth, justice, and The American Way." Now, suppose they make air-quotes around 'law-abiding'--it rather changes the meaning, by prompting the audience to reinterpret the literal wording.

Okay, I . . . think that'll do. So hi, I'm consilium, and as a goth game designer it should come as no surprise that I like my authors with some degree of living-impairment. Interpreting a text has an element of creativity to it that the creator simply can't contribute on the audience's behalf. More than that though, there just seems something off about the idea that, say, a reader of Needful Things might read about Sheriff Alan Pangborn, and interpret the specific way he defeats Leland Gaunt as allegorical of how cultivating creativity, community, and empathy can help prevent the dehumanization of consumerism and capitalism--only for King to say "no, Alan was just a parallel-universe avatar of the Gunslinger and thus could defeat Gaunt, who was just an extradimensional eldritch predator". If King were to say such a thing after audiences have gotten to know and love Alan on the terms presented in the text, and King were to come back with "maybe that's what I said but that's not what I meant"--my response would have to be a cordial "interesting theory, but it doesn't seem supported by the text".

So, I generally like Death of the Author! But . . . but. I've taken to gnawing on this idea in this game-design blog because--of course--It's More Complicated Than That. Roleplaying games as a medium work about as differently from other media as, say, sculpture and songwriting. And despite essentially just putting bells and whistles and protocol on top of possibly the oldest human artistic medium--storytelling--RPGs have a lot of weirdness they introduce for analysis and critique.

For example, my reservations on Death of the Author! Specifically: taking "in-character, in-game events and narration" as the work of interest, and "the other players at the table" as the audience, what happens when you describe your character Doing Something Cool--based on a mistake? We need a teeny bit of "creator as arbitrator of meaning", so we can at least say, literally, "oh, no, that's not what I meant"! Otherwise, the other players' "freedom of interpretation" leads to your character doing something nonsensical and now they have to have their characters respond--they have a worse work to create within.

This gets at something pretty foundational in treating RPG stories as art: almost any other medium has a creator create a work as a finished thing, and only then does an audience ever interpret it. Whether plural creators collaborate or not, whether the work exists as apocryphal oral tradition and mutates through telling, whether some audience members take it up as their own with flourishes (such as with a joke), there still exists this two-stage process of "author creates" and then "audience interprets". Except in stories within roleplaying games as generally practiced.

In RPGs, the creators almost always constitute the entire audience (I'll ignore things like "RPG podcasts" and novelizations of someone's DnD campaign here, as they make up a vanishingly tiny minority). The audience of the work not only creates it though--they experience the work almost entirely before you could ever call the work 'completed'. Even if we falsely grant that every game concludes on purpose rather than just kinda petering out because people get bored, leave college, have other things to do, or whatever else killed your last game, players experience the story in installments that don't exist until the end of the session. So "interpretation" gets . . . weird.

Basic Hermeneutics

On a surface level, the story of an RPG usually doesn't demand a lot of depth and analysis: some protagonists, inciting incident, various conflicts, faffing about as the PCs fail to get the hint, some amusing or tense or infuriating whiffs and failures along the way, and charitably, some kind of resolution to the main conflict and dramatic and character arcs. Usually metaphors tend to be explained straight up ("my character's ability to 'blur' things reflects her own weak personal boundaries and over-empathization"), and motifs often even moreso ("guys, seriously, what happens every single time your characters see spiders?"). A lot of this comes from necessity of that very immediate, improvised, as-we-go nature of the medium! You have to make sure your audience gets what you intend them to get--because in mere seconds they'll create some more story that depends on the bit of story you just created. And back and forth.

But, quite without realizing it or meaning to, we can't really help but inject other chunks of meaning into stories we help create. Maybe even chunks of meaning that contradict others' contributions at the table. Spoiler alert: I do not have a theory or framework to address this. The Queen Smiles kind of digs into this, but this goes beyond my current depth. So, what can we conjecture or say, what scaffolding could we build, to build a more robust "literary theory of game stories"? I have some basics as I see them:

Auteur theory (creator arbitrates meaning)

This can only apply to one player's contributions, not across plural players.

Necessary, for both basic clarification and because perfectly conveying the ~*~intended meaning~*~ frankly just doesn't work as a thing you can do off the top of your head when your turn comes to say what your character does.

GMs (where applicable) shouldn't use this to defend poor description or ill-considered presentation of "cool things for PCs to care about and cool things to do about it"--just because the GM intended the cop to be sympathetic doesn't make him so, and if he's not sympathetic . . . the protagonists will not treat him so.

Dead authors (freedom of interpretation)

Players can try this out on their own characters, and should, but should ask other players about their characters if something seems odd, confusing, intriguing, or otherwise. "You keep making a point of meticulously describing your character's weird nervous tic. The exact same way every time. How come? What's it mean?"

Players of course can answer engagement like this any way they please, including stabbing themselves with the quill: "you figure it out, if your character were to ask mine, mine would supply her answer which I may or may not know".

GMs (where applicable) should really lean on this: improvise, throw ideas and themes at the wall, and frantically build on top of the audience's ideas, since those ideas clearly resonate with the audience.

Code-switching (deliberately modifying interpretation)

We all do this all the time: the dragon is not telling you to roll for your attack, after all. The GM is, by switching between narrating the world, and communicating with a player.

More subtly we do this when switching between "what our character believes" and "what we players reasonably expect". Your costumed superhero might think of herself as righteous vengeance incarnate, but you hope everyone at the table knows you think she's conceited and delusional at best, and a full-bore psychopath at worst. This hopefully doesn't mean you play your psychopath superhero any less sincerely, but it does require a bit of ironic detachment, you know something about her that she can't know about herself (beyond that she's a fictional character, of course).

Even more subtly, sometimes weird game interactions (of the rules, other PCs, other players) imply things we wish they wouldn't, but can't quite control, and often everyone knows this. "Why can't you muster up your courage one more time?!" "Because I ran out of Fate points," your character doesn't say. Instead, your fellow authors share a look over the table, and gingerly tiptoe around an obvious, character-appropriate thing, and seize on some other thing to say or do, hopefully just as obvious and character-appropriate. But, everyone switched codes, from "characters doing things for reasons" to "the rules inform our story, and we follow them because they help".

Prepaid analysis (game-specific themes or arcs)

A lot of games have some baked-in themes right off the shelf, and provide good starting points and directions of inqury for interpreting a story born out of playing them. Monsterhearts deals with teenage cruelty and queer sexuality. Succession deals with faith, one's place in the world, and how these relate to morality. Bliss Stage tumultuous coming-of-age and taking care of one another, or failing to. If you use eg Lovesick to tell a story that you can't approach or interpret in light of "dangerous, unstable, desperate romantics"--you probably picked the wrong game. You should pick a better game.

Besides these themes, many games also have more abstract ideas--arcs or processes--that they really enshrine. Exalted gives Solars (mythical heroes patterned after ancient folklore) a mechanic called "Limit Break" which mechanically funnels a Solar toward destroying themselves with their own virtue. Likewise, even if you somehow excise Monsterhearts' focus on teenage cruelty and sexuality, you really shouldn't play if you want to avoid social stigma as a theme, because most of the mechanics hinge on it.

We players often deliberately bring in some themes and ideas we'd like to play with, too. "I want to play a character whose determination will be her own undoing--and probably everyone else's." Or even just "I really like themes where physical strength is tragically and stupefyingly unhelpful". Those make for great starting points and prompt good questions to interpret stories!

I know someone with more literary theory and less sleep deprivation could add a few basic givens, but I think this at least goes to show we have ground to stand on and territory to explore. And probably more importantly, it points out some useful kinds of questions we can ask about the story of a game and how to interpret it. So, why did I ever bring up Undertale back there?

Audience Awareness

The following works have something in common: House of Leaves, Funny Games, This House Has People In It, The Cry of Mann, The Shape on the Ground, Undertale, and Deltarune. Besides "being very good", they all explicitly pose the audience as an entity within the story--but, they do it in a very unusual way.

See, the story of a Mario game is about Mario even if the player controls Mario--and though it's a subtle distinction, this also applies to eg Doom, where you play as an explicitly nameless faceless protagonist, intended to be your avatar. Even in the most plot-free abstract game, if we can salvage out a story (if perhaps an extremely degenerate and rudimentary one like 'how this game of chess played out'), the 'story' happily accommodates the audience within it.

That's not how the list I gave does things. Not at all.

Instead, the works I listed single out the audience as something else: in House of Leaves, unreliable narrators call out the unreliable interpreter reading the narrative. In Funny Games, the audience doesn't participate--but the audience watches, and the film knows this, and singles the audience out as complicit in the horrible events that unfold. This House Has People In It casts us as the prying NSA subcontractor watching hours of security footage and reading dozens of e-mails, and makes it clear that even our Panopticon of surveillance doesn't give us a complete account of reality. The Cry of Mann casts us as gibbering voices from an eldritch plane of cosmic horror. The Shape on the Ground poses as a disinterested and clinical psychological test, but it clearly has some ideas about what would lead us to take such a 'test'.

And then there's Undertale and Deltarune. Last warning, I'll say whatever I find convenient about Undertale and probably '''spoil''' something about Deltarune in the process. I do not care.

Hostility to the Audience

If Undertale itself had a personality, one could fairly describe it as "wary of the player": it plays jokes and tricks, but it knows the player is a player, of Undertale, which Undertale also knows is a videogame. It gives you ample chance to have a fun, funny, and sometimes disturbing game, with a lot of tempting and tantalizing unspoken-s hiding juuuust offscreen. But Undertale's point as a work involves giving you the chance to not do that while still, technically, engaging with the game.

Namely, the Genocide Run. By killing literally absolutely every single thing in the game that the game can possibly let you kill, the game very purposely unfolds entirely differently--and on multiple playthroughs, the game will outright take notice of multiple playthroughs, and challenge you for--in effect--torturing the narrative it can deliver by forcing it to deliver every narrative. Let's think about that for a moment:

Most videogames have some kind of excuse of a narrative, and lately, many have really good, nuanced stories to tell--and many of those even go to the (mindbendingly grueling) effort of delivering a plurality of good narratives that honor your agency as a player--maybe even a creator, as best a videogame can with its limitations.

But, what can you say about a story that has multiple endings? Or multiple routes to them? And what can you say about a story that, in some of its branches, simply goes to entirely different places as narratives? It strains the usual literary critical toolkit, to say the least.

Now, a game like Doki Doki Literature Club! approaches this exact same idea of addressing its story as manipulable by the player, of the player as an agent in the story, but in a pretty straightforward way as far as "a narrative that works this way": the narrative already describes "and then the player came along and messed everything up". All of the player's different routes serve this one overarching narrative: the game has an obsessive fixation on you and wants you to play it forever (which, given its nature as (roughly) a visual novel . . . perhaps asks quite a lot).

Undertale takes a step back from even this level of abstraction, though: the implicit and often hidden events of its world and narrative unfold / have unfolded / will unfold, and a given player's "story" consists of "what the player does to this multi-branched narrative-object". The game judges you to your face for contorting its weird timeline-multiple-universe meta-story . . . but lets you do it, to prove the point it wants to prove.

And without much controversy, we can conclude that point roughly summarizes to "playing games just for accomplishment and mastery doesn't give as rewarding an experience as immersing in the story and characters". The subtler point under that, though, comes out through multiple playthroughs: "immersing yourself in a story and cast of characters too much will harm your life and your enjoyment of other things". Undertale, were it a person, would probably look nervously at you after several 'completionist' playthroughs to "see all the content", and it explicitly describes this exact behavior to the player's face as something objectionable--even calling out people who watch someone else play on streams and video hosts.

"Just let it be a story"

Which brings us to Deltarune. I've no doubt dozens of cross-indexed internet-vetted analyses and fan-theories will arise in the next few months (and I look forward to them), but on a once-over the game seems to have one specific thing to say to the player's face: "you are intruding on a story that isn't about you". The game opens with an elaborate character-creator (well, for a retroclone computer RPG), then tells you "discarded, you can't choose who you are, and you can't choose who the character is either". It has fun with giving the player dialog options--then timing out and ignoring the input. It even tells the player in in-game narration that "your choices don't matter". The story itself doesn't even care very much about the player's character, instead hinging on the development and growth of an NPC, following her arc, without much concern for the player's thoughts on the matter. And at the very end, after playing mind-games with the player's familiarity and recognition of Undertale characters--the close does something both inexplicable and disturbing. This is not your story: it's not about you, your choices don't affect it, and it doesn't care what you think.

As an aside, it seems like quite a good game--but I think that comes in part because of this very drastic intent and the skill with which it executes that intent (ie, bluntly at first, subtly enough to almost forget, and then slapping hard enough to prompt a flashback).

And holding this alongside Undertale's stark (even literal) judgment of the player for 'forcing' the narrative to contort to accommodate the player's interaction with that narrative, it seems clear to me that where Doki Doki Literature Club! has fun with the idea of "player as complicit in something gross, and as motivating something cool", Undertale and Deltarune seem much more interested in making the player take an uncomfortable look at how they engage with narratives.

Defensive Hermeneutics

On one hand, Funny Games, The Cry of Mann, and Undertale and Deltarune stare back at the audience, judge them, treat them as an intruding, invading, even corrupting force from outside the work, criticize the audience for enjoying the work, and even call the audience out for engaging in detailed critique, like some kind of cognitive logic-bomb, or a cake laced with just enough ipecac to punish you for eating more than a slice.

But on the other, House of Leaves, This House Has People In It, The Shape on the Ground, and Doki Doki Literature Club all want the audience to participate, to scrutinize, to interact with the narrative and question it, as well as themselves. What does that first camp have in common besides wariness and hostility to the audience, and what does this second camp have in common besides treating the audience as creative of the work's meaning? I'll call it "a defensive hermeneutic".

Notionally, the audience has hermeneutics: ways of understanding a work. But, a creator can't help but have some understanding of the likely mental state and view of a(n imagined) audience, approaching the text in some way. A creator can thus bake in or favorably treat some approaches over others, and can even use this to guide criticism about their work.

That first group, which I'll call "defensive", has one striking common feature: the 'surface level' plots either don't matter, or have very simple outlines. Funny Games' plot is exactly as follows: two psychopaths terrorize, torture, and eventually murder an innocent family. The Cry of Mann shows us what looks a lot like a small child trying to mimic a melodramatic soap-opera, before Things Get Weird (and any extant 'surface level' plot goes under the waves). And Undertale and Deltarune give us the stock "hero appears in strange land, arbitrary puzzle-quests ensue, climactic final confrontation restores peace to the land". This serves as the set-dressing and vehicle for the actual plots--or sometimes simply cognitive messages--to get into the audience's minds:

"What, exactly, do you get out of slasher torture-porn movies? Why do you create the market for things like this?" "Are you sure about where your sense of empathy and identification points you? What makes you think you have a grip on reality enough to judge who's right and relatable, and who isn't?" "Don't just passively consume games like they were kernels of popcorn. But don't gorge yourself on the same dish, either--there's more out there, but you have to look for it."

In short: these works don't want you to nitpick the works themselves. Their entire message consists of second-or-higher-order interpretation. To put it another way, they want to make sure you don't pay attention to the handwriting, because the gaps between the words spell out a poem and the words themselves only create those gaps.

Participatory Hermeneutics

By this same token, I'll call the second camp "participatory": they treat the audience as a kind of creator in their own right--Borges did this a lot and with relish in his later years, and Doki Doki Literature Club! makes it a game mechanic. A creator using this "participatory" hermeneutic essentially doesn't consider their work 'finished' until the audience interprets it. This should sound familiar. The audience contributes meaning to the work, by interpreting it, and a "participatory" work counts on it. And, to contrast with the "defensive" camp: they use complex (sometimes even overcomplicated) plots, which matter and inform interpretation, and tie into the second-order meaning that the work attempts to convey. The "surface level" plots don't solely carry a tangled "interpret this" into the audience's brain. Instead, the surface plot has enough complexity to have a plot-hole, enough character depth to have problematic characters, and enough weight on its own merit to have unappealing implications. In other words: even without convoluted postmodern hoity-toity highfalutin' hermeneutic jibberjabber, a member the audience can find a story they can just enjoy on its merits.

Before anyone angrily starts defending the characters in Undertale or complaining about the directionlessness of This House Has People In It, I hope I've made it really clear, I lumped these works into these two categories based on an overall tendency and commonality, in approaching this one really abstract concept, and as with any work, any binary you can think of will have gradations if you look among "all works, ever". And, even more importantly:

I really love all these works, and I love what they do and how they do it. They all also have flaws, because flawed humans made them, and flawed humans enjoy them. That all said: the "participatory hermeneutic" has everything to offer for my purposes, while the "defensive hermeneutic" . . . might get a post of its own someday.

So What Now?

In aeons past, I wrote about feedback and criticism, and this seems like a good time to dust off that idea with a new application. In particular, that old post talks simply about players (and GMs where applicable) helping each other to contribute their best, and get the most enjoyment out of a game. Here, we'll look at some basic questions players can pose each other as creators of a work, rather than participants of a game or members of an audience.

So let's take that 'player survey' and repurpose it for Dark Humanities and getting a toehold on literary criticism:

Can you describe your approach to your character?

What do you want to convey about your character?

What was one thing you want to make sure we all understand?

How do you interpret my character so far?

What theme or motif do you think our characters express together?

What misconception or misunderstanding would you like to clear up or prevent?

What themes do you want to explore?

And just like the 'player character questionnaire', everyone should update and refine their survey every few sessions. As a given game goes on, for example, you might get to know one of the PCs so well that you never need to worry about "misconceptions or misunderstandings", regarding that character's motivations and personality and thematic implication. But, that character's connection with eg themes of parental abandonment might change, and when that topic comes up, you can devote a question or three just to asking things like "might your character be treating this person as a surrogate mother-figure?" Maybe the player never thought of it that way! Maybe the player thinks that would be a great idea! But neither of you will think about it without pausing a moment to consider things like this.

And once everyone has shared a bit about their characters' themes and clarified everyone else's, you can discuss deliberately pursuing an idea, through your characters. Obviously your characters have no motivation for this, but your characters don't even exist, so they don't have any say in the matter.

For example, cyberpunk naturally deals with corporate oppression, alienation, dehumanization, and technological obsolescence. But, when one PC regularly takes recreational drugs, and baits another into joining them, a third concocts elaborate revenge fantasies, and a fourth picks up broken people like stray cats and tries to parent them into being functional . . .

Maybe they all share a more specific theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms". The drug-user is nice and obvious--and their partner joining them in partaking perhaps has a need to belong. The vengeful obsessive might be compensating for feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability by hurting or preparing to hurt others. And the self-styled Good Samaritan and would-be Guardian Angel might be doing the opposite--just as unhealthily.

Importantly, everyone keeps playing their character, the character they made, the character they want to play. But, with some good chewy discussion about story, everyone can also look for spots where, indeed, their character might just so happen to--do something to further this sub-theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms", on top of the background of alienation, obsolescence, and dehumanization.

Academic, critical, literary discussion of roleplaying games as games seems like a sadly underexplored subject. But critical discussion of the stories themselves, the ones happening at each table, might as well be completely unknown--so here's hoping someone can build on this!

[svartalfhild]

2018, I Won’t Miss You

A.k.a. I call out this year for all the ways it fucked me over and reflect on a few good experiences.

This year was the first year I’ve ever had a smart phone, which ended up being pretty damn useful, even essential at some points.  However, the counterbalance was that I had to go through finding out how to live in a post-school existence, and that was not pretty, because it put me at all new levels of social isolation and uncertainty.  I stressed super hard about finding a new job.  I ultimately didn’t get one and lost hours at my current job because I thought I was going to be transitioning to a better job at a toy store, but they laid me off only a few weeks after hiring me to replace me with someone with better availability.  They said I could stay on as a “seasonal worker” but it’s past Christmas and I haven’t been asked to fill a single shift since they benched me in September, so saying I still work there is kind of a joke at this point.

The good news is, despite the stress of failing to get a better job, I’ve added art as an occasional source of extra income, starting with doing the cover illustration for a short story my mother published earlier this year and later with opening commissions to the online community.

My mental health didn’t have a super great year, though, especially in the first half.  On top of the job bullshit and the dealing with not knowing how to live life without school, I was feeling intensely bleak about my existence.  I was in an excruciating amount of emotional pain because of things I couldn’t control, and it festered because I had the free time to ruminate about how lonely and dejected I felt.  I hadn’t felt quite that bad in several years, actually.  It’s hard to compete with the shit I was going through in middle school, but this came alarmingly close. 

I think my biggest mistake was trying to force myself to be fine again as soon as possible when it took me a couple years to get past the shit that plagued me when I was 12.  I honestly think, though, that there was a little while there from about July to late September when I was coping pretty well.  I don’t know what happened in late spring to make that happen, but I was in a state of higher functioning for a bit in the summer.

The sad thing is that here at the end of the year, I am once again struggling with the same shit; I’m just a whole lot better with how that affects my behaviour towards other people now.  I do feel like I’ve learned how to better interact with people and shield those I love from the worst of my mental health nonsense.  In turn, I think that has greatly improved my relationships and made me less prone to beating myself up over the things I say.  Progress.

And hey!  I did manage to do some pretty rad things this year, despite all the crap my physical and mental health were hefting onto me.  I got on a plane for the first time and traveled by myself to Oregon to be with some of my closest friends, who I’d only ever known through the internet before.  We went to a convention together and had a really awesome time getting our asses kicked at AtlA themed dodgeball dressed as our DnD characters.  I went through a haunted house for the first time and found out that I’m too rational to be scared by a lot of that sort of stuff (but it was still fun).  I got to go to huge bookstore and see a first American edition of Fellowship of the Ring.  I think the best part of that whole trip, though, was just living with friends and getting a taste of what life without my family’s control could be like.  For once in my life, I trusted that everyone and everything was going to be okay, and for a few days, I was really happy.  Because of that, though, I spent a lot of the day that I left crying or trying not to cry.  Having so much of what you want and then having to leave it is...really upsetting, as it turns out.

But anyway.  I also managed to complete an application to grad school, so even though my whole Find A Good Job plan didn’t work, I still took a step towards some kind of life goal and I don’t have to have a total existential crisis just yet.  I don’t have high expectations about being accepted, but I do have some hopes and that’s something I can hold onto going into next year.

A lot changed with my family this past year.  Dealing with the wake of my grandfather’s sudden death was a major issue all year that seemed almost handled until my grandmother died just a couple months ago, which threw everything back into chaos and despair.  Death and loss have been an awful theme for me this year in general.  On top of my grandparents’ deaths, my dad’s best friend committed suicide, and a friend of mine, who I know to have been suicidal in the past, completely disappeared from the internet when I wasn’t looking, and I was unable to track her down to find out if she was okay.  Other friends lost people who were dear to them as well.  The world was ravaged by increasingly terrible disasters on top of that.  Needless to say, my empathy circuits are fucking fried.

Thankfully, life handed me some pretty great distractions from its bullshit, like an awesome DnD campaign and lots of time with assorted other TTRPGs, or numerous video games like Pillars of Eternity II: Deadire, Fallout 4, and Overwatch.  Netflix brought me countless hours of enjoyment, and my brother got me to watch all of Stargate SG1 with him, which I wasn’t super into at first, but it grew on me.  I started knitting again for the first time in years, because I love knitting scarves for people.  I did a lot of fic writing, but it wasn’t really fanfiction so much as additional content for my tabletop games.  Same goes for art. 

It’s been over a year now since I’ve posted any proper fanfic or fanart, which feels weird, but I think I’ve become so exhausted with the politics of being a fan content creator that I haven’t had the motivation for it.  It’s much easier to keep your passion for something going when you don’t hope to attract the attention of thousands of people, and instead you’re making things for a story you made up with your closest friends.  The only people whose attention you need to care about then are a handful of people who are already inherently invested.

Of course, that’s not to say that I don’t get sad about my work sometimes anyway, regardless of what I’m creating and for whom.  Depression is and has been a real dick this year, and it made me procrastinate on my grad app manuscript to the point where I had to stress years off my life cramming the creation of a 10k word original short story into a single month just before the deadline.  I managed it, though, and that’s the important thing.

I don’t know what to expect from 2019 except more nonsense, because there’s always copious amounts of nonsense.  Having high expectations, given what the past few years have been like, seems rather silly at this point.  I suppose what the new year shapes up to be will largely hinge on whether I get accepted to grad school in March or not.  If I do, then it’ll be a year of big change in my life, going away to live on my own in a different state.  If I don’t, then it’ll just be More Of Same, still living with my parents, working part-time at a shit food service job, looking for a new job, and tearing my hair out trying to get everything together for more grad school applications. 

One way or the other, though, I intend to try to finally get treatment for my mental illness.  I am tired of being like this and I’m tired of having my memory and focus abilities steadily destroyed by this shit.  If anything goes right next year, let it be that.

[indigodice]

AN END FORESEEN

We returned home from the cultists’ lair, after having murdered them like vermin, we returned and rested and inside the inn at the bottom of the stair the talking rat, La Pieto and I, Claviger Nero, noticed an advertisement for the orphans’ play. It was across the street from the White Stag inn. The Dwarf, Tor Torinson tried to convince us to pursue our leads.

We went to the play which despite the advertisement, was explained to be the worst play we’ve ever seen. The children delivered their lines without emotion, parts and people were missing, the main character included. Damien Krieger goes on to speak to the head of the orphanage. He gives us information and a kind of lead about the burned church, but nothing conclusive about the world or the present drama unfolding. So we leave.

The head of the orphanage spoke about one of his children being worried about her missing friends, and that her friends were part of a teenage romance story involving the burned down house. The girl Lilly was worried about her friends, Laura and Sam. I comment to the others that we still feel fated. “Don’t you feel the pull of the string of fate? I think if we follow this string the path forward will unfold before us. If we’re being watched we could take a different path. I think if we follow what’s obvious, the same fate that befell the knight and Barbar could befall us.” We did not abate. Our leads were Scarlets’, where Lilly worked, and the burned house, where Laura and Sam went missing. “I think they’re the same lead. And we’re not going to survive here unless we make some money,” said Nero.

“We don’t have any other leads, so we should stick to these,” said Damien.

Tor Torinson took some of the fancy clothes to the tailor and asked them about the cultist’s robes. He didn’t learn much, they weren’t made by craftsmen.

La Pieto extracts information and gets the rest of the party into Scarlets where we meet with Lilly who directs us to the burned house after giving us a description of Laura and Sam.

Inside we hear crying and a scream. I engage the cultist and smash his face in with my hammer. We notice a dead Laura in the center of the ritual room become a Hellhound. The fight goes poorly. La Pieto goes down, Damien drags him to safety. I try to drag Sam out of the room, and we make the decision to not leave him here to die. He’s about as strong as Nero is so it’s a fight that doesn’t go well, and he manages to keep his ground. Tor Torinson arrives to fight the hellhound, and Damien commits to the fight as well. Nero commits to the fight, and with everyone nearly dead, we defeat the hellhound after Nero goes down. Tor Torinson alerts the guards, who arrive and take us all in. End session.

Damien’s player comments on not being directed particularly well towards the thing we’re supposed to do, and I comment on how if I had a choice between Disco Elysium and Baldurs Gate, I’d choose Baldur’s Gate, to which the GM comments about how we’ve been rolling poorly, are still level one and acting high and might about our capabilities, built poor characters, and the story isn’t as linear as I think it is.

Yet my main problem, is that I’ve played with this GM before, and the problem of a character not being able to express it’s design isn’t a new problem. If there’s a problem with expectations, I think I need only point to the fact nothing about what or how the session would play was explained in the session zero beyond setting. But maybe its my own fault for thinking that if I held on to hope somehow the session would go smooth in a way I was happy with just by letting it develop.

The GM posted a meme about players complaining about not being able to find the path, then a picture with the path being littered with signs. It made me unreasonably angry because the way the argument went out was mostly with him talking over me, and me realizing I’d never been able to convince him about anything.

I think this is the first time in the entirety of our years of role playing that I’ve ever decided to bring up I had a problem with the session. Usually I sit down and shut up and accept that if I don’t have fun I’ll somehow have fun next time. A gamble. And the first time I bring it up I have this realization he’s not the kind to ever give up ground while he’s ranting off. His word, the last word, is the only word that matters. In a previous session I remember talking as a player, that he couldn’t keep making all the party decisions himself, or take everything into his own hand. For example, trampling over our morals to do what he personally wanted to do would mean we become threatening to him. For example my character could act out or slit his throat if he thought the act was egregious enough. The next session he bought a stone that let him not sleep instead of addressing the problem I had with his character design, or the fact his decision stopped my own character design from being expressed. He’d taken a lich stone and destroyed the vessel it was attached to, a young boy, instead of taking the steps the other players in the party wanted to take to free the boy.

All I can think is that this is a person I can’t get along with. And its some kind of wonder I’ve spent so much time with this person at all. This is a person who I watch my tongue around, and constantly feel I cannot express myself. So while he was complaining about how we wrongly keep trying to act heroic, I say I’m done, and I leave the channel. And I keep thinking about this all now I get angry enough to think, why have I spent so much time on this person, and I decide I’m cutting this person out, this person who doesn’t listen to me, who I have a hard time even thinking of as a friend.

Sepiadice comments that I’ve quit a lot of games recently. There was his own, there was my friend’s Strahd campagin which we were both in, there was the above GM’s end of the world campaign, there was the above GM’s current campaign. All of these were dnd or dnd adjacent, except for the end of the world campaigns which I had other reservations.

And this puts me in a space where I’m not sure if RPGs are for me if I’ve had so many poor experiences. I don’t know if it’s specifically DND and DND adjacent content or if its something other and else like my own personality somehow has a mismatch with these games, or the possibility I have some mental block about DND interfering with my ability to enjoy the games. Having played so much DND in the last decade, and having so many of them be so similarly discouraging experiences, it feels obvious that it should be the game. Yet, if they haven’t been fun, why do I keep doing them? Why do I keep insisting on trying them? There a grail of an experience I want and am going after, and more often than not the GM promises something interesting or close, but there’s always something off.

I don’t know how to clean any of this up. Maybe I’ll just do it later.

[duckandrollblog]

Sample Campaign

This Month's theme is : Campaigns, and so all month long Duck and Roll will be talking about campaign styles, how to build a progression of adventures, how to build an open sandbox game, and more.  

 We're going to kick things off with a nice little sample campaign structure. We're gonna start off with a pretty basic structure that can work in just about any kind of game. This model focuses strongly on getting the most out of a very small range of foes and it starts with a lot of excitement and builds up continually from there. Because of the tight focus it serves best for short campaigns and works well without having many or even any side adventures. This model also provides a good mix of fear, action, and excitement. It's heavy on stealth but has plenty of room for some combat and problem solving and provides a heavy dark atmosphere. Let's take a look:

 Adventure 1: The first encounter

The first encounter is a horror themed adventure. The player characters find themselves together in an isolated area. This works best in an enclosed space where options for escape are few. Good approaches to this are: A carnival funhouse, an office building after dark, the dungeon of a castle, a derelict ship, a small colony on a remote island/planet/moon, in a restricted military base, a pocket plane, or a space station. In this location the players are stalked by your villain of choice. This foe should be powerful, persistent, terrifying, and in some way unnatural. Ideal foes are implacable undead, murderous robots, frightening eldritch beings, killer golems, or the like. The foe stalks them through the location of choice, killing npc allies and making its best attempt on the players themselves. The foe should either be immortal, or at least durable beyond the ability of the party members and it should be clear. If the players have guns then it should soak lead, collapse, and then crawl back to its feet and continue pursuit. If the players have knives it should take a stabbing without even bleeding or slowing. Classic examples of this foe are foes like the Terminator, Jason Vorhees, DND Trolls, and Resident Evil's Nemesis or Tyrant. The foe pursues them slowly but unfailingly and finally through the perfect set of circumstances the party is able to slay or escape the foe and live another day.  During the adventure any information about the enemy is very well concealed and very minimal. No one knows what it is or where it came from or what it's after, and what little can be determined is hard to piece together. It's important however that the final result of adventure#3 is in some way foreshadowed here. And make sure you save your map if you made one, we might need it later.

Adventure#2: The nightmare returns

This adventure is the least like a traditional adventure in the series because it's quite the opposite of the first one. In this adventure the party from the previous encounter becomes aware of signs that whatever stalked and hunted them is back. Maybe a group of slayings on the news match the monsters M.O, maybe the trail of filth it leaves behind has been seen around, maybe the nightmares that it brings with it start all over. Some way the players know that the thing is back. This can also be done by having a group of npc's approach them, they say they know what the players have been through and now the monster is after them!

From there however the players are able to act accordingly. They can try to get help, but who would believe what they've been through, and more important who could actually be powerful enough to help them? The intention here is to build a sense of fear and helplessness. The monster is out there, it's taking lives and only a few people have ever seen it and survived. The players may use this opportunity to reach out to eachother but even if they don't they'll still be in a great position for the climax of the adventure. Once the fear and paranoia has been cranked up it's time for the monster to emerge, but this time it's different somehow. It fights different, or looks different, or it's wounds and scars are gone, it's still closer to the foe they faced than anything else, but something is wrong. It may seem like it's evolved, or devolved, but as the players engage, flee, or hide from the threat they get "the message". A cell phone call from someone who contacted the players, a desperate message spell, a psychic scream, a cry for help in the night, the distant howl of... a second monster. This threat, this foe is not the one they faced before, the invincible unstoppable threat they barely survived, there's more than one. The party escapes, maybe fleeing, maybe somehow slaying both monsters. But they find neither is the one they faced before. These things are out there, and now there can be no doubt, answers must be found before it's too late...if it isn't already.

 Adventure#3 The delve.

After pressing their contacts, consulting the stars, or a lengthy investigation the players become aware of a location that may hold the secrets they're after. An abandoned lab, a distant planet, a forgotten portal, a long closed amusement park, some desolate location holds the secret of the monsters. This may sound a lot like adventre#1, and it should, in fact if it's at all possible this adventure is best set in the ruins or remains of wherever adventure 1 happened, making your map twice as useful. This time however the players know that one or more of the monsters is out there, and they may even be coming from the very bowels of this location. This time escape is not enough, they need answers. This is where all the clues dropped in part 1 can come around and become important messages, the final pieces, or at least more pieces, fall into place and the players understand the full scale of the problem. While evading capture and whatever natural hazards fill the area the party learns that this is just the beginning, that the country, kingdom, world or galaxy could be threatened by this epidemic. What they face now are just the first things awakened from cryosleep, prototype robots, the weaker brood. The players also find the origins of these things and more importantly, how to stop them. They have a weakness, not just for defeating the creatures individually, but for stopping all of them. An EMP, a computer virus, an airborne toxin, a single specially made ritual, some Achilles heel. But in order to make use of it, the party must venture to the very heart of the enemy itself.

 Adventure#4 The final adventure.

The party must now infiltrate the root of the enemy. Now powerful foes, nearly unstoppable threats, are in a multitude and hope wears thin. Now the players can put all the skills and allies they've gained to the test in the climax of the campaign. The nature of the enemy means an all out assault is insane in the best of times so the key for this adventure is stealth. This helps play on the same ideas and themes as the first adventure, but now, thematically, the players are on the offensive, stalking, sneaking, hiding and surviving. This is also a good place to include a few very easy combat encounters, a chance for the players to show off how strong they've become. The element of danger and excitement in these battles though is that the foes don't have to win, they only have to raise an alarm in order for the fight to go very badly for the players. These smaller encounters should be with scientists, failed experiments, security drones or the like to ensure that the big monster of the campaign doesn't get devalued. Finally the players reach the end goal, the final switch. Customarily there should be a nice big boss fight here. If the power creep has been minimal then it could be the first monster from the first adventure, provided it was defeated in a way that leaves a chance for its return. Alternatively it could be an aberrant mutant, a superior next generation model, or the original being that was cloned to make the others. Ideally this monster should be powerful, relentless, and unbeatable, but all the party has to do is keep it busy long enough to execute the program or flip the switch and turn the key or complete the ritual in the right place and then, sweet sweet victory will be had. The threat is finally over, the monsters are banished or de-activated or slain, and the players have earned a long rest.

  Variation: This arc is flexible enough to leave a lot of room for variation. You can use robots, plant people, demons, evil clone demigods, animatronic fursuits, aliens, all kinds of stuff fit this model quite nicely. One could also lighten the tone considerably by casting everything in the light of a B movie. The police are useless to help and don't believe anything, the monster has improbable and sometimes wildly changing powers, the deaths are over the top and gory, and despite mortal danger NPC's are inexplicably prone to making out alone in the bushes.

 Works well with:

Paranoia: Someone or something was behind all of this. This kind of technology isn't cheap. Somewhere pulling the strings is a huge bureaucratic entity. It could be an evil corporation, or a secret branch of the government, but somewhere there were people of power who put their seal of approval on these nightmares.

Eldritch horror: These things simply should not be. Perhaps they are monsters from another reality, perhaps they are created and fed by fear itself, perhaps they came here from beyond the stars. Even if they're defeated the players will forever be haunted by what they've seen, and by the knowledge that things like that exist.

After the ending:

The nightmare continues: The robots are all shut down, except that one who the players shocked so bad it's uplink was severed. A single mutated variant of the creatures survived. The progenitor of the species didn't die in the final battle and went into hiding. Somehow, someway the creature that always comes back...came back! This can lead to either a final adventure where the players must finally face off against the last remaining monster in a no holds barred battle to the death. Or it could also be used to have that creature propagate, reproduce, and begin a whole new arc.

Enter phase two: The project was a failure, but valuable information was gained, and while costly, the wheels of industry keep on turning. A new monster can be cloned, or bred, or captured, one immune to the weaknesses of the predecessor.

The heroes of the past: Once you've battle against terrifying monsters and save the country/world/galaxy regular challenges feel dull and muted. From here we follow the players after their great adventure. The GM should throw a simple, boring, easy challenge, emphasizing how much the players have grown, what they're capable of, and how much more they could accomplish. From there a new opportunity arises. A monster that needs defeating, a special ops team, the call of the king or president, someone needs the heroes to regroup and face a new challenge.

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