#HOW ARE YOU A GOLD KNIGHT WITH THOSE STATS

[genderqueer-miharu]

Bruh what were the fe echoes developers on when deciding to give you a final unit with a base speed of 11 on the final dungeon??

[witch-and-her-witcher]

2024 Fic Writer End of Year Roundup

Answer and then tag three or more creators to keep the game going! Thank you to everyone who tagged me and have had me in their inspo sections, I adore each and every one of you!

1. How many words did you publish on AO3 in 2024?

518,691 (hoping to add another 3-4k to this before midnight hehe)

I CANNOT drop that number without thanking the fucking dream team who has read EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHED WORD of mine: @popjunkie42 and @climbthemountain2020. From cheerleading, to pumping the breaks when my run ons be running, I appreciate the ever-loving hell out of both of you. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Honorable mention betas who hold up that number: @cauldronblssd, @wilde-knight, @thesistersarcheron, and @rosanna-writer. I truly appreciate every one of you babes and your critical, brilliant eyes on my self indulgent streams of thought.

2. How many fics did you complete this year?

21! 13 of those were one shots.

If I can be real, I have two multi-chapter WIPs sitting in my docs, but it felt too irresponsible to post those once I started getting buried in grad school.

3. How many in progress or ongoing fics did you start this year?

Heading into the new year, I have 2 in progress fics: Ruin Me for the Fourth Wing fandom and Who's Gonna Know You Like Me? for ACOTAR.

4. What was your favorite thing you wrote?

Any of my poly fics! I really have to thank @acourtofladydeath for her beautiful brain child @polyacotarweek for getting me into the poly mind set. Although I only wrote throuples for that week (and since aside from the background Nesta/Eris/Azriel/Cassian in Who's Gonna Know You Like Me?), I am interested in writing more complex poly pairings in 2025.

I also can't leave out @yanny-77, @copperfirebird and @hockeyspiral23 for supporting the violaiden obsession! I adore writing the three of them together so so much and it's so fun to have others to share the brain rot with!

5. What piece was your most experimental or different from your usual style?

I had never done a true canon rewrite before dripping in gold! It was so so fun taking an in text scene and making it queer as hell.

6. Did any fics surprise you - either while writing or their reception?

It's undeniable that A Court of Chaos and Darkness's reception took me by surprise. From the moment I couldn't shake the concept of the fic to the over one hundred kudos it received before I took it off of anon. But even more so, the absolute comfort blanket this fic was as I wrote it was shocking. Something in the healing occurring, in the recognition of the complexity of parenting and the messiness of the parent/child relationship really struck me.

The fic @revenge??? I love you filthy azris lovers. This was an outlet for some of my dating app blunders and shenanigans and you all really said "serve."

And then there's my first omegaverse fic and the first of it's kind in the Fourth Wing ao3 tag (when it was posted, I believe there's several more now!): so what now? The Fourth Wing fandom has been warm as hell and so inviting to me, but you have all really embraced me bringing weird into the tags and I just can't thank you enough as I gape at the stats.

7. Do you have a fic you wrote and loved that went under the radar? (This is your sign to reblog/repost it!)

Either of my sapphic fics: dripping in gold (genderbent feysand) and lunch. (morlain ft the mommy kink tag!)

8. Who is an artist that inspired you?

There are so, so many talented artists that inspire me! @thrumugnyr, @copypastus , @queercontrarian and @lucychanart have been my muses for all things Tamlin. @climbthemountain2020 and @wilde-knight are triple threats and their art brings me such joy! There's also @dustjacketdraws that always has primo Cassian and Nesta vibes!

9. Who is an author that inspired you?

There are SO many. First and foremost, my babe @popjunkie42. I love you, my muse. Something about reading your writing and just chatting with you inspires all of my ideas to flow. @asnowfern is another muse and writer I can always turn to for inspiration, we were just recalling her Turning Darkness Into Light elucien spooktober fic that tickles my imagination so much among her other works!

I'm inspired and impressed endlessly by @climbthemountain2020 ability to flawlessly produce well developed, gorgeously vivid stories.

@highlordofkrypton, @missfckingfortune and @beesays inspire me constantly with their raw talent and skill and for the first two, the hot and steamy smut they can turn out. @jules-writes-stories inspires me with her OC work and beautifully layered plots (Mithras, my toxic love.) @c-e-d-dreamer inspires me with her fun AU worlds, but also with her fearlessness to tackle toxic relationships - @secret-third-thing is in this same boat as well as @iftheshoef1tz, @foundress0fnothing, and of course the OGs @thesistersarcheron, @whisperingmidnights, @separatist-apologist and @the-lonelybarricade.

There are so many more of you. I love this community and the inspiration that flows all around your creative, galaxy brained minds.

10. Who is a new author you discovered?

SO many, but those I haven't mentioned yet who are so so talented (but not limited to this list): @dusk-muse, @chairofchaos, @shadowsandlint, @xxvalkyriesxx, @fourteentrout, and @littedidyouknow.

11. Did you do any collaborations? How did it start?

None this year, but the idea is fun!

12. What accomplishments are you proudest of?

Could You Love Me While I Hate Myself is my proudest accomplishment this year by far. I always told myself I couldn't: write OCs, write a longfic, or write a fic that would ever break the UNBELIEVABLE stats this fic has done. I proved myself wrong on every front.

Thank you so much to @asnowfern, @popjunkie42 and @wilde-knight for seeing me through this capstone fic and for believing in me and helping me see myself in a totally different light.

13. What did you learn about writing or creating this year?

Be as silly and self-indulgent as possible.

If you have a killer idea/dialogue line/etc - WRITE IT DOWN. YOU WILL NOT REMEMBER IT LATER.

14. What is your advice?

Surround yourself with people who make you feel like you can accomplish anything and you will never fail because there they will be, gassing you up flop or not.

I love you, harem. Writing is so fun BECAUSE of you. <3

15. What are your creative goals for 2025?

Continuing to eat, serve and let the haters drown in it.

[calamitaswrath]

Lucia plays Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn: Part 3 Chapter 4

Senators continue to senator. Shame I already know that Zelgius's the Black Knight, because otherwise there really wouldn't be anything here so far to make me guess it.

Ah, Skrimir's crush in action. But pfft at Soren just turning him down - if I were to just look at the interactions between those two, I wouldn't have thought that Soren had changed at all over those two years.

And Titania's still talking about Soren like you would about a child or a pet, lmao

Soren's pushing for a peace treaty? Poor boy hasn't realized that he's in a Fire Emblem game. There's no way that this'll go through.

"The same goes for my tribe. If we were to stop fighting now, I'd have to go around knocking every one of my men unconscious." - knowing Tibarn, he'd probably be capable of that, too.

Base conversation - Aimee's back again, this is bound to be gold. And her conversation with Shinon. . . oh, the writers definitely knew what they were doing here.

Ike, Shinon being Rolf's teacher was already a thing in the last game, and the introductory scene for your whole mercenary group still had Shinon teaching him. You're really not paying attention to anything around you, huh?

Zelgius outright challenging Skrimir to a duel. He really does know how to handle this guy.

Kyza and Lyre join for realsies! For now. And. . . I'm sorry to them, but I already have to deploy Ranulf this map, and I already heard that Lyre isn't that strong. I'm afraid they're gonna have to be benched for this one.

Lots of climbing on this map! . . .And I still brought Titania and Oscar, because of course I did. Didn't have much trouble on this one, though.

Unless you count an ally unit stealing the kill on the boss as trouble. I had Haar soften him up and was banking on having someone else get the kill, but guess not! At least Greil's Mercenaries really aren't struggling for level-ups and stats, like a certain other group is and will be.

I did recognize the track from this map, though! They also put that one in Smash. It's one of the nicer tracks, I'll give 'em that.

Zelgius really is going against his direct orders by giving the Laguz the opportunity to escape, no? But a good way of going about this. There's no way they'd ever retreat if Skrimir wasn't beaten. Even if he's undergoing character development, he still wouldn't back down like this.

So no outright accepting the prompt to give a peace offer, but a proper retreat. Some progress there at least.

[cerastes]

I’ve been waffling a bit on which Operator to use that celebration operator permit on, so I figured I’d ask someone a bit more knowledgeable than me for an opinion. Who would you recommend grabbing, Skadi or Mudrock?

I’ve got Gladiia’s Module lvl3 and Andreana’s Module lvl1, so I wanna take advantage of that Abyssal Hunter synergy, but it seems like Skadi is likely to be back in the gold cert store soon-ish?

On the other hand, Mudrock is Mudrock. I did pull Penance, but idk how similar they are in terms of uses.

Any thoughts?

Considering you have Gladiia Module lv 3, then either is a good option. If I knew more about your roster and about what you have and don't have, I'd be able to give a better recommendation, but I'll personally say Mudrock probably has more weight.

Mudrock and Penance are different in terms of usage: Penance specializes in HP Shields, while Mudrock specializes in Single Hit Shields. HP Shields are straightforward: Shields with HP that add their value on top of the Operator's HP. This makes Penance better at tanking groups of enemies. Single Hit Shields disappear with ANY attack, no matter how strong the attack, so a Talulah smack and a Reunion grunt hit will be the same in that the Shield WILL be consumed. This makes Mudrock better at dealing with strong enemies, since she can strong their super strong attacks without any repercussion. I'm saying "better" in both cases, but keep in mind, both Mudrock and Penance are pretty monstrous units that also can do the other job relative to their type of Shield really well. The thing with Penance is that you have to decided how you'll go about refilling her HP Shield: She can only refill it with her Talent (killing enemies to restore a part of it) or by S3 activation, and S3 is a Getting Hit charge, which means you necessary need to be engaged in battle and get hit 20 times at M3 in order to get another reliable big boost to your Penance Shield. 20 hits is either trivial or simply impossible to tank through, depending on what's doing the hits. Mudrock, on the other hand, automatically generates her Hit Shields through her Talent, and her S2 famously makes her incredibly powerful since it heals her whenever she uses it. Mudrock has her S2 and her Shields (which heal her whenever they pop) to sustain herself, whereas Penance has no true self-sustain other than making more HP Shields, and cannot heal herself at all, with only her S3 directly giving her Shields (her S2 increases the rate at which shields recover with each kill, but it still requires a kill). The only ways to heal Penance are Indirect sources of healing, like the Corrupting Heart, Angelina E2 talent, Perfumer talent, etc. Their use is different, as you can see! Mudrock is perfect for firing and forgetting: Put her in front of an enemy spawn or in a crossroad, and her S2 + Shields + Massive Stats will keep her again. Also, if you have Blemishine, she is THE synergy for both Mudrock S2 and Penance S3, allowing those Defensive Skills to also be charged Offensively.

Skadi has a more specific, less universal use that is however very useful: You mostly use her S2 to helidrop her on strong enemies to use her insanely high Attack to destroy them. This used to be rather weak since Skadi did not in fact have the durability to actually do this job well, but ever since the advent of Gladiia's Module and her own Modules, she now absolutely has the bulk and regen to duel VERY effectively against stuff like Patriot. If you don't have a heavy duty helidrop assassin (like Nearl the Radiant Knight or Guard Specter S2M3), then having Skadi on your payroll should enable a LOT more strategies, especially since, again, you have Gladiia Module lv 3, which is a huge huge buff to Skadi. For more static uses, S3 exists, which gives her insane stats for a whole minute, but then has a 90 second recharge, meaning it's a bit of a one hit wonder per map (alleviated by Specter the Unchained's Module that speeds up SP at lv 3, making it a 60 second recharge instead).

Take these in consideration when making your choice. If you already have some drop assassin, then Mudrock is an easy choice, she's simply VERY VERY good, and if you don't, then consider what it is you value more between what Skadi and Mudrock can offer, since their roles are quite different.

[before-calamity]

Buffs and Debuffs

Okay, no idea how this is going to go given I'm still relatively new to Tumblr, but here's a very quick look of some buffs and debuffs that you can receive in 1.0. I'm not sure which ones are actually in the game and which one's not. You'd probably need to click to expand each one. This is going to be a lot dryer of a post than regular ones as we pore through black text on white background, because the real horror is data analysis.

In this first one, you'll see Thamaturge and Bard effects which we'll look at later, as well as things like Gold Lung and Goldbile, which are effects from Aurum Vale. There's also an effect called Red Riding Hooded, where you "don a red riding hood as per Chuchumu's request", which might be relevant to XI's old costume system, as well as one effect where you "tote in intact sylph podling" ala the Sylph beast tribe quests.

Oh! And Sanction, which does its ARR ability of simply providing additional benefit (I believe it's in ARR. I know it's completely different from the XI version. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

In this next set are some Gathering and Crafting ones among a few buffs that are able to stack together, like Power Surge or Life Surge. You also see Double Nock and Triple Nock which I'm not 100% if those were actually in game.

As well as some mysterious removed ones~.

And interesting enough, you have spells that modify your level. Which is interesting, because that hasn't been a mechanic in any Final Fantasy except for the best one, Final Fantasy 5, where there were a lot of Blue spells that would modify your level or a monster's level.

I believe "Comradery" and "Strength in Numbers" are basically similar to the Echo buff you have in FFXIV raids.

Here we have a few interesting ones. I think some of these are either from cut spells or were leftovers from XI. Then some that would break the game like Reraise, unless an NPC casts that on you. Or things like Shell, which was in XI but is not in 1.0 (unless it was planned for it).

Even tohose Absorb Stat spells are from XI, and they are here, and even translated. Why? Absorb-STAT were Dark Knight spells in XI, was Dark Knight in its more XI form (or something similar) was planned for 1.0 at some point? Remember that XI and 1.0 ran on different engines, with 1.0 using a modified version that XIII ran on.

Our last batch.

Here we have some GLA/PLD or MRD/WAR attacks, as well as some things related to Battle Regimens which we'll get to at some point.

The top four - the Incapacitation infliction are interested - what is damaged beyond use? Usually the game uses "incapacitation" to mean that you as a PC are knocked out - this makes it sound like your gear is incapacitated. Something like Couerl Step sounds like it'd be a PUG/MNK action but as we'll see soon (please look forward to it), it isn't one.

Anyways, I hope you found this interesting. I know it's not one of the most visually interesting posts, but it's been on my backlog to post for a bit, and it just needed it done.

Happy Halloween! (And yes, if you are curious, Pumpkin Cookies are in 1.0, I just don't have a picture of them at this time!)

[shiningforcegirlpower]

Battle #1

We start the game with a task from the King to stop the Neighboring Kingdom of Runefaust from getting into the Gate of Ancients near the town of Guardiana. Our main character gets a group to assist him... but we're changing the story here.

Instead, a young mage, by the name of Tao, is always looked down upon by her fellow students. She seeks to prove herself by going to the Gate of the Ancients herself and battle the monsters with her firepower.

Unfortunately for her, she has to deal with this lineup: 5 Goblins, 2 Dark Dwarves, and 1 Rune Knight.

With a total amount of MP being 7, and HP being 10, she'll have to plan strategically how to take out these monsters and when to use her medicinal herbs. Perhaps saving her Blaze spells for the Dwarves and Rune Knight.

When she gets to her first goblin, she strikes and- Does one point of damage.

When the Goblin gets its turn, it does 3 damage instead

Tao is by far the most frail of the group. Even more frail than the archers. She will have to do Battle #1 and #2 completely on her own, which may over level her and cause grinding to occur. She is also one of the hardest units to move, as she does not get that great of a movement being a human, and loses more by being a mage. Tao as well often gets her turn skipped over, meaning she moves every OTHER turn compared to the rest of the units (including enemy units). And she cannot get experience via using items on herself, unlike when an ally gives another an item.

I will stop with the play-by-play, and inform you now of how the attempts go

Attempt #1 - Strategy had to change immediately, decided to begin griding gold and EXP by using the Blaze spells. Got to Level 2, so now I have 9 MP

Attempt #2 - Not going in with any Medicinal herbs, as it's just a waste of money without the EXP gain, and I'll be spending money on reviving Tao a lot anyways. Got to Level 3, so now I have 11 HP, and 12 MP. Tried to go straight on into the enemy cluster and got surrounded. Duly noted, I will go more of a ranged route next time

Attempt #3 - The Goblin with 2 HP was too tempting. Took unneeded damage to save MP. Grew to Level 4, so now I have 12 HP and 17 MP, with Blaze becoming Level 2, meaning it will be able to hit more targets next attempt.

Attempt #4 - Testing Blaze Level 2 on 2 Goblins to see if it's worth using the extra +1 MP on two targets or saving it for later. Due to the goblins still needing to be two shot, it's best to save the MP. Ran out of MP to do Blaze Level 2 before getting to the enemy cluster. Decided to start attacking the left monsters, as opposed to those on the right.

Attempt #5 - Got to Level 5, getting an MP bump of 1

Break time, to regroup and take a break playing the game until the next batch of 5 attempts.

Analysis - Coins are going to be a more finite resource, and more important that EXP considering Tao has no one else to assist her in fighting, and her defense stat is still at an abysmal 6.

Attempt #9 - I finally won at Level 8, took out the Goblins without magic and saved using the Blaze spells against the Dark Dwarves and Rune Knight. Along with using up 2 Medicinal Herbs. I'm going to try to not use my next Medicinal Herb unless I am SUPER close to beating the second battle

[claire-starsword]

The Guardiana Magic School Run - Part 3

No doodle this time as I had no ideas, every joke about giant bats sucking has already been done I think. Also I've just realized I lost all my pre battle screenshots due to a emulation mishap so. Oops. We bad at pictures today, sorry.

Anyway. We return to Guardiana to sing our praises and maybe not dwell too much on the fact Gong just died. Resurrection is too a good display of Guardiana's magic. I guess.

We say hi to Mae and Gort and grab their weapons for extra money. We also grab plenty of stuff from the treasure room. The Antidote gets safely tucked in the item box as poison won't be a thing for the next battles. The Angel Wing is against my rules and thus to be sold. The Power Wine and Defense Potion also go to the item box as I don't see the need for them right now.

More importantly, the Rousing Ring. This thing is a gift for giant bat haters everywhere, preventing a character from falling asleep. Unfortunately there's only one in game (unless they show up in deals? but I sure haven't seen them there ever). I give it to Gong because Max is kinda overleveled right now, and Tao and Lowe should not be directly hitting enemies too often.

All the loot we could sell gives us a sizable chunk of money. I check the deals and there's still nothing there. The Guardiana weapon shop is also very disappointing. So it's time to start stocking on Steel Rings as I hoped. And by stocking I mean buy two. Definitely would like to have more, as for now, I move all three to Tao, who is by far the most frail character right now, and next battles will be more open so I don't think Max and Gong will manage to fully protect everyone.

I also replenish everyone's stock of Medical Herbs, which isn't a big deal since we didn't use many.

This is where I should have screenshots to show how absurd Max is getting in stats, his attack is like 20 compared to the others having less than 15, definitely need to let the others catch up on levels. Tao's base defense is 4, which is half of Gong's, the guy who died last battle. You can see now why I want those rings so bad. Especially since I recall now there being more Rune Knights next battle.

We cannot delay meeting them any longer. I save the game, and go on for the glory of Guardiana's Magic School.

The clear bonus is 400 gold for winning in at most 10 turns, almost enough money for another Steel Ring, so I want that, but perhaps I should have learned a lesson from last time. Also I don't think skipping enemies to get to Alterone is worth it, we'd miss a lot of exp. Let actually try to minimize deaths this time.

We have a couple of bats who I think will advance immediately, and a lot of dark dwarves. I would love if they didn't advance, which might mean taking things slowly and missing the bonus. Though they might advance anyway and then I'll feel very stupid. Oh well.

Turn 2, nothing happened. The dwarves indeed don't feel like moving, while the bats have inched closer. Let's see if we can deal with them quickly. I send Max to bait them as his huge stats should shrug off bats without much issue.

They take the bait immediately due to having great agility. Their position annoys me a bit, but at least every other character can hop to beat them up right now.

By characters I mean Tao. Lowe can't reach, and Gong gets dodged because flying enemies Do That A Lot. Tao does level up though, and gets Blaze 2, which is fun and exciting. I will mention though, she has yet to get a single defense point via level up. I'm beginning to wonder if it's ever a thing for her.

Turn 4. Gong has managed to hit the second bat and take more than half its HP so Tao can definitely finish it up after Gong tanks a hit, and he will not fall asleep due to his ring. Let's see if Max can bait some dwarves already, though I have little hope of getting the bonus. I just rather these guys come for Max than anyone else.

The dwarves refuse to come and are instead gathering to block the road, which is the fastest path to Alterone. But I said I wouldn't rush, so perhaps beating them from the forest side I can get some terrain bonuses. Unfortunately they too will be getting the terrain bonuses.

To put it plainly, I don't know what I'm doing.

Turn 6. Whatever I did was good, one dwarf came after while the others are now closer to the road and thus getting less terrain bonuses. Hope they stay that way.

Max and Gong team up flawlessly and Gong's level up makes him seem very determined to not die again.

Man, why did I even want the Demibuster.

Lowe is doing a whole bunch of nothing so I send him to heal Max from all the 1 damages he's been taking.

Everything proceeds smoothly and Tao proves that yes, she can get defense on level ups. Sometimes. Occasionally.

Lowe also gets to do something after Max kindly left a dwarf with 1 HP remaining.

Unfortunately we're at turn 9 with a mass of knights and bats remaining so it's safe to say the bonus is impossible. So let us be as cautious as possible and go through the forest, hoping dispatching the bats before the knights get involved.

The bats get baited and finally some snoozing happens. It's chill though, I legit skipped Max's turn to see if others can get the exp.

Lowe proceed to disappoint me as usual.

Eventually he does land a hit but it doesn't even do half and I don't have that kind of patience, Max reaps the rewards here and his level ups continue to be absolutely wild.

Knights are horrible in forests so I'm hoping it's okay to advance this much. Gong also heals himself for some exp, clearly no useful healing is getting done today.

I mess up again because they can still use the roads! Everyone thank the Steel Rings right now.

Gong is also reaping sweet rewards of his training. The reward is "dying less".

Tao spends her last MP on sweet revenge.

Lowe finally gets a level up from healing Tao, and learns Detox. This never happens in a timely manner on my usual playthroughs.

Nothing else to say, we wipe out the knights in this chill manner, with mostly Max and Gong. I try leaving this final guy for Lowe but Max counters because he's too good to share the spotlight. We're four or five turns beyond the bonus, I didn't pay attention, but the battle itself was pretty easy. I feel this will be a pattern in this playthrough, we're pretty overleveled for this part so we survive well, but with few characters we just don't deal enough damage to wipe the enemies fast enough. Obviously, this is because again I wanted all enemy exp instead of rushing to the objective.

There's only so much I can weep about it right now though. This is Alterone, the town full of loot. So money won't exactly be lacking. I might have one less Steel Ring by the end of the chapter though :(

after like ten minutes maybe more of opening chests, including the one after talking to the king, we have extra herbs, Healing Seed for the late game, another Power Wine and Defense Potion, a Life Loaf that might actually be from Guardiana and I didn't notice, some Middle Swords, plural, and useless wooden weapons, I can't understand why they're here. One Middle Sword manages to make Max more powerful than he already is. The rest of the weapons are going to make us rich as the average Alterone citizen.

The deals section decides to finally have something…

It is an axe. Which no one will use in this run. Also I would love to have data on these special weapons because the Jagged Flash tends to be the most useless of them to me, I don't notice any significant extra damage on flying enemies and flying enemies dodge it all the time anyway. This might be the worst thing we could have possibly rolled. Let's just check the normal weapon shop.

The Demibuster is a whopping 800 gold and actually weaker than the Middle Sword. It will still deal more damage against dark dwarves, but man, Max doesn't need it.

The Voodoo Staff meanwhile is a new weapon exactly between the Wooden and Power Staff. Makes sense, right? It can also poison enemies, which I guess could be useful, if we weren't killing anything in one or two hits anyway. With all that said, the Power Staff is debuting like, literally the next battle. I also don't have much interest in sending the blazing woman and healer guy to hit stuff when they could be blazing and healing instead, especially when their defenses still don't inspire much confidence. That's right baby this isn't the Alterone Magic School run this is the Guardiana Magic School, I'm going back there and grabbing more Steel Rings before the chapter closes!!

Just to complete the ramblings, Alterone has their own special ring too, the Evade Ring. In this version, characters have no natural chance of evading as far as I've seen, and depend on equipment like this instead. Of course, this one stacks to a chance of at most 6-8%, so it's very shaky compared to our great and solid Guardiana equipment. It is cheaper than Steel Rings though, so might be a good option for squishy characters once we run out of money.

For now though, we're off to funding the restoration of our glorious country. We buy three rings and store them safely in the item box for now.

We have an old friend to meet next time, after all.

Losses: 0 Deaths: 1 This episode: not yet sponsored by the Guardiana royal family but Queen Anri if you're out there I'd love the money

[prokopetz]

The aforementioned Run Robot Red is definitely a good one. Creation of your goofy little robots is carried out as a group activity, with multiple mutually incompatible character creation systems depending on which "factory" the robots came from. For example, you might randomly generate your components, purchase them from an equipment list using a fixed budget (with certain components being in limited supply, so whose turn it is to make a purchase matters!), or even take turns grabbing papercraft robot parts from a pile in the middle of the table.

Troika! is another personal favourite. Apart from the expected random stat generation, the centrepiece of character creation is a big d66 table of backgrounds with entries like "Vengeful Child", "Dining Club Member" and "Poorly Made Dwarf"; Troika!'s central conceit is that it has a very specific setting in mind, but never explicitly explains most of it, instead communicating its worldbuilding almost entirely through the descriptions of its character creation options.

Danger Patrol isn't one I'd recommend for actual play, since it's an incomplete playtest draft that wasn't been updated in over a decade, but it's a fun example of how far this sort of character creation can be taken. Character sheets are divided into multiple separately printed parts, and you arrive at a playable character by literally taping together the character sheet fragments corresponding to each of your archetypes to produce a single complete character sheet.

Cuticorium is a game about sentient bugs that pairs Forged in the Dark style "action word" stats with a pick-list of physical features that attach mechanical effects to each facet of your bug's anatomy; the latter was actually a major inspiration for Eat God's Trait mechanics. I'm not sure how to describe its gameplay; maybe imagine if Hollow Knight was a dating sim?

Mausritter inverts a key element of the OSR formula: rather than choosing a character class, then rolling your starting hit points and gold based on that choice, you roll for your starting hit points and gold, then interpret the results of those rolls as indices on a lookup table to determine your character's background and profession. For example, if you rolled 6 starting HP and 4 starting gold, your mouse is a Bee Keeper; conversely, if you get snake eyes and end up with 1 for both, your mouse is a Test Subject.

In a Wicked Age flips things around even further and puts character creation at the end of the setup process. Each session begins with the group using a set of random tables called Oracles to collectively brainstorm both a scenario and the setting in which it occurs. Each player then points at a specific character who needs to exist for the scenario to make sense and says "that's me". Any such role is fair game. Does the scenario require there to be a King of the Weasels? You can just decide that's your character now.

There are lots of 'em, really. "Games with baroque character creation mechanics tuned to produce some sort of fucked up little guy" is practically a genre unto itself – I'm convinced many of them are only games as such in order to furnish a context for the character creation bits to exist in. (And I'm by no means innocent of this, myself!)

While I agree with the sentiment that having a character creation schema that doubles as an OC incubator is a cardinal virtue of any tabletop RPG, I think it's important to bear in mind that focusing on relatable identities and clear motivations and evocative personal histories is only one possible way of achieving that. Another is having a bunch of goofy rules toys and big stupid random tables that both encourage and facilitate creating some sort of Fucking Creature.

[athetos]

Dead Cells is my favorite roguelike, and easily one of my favorite games of all time, and it boils down to one simple reason - you can never get bored of it.

Let’s compare it to Hades, the most popular roguelike (that I’m aware of) right now. The game is championed for its replay-ability, and they’re absolutely right! The game is phenomenal! But it still pales in comparison to Dead Cells. A broad overview: Hades has 6 weapons, each with 4 permanently upgrade-able aspects that change your abilities. There are 4 biomes, with random rewards for clearing each room. There are about 2 dozen permanently upgradeable talents that give you stat boosts or luck. There are about a dozen gods that can give you one of a dozen or so boons, which can stack with others. There are keepsakes and buddies you can earn by gifting characters items you earn on your journeys, which when equipped give you new abilities. There are a plethora of side quests you can take on by forming relationships with those same characters. You can use gems to upgrade the underworld’s appearance, typically for purely cosmetic purposes. And, of course, once you’ve beaten [redacted], you can use punishments, which give you more rewards, but make your mission much harder.

It sounds like a lot of content - and it is! It was downright overwhelming at first. But there are a few things that make the game become less enticing to keep returning to. The weapons, even with their different aspects, all have the same general play-style, and you can’t switch weapons during a run. The biomes must be fought in the same order in every run, and the environments and enemies/bosses found within can grow tiresome. The talents are useful and can be swapped out, but only a couple will drastically change the way you play. The side quests are entertaining and can even be emotional, but getting the proper dialogue to keep them progressing can be very frustrating and tedious. And the punishments, while some are very creative, can also grow stale if you’re looking to play more casually, but still want to farm items for quests and renovations. For some people, these are minor hassles and won’t deter them from putting hundreds of hours into the game, but for others, it can make the experience seem rote.

Dead Cells, on the other hand, while it may not have the more universally appealing plot and characters, makes Hades seem downright plain. There are about 20 biomes and 10 bosses, and you can take different routes on every run. There’s at least 100 obtainable gear, all categorized as either melee, tactics, or survival, which are found within stages or purchased at shops, and can be swapped whenever you desire. The weapons and skills range from one handed swords, two handed swords, shovels, whips, giant needles, bows, shields, force fields, bombs, little buddies who follow you around, boomerangs, and axes, just to name a few. Each weapon has a unique way to deal critical damage, and has a number of random affixes that alter how much damage it deals, what status conditions it afflicts, and more. There are mutations you can stack at the end of every biome that can drastically alter your play style to better suit which weapons you have on hand. There are over a hundred purely cosmetic costumes you can unlock. The game is infinitely customizable to whichever difficulty level you want, with the ability to change how much gold you start with, whether certain things damage you, what your starting weapons are, if food can poison you or not, etc. and yes, you can even change whether food you find is meat, fruit, or veggies, and if you’d rather the music was modern or 8-bit. While sidequests are not really a thing, the frustration in obtaining them isn’t there as well.

But the thing that really makes Dead Cells great, in my opinion, is that it came out in 2017, but is still getting new free and paid dlc to this day. They’ve done crossovers with other games, like Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter. They’ve added dozens of weapons, bosses, biomes, costumes, mutations, and lore rooms. They continually update the game’s mechanics based on player feedback - re-balancing weapons, adding or removing affixes, fixing bugs, making the game easier to speedrun, etc. like, nobody is doing it like these guys. Next year we’re getting a Castlevania crossover! With Richter and Alucard! Like, holy shit!

The whole point of this is to say that if you love Hades, but fell off the bandwagon at some point because it grew boring or tiresome, you really owe it to yourself to check out Dead Cells.

[red-dragon-archfiend]

Today I've given each non-Sorcerer class in D&D 5e a multiclass build combining them with Draconic Sorcerer. The power level of these builds ranges from terrific to typical to terrible, and Draconic is usually not the most optimal subclass to choose for them anyway, but I try to highlight when the subclass features are important. I'll start by just giving you the list of each combination, and below the cut I'll go into far more detail about each one, including how it functions and how viable I think it is.

Artificer: Half-Elf Draconic Sorcerer 17/Alchemist Artificer 3

Barbarian: Half-Elf Ancestral Guardians Barbarian 12/Draconic Sorcerer 8

Bard: Custom Lineage Draconic Sorcerer 17/Eloquence Bard 3

Cleric: Mountain Dwarf Draconic Sorcerer 19/Order Cleric 1

Druid: Half-Elf Spores Druid 17/Draconic Sorcerer 3

Fighter: Half-Elf (Drow) Eldritch Knight Fighter 11/Draconic Sorcerer 9

Monk: Half-Elf (Drow) Draconic Sorcerer 16/Kensei Monk 4

Paladin: Half-Elf Draconic Sorcerer 14/Crown Paladin 6

Ranger: Half-Elf Hunter Ranger 16/Draconic Sorcerer 4

Rogue: Ravenite Dragonborn Swashbuckler Rogue 19/Draconic Sorcerer 1

Warlock: Hellfire Tiefling Draconic Sorcerer 17/Hexblade Warlock 3

Wizard: Half-Elf Bladesinging Wizard 17/Draconic Sorcerer 3

To clarify a few things, the reason Half-Elf is chosen so frequently isn't just my own personal affinity for Half-Elves, but also because the stat increases Half-Elves offer are crucial for making the many MAD combinations (multi-ability dependent) function. If you're playing with stronger starting stats than those afforded by Point Buy, it's fine to change for a different race in most circumstances. As for the color of your Dragon Ancestor, it only matters on a mechanical level if you take six or more levels of Sorcerer. If you do, fire is generally the best choice, so Red, Gold, or Brass Dragon works best, but if you don't, any color works the same, so just choose the one you like best or what makes sense for your character. I'd also recommend starting with Sorcerer unless the other class gives you heavy armor, also offers constitution save proficiency, or if the class is (for some reason) Monk, because newly acquired versions of Unarmored Defense replace previous versions, and chances are Draconic Resilience will work better for you than the Monk's Unarmored Defense. Also, remember if you get armor that you're going to need space in the back for your wings when you hit Sorcerer level 14, so be sure to set time aside to get your armor modified.

Artificer: Not really exciting, but Infusions are always helpful, and medium armor and shields improves our durability. Healing Word is all we need to bring up downed party members, and Experimental Elixir gives us a free potion every day. We don't get to CHOOSE which one we get, but all of them are helpful, especially in a diverse party where at least somebody could benefit from whichever result our Elixir provides. The real value from this combination is flavor; a Sorcerer who experiments with their own magical blood is a cool concept!

Barbarian: This is kind of a joke? The idea is to cast Mirror Image and Fire Shield before we enter a rage, using Extended Spell to make them last longer. Ancestral Guardians makes attacking anybody but us both difficult and unrewarding, and our spells make that same for attacking us too. If you're not particularly attached to Draconic Sorcerers like I am, I'd recommend Clockwork Soul instead so you can learn Armor of Agathys.

Bard: This one is pretty straightforward. Silver Tongue is incredible, both classes use charisma, and choosing Custom Lineage and choosing a feat that increases charisma offsets the fact that we get one less ASI to work with. Notably, Sorcerers stop learning new spells after level 17, and our spell slots still scale like a full-classed character since we're combining two full casters, so we're only trading 3 Sorcery Points, Draconic Presence, an ASI, and Sorcerous Restoration for all the things those Bard levels have to offer. Not necessarily better than a full-classed Sorcerer at level 20, but not really worse either, if you're in a social campaign where Silver Tongue goes a long way.

Cleric: This one is actually really cool, I'm glad I thought of it. Voice of Authority is great in any party that makes weapon attacks a lot, and Font of Magic lets us make more spell slots to keep using it. An additional charisma-based skill is great for a Sorcerer, and the combination of heavy armor and shields in addition to constitution save proficiency from starting Sorcerer give us Fighter-like durability, outside of hit points, but those are already better than usual thanks to our great Mountain Dwarf stat increases. Mountain Dwarf also adds poison resistance, which goes nicely with fire resistance from Elemental Affinity, and more importantly we're not slowed by heavy armor, so we can dump strength.

Druid: Spores was chosen because it's the melee Druid, and Draconic Sorcerer offers better AC, constitution saving throw proficiency, Booming Blade, Shield, Mirror Image and Metamagic. Notably you get access to a lot of utility cantrips that Druids lack, like Prestidigitation, Minor Illusion, and Mage Hand, so I'd suggest grabbing those to make yourself more useful outside combat. It's MAD and delays your Druid levels by more than I'd like, but given how allergic Druids generally are to multiclassing, I'd say this is a reasonably effective combination.

Fighter: This one takes advantage of Draconic Resilience to focus on dexterity. Metamagic is the big draw though, that combined with Action Surge and War Magic gives us a buffet of action economy. Either pick of a rapier and use the blade cantrips, or a longbow to use with ranged cantrips. Consider taking Elven Accuracy to use with Faerie Fire, and Quickened Spell to pair with Scorching Ray and Action Surge longbow attacks to capitalize on that advantage as much as possible. By level 20, this build can use Action Surge to make six longbow attacks, then follow with Quickened Scorching Ray, upcast to sixth level, for a total of thirteen attacks in that turn, with super-advantage if you have Elven Accuracy and cast Faerie Fire beforehand. This sounds incredible, and it is, but the biggest problem this build faces is (spoilers) it's mostly outclassed by Sorcerer/Paladin and Sorcerer/Warlock, as you'll see below, because they can accomplish similar things much more effectively and with less multiclassing investment. This build absolutely works, especially if you were disappointed by the Arcane Archer and want something stronger, but consider those other two combinations first.

Monk: This one is terrible, but there is something you can maybe do with it. If you take Elven Accuracy and Great Weapon Master, you can make two-handed longsword attacks with dexterity for big damage, using one of the blade cantrips. Martial Arts is an amusing bonus action, but compared to Quickened Spell it's kinda just filler. If your DM allows the use of Dedicated Weapon, you can use the Elf Weapon Training feature from the Half-Elf variants in place of Skill Versatility to make the Way of the Kensei entirely obsolete, so you can choose a different subclass, which may as well be the Way of the Ascendant Dragon, if only for flavor purposes. Is that the most practical choice? Not really. But this build is itself very impractical, so it doesn't matter much. Really, if you want to be a dragon-themed Monk, just play Way of the Ascendant Dragon, it's really cool and does everything you'd want it to do.

Paladin: In stark contrast with the last one, this one is not only good but actually better than most single-classed builds. The Sorcadin, as it's called, is one of, if not the, strongest multiclass combinations possible, and also my favorite build in D&D 5e. There's a lot to say about it, but the TLDR is Quickened Spell means we can be a Paladin and a Sorcerer at the same time, and our Sorcerer levels give us a lot more spell slots to burn for Divine Smite. I could write an entire post about this combination, from the several ways to play it, the sheer potential it has, and the narrative potential of a warrior motivated by a personal oath they chose for themselves grappling with powerful inner magic they had no say in possessing.

Ranger: With quite possibly the best combination out of the way, back to one of the worst. This one has similar problems to Monk, but it's not quite as bad. The idea here is to use Horde Breaker in conjunction with Green Flame Blade to do sizeable damage to two foes at once. Draconic Resilience aside, not much to say about this one, though the flavor is neat. Like with the Monk, the Ranger has a dragon-themed subclass in the Drakewarden, so I'd recommend just playing that instead.

Rogue: Better AC on the only Rogue that wants to be in melee a lot, Booming Blade for more damage, and we already want good charisma so we can actually get some solid use out of our few spells. Ravenite Dragonborn was chosen for Vengeful Assault, which paired with Quickened Spell (from Metamagic Adept unless we decide to take more Sorcerer levels) allows us to make more sneak attacks outside of our own turn. If that's not your speed, Half-Elf is once again the best option, this time because Rogues really like the extra skills. If you liked the Fighter build, you could play an Arcane Trickster instead of a Swashbuckler and take several more Sorcerer levels, though managing the build becomes a lot harder at that point. Still pretty solid though, an Arcane Trickster with several uses of Subtle Spell could be an absolute menace.

Warlock: The "Sorlock", the only combination here that rivals Sorcadin, though I'd say this specific version is probably worse. All the benefits of Warlock without the downsides! We can even convert our Pact Magic slots into Sorcery Points every short rest. Hellfire Tiefling was chosen to capitalize on Elemental Affinity and to use Darkness alongside Devil's Sight, since we want to get the most out of Draconic as our subclass. Usually Sorlocks take Eldritch Blast, but Elemental Affinity means Fire Bolt is almost (but not as) good, so we can afford to take another invocation besides Agonizing Blast. I'd recommend choosing Pact of the Chain and taking Investment of the Chain Master, because we might as well get a pseudodragon familiar to match the theme. The real gimmick to this particular Sorlock is combining Elemental Affinity with Hex Warrior to make Green-Flame Blade a viable melee option, especially with Quickened Spell. This matches and even outpaces the damage from a Hexblade with Pact of the Blade just using a longsword, and we have the spell slots to make casting Shield actually worth it, which pure Hexblades can't do. Not the most optimal way of playing a Sorlock, but certainly a cool one that's still very effective.

Wizard: Same benefits as the Spores Druid and works for the same reasons, though Wizard spells are stronger in general than Druid spells, so Metamagic is even more of a benefit. Consider learning Shield and Shadow Blade as Sorcerer spells, so you always have them prepared. Between Sorcerer and Wizard, we'll eventually have 9 cantrips, fixing the Bladesinger's struggle to fit in their combat cantrips and utility cantrips at the same time, but like with the Druid, MADness is the main issue here, and the Bladesinger really doesn't want to be more MAD than it already is. You may want to prioritize dexterity over intelligence or charisma, or if that sounds too gimmicky, try a more traditional subclass like Abjuration, Divination, War, or whatever makes sense for your dragon ancestor. An Evoker with red dragon ancestry or an Enchanter with green dragon ancestry feels thematically appropriate and fun to me!

[archer3-13]

to be honest, units in engage are just fundamentally more unique then units in three houses, because of how engage treats unit progression and development.

to wit, well you can make pannette any unit in engage, pannette will always be heavily weighted towards str and hp thanks to her innate growths, base stats and her unique stat caps [stat caps that arent ridiculously high like in three houses i'll add]. even if you make her a mage or mage knight, shes going to be a mage knight that hits people stupid hard with a sword as opposed to having useful magic. and if ya turn her into a swordmaster she'll be a bulky hard hitting swordmaster.

in three houses, unit progression is tied largely to class.

as i already noted, stat caps for characters are so stupidly high as to be effectively meaningless especially for the average player. theres no practical way to reach those caps unless you over invest in a single unit which makes them effectively irrelevant to character progression. that leaves character growths and character base stats when it comes to the unique feel of each unit. and in three houses, those are fairly homogeneous and flat across the board. there are some standouts of course, lysithea being heavily weighted in magic, but those are also often by virtue of being particularly weak in other areas of their stats.

lysitheas mag growth is 60%, well flayn and huberts mag growths are 55%. the differences in their gains on those stats are effectively minuscule especially in a game with such heavily inflated stats like three houses. yet lysithea is commonly remembered as the hilarious magic glass cannon of the game, despite only having 5% more spd growth then hubert. I would argue that has less to do with her being noticeably better in that role compared to other characters, and more so because her growths in other stats are so pitiful being the only character in the game with a true 10% def growth or the only one in the base game to have a 20% hp growth. and even then shes an outlier in this regard with most characters growths hovering in the 30-40 range.

hence why i said that character progression in three houses is tied pretty heavily to class. the characters stats and growths in three houses are heavily homogeneous compared to other fire emblem games, and with stat caps youll probably never reach that leaves a characters class as what defines them in terms of stats, as classes add class growths and class stat gains. but as a consequence that means sylvain will always feel like a paladin first or whatever class you have him as, instead of feeling like sylvain in the paladin class.

and this is all without considering how engages character personal skills are just flat out more interesting then anything three houses has to offer in that regard. engage annas personal skill has a lck% chance of generating additional gold! three houses annas personal skill adds 5 points to her lck stat. you spot the difference in terms of personal skill creativity or individuality.

Aren't units way less unique in engage than houses?

I don't think so anon!

[starlytenight]

So there are different generations of puffs, and they're yeeted out as babies. Why are they yeeted? Who made up the procedure? Also, how big was Meta Knight's generation? How are they doing now?

Yes they are! The yeeting thing began in Galacta's generation, and he was among the first few that happened with. Most were still naturally born so there was a mixing thing going on with families adopting space babies.

That's a question not even their own kind truly know. All that is known is that their elites are off somewhere in hiding doing this for their species and for the galaxy as a whole.

Mostly thanks to a prophecy of a fabled Puff being the one to take Nightmare down and they were getting desperate to keep themselves alive. No one even knows where their home planet is, if it even exists anymore. Even Velesia, was one of the oldest living Puffs has no idea about their home planet. She's from the generation before Galacta or Arthur (aka the Bronze Star Generation) and most of whatever she knows is lost beyond what she can recall/was told by The Ancients.

The Dark Matters were not exactly very nice to their cousins when they were fighting back.

As for Meta's generation, aka the Silver Star generation...

They're doing just fine. It's a very small generation since Nightmare was still picking off the GSA's remains until Arthur rebranded as Star Warriors and tried to rebuild the almost destroyed faction. He picked up what few Puff children he found and he could only find these four in his travels and weak numbers.

Dragato was is the eldest of the Silver Generation and has the Water Ability. He also has a fondness for dragons (hence his name and his little tattoo over his arm) and is a very relaxed sort and does often take up leadership in Arthur's stead. He and Meta used to butt heads over leading at times but they got along well.

Falspar is the second oldest and is a rowdy rascal. He and Meta used to get into all sorts of trouble and those two definitely were reckless together. They were the closest out of their group despite their clashing personalities---Falspar actually knew Meta when he was young and stupid and closer to his Mirror World counterpart. He has the Metal Ability. He also likes doing art as a hobby and was the first to try to learn a bit of Japanese when young Meta was struggling with English.

Noisurat is the youngest of the group and has a Fire Ability he never learned how to manage. He never brings his wings out out of fear of burning someone (he actually burned Dragato's arm by accident but Dragato has long since forgiven that incident since they were kids.) He's quiet and bonded with Meta over books mostly. He's a brute only in battle but outside of it is the quiet kid.

All in all the other three of the smallest generation are fine, they're just with Arthur in trying to help save planets and whatnot. Only Noisurat has been contacted in the 10 years Meta flew the coop because of his grief from losing Jecra and Garlude thanks to needing info on Necro Knight and Lady Sis Knight. Meta loves his foster siblings but when you live for a really long time, sometimes time slips and before you know it a decade passes.

But yeah, the Silver Generation is by far the smallest one and was the closest to extinction the species got to. Kirby's generation, the Gold Star Generation has a bit of a boom happening because the prophesized Kirby is finally here. They also realized, oops we need more babies STAT.

[thoughtfullyrainynightmare]

Hey! Not a request but I saw you said were trying to dm a black clover campaign and I have been thinking about doing the same thing. I was wondering if you had any ideas for yours yet as I’m still trying to start building mine 😅

Hiya!

Well, I suppose the first thing to know about me as a DM is that I wing a lot. That's just my style, and it allows for a lot in my opinion. I also operate by "if you can convince me/reason your case, we can make it happen".

The world I'm keeping as much as I can, as canon BC. And my players have taken elves, halflings and half-elves as their races, which is doable as it is. When it comes to classes I'm also going to allow for each of them, but for melee based ones one might need to think of some spell casting adaptations. Though there are already spell-caster variants of all of them, so that's not really an issue either.

One of the biggest things for me, so far, has been magic, interestingly. Because I'm going to go by one-affinity basis, which makes choosing your spells difficult. But since the players are largely writers, we're going to make it a creative writing exercise. Meaning that they can pick any spells they want to, and we'll re write the description so that it'll have the same effect, but utilizes their affinity.

This way we don't need to create spells from scratch, but still have that creative freedom.

Our warlock took "fiend" as their patron, so I just gave them a small devil, who's stats I'll modify based on Spined Devil. But honestly, a lot of the patron types would be doable. "Archfey" would be dryads/elysia beings, "Fiends" are obviously devils, Great Old Ones can be basically anything, but my first thought was the WQ.

For money 1 copper is 1 yul, and thus 1 gold is 100 yuls. But I think the DMs guide has good value scale, so I don't see a reason to mess with that.

I guess it depends how strict you want to be about things. Like obviously elves might raise a lot of eyebrows in canon. If they wanted to join the magic knights, I mean. But I'll mellow it down for the campaign a bit.

If you wanted to, you could grant additional spell slots for nobles, and take some away from urchins, but granted how limited the spell slots are in the beginning, I'd stay away from that. Plus, I don't want to punish my players for choosing any other background than noble, so it can be a bit tricky. Alternatively if you don't want to control their spell slots, you could adjust spell casting modifiers, or grant damage bonuses.

But I don't think I'll interfere with those, because I want my players to just have fun with it. And this is very much a trial run still ^^'

[wirewitchviolet]

Dear Game Developers, I don’t want to be a rapacious colonizing blight on the world.

I like a pretty wide variety of games, but one general thing I’ve always been particularly keen on is the sort of game where I start off just kinda naked in the wilderness with nothing and have to build up a bunch of infrastructure to accomplish something. So you know, RTSes, Civ clones, survival games, sandbox-y Minecraft stuff, Dwarf Fortress and similar things, but these all have this really annoying habit of making my character the biggest existential threat to the entire world, and I would really like them to stop doing that all the time.

So, just to open up with an example of how to do this sort of thing in a way I like, Subnautica is one of my favorite games. I recently streamed the whole thing, so, links to that if you’d like: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Subnautica actively confronts my issue head on, and handles it right. I’m not slaughtering everything I see, I’m not strip mining the whole planet, I’m not leveling forests. I’m here by way of horrible tragic accident, and by the end of the game I’ve done my best to clean up the mess from that and address some other global issues to the point where I can confidently say my presence over the course of the game has made for a net positive impact on the environment in which it’s set. Plus it’s a great game in a bunch of other ways.

I’m also pretty happy with Factorio, oddly enough. In Factorio I AM strip mining the whole world, slaughtering absolutely all of the local wildlife, and any forests I’m not clear-cutting I’m choking out with industrial emissions that leave nothing but dry withered skeletons where there were once beautiful stretches of foliage. The thing of it is, between actually tracking my environmental impact as a mechanic and having such downer visuals, it at least feels like the developers and I are sharing a really dark joke about how awful you are in games like this.

Then on the other side of the coin here, we have, say, Satisfactory. A game in the same weird subgenre as Factorio (do we have a name for these yet? Convey’em Ups?) but... really gross. The player is explicitly just heading down to this really beautiful planet to extract and process all the resources they can. You’re rewarded for killing... basically all life you see despite it not generally posing any sort of real threat to you, clear cutting all the vegetation, and to keep the factory building vibes nice and chill, when you tap into a coal vein or set up an oil well, you get an endless supply of those burnable fuels to use forever, with absolutely no consequence, as you just consume all the things to make all the other things and ship them out to meet quotas. And that’s... kinda gross? Again, the fact that nothing you do has any sort of consequence despite half of it being stuff that is literally killing the world in reality makes it way worse.

Meanwhile, lately I’ve been keeping a lot of modded Minecraft videos going in the background to stave off the social isolation with the whole plague and all with some human voices, and see what cool new ideas people are testing there. One of the real popular new mods is this one called MineColonies, and you know what? It’s really neat. The idea is you find a big open plot of land somewhere, throw down blueprints for really huge multiblock structures of houses and workshops and such, get those built up a little, and NPCs start wandering in you can start giving jobs to. Here’s someone to harvest and replant trees, someone to go mining for underground resources, someone to build and upgrade the rest of these buildings, people to provide renewable food and medicine to all these other NPCs. Schools for their kids to get their stats up to good places by adulthood, a whole higher learning system to advance a tech tree, it’s cool.

But the thing is, as you probably gathered from the name, it’s DISGUSTINGLY colonialist. All these people coming in are explicitly white, with British accents, explicitly gendered and explicitly heterosexual too incidentally, and a huge part of the general infrastructure building is having to set up guard posts and barracks all over, training knights and archers to defend against the local barbarians native to the land you’re building on who wander out of the wilderness to attack everyone with some regularity. And I mean, how messed up is that? This mod is explicitly adding in native people’s just so there’s someone for you to displace and murder as you colonize some big chunk of unspoiled wilderness in the name of prosperity for your... British colony. Which of course works on an explicitly feudalist system (and then also for some reason has everyone grumbling about how you’re spending your gold, which you aren’t even doing). It totally thematically ruins what I’d otherwise be super super into. And not long after this was released, baseline Minecraft did basically the same thing. There are now roving barbarian tribes who go around trying to kill you and any villagers near you and you have to concern yourself with wiping out whole groups of them with some regularity, whereas previously the only enemies you really had to deal with were zombies and skeletons and a few other weird explicitly monstrous things. It’s gross.

My distaste for slaughtering barbarians extends to the civilization games too. Which... I mean I have put a LOT of hours into a lot of Civ games so it’s obviously not a total dealbreaker for me, but... you’re always this weird immortal dictator and even if you set your civilization up as a democracy, you sure do win every single election regardless of how unhappy people are with you, and you spend a good chunk of time slaughtering local barbarians. And increasingly, with each new game, smaller independent nations because they really keep putting more and more emphasis on military conquest being, if not the best path to victory, one you have to push pretty far no matter what you’re going for.

And it doesn’t have to work like that. My favorite game, mostly in the franchise, is still Alpha Centauri. Where the “barbarians” are brain eating space worms, not other humans, and even then, you can (and I consistently do) be a big tree-hugging hippy, enact worm-friendly social policies, make friends with them instead of killing them, and have them go devour a bunch of violent anti-science anti-environment right wing creeps, strongarm everyone else into adopting similar policies, and, like Subnautica, leave the world better than you found it by foregoing all the easier wins and doing the thing where you find a permanent solution to the local planetary superconsciousness accidentally going berserk and eating itself at periodic intervals. Happy ending for everyone! Except for Miriam. Screw Miriam.

Meanwhile, someone I know not to long ago just randomly pitched a game where there’s a big nature ravaging industrial sprawl, but you play as some sort of reclaiming embodiment of nature, strategically... I guess spreading trees to grow up through everything and have rats chew through the wiring and stuff, and yeah, I would play the hell out of that game. If nobody else gets to it before I clear my plate of all these other projects, I might even make that game.

I should stress again too that it’s not even that I don’t want games to ever put me in such a role as the player, just if you’re going to do it, acknowledge that that sort of thing isn’t cool, and either make it clear that the player character has been forced into a really unfortunate position, or that said character is just awful. Or both, both works.

What I don’t want to ever see people do is rationalize a way out of the issues. “Oh this is an infinite supply of clean-burning coal” does not fly with me. “Oh we’re establishing a colony but it’s on an alien planet” is still colonialism. The weird fetish the whole game industry seems to have with leveling forests is not made better by having those trees give you saplings that fully replace every tree cut down in like 2 minutes. If you don’t want to unpack the moral implications of something, you can just not include it to begin with. None of the stuff I’ve been laying out here is actually necessary for any of these games to work. Just... quit being weird and making me play coal-mining conquistadors already.

[huggingtentacles]

Your weapon choice seems quite sub-optimal for your build, and you definitely can push the potential of your stats further. I'll give you a couple of ideas. If you wish more, feel free to DM me.

General advice:

Hand of Malenia is good when you have the window for the Ash of War. Eleonora's Poleblade is quite tricky to use, and requires some arcane. I would consider switching it for Godskin Peeler, or even dual-wielding those.

Black Flame Incantations and Blade of Death deal % based damage to your opponents, so they're the most effective against large healthbars.

Get yourself Black Flame Protection, Lord's Divine Fortification, Barrier of Gold, Flame, Protect Me spells. Swap them according to the bossfight/area you're in. Swap to the Old Lord's Talisman when you cast any buffs, and then swap it off to something more useful. This way you drastically increase any spell duration for no cost.

You don't need 45 mind. Get 60 vigor, activate Morgott's Great Rune. Also if I were you I'd invest in some heavier armour, it really helps. Only when you're wearing the armour that is comfortable and have 60 vigor, pour the rest into mind.

Ancient Dragon's Lightning Strike Setup:

Ancient Dragon's Lightning Strike might be the most powerful single-cast incantation in the game. Erdtree Seal in the mainhand, Gravel Stone Seal in the offhand. Lightning-Shrouded Cracked Tear in your physick. With high dexterity the casting time will be really good.

Catch Flame setup:

If you wish for a longer, but more consistent bossfight, use fast, high power incantations like Catch Flame. Buff it with the fire physick and watch most enemies in the game melt.

Dexterity focus setup:

If you have 2 Nagakibas and some smithing stones, upgrade those. Use lighting infusion and lightning physick. Put Lightning Strike on the offhand nagakiba and Impaling Thrust on your mainhand nagakiba. Enjoy your fast, high dps, high stance pressure weapon setup that has bleed and high reach.

Jump Attack Setup:

Same weapons as above. Grab Raptor's Black Feathers, Claw Talisman, use Royal Knight's Resolve in the mainhand and enjoy your jump attack build that deals high burst damage and can safely engage and disengage any opponent. If you want to send this build to maximum overdrive, use Godskin Peelers Dual-Wielded. Instead of RKR use Lightning Strike for a buff.

One cool and skillful thing you can do is use Raptor of the Mist Ash of War to stylishly avoid an attack for a powerful jump attack counter.

Cheese setup:

Okay finally the big cheese. The silliest move. If you really want to just get this shit over with. Glintblade Phalanx ash of war. No need to even upgrade the weapon. It breaks almost any stance in 2-3 casts. Use it, and then grab any weapon that has Black Flame Tornado ash of war. Melt any boss. For Malenia specifically, instead of trying to break her poise, flip her over with Giant Hunt Ash of War and then cast BFT.

All of these setups are immensely powerful, but unless you use the cheese setup, they are not replacement for actual skill. You still need practice and adjustment, that's kinda how these games work.

Okay I hate to admit this but I’m struggling with my faith/dex character. I’m on NG+3 or 4 now with her, and every major boss fight is such an ordeal

Faith is 75 with erdtree seal +10, dex is 85 (90 with talisman) and I use hand of malenia +10, elonara’s poleblade +10, and hoslows whip +10 when I need strike damage. Mind is 45 or something, health 55

Main incantations are the lightning strike (the single yellow one like a spear), black flame, destined death/malikeths blade, magic dragon breath, and golden vow

Talismans are takers cameo, Millicents prosthesis, erdtree favor +2, and flock’s canvas

Anyone have any advice?

[crybaby-tarnished]

The Brilliant Goldmask

It was raining, and Fyra was dancing. She was jumping, twirling, tumbling in the wet grass and mud, filthy. Every once in a while she fell to the ground, shuddering with crying.

She was so confused by it all. Hurt by it all. How could he do that? Do such a thing? Wait so long to tell her? She gave everything of herself to him… She loved him still, just as strongly as before.

It was so hypocritical of herself, to forgive Castella so readily, and yet for Gideon she ran away. It was different though, wasn’t it? Castella had been manipulated. Gideon… He had not. He had ordered it.

She was no longer anywhere near the windmills where she started, now instead near where those things coughed and wheezed, by a bridge that was broken and ruined. Fyra ran along it, still twirling around wildly but feeling no better.

In fact she felt even worse, the cold and wet getting to her.

She fell over, slipping on a rock, coughing hard, wheezing, when a familiar voice speaks up.

“Is that you, Miss Fyra?”

Fyra looked up, and was met face to face with Brother Corhyn, equally as wet as she was. She just coughed again, unable to speak.

“It’s quite fortunate you are here. Come and meet the Brilliant Goldmask. I have found him.” He grabbed her, pulling her to her feet, and motioned to the tall, unmoving man who looked like a walking corpse dressed in rags and gold finery.

She just looked up at Goldmask, and Corhyn observed her. “You seem to be in great distress… Why don’t you come with us to Leyndell? Clear your head. It’s where you are going, isn’t it?”

Fyra agreed with a simple nod. It was something to do, something to distract her better than her dancing.

—--

She protected the two men, guarded them from anything that would threaten them. All the while, Fyra coughed increasingly more. They made it into the capital, Fyra keeping her promise to Marsel and avoiding killing anyone she came accross, and as Fyra rested at a spot of grace, Melina appeared.

“Thank you. I now go to learn of myself.” Melina said softly, “I leave you with the power to use runes for strength. This is where we part ways, Fyra.”

“Goodbye Melina… I hope I will see you again.” Fyra said quietly, the first things she had spoken in a while.

“You will. I promise you.” She paused. Though Melina’s expression remained blank, she radiated concern, “You look unwell.”

“I am fine.” Fyra lied.

Not long after, as Corhyn and Goldmask walked up to the colosseum for a clearer look at the Erdtree, Goldmask resumed his pensive staring at the heavens, his finger slowly waving as he read the stars.

But then… He stopped. Frozen in place with the only movement being his breath.

“What happened?” Fyra asked Corhyn, who had taken up ‘deciphering’ what Goldmask said and did.

“He has come to some sort of confusion in reading the heavens… It seems that…” he paused, thinking very hard, “It seems that Marika and Radagon are occupying the same spot as the one true god. But… There can not be ‘one true god’ if there are two of them.”

“Is there something I can do?” Fyra asked.

“Try going to the Erdtree Sanctuary, perhaps it has something there.” Corhyn reasoned.

And so Fyra did, sneaking her way up to the sanctuary, bringing her close to the Erdtree, she climbed the roots, wheezing and coughing, but pressing on until she stumbled into the building.

And before her stood a massive man of golden light, axe clutched in his hand. A vissage of a man she recognized from her journey to the Lands Between, upon the ship that took them there.

She pulled out her weapons. She supposed she could do one fight.

—

She rested for a while, reading the book she had found within. An incantation book, teaching her Law of Regression, among other things. She sat in a small area secluded from everything else, with no other foes save for a single crucible knight she avoided.

It was hard to concentrate, she was very hot, and just felt all around so very sick. But still she read it, looking up a moment in pause at the statue of Radagon.

Maybe she was delirious, maybe she was brilliant. But she had a rather… Odd idea. She got up onto her feet and stood before the statue, the incantation book clutched in her hands. She stared up at Radagon’s visage, and remembered the tale Muriel told her.

That the sculptor knew Radagon’s deepest secret. Indeed, a riddle was carved into the stone street nearby, hinting at something.

Slowly she put the book away, her seal clutched in her hand, and she cast the spell she felt would reveal it, Law of Regression. The statue glowed, melted into a smaller, feminine form. A statue of Marika now stood before her. She stared, confused, until slowly, it fell into place.

Radagon is Marika.

Marika is Radagon.

The Golden Order claimed there was only one true god, and yet Marika and Radagon were one in the same, two halves making a whole.

It was wrong.

She returned to Goldmask, and told him, and soon the man’s finger moved again. But Fyra pressed him, giddy with fever.

“The order is flawed… Do you think it’s broken?”

Corhyn sputtered. “The Golden Order is not flawed-” he froze though as Goldmask’s finger changed how it moved across the stars, “You can’t possibly think-”

“Everything that happened, that went wrong, it was because it was imperfect right?” Fyra grabbed Goldmask’s tattered shawl.

His finger continued to move, an arm rising to stand straight out to his side.

“Master Goldmask, please you must not think such blasphemous things! Do not listen to her!” Corhyn begged.

“Can I make it perfect? Make it incorruptible? So that no one can use it to harm anyone else?” She asked, “Can I mend the Elden Ring and erase the flaws in it?”

She watched as the arm pointing upward moved too, Goldmask now standing perfectly still, both arms out straight at his sides. He was unmoving now, not a twitch or any discernible breath taken

“You're insane.” Corhyn hissed, holding his head and sinking to crouch on the ground, “The Golden Order is without flaw. As is said. It's- What have you done to him? You- You-”

“Shup up, Corhyn.” Fyra snapped, and she watched, unsure if she was waiting for something. Hours passed, and she just watched, stared, waited.

Finally Goldmask moved, his feet shuffling. He turned to face her, his head lowering from his gaze at the heavens and falling upon her. He let out an audible breath, and something slowly began to manifest before his chest.

A rune. Simple in shape. A circle. Fyra lifted her hands, and held them out, taking the rune within herself, and with it, an understanding.  

The gods were flawed and fickle things, no better than men. Flinging decrees of heresy at one another, causing wars and strife. Things once considered blessings were changed into curses. This rune… it would end all of that. Prevent the Golden Order for being twisted and warped by the petty squabbles of others, to be used as a tool of war and oppression.

This rune would mend the Elden Ring, and perfect it. It would make the world she wanted.

She cried, though not from sadness or heartbreak, but relief. This was the solution to everything. As long as this rune was put in place with as many pieces as possible, nothing could change the Elden Ring, corrupt or taint it. Even someone ill fit could become Elden Lord without fear.

Goldmask’s knees gave out and he fell, arms still outstretched, form slumping and sagging with the effort of his creation. Before Fyra could tend to him, a hand grabbed her shoulder, and she turned.

Melina was by her side again.

“All we need s to get to the Erdtree.” She said quietly, “Getting Morgott’s Great Rune is also important. It is an anchor rune like Godrick’s. It is essential for the rune’s mending.”

“I know.”

“Do what you must, dear Fyra.” Melina said, “In whatever way you see best.” She held out her arms knowingly, and Fyra fell into them as she succumbed to exhaustion and sickness. She held her tight, cradling her as Corhyn ignored them both, and Goldmask merely sat there, slumped and spent.