#this is just dnd huh

[masc-ochist]

is there an open world botw style star trek game. if not that would really slap. each planet a puzzling mystery to be solved that gives you unique elements and knowledge. side quests to rescue marooned ships in distress.... i need to learn to code.

[grimvestige]

Let's go, fighting from the heart / I'll tear the world apart / No, I can't stand to see you be with anyone but me

---

Shaking my GM (/pos) for using this as nightmare fodder for tiarnán in last night's session

[thestarfishface]

The Lost and The Living

[sleepfight]

One thing about Orin impersonating Halsin that I find interesting is the implication that druids have a physical connection to the world, wherever they are, and can become extremely ill if the land is corrupted or unwell in some way. Their own health being dependent on nature being properly cared for or else they fall into a state that mirrors their environment. Halsin being miserable in the city not just because it sucks but because all the suffering there flows into him like a disease. Constantly feeling the pain of life struggling to survive, the hunger and fear of the people, becoming weaker as magic leeches away into the greedy cracks of brick and mortar.

Going back to the Shadowlands must have felt like being ripped apart. His urgency not just due to a century of anticipation but because time is limited before he is completely incapacitated by sickness. He *must* open the portal as soon as he can, before he becomes a mindless, writhing reflection of the dead land around him. Before he's too weak to see this mission through or even support the others in doing so. Before potions and healing magic become impotent.

Jaheira insisting he stays at Last Light where the effects are less severe because she intimately knows what he's feeling. Her own vigil even under the relative safety of the moonshield has shaved years off her life and left aches in her body that will never fully heal-- the stakes are clear to her in a way they aren't for the other party members. Quiet, exhausted conversation over medicinal droughts, fussing over each other whenever they venture beyond Isobel's shield for too long. Making a dozen alternate plans in case Halsin succumbs out in the darkness before Thaniel can be rescued, praying to the Oak Father that He guides Jaheira or a druidic Tav through the Shadowfell if Halsin is too close to death to go himself.

tldr good excuse for angsty sickfic and maybe a little side of old people kissing idk idk

[peppermint-moss]

it's 'citrus unhinged knowledge' time (og meme templates)

my city of mist game has been on pause while all my friends n i are busy but! i still get to rotate our sillays in my head and draw them (aughhh let me have time to draw them goddamn finals season)

commission info || ko-fi (tip jar)

[monerelluvia]

Late library evening 🕯️

It was supposed to be a blanket on their shoulders during a long evening of research, but I repurposed it to have something pretty for this year's pride after all. On the book it says "LGBT+ Ideology" which is a reference to a stupid phrase homophobes and the former ruling party in my country used to criticize gay people for "indoctrinating" others to become gay.

[cookiesnpaste]

DND PARTY!!!!!! WOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[firebuug]

I havent made any irl friends at this uni yet and as a social creature it is making me wanna kms

[flugame-mp3]

what do you fucking mean that's how charlie dies. THAT'S HOW CHARLIE DIES??? i mean i know the show has a penchant for killing off every character who's not a winchester brother or an angel of thursday but good god. what the fuck. charlie was such a good and enjoyable recurring character, and she had such a fandom impact that i've seen, and she's only around for THREE SEASONS?? (sidebar: it's amazing she has the presence she does for only being around for a couple episodes in the long run!) but: was this necessary? and she just dies offscreen after her skills are utilized to progress the plot of decoding the book of the damned?? oh my god. what in the actual fuck. i'm finding myself getting genuinely very upset at her death. she did not fucking deserve that. and i can absolutely see why the fan response to her death is what it is now. completely fucking unjustified and throwaway and useless.

[meggettes]

the last line of this post got me thinking about dnd-ifying tortall (i know about the tortall rpg but here im thinking specifically about dungeons and dragons 5e)

Kel is certainly a paladin. Aly is a rogue no question. Daine is probably a wildshape druid with some sort of archery feat/outlander background.

Alanna is giving me trouble, though. She's both a fighter and a mage, and very adept at both. I guess in order, her fighting improvement happens before spellcasting improvement. It's feeling very cleric, but that's certainly not the type of character Alanna is. The descriptions of her magic, though, are pretty close to sorcerer, but that doesn't seem right either.

Any ideas?

[invinciblerodent]

... so does anyone have any clue on how undeath is supposed to affect elven souls?

Because I have been building my own elf character, and thinking about this a lot, and it's a thought that just will not leave me (hard not to think about this with an Astarion romance), so it's time for another one of my navel-gazey thinkpieces i guess lol.

Like, my main source is Mordekainen's Tome of Foes, and that book states clearly that elven souls are immortal. Their numbers are more or less fixed, or rather "capped" (that's why they haven't "outbred" every other race even with their long lifespans), and each elf currently living is the reincarnation of an elven soul that's already been to Arvandor (their afterlife) at some point, and then returned in a new body. That's why they have such few children: because a birth is as much a joy as it is a sorrow. It's both the arrival of a new life, and the death of another- either decades, centuries, millenia past, or as soon as barely a few months ago.

As a quick and dirty run-down for those who don't really want to wade into the lore (I don't blame you, it's murky in there), early in their lives and when they are nearing death are the times when elves are most intimately connected to their previous lives, and in their sleep-trance (their "Reverie"), these individuals can call upon memories of those past lives. The young elves relive exclusively the experiences and adventures of their immortal soul until their second or third decade- then, slowly, those memories become interspersed with those from their current life (the First Reflection, the first time that happens, marks the start of their "adolescence" of the mind essentially- they are physically fully mature by then), until roughly the end of their first century, which is when their access to these primal memories is cut off. From that point forward, the elf loses access to their previous lives. This is called the Drawing of the Veil, and from that point forward, the elf may only relive events from their current life in their trance, right until they start nearing the end of their natural lifespans some 600 years later.

This is all fairly clear in the case of a living elf.

But what happens if that immortal elven soul, that's so intimately interconnected with the afterlife and the very passage of time, finds itself suddenly housed in an undead, unaging, immortal body? How does that change things?

It's got to change things, no?

Like this is such a specific thing, I don't believe specifically elven intelligent undead (that is also a protagonist about whose soul we are supposed to care) has been written about super extensively in the sourcebooks, but my guess personally is that the moment of undeath, it... severs the bond of the soul to Arvandor. This is not unrealistic, as that bond can break for many reasons: Drow for one are never invited back and die true deaths with no way to be reincarnated, and so do elves who have turned to gods outside of the Seldarine. (.... that also means that, with the drow's propensity for casual murder, the number of elven souls available for rebirth is in a constant and steep decline, but that's a whole other thing.) (I've no clue what this means for the Seldarine drow. I wanna say that they can gain admission back, but that's just me being an optimist, I've no recollection of a source literally confirming or denying that.)

This loss of the primal memories, it's said to be a traumatic experience in itself, even if it comes naturally, as just part of the elven life cycle, and it coming on the heels of such a profound upheaval of one's life (such as being turned into a vampire), it may just be the least of the person's worries... but it would explain some things in a way that goes beyond the traumatic experiences of Astarion's current life.

If that moment of being cut off were to happen before the elf would naturally lose their ability to access primal memories, I assume that they would... be forced to more or less "grow up" (at the lack of a better term) in an instant. And to be denied roughly half the time you would have otherwise had for regaining experiences and memories from your past lives, it's got to leave one a bit... emotionally stunted, when compared to a living elf of a similar age, who had time to go through their natural life cycle as one should.

(Which, it's not a huge reveal that I believe our guy to be emotionally immature, and a bit stunted in his emotional growth. That's, like, clear, and I don't mean to say anything to the effect of "ooooh, he was so youuuung, still an uwu baaaaby---" no, we're unequivocally talking about a fully grown, adult man lol, but specifically in the case of how this all relates to this weird trait of elves, it's still interesting to think about this odd dissonance that... may very well exist between a living- and an undead elf.)

Hell, my personal little theory is that elven intelligent undead (like vampires, who do retain a soul within their bodies) specifically, while they do go into a trance and have dreams/nightmares/memories of their current lives, may just even lose the ability to recall events from their pre-undeath life (beyond conventional memory, meaning that they can't strengthen those memories and are bound to eventually forget them) as well, as evidenced by Astarion not remembering his own face, or what color his eyes were once. (You can't tell me that while he was alive, he didn't spend a shitton of time looking at his own face. If he could relive pre-undeath memories, he'd know these things, or would be able to recall them if he wished.)

There would be something... strangely tragic, in this kind of isolation, for an elf. By becoming a vampire, you'd become undead first, and an elf.... somewhere way, way, way down the line.

As a fairly young undead elf, you're somehow simultaneously ancient, adolescent, and middle-aged, and also pretty much confined to a singular existence of nothing but pain and abuse, with memories of a distant childhood slowly fading just out of reach, knowing that... this, this is just your soul's lot now. That a significant part of your fey heritage, your very ancestry as well as part of your immutable essence, has been torn from you in just one moment, in exchange for preserving this current life, as a simulacrum of itself. And now there is no next life, because this one is one without a natural end, and Sehanine Moonbow will now never invite your immortal soul back to Arvandor to be reborn, because it's been cut off from you, and your very body is holding you hostage. Six, sixteen, or sixty centuries can come to pass, and still nothing is going to change... unless you die, in which case you're just dead, like any non-elven creature.

Anyway, there's no real point to this, or a conclusion to be drawn, beyond just... fuck, man, they couldn't have made this fucker more of a tragic figure if they tried.

(...... Fun fact, Silvanus is not part of the Seldarine. So unless he maybe turns to worship Rillifane Rallathil instead, Halsin's soul would not be reincarnated either. But he seems to have made that decision himself and he seems content, so I'm guessing he's just cool with it.)

(I'm not fucking touching half-elves now, you can't make me, that's such a fucking can of worms oh my god)

[blujayonthewing]

SUPREMELY frustrating that we found something actually really cool and intriguing and plot relevant in tonight's session but I'm still so constantly preoccupied with whether the DM is going to 100% kill us with sheer poor game design that I barely have enough brainspace left over to even enjoy it

[zeynatura]

You see everyone in bg3 tells me mindflayers have no souls, they're monsters and deserve to die but then Omeluum is right there and is the opposite so I beg to differ

[piratespencil]

I’m never going to get over how much young Senshi looks like Steven Universe.

[okcoolthanks]

Wait the Patreon is only five dollars???? Why did I think it was like, 30???????????

[rainia]

i don’t know why dnd podcasters seem to often have this anxiety over playing a character with a different gender to them. Like just play the character as you would any other. but you use a new set of pronouns. It’s like that simple. No you don’t need to put on an exaggerated feminine/masculine voice. no, you don’t need an in depth understanding of psychology. funnily enough, people with different genders to you are still, in fact, just people. go figure I guess