#it’s also interesting that Karna is Aabria’s character from ravening war

[heytherecentaurs]

I wonder if the etymology of Ankarna comes from the character Karna, son of the Sun God Surya, from Mahabharata, the Hindu epic.

[cloudmancy]

i don't want to be mean or anything but like. the cr/t/cal r/le girlies in the dimension 20 tag are just sending me like, i just Knew these people be just all over this season and diving in and dissecting every little detail and speculating for the larger picture (of six episodes) (plus a season that's already been out for a year) as though people like. haven't been having to Sit with the Very, Very unfinished/untold part of the world of this campaign setting for Years already? (the Widely Established Fanlore of it all XD) although that's also been also been folding in the face of. all the colin posts (like Specifically colin too past even colin+raphaniel or colin+deli). like they fell for the cr bait so hard- group of fans starved for mlm content based on their typical cr diet, see a guy (Just Some Guy) looking the way he was, see his mysterious past and divorce and arc and glowup and post-divorce talks and. yknow. whaddya gonna do. that's all they're gonna talk about when the EXPLICITLY mlm radish priest who's been grooming that VERY SAME cheese guy for five years is right there.

anyways i'm going to write all that off anon and pretend i'm not deathly scared of invoking the wrath of cr fans after that thing on twitter

IT'S ACTUALLY REALLY FUNNY YEAH. gonna address the colin part first then talk about my problems with the season under a spoiler. listen I think deli & colin are very real in that deli wants him SO bad but it's crazy that people are dancing around colin's whole thing with raphaniel. like what do you guys think was going on there 😭 'he's his babysitter' SAY IT OUT LOUD! he was fucking that radish

now for my thoughts about the plot and pacing of ravening war

I do not like that this season (that was supposed to be about a war covering 7+ years of intense political conflict and full-scale warfare involving every country in the continent) got boiled down to 2 massive timeskips & 3 battle episodes of five guys fucking around in a cave because the entire war was actually started by a secret cult. there were no battles involving the actual war + 1 skill check for entire 5 years at a time + almost nothing politics wise + they missed the ENTIRE climatic final push for the end of the war because they were underground. it's so poorly paced, I really don't know what to say. am I the crazy one here for wanting a season about the ravening war to be about the war? it just doesn't feel like the characters had any impact on the plot past episode 3 and they ONLY because they kill the queen of candia because a cult told them to. because we get alliances forged and broken and conflicts ended and rulers crowned within the span of a single sentence from the DM before we chug back off to the mycelium hivemind main plot. hot take but every season does not in fact need a plot twist big bad to fight

all of the characters in the season are genuinely the most interesting characters I've seen in YEARS. it's a goddamn shame we didn't get to spend more time with them. it sucks that each of them brought so much intrigue and backstory to the war, but every single one of them ended up contributing not much at all to the scale of the campaign because, again, the final boss turned out to be a cult within the top secret cult of mushrooms that was ALREADY a secret but there is also ANOTHER, more powerful deity to fight in the very last episode. we needed more episodes, or less time spent on battles. we needed to not bring on a DM known for having all the time in the world to wrap up years-long campaigns in 5 hour chunks at a time, for a 6 ep miniseason. we did not need two more powerscaled deities for no reason to a war that should have been about the people and not... random alien eldritch forces. we needed closure on amangeaux's child, we needed to know WHY raphaniel was poisoning the king and starting a war in the first place. aabria wrote a whole essay about karna's backstory that I would've loved to see in the show itself, but... we didn't get to see it! there were almost no politics. we did get 4 separate secret underground mushroom fights though. in a campaign about a war.

"real life is messy! not everything gets wrapped up neatly! it reflects real wars!" this is a dnd show sir and when you spend 20 minutes out of 12 hours of content actually talking politics and the rest of the time fucking around with mushrooms in a cave, it starts to look less like a deliberate artistic choice and more like poorly paced plot threads that didn't get a chance to finish.

[chiakery]

It's just one more week until Dimension 20: The Ravening War (woohoo!!) so it's high time for some class/subclass speculations:

Starting off with our fabulous ladies, I think Anjali may be a caster. I know Lady Amangeaux is holding a dagger in her art but she just gives me this vibe of maybe a College of Valor bard (also, this party seems to be pretty low on magic users and her being a caster would help to balance things out)? Aabria on the other hand gives me strong rouge vibes, although we see a flame appear in Karna's hand, so maybe a Hexblade Warlock? If she's playing a rouge though, her "trying to affect a sense of calm" could be an interesting choice if Aabria decided to play the Soulknife subclass (I'm definitely not biased bc that was my subclass in my prev game, not at all)

Brennan's character seems like an archetype of Cleric and I doubt he'd do a similar stunt to Lapin in ACOC. The bishop may (and probably does) know about the Hungry One and true nature of the Bulb but I still think he's a cleric. Similarly, Thane Katzon looks like a martial, strenght based class, however it's hard for me to say which one. Lou has already played a barbarian (in ACOC) and fighter (Fantasy high), he's also now playing a paladin as Eursulon in WBN, so that's a big question mark between those three.

Zac's character is the biggest mystery to me. What's this cheese man's deal?? He comes from Dairy Islands so most probably has some sailing background, could be a Swashbuckler but I'm not sure if Zac would choose to play the same class for the third time (after Starstruck Odyssey and Neverafter) so maybe a Fighter?