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cr cooldown is very good

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Level 0...

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Orange tuxedo calico combo is crazy 😍🐈

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Skaldova episode 1

skallll-DOOOO-VAAAA

Jake's going with DM

Murphy teasing an extra deep and gravelly voice

Emily being mysterious, voice is slightly sing-song

Caldwell going loud and jovial with like a showman's accent

Scheduling change! 2 weeks of campaign and one week of bonus content (good idea to give a little cushion what with the new baby and the new baby)

skal-DOo-VA

Jake intro, post apocalypse, low magic, rich v poor, fuck the nobles across the bay, Mud Town on Steel Bay

'Leviathan Inn' I like it, dingy, giant fish jaw, 4 choices of drink - light, dark,smoky,sweet

Rorick Farflung the innkeeper, I do love how Jake does surnames

Fuck I love a shore town

Boggy Roger - Caldwell, talkative, lumbering mossy mound, from mosslands, piercing blue eyes and a beard under a hat

Boggy's Buds were a capering outlaw band that threw parties and brewed peat spirits, some fish lord killed them all, vengeance pact, looking for more Buds.

Zudrick of the Murder - rusty dark souls knight gone mad, anime sword, bag of something bloody for dinner, accompanied by crows (the Murder I suppose - sick) Must be Vigilant in the Night.

Keeps coming to the inn and ordering water only

Welly Hamden - Emily outside trying to pitch a tent amidst the crows, disgraced knight Order of the Oaken Oar, cherubic face, crown braid, barnacle plate, green tabard with river pebbles, heron feather behind her ear, bark bound folio

Edgar Tabitha Salem Sabrina - The Murder

Ooh PvP threatened very quickly lol, don't touch the Birbs

Zudrick and Welly bond over the teetotalling

Welly says Chastity and purity are two of her five knightly virtues - five seems like so many. She is in sharp contrast to this world

Mystery bloody sack is a deer! Zudrick didn't think this hunting thing through

Welly was brought up in a court and thinks dressing a deer means to clothe it ... Oh she's fresh out of court isn't she, of course she is she was setting up a tent next to an inn

Welly: Oh! Guts!

Boggy comes in to save the day with the deer

Jake politely indicating that this behavour is unacceptable by having bystanders run away

God Drop! "as sure as The Ender comes for us all"

Welly latching onto the Buds and not taking Zudrick's hints to drop it

Bud Names! - Longest Tom, Sister Bix, Dandy O'Candles, Flute Boy, Crunchems, William Shits, Lady Linnebeth (love how it reads like some of the Council of Elders)

All slain or taken while Boggy was chasing a haunted deer

Aww they all want people

Zudrick is a delight

Zudrick: you can pay for drinks with sonnets here.

ngl I like the job jar

two more gods dropped - Welly is pledged to the Lodestar and the Ender and the Hilt

Zudrick trying to take care of Welly and keep her out of trouble, this is cute

"Hilt's Balls" we have a swear!

Black Lace elixir made by hermits, the Scared Ones, getting it from somewhere else, there was an expedition to find the source but they haven't come back, mission to find the expedition and extra for the source

Age of Stories

Gods War 200 yrs ago

Castle that no one leaves alive

Oh hell yes I love a singing Caldwell character

The gods are gone and Welly believe they're coming back if people keep their souls pure

(Oh was Welly's fall due to a 'dirty sonnet' I wonder, maybe some sordid stories written of the royalty, in some unfamiliar romantic constellation?)

Boggy is a bit obsessed with peat huh

Steel Hawk Fighter Zudrick

Zudrick a soldier who walked away from war because he was tired, then went and made some crow friends

Crows and Herons as opposites

Welly kissed Guinevere's hand and had a 'carnal release' and wrote an 'indecent sonnet' and other knights found it and read it aloud to everyone including Guinevere's betrothed ... So Welly exiled herself

come-patriots oh no

I like the Salt Market

driftwood temple to who I wonder

Welly is a Rune Knight, runes are the writing of the gods

Herb's 'Erbs and Teas and Tonics oh my ... Herb went from happy burpy drunk to scared burpy drunk

Welly can do a little disguise self and is willing to be a little sneaky for the good of the mission

Boggy concerned with respecting alcohol, also interesting, uses a bow

Forge Time! Handstrong, good Jake name, and apprentice Teemo

the shopkeepers all have pretty distinct voices a+

No such thing as evil

Castle's in a Cave okay, fun dungeon

Welly and Teemo bonding is cute

Iron ring with sigils - star, T and leafless tree, for lodestar, ender and hilt

T could be a stylised crow?

Herons represent the beginning and crows represent death

PVP again, Zudrick pretending to go down lmao

New swear "Ender's Chin"

This poor teen guarding the horses

Oh I wonder if Emily has created some courtly dances based on herons

Humans get heroic inspo, so Boggy confirmed human despite the peat attachment and hidden facial features

Poor herb can't catch a break

Jake says they'll need to make deception or stealth to not be noticed...

Welly biffed it so she just runs for it and the other two follow

One of the guards voice breaks, the salt market is like a mall running on underpaid teens

Zudrick thinks about how he'd usually kill these guards and follows Welly's lead to run ... planking on the horse

Boggy moons the guards and runs as well

Welly almost takes his lead but gets shy and Boggy warns about the doffing rules lol

And they're off and away! Guards didn't stand a chance

(Jake gets to brew consequences for when they inevitably have to return for the money)

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uh oh! one of your organs has mysteriously vanished! Spin this wheel to find out which one!

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the cheek of Ashton saying they just don't come back one day. "Who knows where they went, who knows what happened?"

Well Bells Hells knows. Because the second they realised Ashton wasn't coming back on their own BH dropped everything, formed up and went looking.

Maybe Ashton stays gone, but Bells Hells make damn sure that it's willing.

Get loved, idiot.

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Orym trying to offer Dorian his whole life, while Dorian wants to take it day by day, finding out how they fit together, settling into an open relationship where they're romantically exclusive and together when they're together, Orym serving where the Tempest needs him, Dorian roaming when his feet get itchy and getting to experience everything he wants to, and eventually becoming the golden thread that keeps them all tied together ... I love it so much

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Twins

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This song has single-handedly taken over my life and it’s only been like a week

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PSA from Blobby. Something we should talk about more ❤️

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These were the rolls to convince the gods to go along with the Catatheosis plan:

Orym: 22

Imogen: 25 (thanks Orym)

Braius: 27

Laudna: 9

Fearne: 25

Dorian: 22

Ashton: 24

Chetney: 9

Total: 163

Average: 20.3

This modified the final DC to 30

Final Roll: Natural Fucken 20 for 37

I really wanna know what the original DC was, because DC 30 alone is nearly impossible.

I'm also curious which of the gods would have run if the DC wasn't met - I think the actual arguments made by the BH would have largely determined it

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on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.