goodknightrooks

[goodknightrooks]

Aaron Fox'sTongue by @muffinlance character of all time. He's an ex-ish assassin thief and a master of scheming who just sorta accidentally fell into pretending to be a spy-in-training for people who would have killed him on-sight. His bright idea to get himself some leeway for this ruse was to pretend to be someone who is pretending to be him. He kills both animals and humans with the same sort of value. He is so against cannibalism that he won't eat any meat of any kind. He is a strict vegeterian who won't even eat meat to keep his cover from being blown. He was so food insecure before that he stows food away in his pockets Just In Case. When he was trapped as a wolf for several weeks, he practiced barking in a way that sounded exactly like the word "woof" just to mess with people. One of his favorite pastimes is antagonizing a specific member of the Royal Guard and sometimes he doesn't even do it intentionally. He doesn't listen to dead men but that just means he'll kill anyone he wants to stop listening to. He was late to his own death so now he has an ability that lets him know if someone is scheduled to die within the next one-to-one-hundred business days. He wanted to kill a woman so bad that it got in the way of someone else's assassination attempt. He has killed so many people but he can't just let a stranger die for no reason. He catches feelings of friendship towards anyone who doesn't try to kill him after a handful of conversations, with very few exceptions. He doesn't trust anyone completely, and won't even let the 3rd person limited narrator tell the readers parts of his plans until they become relevant. He is so Ace that he overlooked a major development that kinda led to the downfall of a kingdom. The reason he was in a position to accidentally kind of topple a kingdom in the first place was because he kind of accidentally toppled the kingdom he was raised in by on-purpose killing its king. He willingly and knowingly wears cloaks that he considers to be equivalent to human skin. He spent half the Spring stealing specific "human skin" cloaks so that the people whose culture those skinned people belonged to could give them a proper funeral and so that their leader would trust him. Some of his best friends are animals. Some of his worst enemies too. He isn't keen on horses and he doesn't trust whales. He is extremely intelligent. He just learned how to write his own name two weeks ago and he still can't read calligraphy. His dead brother was supposed to be the Saviour of Humanity.

[goodknightrooks]

Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.

[goodknightrooks]

you know that phenomenon where vaccines are so effective that people forget how scary the original disease was? I think Americans are like this about government

[goodknightrooks]

An adventuring party is in a cage suspended over acid the wizard clears his throat "I just sent a message to my wife she should be here to save us soon." "Wait your married?" Said the rouge "more importantly what is she gonna." The paladin is interrupted by a massive explosion.

[goodknightrooks]

Is it disrespectful to get a tarot deck for reasons that aren't occult? If I buy a deck just because it looks pretty, for instance?

Yeah they are just cards lol do what ever u want with them

[goodknightrooks]

This is cinema actually

[goodknightrooks]

[goodknightrooks]

I know it’s not the same thing but Hardison and I are gonna be here for you forever.

[goodknightrooks]

captain afab is honestly a very relatable character because whomst among us does not have some great beast that has eluded us all our lives. mine, for instance, is a decent night's sleep.

[goodknightrooks]

this website’s easy watch. *dangles a bunch of greek gods like keys*

[goodknightrooks]

One of my favorite things about Put Baby In Pelican Mouth is that not only does the pelican have the intelligence necessary to speak human language but also knows how to lie, suggesting it has a theory of mind, yet not enough to understand that no one is going to put baby in pelican mouth.

[goodknightrooks]

I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.

[goodknightrooks]

Headcanon: sometimes Jedi talk directly to the Force and they’re just …talking. Out loud. Sometimes in a skyward direction. Sometimes elsewhere. Just clearly not at anyone else around. And not like polite or prayerfully or anything. Like “where is it? where - oh, there it is, thank you!”, “are you karking serious?”, “So what do you think?”, “is this a good idea? My master said it was, but I wanted to check with you”, “You couldn’t have told me this earlier?”, “Suuure we’ll go into the creepy cave just because you said it’s fine, not like we have massively different understandings of what fine means”, “Hey, could you pass me that? …Thanks”, “Meddle I will not, if meddle you do not”, etc.

[goodknightrooks]

oh my god god god god god my dad just tried to complain about me wearing earrings with ghosts on them because they're "not very festive" so i said Well Actually ghosts are very appropriate for christmastime and he said tell you what if you can show me a single christmas themed thing that has ghosts in it i won't say another word about your fashion choices this entire holiday. i Promise. so i got him to lean in realllllll close as i opened up the browser app on my phone and slowly began to type "A CHRISTMAS CAROL" while the blood rapidly drained from his face.

[goodknightrooks]

this reply kills me 😭

[goodknightrooks]

Comic by Sarah Andersen

[goodknightrooks]

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.