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I love the idea of a roomba topography map being the jumping on point for a liminal horror story. House of Leaves II: Roomba.

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"Why are you complaining about not having evil options? I know that none of you play evil/the majority of people play good characters anyway."

Most good RPGs won't just give you an evil choice and a good choice. Usually it'll be a sliding scale of assholery, and usually there will be a decent enough in-universe reason to do something "evil".

A good enough writing/dev team will make it very tempting to pick a shitty option, be it through gameplay advantages or character motivation. Some games get away with just making it fun/unhinged to be a dickhead (Mass Effect Renegade Shep comes to mind, as they objectively get a "worse" mechanical outcome at the end of the trilogy, but plenty of people still maintain it's the best way to play). WotR gives you enough wacky chaotic options that playing a goody two-shoes makes me feel like I'm missing out.

I actually think that having bad options presented to the player makes the choice to be good all the more rewarding? Like when I see just how much of a shithead I could make my character, what truly cruel and unhinged things they could say, that makes it more meaningful when they don't? Ya know? I could be evil but I choose not to? In games where I'm placed in a position of power? Imagine that. Not picking those options is just as much of a power fantasy as anything else, to me.

You can be good without being nice. Games aren't great at this distinction yet, but being able to be sassy or stoic or rude while still making "good" choices is very much a part of roleplaying. I don't have many "evil" OCs (aside from my original work), but all my OCs are good in different ways. Some of them are just barely good enough to not be evil.

Sometimes one "evil" choice presented can fit an OC that is otherwise a disinclined to do bad shit, just because it better aligns with their personal morality. So even if I don't play a wholly "evil" OC who picks every "evil" choice, I can still play somebody who's unique and complex. Or at the very least somebody who makes mistakes? Like people do?

Replayability? In an RPG?? Might be important? Yes most people don't play evil ... for their first run. But people who replay games, and particularly RPG players, will make multiple characters/runs, and the existence of different options makes the prospect much more rewarding.

Idk man. There's like a bajillion reasons that players who only play good guys should still want the options to be shitty in their games. And a bajillion more for why they should exist in roleplaying games in particular.

Just my onion though.

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In 1967 the government discovered that specific syllable structures combined with specific vocal tones and ultra-low-frequency sounds could speed up the process of unconscious internalization by over 1500%. This became particularly useful for teaching low-level employees large amounts of information, as "hypnophonic learning" could be done while the subject was asleep.

Hypnophone use became standard for new employees of the IRS and SEC, as it made large scale memorization of tax code and financial law significantly cheaper and easier than traditional conscious education.

However, long term use causes the subjects long term memory to atrophy, requiring nightly repetitions of hypnophone use. Some enterprising employees found that the effects could be counteracted with low dosages of LSD to preserve neuroplasticity.

Roughly 1 in 7 employees encountered a strange phenomenon: Mild financial clairvoyance.

One in roughly 50 employees experienced more significant effects, generally those ensconced in large isolated IRS warehouses, which seemed to replicate the monastic lifestyles of historical sages, depriving subjects of ordinary stimuli in favor of becoming attuned to minute changes in the sub-finantial background grid.

Once it was learned that these "enlightened" employees could predict market trends before they happened, the technology was bathed in funding, patented, and made the soul property of the IRS.

Now, these "Plutophants" are kept in nigh-perfect sensory deprivation at all times, fed a constant hypnotic fugue stream of psychic conditioning in the form of "radiosonic neuro-induction" which contains a special form of the United States Tax Code modified for recursive hypnophonic induction, as well as a ticker tape wired directly into the users spine.

The effects achieved are nothing short of stunning. The invisible hand is no longer invisible to us. The market can be fine tuned with surgical precision. The price of bread has maintained a perfect 0.002% +/- variance for over 25 years now, and those who attempt to disrupt the guidelines are regulated by the SECs crack psychonautics division, who are now able to hunt market manipulation via their disruption in the financial dreamscape.

Very rarely, a Plutophant can become so attuned to the guidelines that they achieve a sort of catastrophic neuro-depatterning, their synapses begin to produce a counter-signal to the neuro-induction frequencies; jamming, and eventually overpowering the machine. Study is still ongoing, but it is believed that they somehow perpetuate their own neurological fingerprint into the financial causal background grid itself, literally becoming "one with the market."

Study is ongoing.

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Remember kids, every npc is romanceable through the power of delusion

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Ugh, I'm trying to get into fic for a new fandom and every time I read something I keep thinking "I wouldn't write that."

Like, brain, shut the hell up and let me enjoy this art people have made!! We don't have the free time to get on our high horse and do it better!

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Wip Wednesday

@fangbangerghoul thank you so much for the tag! It's been so long since I've participated in one of these and I have missed it. Tagging @flamemittens if you fancy it! :) This is a snippet of that BG3 tech AU I keep banging on about. I've written chapter one, but I'm not sure when it will make it to Ao3, if ever. I don't want to post it unless I can commit to finishing it, and work is taking up most of my time right now.

She nodded. Behind him, Wyll winked at her. Then the lights went out. For a moment, all was still. Utter darkness. Zero. The off in a binary switch. And then, one. Chaos. Shouting, murmuring, movement, shoving, questions. A hand grasped her wrist, and she felt that warmth from before. Gortash. ‘Come on!’ He pulled her through the crowd and she stumbled in the stilettos, careened into the back of someone. Before she could right herself, there was an arm around her waist, pulling her along, into the cold air of the car park and then—calm. Back to zero: the soft glow of interior lights on cream leather, the smell of fresh upholstery. The lights of the city sped past the window. She was in Gortash's car, and they were driving. Where was he taking her? What had just happened? And what did it have to do with Wyll?

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I have a soft spot for blorbos who get turned on by ambition and danger (aka Gale, Gortash and Raphael)

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bitch you lack so much class marx declared you a utopia

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"The likes of you could stand to benefit from the likes of me."

Meeting Gortash, with a little spoonful of elf jealousy.

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The problem w writing fiction is that you'll be like tee-hee I'm going to write a story about a fucked up little scenario that's got nothing to do with anything in real life, just some pure messed up nonsense, and then you finish it and take a step back and go aw rats I made a metaphor again

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ruling as equals, hmm? interesting. join my print club to get this exclusive for october!

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Anyone have any recs for Gortash fics I should read before I start writing seriously again and can't see anything but my own take on him?

I like Tavtash and Galetash, and would be intrigued to read some gen fic or see him paired with the other companions. Not really into Durgetash but willing to have my mind changed--if something in this realm is really compelling let me know why!

And please do rec your own fics: we all have to be our own biggest cheerleaders 😁.

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Hey, for the fic writing asks - ✅, 💕 and 📚 please :)

✅ List one or two favourite lines you’ve written and explain why they’re your favourite.

Tav Ammakyl was dead. Long live Rina Gortash, Archduchess of Baldur’s Gate.

There's no line level beauty to this, but there was no other way to end Towards Tyranny. I had this in the back of my mind from nearly the very beginning, and I knew it had to be my last line. The name as a metaphor for allowing Gortash to change Tavarina was such a heavy lifter in this fic, with it also working on a plot and worldbuilding level when I introduced the Baneite church.

Those lights were not an invitation. They were a warning, like POST-failure LEDs blinking out a message: error 2, social anxiety overload.

For funsies I thought I'd post a line from a new fic I've just started writing! This is from a Baldur's Gate modern tech AU, and something I really enjoy doing is trying to match similes and metaphors to the genre or subject of the piece.

💕What's your favourite part of your writing process?

This is going to make me sound so lame, but the consistency. I am really proud of my ability to stick to a schedule, to execute what I planned and to get things out on time.

In terms of what I enjoy, my favourite part is definitely what my partner and I call "watching TV", which is when I go to bed an hour early and just lie there and daydream the next scene. It sounds silly, but it is a genuinely helpful writing technique. Scenes I've done this with feel easier to write because I'm just looking for the words, not the action. I do outline, but it's at a high level (and often changes), so this is sort of the next step from just a line on a beat sheet for a scene or chapter.

📚Do you ever read similar works while writing, or do you intentionally not read them? This is different for fics and original work, actually! For originals I read in the genre I'm working in to make sure my tone fits and I understand which genre elements I want to include, omit or subvert. I've just started a new job and I'm spending a lot of time right now looking at comparable media to get a feel for what the team are after.

For fic, I had to stop reading other Gortash stuff once I was about halfway through Towards Tyranny. I kept thinking "but he wouldn't do that!", when really I meant "my version of him wouldn't do that." I think with a character like Gortash who doesn't actually have a great deal of screentime, headcannon characterisation can vary quite a bit, and that makes reading other people's fic difficult, either because I'm doing the above, or their characterisation is seeping into my own, and I'm wondering why things feel off.

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fic writing ask game!

nothing groundbreaking but it’s fuuuuun

✅ list one or two favorite lines you’ve written and explain why they’re your favorite

🧮 what are you working on? describe it in 20 words or less

🎶 do you write with music? does the music you’re listening to influence your writing?

💕 whats your favorite part of your writing process?

😠 whats your least favorite part of your writing process?

🎀 how do you decide when something is done?

🌅 do you typically known the ending to something before you start writing it?

🔚 have you ever completely changed the direction a piece was going?

🤔 why do you write fic?

⛔️ whats something you try to avoid in your work?

📚 do you ever read similar works while writing, or do you intentionally not read them?

🦉 give yourself a piece of writing advice

😊 say something nice about your writing

😭 what’s something you’re currently struggling with?

🔥 what’s something that’s currently going really well?