#Bug Gribble

[missladybirdhill]

[creaturefeaturecommando]

It’s cool that Nancy cheated on Dale with John Redcorn because Dale is cheating on Nancy with Octavio. He likes Mexican men. Just like his dad.

[glimblshanks]

Not enough vermin in Star Trek btw. How are Tribbles the only example I can think of when it comes to the plot point of "space rats infest ship and/or station"?

Like a pest infestation on Voyager could have been devastating. A pest infestation on DS9 would have been down right realistic and caused problems for all the ships docked there.

You're really telling me Starfleet has pest control down to such a science that they never get vermin on their ships? Not even in a cool sci-fi way where space critters infest the Jefferies Tubes after an away mission to a new planet? Come on.

[ask-hank]

hey hank do you know that Dale sounds like my uncle Brian?

Who's stealing my voice...

[litsponge]

I don't know if this joke has been made yet but RIP Johnny Hardwick

[hillofthehank]

Idk we see him use too many chemicals but he also seems to know a lot about bugs and pests so up to you to figure out!

[whatsthisascianbullshit]

🐁Do they find a creature cute, that normal people don't? Such as spiders, rats, snakes, sharks, etc? (Muireann)

Thank you @raynshyu ^^

Muireann does but it is not as universal as Panthea's love for all gribblies lol

She doesn't really mind bugs too much, but at the same time doesn't really find them cute herself. She does find snakes and reptiles cute - particularly after spending so much time in Dravania they remind her of the dragonets she used to play with.

Probably the most out-there guy would be the cyclopses - they're cute little guys! Big and round like goobbues but with Giant eye for maximum cute-aggression.

OC Asks

[samueldays]

Ritual magic in fantasy: a small rant

It's fine when writers use the standard trappings of a genre without detailing the underpinnings of the worldbuilding - we can take it for granted, we don't need it explained again every time, not everything needs a new plot twist. Tropes are tools; wizards are part of the grammar of fantasy and don't need their definition explained at the start of every book.

It's fine when writers skip the underpinnings entirely, and treat the wizards as convenient plot devices for the hero to go do something or be somewhere. Some munchkins will say "but then why couldn't the wizard solve the entire plot?" and I say to them "if what you want to read is a list of wizardly constraints, put down the novel and go play D&D". ;^)

But it bugs me when writers seemingly forget that the underpinnings ever existed and act confused as to how the trappings work with no underpinnings. This strikes me as both lazy and ignorant. It's the mark of a writer who is cribbing standard fantasy tropes and hasn't taken the time or effort to understand why those tropes were like that in the first place, and also is poorly read, not having seen the original explanation (nor any of its variations), only the superficial tropes among other people cribbing those same tropes in a game of telephone and losing the underpinnings along the way.

Today I want to talk about ritual magic and the mages doing it. Rituals are for someone; freestanding rituals make no sense!

I've written before on how one of the features that helps fictional magic be "magical" as opposed to Spicy Engineering (e.g. Fireball is Spicy Grenade) is if it involves a thinking entity other than the mage: intercessory magic is less prone to being operationalized into just another craft. Sometimes this is a powerful patron, sometimes it's a specialized sidekick.

To use a less fancy word, magic is often social - it involves a deal, explicit or implicit, between the mage and some goblin, ghost, or other gribbly. (The faeries in Dresden Files take their payment in pizza.)

If you pick up some old medieval grimoire like the Key of Solomon, it is deeply social. Its ritual magic is in some ways like a court order: things have to be done properly, forms filled out, visit during the correct opening hours, appeal to the right judge (God) for a sign-off, then speak with the authority of the judge and the legal system backing you for some specific purpose. Rituals are powerful but inflexible, for comprehensible internal reasons.

Fast forward 500 years to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series (you probably know this as the origin of "Vancian" magic in D&D) and you see more social magic. In the distant future, wizards are living in the ruins of dozens of civilizations that rose and fell, leaving behind relics and creatures. One facet of their magic involves calling on "sandestins", powerful genie-like creatures hinted to have been bound or created by a previous civilization, and the sandestins have to be commanded and persuaded and contracted and threatened with the Great Name, in a word, they have to be wrangled. Libraries of Wizard Lore are not just lists of spells, they're also bestiaries of sandestins, advice on how to wrangle them, collections of rumors by travelers to find other sandestins, etc.

When Gandalf is at the Gates of Moria, pondering the riddle "Speak, friend, and enter", this is also a kind of social ritual. Password-access systems are not found spontaneously generated in nature. The gate itself is not intelligent, but it's the result of an intelligent mind engaged in deliberate design to control access. Gandalf has to jump through hoops to make the gate open, and figure out that the clue to the password is hiding in plain sight.

Social rituals make sense. Rituals for formal polite interaction with another creature (or its proxy) are one of the many reasons the classic fantasy genre looks the way it does.

But skip ahead a couple generation of writers cribbing, pastiching, and repeating tropes they don't understand...

These days I'm seeing an increasing number of works where rituals are treated as a sort of brute fact about the universe, with nobody on the other end. For example, there's a song that heals people when sung word-perfect. It does nothing until it's finished, it does nothing if you get a single word wrong. Why?

A social ritual of this form can be explained with "the genie is picky". There's a genie or some other intelligent creature, acting as a middleman to hear the magical song and cause healing. A brute-fact ritual has to treat the universe as having countless special cases and carve-outs in the laws of physics where certain actions cause unusual effects. Somewhere in the nature of reality is a reaction to a song - in a specific language, of a specific era - which results in "healing", a simple concept for an intelligent mind, but an otherwise complicated concept both fantastically specific and carefully customized to do the right thing for humans.

Brute-fact rituals make for a frankly nonsensical setting. Some writers notice the nonsensical setting, but since they're ignorant of the social origins of the ritual, they think this is a problem with rituals and complain that ritual magic makes no sense.

Worse, how are rituals discovered/created in the first place?

Social rituals: by talking to the genie or fairy or other critter that the ritual is to communicate with.

Brute fact rituals: well, uh,

Harry Potter and the Natural 20 plays with this trope in book 3 chapter 9, doing a little lampshade-hanging:

Chant a little Old Aramaic, burn a little sandalwood, sprinkle a powder made from the canine teeth of a child murdered by his brother over a bowl containing stone from a fallen star under the light of a crescent moon and, in three days, it will rain vinegar. And nobody knows why. That terrified Lucius. Who out there was watching, waiting, to see that someone performed the ritual and had the power to follow up with the effects? More troublingly, why would they do it? What possible gain could this shadowy entity get from powdered teeth and space rocks? Or maybe there was no entity, and it was a fundamental property of the universe that vinegar would rain in the middle of the lunar month because somebody said the right words in a dead language? Lucius wasn't sure which was worse. All of this brought up the uncomfortable question of who it was who first figured that out. It can't have been coincidence, or even experimentation. (...) Rituals, it appeared, wanted to be discovered—and, more troubling, wanted to be shared.

Lucius Malfoy is a bit preoccupied with Voldemort, so he's excused for not being sure which is worse. But from my OOC perspective, "fundamental property of the universe" would be worse writing. Shadowy entities with mysterious motives are a staple of fantasy fiction, and practically required in some sense to be the sharer-of-rituals making rituals be discovered by human wizards.

[talenlee]

3e: Kythons

Where the creeping edges of reality ripple and shimmer, where foul and dark powers reach into the world to try and plant their foul fingertips there, there lay hallmarks and signs. There is a chance your world has tasted them, the chance that they have been left there, at some point by some errant and cruel source, and therefore, the only opportunity you have now is to wage war on their very existence, or to abandon your world, knowing it is a matter of time before the ultimate predatory violence bursts forth from some forgotten earthen womb, and renders all that you considered a civilisation into the same, cyclical, eternal pereptuum of feasting.

Content Warning: This article is going to be about a creepy monster from 3rd edition, D&D, and involve discussing some of the details of its source book, the Book of Vile Darkness. The art gets gory and bloody after here.

Kythons are a threat. They are a menace. They are first and foremost a creature of violence, a ravening mouth with a selection of limbs around it; sometimes just two and a tail, running feet that let the maw chase you, or sometimes it’s four limbs and two legs, with hands that can grasp and wield weapons and threaten your life and limb.

Most resembling some mix of insect and reptile, a Kython is an intelligence that seemingly exists on a different plane to other intelligence; they have seemingly no need or want for conversation or diplomacy, and they wield weapons they manufacture entirely on their own. While weak as — children? infants? nymphs? spawn? — they still are threatening to full grown adult adventurers from birth and it’s only a matter of time before they overcome, overrun, and consume everything.

The Kythons are dangerous not because they hate you but because they are incapable of good, honest, human, hatred, or somesuch. You see this is a Kython broodling, a smaller kind of Kython. And when they eat your face, nobody can hear you scream.

Look, they’re nasty gribbly things that are both alien (in that nothing is like them) and alien (in that they were put on the world from an outside place) and alien (in that they very much are trying to create the feeling of fear and horror as you remember from the movie Aliens if you’ve seen it). They are the tension of a blockbuster movie about failure and incompetence and desperation against the implacable inexorable force of a pitiless consuming force, turned into a D&D monster you can hit so it drops treasure.

Now, setting aside how useful or reasonable these things are as a threat, there’s a lot of work being put in to making these things both incredibly nasty and monstrous while also badass as hell. These things are a mix of traits that would require some truly breathtaking 1990s animatronics and material effects. There is an alternate reality where I got into painting miniatures and had a bunch of secret Kython OCs along with the Tyranid OCs and the Xenomorph OCs who shapeshift into these things instead of much more wholesome and fuckable werewolves.

The Kython aesthetic is a mix of generic bug in the carapacey design, with specific traits of praying mantises, and how we imagine preying mantises to work. They have big jagged fanglymouths, lots multiple limbs, but they’re also blind, you know, to avoid having eyes you can look into and see their humanity. They see somehow, and that’s between them and whatever got regrets making them.

They have poison? Well, venom really, but you know that discrepancy is the kind of thing that only matters to huge fucking dorky nerds. They have venom. They come in a variety of forms showing an evolutionary lifecycle that is both recognisably an escalation in the way we’re familiar from baby to adult to oh no, and in the process they get less cute and more dangerous. This means that any given encounte with Kythons can include small medium and large members, and that they can present a variety of different combat opportunities in tactical combat. You can pick some small Kythons to be a doable combat encounter and you can pick a big Kython to be a dangerous kind of stalker threat harrassing the player characters.

The gameplay versatility of the Kython is part of what I think represents its enduring gameplay presence. I haven’t seen them in 4th edition (my native grounds) but there are people making art and campaigns that involve Kythons even this year. The urge to use fanart of Kythons for this article was strong, but contacting all the people involved seemed very hard. And we wouldn’t want to inappropriately credit in an article about the time D&D tried to riff on the Slivers riffing on the Zerg riffing on the Tyranids riffing on the Xenomorph.

What really sets the Kythons apart is one of the enduring problems that a truly free form tabletop roleplaying game with a polar morality system as Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition has: How do you represent a completely alien intelligence? There’s magic in the world, magic capable in multiple ways of breaking down barriers for communication. There really is no reason why, if one wanted to, one could not, somehow, communicate with a Kython.

The problem the Kython presents is that they are meant to be a thing that cannot be communicated with, cannot be reasoned with, and will not stop, until you are dead. Er, wrong movie. No, the Kython is meant to be the Predator and the Alien, bound up together in one horrible insect-crustacean-reptile-beast form, with bio-organic weapons. They’re an environmental horror: You find some eggs, you have to destroy the eggs, and if you don’t destroy the eggs, if you leave the problem to later, the problem will get out of hand. There is no natural ecosystem of the Kythons, they are just going to get out of control no matter what because that’s what they are made to do.

They are the Zerg, they are the Tyranids, they are the Swarm, they are the Hive. They are a monster in the purest sense, an un-rehabilitable enemy that is smart enough to be able to be evil and inhuman enough to not want to negotiate on that fact. They need to be capable of thought to be capable of a moral framework and they need to be incapable of communication to keep you from interacting with that moral framework.

A truly feral, animal threat – something in the vein of an actual form of the xenomorph – would be a problem. That presents something natural, something that should be placatable, something that doesn’t fit in the D&D generality of nature as a stable ecosystem where everything is okay until someone messes with it. A genuinely hostile ecosystem isn’t a thing that works within the framework of absolutes of evil and an irredeemable creature that doesn’t care about you.

Kythons are what people imagine nature isn’t and what nature is. It is a reinvention of bears and bees and bacteria, the violence that meat does to meat, but given a moral dimension because if it’s not given a moral dimension, you can’t be morally superior to it. And they are presented in the Book of Vile Darkness because they wanted a truly terrible, nasty thing to put there.

The nastiest thing they could imagine was mid-tier copyright infringement of the Tyranids for a second time.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[dang-ol-love]

King of the Hill. Class and community

"The courtship of Joseph's father" is one of my favorite episodes of the later seasons. Of course it's funny in a 'Dale takes it too far again' kinda way, but I think it says something interesting about the characters and setting as well. 

Joseph gets his talent as a quarterback recognized. Spencer Academy, a prestigious school, offers him a spot, in the hopes that he'll be a part of their team for football season. The kid doesn't want to leave Tom Landry, but Dale chooses for him,  sends him there, and later goes to great lengths himself to fit in with the rich families.

On the surface, it seems that Dale is interested mostly in the aesthetic the academy allows him to indulge in. And sure enough, he enjoys wearing elegant outfits and taking his Nancy out to enjoy a fancy dinner. 

But at a gala, he gets a harsh reminder that his wife and him don't belong with the upper class. Joseph himself has been struggling to connect with his peers: despite sharing a language and nationality, the class gap creates what is effectively a cultural difference. Dale speaks with Hank, and after his friend tells him he should do what's best for Joseph, he draws the natural Dale-conclusion and leaves his son at a rich family's door in the hopes that they'll adopt him. 

What strikes me about this episode is that it functions around class struggle. For starters, Dale knows what it's like to be an outcast. As a child, he spent his days talking to baskets and eating bugs. As an adult, he's too scattered to hold down a job and his family struggles financially as a result. He's also a gun fanatic with bad aim and an expert in conspiracies no one else takes seriously. 

But, if he had means and power, all of his weirdness would be forgiven as harmless eccentricity. His Nancy would stop struggling with the bills, and Joseph would escape the class his parents were born in and secure a stable future for himself. Dale senses that climbing up the social ladder is the key to success and happiness, but is naive enough to believe a mimicry of the elite's behaviors and mannerisms is enough to gain a place among them. 

Of course, his plan doesn't work out, and Joseph comes back home. Dale is initially horrified ("I just saw Joseph at the Hills'" Nancy tells him. "What?! He can't stay with them! They're worse than us!") but eventually realizes he loves his son too much to send him away. He decides to bring him back to Tom Landry, and, as he now owes Spencer Academy money, his neighbors help him organize a gala of his own to raise funds and pay them back.

In the end, we're left with a sense of injustice. The Gribbles deserve nice galas, fancy dinners and trips to Brazil, but their class prohibits them from accessing these experiences. Power and money are distributed unevenly and unfairly, and class mobility is unattainable. 

But there's also a sense of hope. I believe one of the key themes of King of the Hill is community. Dale, Joseph and Nancy are back where they started: no money and no fame. But their friends (this flawed and weird set of people) have banded together to get them out of trouble. Perhaps they'll never reach the top of the ladder, but they have each other. And that too might be a good place to be.

[eliza-who-smiles-at-death]

NEW BUGS NEW BUGS NEW BUGS NEW BUGS NEW BUGS

Y’all they literally got me flailing flapping and yelling with this shit!

New lictors look good; with that new deathleaper model revealed a bit ago, they had to.

Hormagaunts my babies! Finally, after 25 years, my little gribblies have a new kit, and it is beautiful 🥹

New type of lictor! Brainy fear-bugs, with maybe even better camouflage than the original?

New biovores and pyrovores! Holy shit these look excellent. I’ve literally never run these units before but I HAVE to with these kits on the way.

Last, and farthest from least, the solid rock of gold at the bottom of a bucket of nuggets…

THE NORN EMISSARY MY BELOVED

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

She looks incredible!!!! I need her cock. I need three copies of the kit. I need her to jump off the screen and shove her tongue down my throat. The multi-chambered brain! The massive dorsal ridges! Those claws….

The kit even makes an alternate unit with a smaller brain and bio-harpoons!

Truly, the great devourer feasts on this day.

[missladybirdhill]

[lilzurapage]

Went from minor carbon monoxide poisoning from car fumes

To spray painting and plastic glue all day from warhammer

Now I've sprayed the whole flat down with bug killer with little ventilation

And I don't drink enough liquid

Fuckin no wonder my brain is dying I got more chemicals slushing around in there than Dale gribble...

[omega-red]

if you needlessly kill bugs dont talk to me

unless you're dale gribble

[minicy]

[ID. OP has typed "bug gri" into a Bing powered search bar. The recommended searches include "bug grindr" spelled like the app Grindr, which is circled. The full list of options, in order, is:

bug gribble

bug grieving

bug grip

bug grill screen

bug grill

bug grindr (like the app)

bug grinder (like a device to grid bugs)

bug grinder weed

End of list and ID.]

hmu on bug grindr

[chroniclesofdenzar]

Do you wish you had more binding stones to catch that monster you had your eye on? You're in luck then, as Tyler has started supplying binding stones, both individually and in bundles! Furthermore, taming probability has now been overhauled, and you'll find the odds are more in your favor than before. Getting knowledge levels will make a far greater impact than before, and whether you are taming a Gribble, a Cow, or the Giant Worm of Despair itself, the chance is the same for the same knowledge level. Capturing a Dire Wolf has never been easier! Additionally, damaging a foe beyond half their life will improve your odds of capture, but you also don't need to beat them to within an inch of their life for the best chances. While this is friendly for newer players and those who wish to catch all manner of creatures, beware, however, as elites have become far more difficult to challenge. Only the most learned of hunters can catch these empowered foes! To better assist our hunters, chests of higher grade binding stones are available in the Chrono Den, with reduced pricing on Celestial Binding stones as well! Finally, a few changes and bug fixes to accompany this update: *Damage reduction on "Blacksmith Enchantment" effects was fixed to set damage to the remainder rather than the reduced amount *Damage reduction on "Blacksmith Enchantment" effects no longer affects Pure damage *Logs of battles will no longer track enemy numbering *Anti-ambush check will now examine either attack vs enemy defense OR defense vs enemy attack, rather than requiring both as before. This makes it easier for those who are trying to hunt a specific enemy down earlier on. *Talbot Spring will show items that are pending or ready for pick-up *HP/MP/Energy regen outside of battle will now correctly fill to your calculated max rather than your max without boosts from other stats or equipment *Slithers now take 1-2 physical damage on hit again *Crimson stat gain is colour-coded to #BB99FF *Viewing a custom's item info page will display in parenthesis the respective info for the item it is set to, if any *Viewing a belt's item info page will now display the number of item slots the belt has *Rebirth scaling on enemy attack and defense will now be accounted for in anti-ambush checks As always, we appreciate our players! Chronicles of Denzar Staff