clan-passionblood

[clan-passionblood]

Dead God

Where do gods go when they die? A complex question with deep philosophical and theological implications, but in your setting of choice, perhaps one with a very simple answer. It could be a place, out of time and space, where decaying deific forms wither and rot, forgotten by all and no longer sustained by the power of belief. What manner of treasure, knowledge, or power might be found within such a long dead husk, and what bizarre and alien creatures might make their lair within one? That’s for you to decide, as you dazzle your players with these three maps, all animated, featuring an external and internal view of a massive humanoid carcass floating in a sea of stars. A giant, a god, or maybe just a regular-sized corpse visited by really tiny PCs?! A Fantastic Voyage into Innerspace awaits!⁠ ⁠

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On the subject of TPKs and failure in TTRPGs, I gotta say, I love a good mechanic for losing.

I love that Fate gives you metacurrency for conceding a scene, and I love that taking extreme consequences creates a new aspect for your character.

I love that when you die in Blades of the Dark, if you're still attached to the character, you can just become a ghost.

I love that in Monster of the Week, when you need to avoid harm it costs a point of luck, which triggers a character-specific consequence and lets you see when your character's luck is literally going to run out.

I even love that in Cyberpunk they've created an omnipresent group of amoral, heavily armed paramedics, so no matter where your character gets gunned down, there's always a chance of pulling through.

Basically, any game that is set up so that losing is going to make things more interesting, not less, is a game that's going to help great stories happen at the table, and I love that.

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It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

[clan-passionblood]

An early Basket-hilted Broadsword,

OaL: 42.5 in/107.9 cm

Blade Length: 36.5 in/92.7 cm

Width: 5.75 in/14.6 cm

Depth: 4.25 in/10.8 cm

Weight: 3 lbs/1360.8 g

Potsdam, Germany, hilt ca. 1540, blade 17th century, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[clan-passionblood]

RPG represented entirely as if it were the strategy guide for some obscure CRPG. Opens with guidance on how to create characters and what makes for an effective party, describes basic mechanics of the game, and then goes into the actual guide to the game.

Of course all the numbies and stats are just presented purely devoid of any context. It also becomes an exercise in trying to collaboratively figure out what kind of system best works with it.

[clan-passionblood]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[clan-passionblood]

Bear Paw Armor Cuprum Arm Guard, Indo Persian Islamic Empire Dynasty

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[clan-passionblood]

Sketch commission for a super chill client on Insta of their Dark Souls inspired duo ✨

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Expanded rules for learning languages by FishySpells on reddit

[clan-passionblood]

This is a tufted ground squirrel. IUCN Vulnerable to extinction and endemic to the island of Borneo/Kalimantan.

It has the largest tail to body size ratio of any mammal, with the tail being 130% the size of its body.

I just think everyone should see it

[clan-passionblood]

Bowie knife produced in Sheffield, England, dated 1835

from Poulin Antiques

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Had a dream about a thing that looked like this recently and I thought they were perfect for the season!

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Martinapis luteicornis. I am spacing at the moment as to who lent me these species (Tim McMahon?). Such a lovely odd bee.  It forages a dawn in the deserts of the Southwest, is big, lush and lovely.  One of only 3 species.  This one caught in Wilcox, AZ

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(source)

[clan-passionblood]

please please please talk about christian art history and the meanings behind how halos are depicted

[DISCLAIMER: I was raised Roman Catholic and I studied Religious Philosophy/Italian Renaissance Art- I am not associated with the Catholic church currently but I have interest towards keeping information accurate and effective in this field.]

[clan-passionblood]

Welcome to The Beekeeper’s Tale!

It’s been almost two years since I finished my last webcomic and I’m finally back with this new fantasy story about a little sprite with a big destiny. During this launch week, I’ll be posting three pages (today, Wednesday, and Friday). After that we’ll be going down to Monday updates. If the Patreon reaches its next goal I’ll be able to update more often. For now though, I need to spend that extra time on freelance work.

It’s been too long, gang. I’m excited to be sharing webcomics with you again.