#Character Creation Cast

[creationcast]

Our February series is underway! We invited Maso Perez to join us to learn about the official Boyfriend Dungeon TTRPG, Life on the Edge!

We were thrilled to learn about this unique game where you play as people who can turn into weapons, and it's as much about your relationships with one another as it is about fighting through some very personal dungeons where you wield one another in battle.

If you like what you hear on this episode, the rest of this month's series is up on our patreon! Check out episode 2 and 3 right here:

[shyestbarbarian]

#1 First RPG Bought This Year

I picked up Sleepaway by Jay Dragon when I spotted it while exploring game stores in the area I moved to. I remembered it from the episode Character Creation Cast did and had to pick it up. Basically you play as camp counselors doing your best to ensure the safety and guidance of your campers all while hiding the horrors that lurk under the pastoral scenery. For no matter what you do, as the summer wanes, the Lindeworm will come. What parts of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to keep the campers safe? Play to find out....

[shorthaltsjester]

me when the campaign with characters i’ve praised for being essentially pawns/npcs in the greater world is ending by underserving the main characters by [checks notes] highlighting the role those characters have played as quasi-npcs who are nonetheless still the narrators of their destinies within the limits of a world beyond their control

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Watching Severance does feel a bit like reading a fic with 15000 word chapters that are almost entirely world-building and setup and there are only 2/47 chapters published and those came out 3 years apart

[sparring-spirals]

they cant keep making critical role campaigns. First the Jester Sendings from c2 and now Imogen organically developing secret disaster gay feelings without her intentional involvement. Laura Bailey is clearly too powerful a conduit for her characters and if this trend keeps up the next one is simply going to manifest IRL and befriend Ronin. (remembers how Chetney was named) AH FUCK

[utilitycaster]

Sort of a distant tangent off my post about Ashton, but I'm growing more and more suspicious of the fandom claim that there's no time for small RP moments in Campaign 3. I do think that it's been challenging to get deeper party bonding or serious conversations that aren't about the big philosophical questions they're facing, since those do take much more time; but then I think about Calamity, or Candela Obscura. I can genuinely give you at least a couple paragraphs about pretty much every relationship in the two Circles, or in the Ring of Brass. I can also point to no shortage of small moments between characters in the Mighty Nein Aeor or Vox Machina Vecna endgame episodes, which were all extremely plot-heavy and fast-paced, and D20 consistently nails character relationships in a fraction of the time.

I think it really does come down to, as Brennan Lee Mulligan always says, the character creation phase. Laying down a solid groundwork in which everyone has a detailed, rich backstory and sense of personality and relationship history (in the case of characters who knew each other prior to the start of the series) is absolutely crucial, and even in the case of characters who don't know each other before going in, a good amount of time spent in character creation ensures that it's easier for them to develop those interpersonal relationships on the fly. I know in actual play there's some degree of finding the character as you play, but there are games for which there is a very short runway, and I don't think it ever hurts to do more extensive character prep than the bare minimum. And if there are gaps, I think it also helps to go back and fill those in mid-way, away from the table - Travis clarifying Chetney's backstory being a great example that allowed the history of Chetney and Deanna to feel realized and full, despite only a few episodes.

I'll also be blunt: most of the time when people complain that there aren't moments because the plot keeps moving...they're mad about shipping. Which has always rung hollow to me. It was a common complaint in C2, that no time was taken for character relationships, despite them taking an entire half of an episode for the Beauyasha date and despite no shortage of moments for all three of the other couples (and plenty of platonic moments between friends). The issue was never a lack of time; it was that the characters they wanted to talk to each other didn't actually have the relationship in canon that the fans had dreamed up, and so, when the chips were down, they went to other people.

It takes two seconds to say something like "I hold their hand", even in the middle of plot-heavy adventuring. If someone doesn't say it, it's rarely the GM rushing them; it's the player either choosing not to do so, or not remembering to do so, and either of those is quite revealing regarding how the player feels about that relationship and where it stands in their priorities.

[stardestroyer81]

Last July, I expressed interest in wanting to create arcade flyer-inspired character cards for the colorful cast of Rascal... and only ended up making one for the titular bunny boy. To make up for it, however, I think it's finally time to reveal Rascal's full cast...

... by way of a group shot and sprite showcase! 🍬🧡💙🧡🍬

[pocketgalaxies]

the daggerheart stuff is so cool. the logos the typography the cards the mechanics

[the-outsiders-smp]

Welcome To The Show!

Hello everyone! welcome in to the question box of S.T.A.R! we are the compony that owns and runs the maze! feel free to send in any calls! apologies for the long hold times. ----------------------------------------------------- our show is ran by Scott and magic Star, the best pair of siblings in all the districts! as we all know Scott is the face of the show, magic tends to work more in the background. we'll be waiting to hear your call!

(this is an in character intro)

[othernaut]

Character Creation Challenge, Day 15: EverQuest Role-Playing Game

Appearance is reality.

The placid picture of a Koada'Dal enchantress sits by a marble-veined window in one of the spiraling towers of Felwithe, sipping clear tea and taking measured notes. The curling fern in the window sways its long leaves whenever another scholar passes by, dappling the study table with a manicured representation of the Greater Faydark in totality. A stiff-backed librarian passes by and takes in the scene, the open books and organized notes - the teacup conspicuously placed far away from any uncaring elbow or flailing pen. Nods, whispers a pleasantry. Smiles, and moves on.

One of the open books is a Freeport merchant's guide, outrageously unethical, detailing just how much a person can fleece their suppliers before they need to begin bribing the authorities. One is a dwarven judiciary book, little more than court transcripts, thought so worthless it had to be rescued from a midden. Two are explicitly and enthusiastically pornographic. The fifth, a delirious religious tract praising all-consuming, all-destroying Solusek Ro, was discovered in a cult compound, copied in secret, and is powerfully heretical to the nature-worshipping elite of the High Elves.

The notes, then, are about influence. The levers of influence, the mechanics of want and refusal. In sixteen pages of looping shorthand, the enchantress has detailed the skeleton of a philosophy, one built from its bones to influence people, to change their opinions, to manipulate their favor, to cause them to do and believe advantageous things. To a detailed reader, it would appear psychopathic. To a passerby, it appears as schoolwork. To her, it is the only means she has discovered to interact with other people.

Appearance is reality.

Two months earlier, the enchantress was breathing hard under the all-concealing canopy of the Faydark forest, sweaty and dirt-stained, standing over a corpse. The orc was a young one, she could tell. She was young herself; like recognizes like. The heavily-muscled creature carried a chipped sword and a belt full of beaten knives, but no trophies - no teeth, no ears, no locks of hair. A pawn, she remembered. Not yet an adult, to the orcs; it would have needed to kill before being trusted with that status. That would be why it attacked so fiercely, why it had sprinted towards her the second it saw her. She, actually - the enchantress only noticed these differences once the violence was done. The orc was attempting to earn her place. The enchantress was attempting to save her life.

Battle was quick, a matter of seconds. A spell cast reflexively, learned and memorized but never tested. The enchantress manifested a braided loop of magic around the orc pawn's throat, seized it in place while the spell choked the life out of it. Only now, in the frayed peace of the aftermath, did she realize she had other choices. She could have become a flower, a fallen log; she knew the illusions, she had the capability. And now a corpse was cooling at her feet and no one would know the orc had died, not if she didn't speak of it.

There came a rotation of perspective, under the shadow of the leaves. If she modified the illusion, took on the appearance of the orc, then she could prise a tooth from her victim's head and take her place in the clan. She would be inducted as a member of the Crushbone clan, in whatever means the orcs sought to do this, and live as a tested equal among a people she had only known as enemies. How different would it be from her own life? Would she crumple under brutal reality? Would there be something there, something alien but not altogether unpleasant to the Koada'Dal and her life of genteel isolation?

Appearance is reality.

Five years earlier, the apprentice enchantress was stopped in her tracks by a spell trap. She had only just begun her studies; she had never seen this kind of magic before, never felt it. All muscles in her body seized and any thought bent towards motion or speech died unmanifested. It would have been terrifying enough, had she not been miles below the Academy spires, exploring hidden passageways that she was distinctly not permitted to see.

But what else was there to do? When classes ended, everyone either paired off or gathered in clumps. She was left alone at her worktable to pack up her things in silence. She tried, she really did. She introduced herself, made jokes, did everything she knew how to do, but the best she could hope for was a polite goodbye. She didn't know whether everyone had already found exactly the companionship they needed or whether it was something to do with her. She bathed, she had a decent personality (according to relatives), her clothing was decent and her hairstyle recent. As she learned the illusions, she applied them to sharpen a cheekbone or conceal a blemish. And still she sat there, day after day, packing her things and listening to a camaraderie that she would never be a part of.

So she wandered. She wandered in the steepness of the hills, stayed out late, watched the stars. When she did the illusion right, she took the appearance of burning candles and stayed in the temple to watch the secret lives of acolytes and priests. She wandered by the gate, sat by the burning braziers to watch the Faydark, green and glorious. Alone, always alone - and now alone here, in the dark where the familiar had become a threat, unable to move a muscle.

Someone came and got her, of course. She got a lecture about which places were appropriate for a student and which were not. Because she was known to her teachers as a quiet and studious elf, she would be forgiven her transgressions - so long as she never spoke of it. Never mentioned that she had seen the pale marble of Felwithe shift to an older stone, a darker foundation, deep in the bones of the city. Never mention the ever-burning purple flames she found flickering at the end of that tunnel - that she had fixed her eyes on and wondered, while her body failed to move. Let it sift into obscurity and it will be as if nothing had happened, as if there was nothing at all to discover.

Appearance is reality.

Ten years earlier, she watched a shipment of raw stones delivered to her parents' jewelry shop. Night after night, her parents worked to cut and polish those rough bands of color into glittering gems. They went out in bulk, too, to Ak'Anon. Something to do with gnomish experimentation. They would never adorn a finger or enliven the curve of an ear.

Fifteen years earlier, they cleared the furniture from her brother's room. The stonework items, they would be broken into slag and dumped as gravel on the Caravan Road; all the wooden ones would be burned. Her mother filled the space with potted plants. The light, she said, was ideal, as if it were made for this. They never spoke his name again. She didn't have a brother. But that's when her father began the habit of spitting whenever the name Crushbone was said in his presence. The houseplants flourished and her mother spent hours in that room every day, alone.

Twenty years earlier, she had been playing by a lone tree in the gardens when a pixie twirled down out of the leaves and sprinkled her with dust. With a laugh and a word of magic, the pixie turned all her hair a vibrant pink. She laughed, too, which seemed to surprise the pixie - so it changed its hair to match. Giggling, it fled into the trees, leaving the girl alone with her alterations. The color change was permanent. She had to cut it all out for it to grow back the same basic blonde she was used to. Her parents fretted, made her cover her head. They hadn't heard the laughter, they only saw the consequences.

In the undefined future, the enchantress might do incredible things. Who could say? It was a world of adventure and excitement. People broke the barriers between planes, met their gods in the flesh, and slew them. People died unremarked in a nameless stretch of forest and that was all there would ever be of them. What mattered was the narrative, and that was a universal province. If the world saw her as beautiful, as powerful, as well-traveled, capricious, as everything she would ever want to be, would there be a difference?

Would anyone care?

Appearance is reality. Anything was fair.

*****

Solstyce Wintersun High Elf Enchanter 3 Training points: 0 Alignment: DG (perceived NG)

Str: 8 (-1), Dex: 14 (+2), Con: 11 (0), Int: 20 (+5), Wis: 12 (+1), Cha: 19 (+4) Speed: 30, Size: Medium, Languages: Elven 4, Common 4 Senses: Infravision Hit Points: 11 Armor Class: 13 Equipment: Quarterstaff, adventurer's clothes, spellbook, 4 daggers, 10 tiny daggers, backpack, bedroll, candle, flint and steel, ink (1-ounce vial), inkpen, small steel mirror, belt pouch, 6 days rations, 50 feet of hempen rope, sewing needle, 1 pound soap, waterskin, 11 gold pieces

Base Attack Bonus: +1 Melee: 0, Ranged: +3 Fort Save: +2, Reflex Save +3, Will Save +5 Proficiencies: Simple weapons, one-handed blunt, two-handed blunt, piercing, throwing. Class features: Spellcasting, bonus mystic feat feat. Feats: Combat Casting, Extend Spell, Dodge Skills: Appraise 6 (Int, +11), Bluff 6 (Cha, +10) Channelling 6 (Con, +6), Meditation 6 (Int, +11), Spellcraft 6 (Int, +11), Knowledge 6 (mysticism, Int, +11), Diplomacy 6 (Cha, +10), Animal Empathy 5 (Cha, +9), Sense Motive 6 (Wis, +7), Trade Skill 5 (jewelcrafting, Int, +10)

Available Spell Level: 2 Mana: 30 Spells Known: 1 - Lull, Minor Illusion, Shallow Breath, Pendril's Animation, Minor Shielding, Weaken. 2 - Gate, Color Flux. Prepared Spells: 1 - Minor Illusion, Shallow Breath, Pendril's Animation, Minor Shielding, Weaken, Gate, Color Flux, Lull.

*****

As I continue this challenge, as I write these bits of (hopefully) good fiction for bad games, I come again and again to this idea of exorcism. Of a personal closure, of pulling things out of myself and, by making it explicit and giving it stats, transforming it into a thing that can no longer trouble me. A thing that may be a part of my past, yes, but nothing I need to be ashamed of anymore. Look at it, it's got 30 mana and a +11 to Meditation. I know exactly what it is now.

EverQuest was the first game that ate me. I never had a chance. I had already been hooked by the seductive imagination of the fantasy genre and, like our protagonist above, spent most of my life achingly alone. To find a place where I could engage with others about my sparkly magical interests, and I could do it exactly as and how I wanted to be perceived? I never had a chance. They baited the trap with belonging and knew exactly what they'd catch.

It's been literal decades since I've touched anything related to EverQuest, but this silly little fantasy world is still an indelible part of me. I met friends that I've known, now, for years - I've had a 25-year-long conversation with a dude I first knew as a bucketheaded human paladin, what the fuck is this life. My tastes in fantasy have grown beyond the out-of-sequence Dragonlance and clearly-unredacted Greek myths that fascinated me as a lonely kid, but every weird obsession has to start with the simple things. And even now, decades later, here I am, making my old EverQuest character exactly as she would have been walking out of her starting city, having already done all the bat and spiderling killing she'd need to begin a long career of bullying sand giants and turning into trees in front of the bank doors so no one could get out.

As for the game itself? It's 3e D&D. If you know what that is, you know what the EverQuest Role-Playing Game is. But it's also good 3e D&D, to a point. The mechanical changes that White Wolf (jesus christ, yeah, it's White Wolf who made this) put in place to make the tabletop feel more like the MMO serve to improve the base game of D&D without adding too much complexity. A lot of the modules and additional adventure packs are, like, dungeons the game very much intends for you to grind for loot, and while I found this hilariously incongruous to what I come to tabletop for upon first blush... yeah, yeah, this is basically exactly what someone wanting to play tabletop EverQuest would want in 2002. I built my old High Elf Enchanter and immediately felt the urge to go troll Crushbone. It's in me, now. The hook that caught me once knows exactly where to slide in.

Next up: I deserve a good RPG for once, as a treat.

[dannybobany]

more oc stuff-

A character! I’m not sure why I picked her as opposed to anyone else, maybe she was just on my mind

Her name is Claire Silverstone but I have to admit that’s a misleading statement, Silverston is not her maiden name nor her married name, it’s more like a title- she’s a keeper of sorts for a very very old castle which in her lifetime she’s transformed into a school as to make use of the space

Silverstone is the name of every keeper who has ever lived there, she took it from the man who kept the place before and one day she will pass it to someone else, this is not well known information to outsiders by any means though- most people are under the impression that the property has been regularly passed through a family line, very few are aware of the places true nature

Claire is something of an enigma to people who know of her and to her students, nobody’s sure why she wears a veil as her answers are very inconsistent whenever asked and her children say she doesn’t seem to mind taking it off in private, some think it’s religious while many have thought she must be marred in some way under that cover although again, her children deny this

There’s a certain story about the castle she keeps, which for the last 14 odd years has been a school, that the castle itself is alive somehow, students have seen how sometimes the halls change shape or new design’s or murals or statues in the gardens appear from nowhere, no one ever seen putting them up, no one ever seen doing construction

A less prevalent rumor is of disappearing elevators, some students claim they’ve seen the Silverstone siblings entering into doors or elevators that turn back into walls when you blink, but most people say it’s silly, that kind of magic just isn’t real- no such thing as portals!

Although, despite disagreement on what exactly is strange about the building, most can agree it’s … strange somehow and that the land around it is too, in fact some describe feeling less focused or aware of themselves whenever they leave to visit family or after graduation, this feeling though dissipates quickly and is written off as kind of culture shock, after all; it’s so far from anything else that one might forget what the world outside Silverstone is like, perhaps those beautiful gardens and polished hallways go on forever

[taag-the-withering]

I lost my most reliable picrew for making older adult men I'M FUCKED

[nyxl0x]

The day nrfti gets fanart is the day all of my depression is cured and gone forever

[manicpixxiedreambitch]

Just went to see that new Colleen Hoover movie, It Ends With Us in theaters with my mom and my sister.

What the fuck is this straight white people shit?

[margle]

you would think that the fake kiss on stage would make me think of deetress possibilities but no. it was too playful and happy. that was not a deetress kiss. deetress would either kiss with the harrowed desperation of milfs or with a kind of fragile mediocrity.

[seventh-district]

so was anyone gonna tell me that Neil Newbon is the VA for Astarion or was i gonna have to find that out myself when he suddenly started uploading his playthrough of the game on YT