wrennwyrmnest - Tumblr blog

[wrennwyrmnest]

so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie - the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels - it’s not love, it’s control.

BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.

i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…

you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’re realizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist

[wrennwyrmnest]

RATS WORLD

Made myself a little game using Viditya Voleti's Fill in the Blank TTRPG zine.

This was fun to make and I feel like I'm gonna make a hundred of them.

Get Viditya's zine and make yourself some games.

[wrennwyrmnest]

Wandering Friendship Simulator 2023

Hey, rpg tumblr, I think you might enjoy The One Ring.

Some stuff that it does:

-Adventurers aren't mercenaries, they're either brave and meddlesome or Really Going Through It

-Your adventuring party specifically has a stat for how off the hook it is, Men Of Bree increase this stat

-As part of character creation, everyone picks a home base

-As part of character creation, everyone picks another PC as a bestie and becomes Shadowed if their bestie gets hurt

-There's a corruption mechanic, getting Shadowed, but you reduce it by taking a break and gardening for a few years

-There's a robust downtime system where everyone goes home after an adventure and then you all meet up like ten years later with full beards and prizes in Regional Avocado Growing and whatnot

-Combat and Walking Too Hard both deal damage, and traveling matters as much as fights

-The dice are genuinely easy to understand, and you have lots of ways to tilt the odds on a roll. You're not held hostage to your own luck

-The art's gorgeous. Really needlessly pretty. This would be a coffee table book if it wasn't also such an unfairly well made game

In conclusion, I just read it and it was supposed to be a gift for a friend, but now I'm apparently buying them a second copy.

(This game feels like a fever dream. I was expecting to snooze through it and instead my brain is alive with Game Design.)

[wrennwyrmnest]

Kay: Lancelot may be part of the plot against you!

Arthur: Oh please…

Arthur: Like anybody would let that guy in on a conspiracy. A freaking landmine deals with pressure better than him and would kill fewer people.

[wrennwyrmnest]

For years I would look at posts and questionnaires about neurodivergence that takes about being so focused on something that you forgot to eat and be like, "Couldn't be me. Being hungry is so uncomfortable! Your stomach is growling and cramping? How do you ignore that?"

Then someone informed me that neurotypical people have a whole bunch of "hungry" sensations before they get to that point.....

[wrennwyrmnest]

Dungeons and dragons? In this economy!?

Look, best I can do for you is an angry lizard in a hole in the garden.

[wrennwyrmnest]

The Map of Drak'Arna - an update on my worldbuilding project!

This is an introduction to the world of Drak'Arna while referencing the map I've created in the process - images are under the cut :)

Core premise: This world explores the question ‘What if the alchemical theory of classical elements - that instead of atoms the world’s building blocks are the elements Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, were true?’

Due to this, things that make up the world of Drak’Arna have a ‘signature’ that indicates their elemental makeup. Therefore, flora, fauna, fungi, and sapient species have elemental signatures that are impacted by their environment as much as their parents.

The way that elemental signatures are determined is based on the geographical location of the species. The world is a globe with a few key elemental locations.

Air: encompasses the atmosphere and sky, there are a few different layers that determine what kind of creatures can exist there but notably a feature of Air + Earth is the Aerlands - floating islands that float across the world, either anchored in one spot or are piloted.

Earth: from a globe view, a band of Earth splits the globe into two distinct hemispheres. This is further reflected underground with subterranean ecosystems and eventually a place the dead go.

Fire: the center of this element is found in the southern hemisphere and is a volcano called ‘The Spire’ that resides on an island surrounded by flowing lava. Between it and Earth there are various desert and savannah biomes.

Water: the center of this element is found in the northern hemisphere ocean called ‘The Seanote’ as it is seen as a hole in the ocean, the edge characterized by its waterfalls.

In addition to this, there is a spectrum of Hot/Cold and Wet/Dry that mirrors our world’s equatorial and polar effects on winds and oceans.

North Pole: Dry + Cold. Technically also wet due to the ocean, but an ice sheet is not noted on the main map.

South Pole: Dry + Cold, due to it being connected to the main continent, this is an extremely cold desert referred to as ‘The Badlands’.

Equator: Wet + Hot, also has dry pockets of land.

What about Aether?

Aether is the fifth element and is what is found at the core of this globe. It is the reason the four elements are able to exist so close together in ‘order’ rather than ‘chaos’. This will also play into a softer magic system that covers a wyrd-like fate, curses, and shape-shifting.

Map Making

Through a lot of trial and error, I create the map of Drak’Arna as pictured below after starting with some core starting points - there are two points that represent Fire and Water while between the two, in a sine wave, Earth keeps them separated. This enabled me to create various magical and mundane biomes and features.

Initial colours and drafts:

You can see a snippet of what it's become in my blog's header but I'm really happy with this progress and how it looks when I project it onto maptoglobe which I highly recommend! 

~ ~ ~

*flops* compiling months of work into a single post feels like I haven't gone into enough depth about it so please ask me any questions you might have. I'm currently working on making these updates a bit more formal and putting them onto Campfire as a world wikipedia too.

[wrennwyrmnest]

Cheat code for writing disabled characters in sci-fi/fantasy without eliminating their disability:

Don't change humanity, change what's available to humanity.

i.e.: If your magic removes/fixes a defect or your sci-fi lets you select for traits at birth, that's changing humanity. That's altering a fundamental aspect that real humans live with, and distancing your fictional version of humanity from the real deal by cutting out a portion of it that your setting deems "undesirable."

If your magic/sci-fi aids a defect (like magic netting that acts as a brace, or a wheelchair with wheels that transform to fit the environment), then you're taking humanity as we know it and saying "wouldn't it be cool if we had these tools?"

Don't change what makes us human, change what humans can create.

[wrennwyrmnest]

I was inspired by @jezifster's recent question about non-gendered royal titles, and I put together this graphic to serve as a jumping off point for people writing monarchies in SFF !

Obviously this non-exhaustive list contains mainly western titles, all in English. Feel free add any on additional gender neutral terminologies that you can think of, including those from different languages and cultures!

A small addition: I'm not a linguist or historian and put this list together based on some quick googling! While you're free to flex the usage and meanings of these words however you choose, researching the real-world context of each term before using them in your own writing is a best practice.

[wrennwyrmnest]

Worldbuilding-wise additional sentient species are often a big deal, but TDP doesn't lose a lot of words about these guys.

This could just be my flesh bias speaking, but I assume they are more like ... elemental spirits? Probably few in number, not forming their own societies, might not reproduce (sexually), possibly ageless, stuff like that. An interesting question would be whether they are created artificially (Finnegrin being Elmer's creator sounds intriguing) or whether they occur naturally, e.g. occasionally spawning close to a nexus.

[wrennwyrmnest]

I have such a specific kind of game I want to play that I just cannot find anywhere on Steam (or PS4/Switch). There are one or two elements of it in various existing games, but not all (or many) in one. 

I want a cottagecore farming & witchy sim with:

‘realistic’ looking, 1st and/or 3rd person POV like Skyrim, Horizon (ZD &FW), Witcher III, Dragon Age Inquisition etc (not cartoon/pixel style like Animal Crossing or Stardew). This is the most important thing that I want and can’t find - there are loads of great looking cutesy things out there (My Witchy Life, Little Witch in the Woods, Wytchwood, Wylde Flowers etc.) but that’s not what I’m looking for (their style is sweet but it sort of hurts my eyes after a while, even Stardew).

open world

make your own character from scratch (not play as a prescribed character) with lots of physical and gender options

lots of great weather effects and changing seasons (like some of the weather mods for Skyrim)

build your own house (modular like Skyrim Hearthfire DLC or Sims)

ability to craft items or buy items to decorate your home according to various styles/tastes/aesthetics

variety of plants/herbs to grow in a garden plus more to forage in the surrounding countryside

things to make/craft/bake (potions, salves, medicines, food, treats, meals)

beekeeping?

animal keeping/breeding?

lots of different witchy familiar options to bond with (maybe depending on the ‘biome’ where you first set up the house/start the game - forest: deer, owl, mouse, fox; tundra: wolf, eagle, raven; coastal: seal, dolphin, puffin; plains: horse, wolf, big cat etc. etc.)

cute village nearby to interact with - shops, upgrade tools, buy rare seeds, trade etc.

option to romance any villager but no obligation to do so (like Stardew)

no combat/angst/stress/quests with ‘bad’ endings

a few seasonal events - fairs, fetes, competitions, markets etc.

witchy/monstery friends (like Krobus and Dwarf in Stardew, but… more? Spirits in the woods/mines/sea/grasses etc. Or if the world is a fantasy one and not all-human, then lots of non-human villagers to be friends with)

That’s… a lot, I realise, but if someone made this game (or like a complete overhaul mod for Skyrim that was literally just that), I would buy it immediately and never leave (and stream it on Twitch every day for the rest of my life!).

[wrennwyrmnest]

World Building

Creating Land

❂

⥇ agriculture

⟿ what is grown in abundance? how common is farmland? where is the farmland?

⥇ architecture

⟿ what kind of buildings? how tall/spacious? what are they made of? how well made? how well planned?

⥇ animals

⟿ what wild animals are lurking in the area? hunting? any animals affecting the livestock or agriculture?

⥇ biomes

⟿ desert? tundra? grassland? forest? savanna?

⥇ bodies of water

⟿ seas? lake? ponds? rivers? fresh water/salt water? fishing? keep in mind, settlements are often built near bodies of water

⥇ climate

⟿ dry? rainy? temperate? tropical? polar? how have people adjusted to this climate?

⥇ elevation

⟿ altitude? how does the altitude affect lifestyle?

⥇ geology

⟿ rocky? types of rocks?

⥇ landforms

⟿ mountains? valleys? plateaus? plains? hills? glaciers? peninsulas? volcanos? canyons?

⥇ latitude / longitude

⟿ location on planet? how does it affect other elements of land?

⥇ livestock

⟿ common domesticated animals? common animal usages?

⥇ minerals

⟿ any valuable minerals / metals? are they mined regularly? how are they used?

⥇ natural disasters

⟿ earthquake? tornado? volcano? duststorm? flood? hurricane? tsunami? how often do these occur? protocols?

⥇ population

⟿ how many people? how dense is the population? how does the population affect surrounding nature?

⥇ resources

⟿ what is abundant? scarce? how are they used? how available are they?

⥇ sacred land

⟿ religiously important land? historical importance? widely accepted as sacred? how is it honored?

⥇ soil

⟿ good or bad for vegetation? rocky?

⥇ tectonic activity

⟿ earthquake frequency? volcano frequency? trenches?

⥇ topography

⟿ how common are maps? how accurate? how long have they been around? who makes them?

⥇ vegetation

⟿ what is abundant? scarce? what grows easily? with difficulty? what is commonly foraged? who forages? plant types? tree types?

[wrennwyrmnest]

✨LIMITED EDITION✨ Only 8 hours left to pre-order!

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[wrennwyrmnest]

In honour of disability pride month, we made a disability Pride Knight! Stay proud! ⚔️🌈

[wrennwyrmnest]

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

Dir. Beeban Kidron

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