#Trossfrau

[weirdlet]

That was an interesting session.

We started off in media res, in the middle of the battle we'd left off in after last time. Surrounded on the deck of a ship built of bones, fighting Talos Anchorite cultists, our cleric paralyzed, our wizard down below convincing the soul of the (un)living ship to rebel, our health starting to get low.

First up, the barbarian tortle crawls back up on the deck, snatches the one-winged roc around the neck, and drags it down under. This thing has been trying to prise open his shell like an oyster for like four rounds, because apparently rocs are the tortle's natural predator/tortles are the roc's natural prey. But by golly, between the roc's unhinged stubbornness and Trinidad's natural swim-speed, we're about to see some shit go down out of that Farside cartoon with the frog strangling the crane trying to swallow it.

Eventually Carver gets unparalyzed- that first round seemed to take for absolute ever, and then getting free was the only thing he could do for another several rounds while things shot at him and, in fact, lightning-bolted him in the face.

I spent the majority of this fight yoyoing up and down from three hitpoints, people.

But his second and last Channel Divinity (Preserve Life) of the day gets parceled out to each party member he can see, and in the midst of the chaos, the dice may not like us but they like the cultists even less. We are- just barely- surviving as we get stabbed and shot at, and meanwhile as our wizard and the NPC bard she rescued keep convincing the death knight that runs the boat to take a vacation, the boat starts lurching and things start exploding in the powder keg. We cut it down to the wire, the last round dancing on the edge of a knife of whether we take out these cultists or die ourselves ignominiously.

The death knight steps up on deck. Says fuck you Myrkull, but fuck Talos even more- and then an avatar of Talos shows up, lifting the boat a hundred feet in the air and twisting it in his hands because, as the roar of the storm states, the cult of Myrkull cannot be permitted to have it. Which is fine and good, but we are all very bleedy and not prepared to fly- but as the death-knight launches himself into the avatar of Talos, Sorianna Feather-Fall's us all and we make it safely to the rocks, where Trinidad eventually joins us after having drowned the roc in the stormy sea.

'Well there's somethin' ya don't see every day.'

Dragging ourselves back to shore, we find the orphaned kids of the devastated village, comfort them and patch ourselves as best we can. A little bit from every household is set into a boat and burned at sea, while the family names are put on a marker to commemorate the poor fishing village that was destroyed by necromancers and sahaugain. Tenth level hits while we're resting.

The kids come back with us to Leilon- they're immediately adopted by the orcish trossfrau. Carver goes home to Glory, Trinidad to his orcwife, and the rest are handling fallout as best they can. It turns out that the local cult-members of Myrkull and Talos were burned out- literally- by the priests of Lathandar who have been trying to set themselves up as local religious authority. We don't- actually have wild objections to the act, we have some serious worries about how they took it upon themselves to. Alain the revenant of Alistair shows up in their rooms in the middle of the night, scaring the everloving crap out of them and extracting promises to not do shit like that again, leaving them in damp beds crying to Lathandar to forgive their over-zealousness.

One of the things that we found after the fight was a journal stating the date, time and location of the imminent raising of Ebondeath as a dracolich. We've got about thirty days, one week of which we spend in our town, getting ready, leaving notice about how we're going off to fight a terrible evil and we may not be back.

The night before we're to leave, each of us has- a dream. Each one is different, but Carver's is of being born of a mass of flesh, of being evil from birth- and asked to describe the life he lives from there. I am- not as articulate as I would like, despite having spilled ink to myself over the homework assignment of 'what if your character went evil' because that was all predicated on going evil from the point they're at now. But there is mention of being a torturer and bodybreaker, of having no compunctions about breaking whoever is in front of him to get what he wants, doing unto others before they do unto him, etc.

Carver wakes, shaking and sick, before steeling himself and breathing through a mantra, allowing himself to acknowledge how upset it made him while reassuring himself that it wasn't real- and what was true, was in the past. Glory sleeps right through it all.

And then the DM has me roll on a chart.

The chart is titled Madness of Baphomet. I get an 86; “I see those who oppose me not as people, but beasts meant to be preyed upon.” Which, fitting for the past I've designed for him. But apparently there is now a darkness upon him, on all of us, which may be invoked at a later date.

The next morning, we say our goodbyes, and head off to the Swamp of Dead Men.

[luenelsdesign]

Renaissance summer seems to be a theme of this summer for me. I am finishing my trossfrau outfit and torn between trying to make it a bit more historically accurate and to “slash it all”.

“det gör detsamma vart du går och vem du var, ty minnet av en god kamrat skall alltid dröja kvar” 

[bax390]

#inshot 🤗 #picoftheday #renaissance #16thcentury #livinghistory #kampfrau #trossfrau #Germanrenaissance #historicalsewing ##traditinal #historic #landsknecht #roideloiseau  #Traditional #costume #photographer #photography  #bax #bax390 🤗 https://www.instagram.com/p/B27UOaVIqcP/?igshid=1plq6uebijyh3

[demonindistress]

Landsknecht asså👌🖤

[anamelessfool]

Death and the Landsknecht (Various 16th Century Artists)

HUMANS HAVE DECIDED THAT OUR HOME IS THEIR HELL. The two ghouls watched the trossfrau in the battlefield finally drop to her knees. She pulled out a little knife from her cleavage and yanked at a corpse, diligently sawing off a finger to get at a gold ring. Edelweiss Ghoul snorted. AS IF THEY NEED ANOTHER HELL.

Verlorene Haufen

Edelweiss Ghoul's Last Tour of Earth

Germanic Frontier, 1530

No it was not fun, no

[ukulelegodparent]

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that eventually I will also need to make a Landsknecht costume BC I want an excuse to buy a sword and I mean a little crossdressing never hurt anyone

[baeddel]

is Caliban and the witch worth reading?

i've never read it. i've had the good fortune to have discussed it with three good friends who have, however. cc @canmom @epee-prisme @matador

i think it's worth reading. anything is worth reading. but is it a better use of your time than reading Lazarillo or Religio Medici or Tsurezuregusa? i apparently did not think so.

here is my best argument against reading Caliban and the Witch. Caliban and the Witch is Federici's big book where she proves her theories about primitive accumulation and reproductive labour by putting them to use in an analysis of the origins of capitalism. it is thus a test of a theory using history. but all of the history she uses is wrong. she inflates figures up to orders of ten, she neglects relevant facts and includes false ones. insofar as it is history it is bad history; so insofar as it attempts to prove its theory through history, it fails to prove it. now you are reading for the theory alone, which, while not proved by this book, might still be correct. but if you are reading for the theory alone, why read Caliban and the Witch when the theory has been laid out just as well elsewhere? you should instead read Fortunati's Arcane of Reproduction (1981) and Federici's Revolution at Point Zero (2012). between the 151 pages in Fortunati's book and the 148 pages in Federici's book you'll have to read 299 pages. since the first section of the Revolution... covers much of the same material as the Arcane... you could skip the first 65 pages and read only 234 pages all together. that commits you to between 15 and 80 more pages than you'd need to read to finish the Caliban... (all page numbers exclude covers, acknowledgements, etc.), all covering the theory in more detail and unburdened by factual inaccuracies.

you might want to read for other reasons, although those reasons still might not persuade us. you might read for Federici's wit, but the author of Lazarillo is more witty. you might read for Federici's clever rhetoric, but Thomas Browne's rhetoric is more clever. you might read for Federici's moving arguments, but Yoshida Kenkō's arguments are more moving. is there no reason to ever read Caliban and the Witch? lets not go too far.

here is my best argument for reading Caliban and the Witch. it is, first of all, better to read bad history than good history. when you feel comfortable in the hands of a scrupulous historian you will accept whatever they say. when you know the historian is unscrupulous and expect them to lie you will accept nothing they say. in the first case you will relax as you read and let yourself be impressed by the facts; in the second case you will investigate every claim and scrutinize every argument. we are lazy readers of good history and vigilant readers of bad history. even worse, after you have finished a good history you will set it aside and feel satisfied that you have learned something; yet soon you will forget it, and you have really learned nothing. while you read a bad history you will 'read around the subject', you will confront it with other sources, and you will feel proud and tell your friends whenever you defeat one of its false claims; after you finish you will seek out good criticisms and perhaps write your own. you will never forget this bad book and how you got the better of its scandals.

second of all, the task of reading the Caliban will be to extract the theory from the false facts. the task of reading the Arcane and the Revolution will be to scrutinize this theory which is naked in those texts. it is much easier to discover the underlying theoretical structure of a text than it is to scrutinize it. in the first case you need only the Caliban itself. but to scrutinize the Arcane and the Revolution you will have to be aware of Marx's theory of value and what he means by production, of the various conditions enjoyed by women in various societies, and of competing theories like Roswitha Sholz's value-dissociation. so while you may only need to read 15 more pages to finish the Arcane and the Revolution, in reality you may need to read a few thousand pages before you feel satisfied, whereas with the Caliban you will feel satisfied after only 219 pages.

we admit these are crummy arguments. instead of reading bad histories it would be better to become a vigilant reader of good histories; and you should of course not read only to understand one book but to understand the things it discusses. let me make my real best argument, then. what if we were to read the Caliban not as an academic history, and then find that it is a bad one, but as the same kind of "useful history for life" that Nietzsche liked to write? if you wanted to know something about the history of Chrsitian morality you would be very poorly served by reading the Genealogy of Morals. Christian morality was not first developed by slaves, so it couldn't really be a 'slave revolt' against the morality of slavemasters. but if you feel you have defeated the Genealogy with only this fact you will have fundamentally misunderstood that book and everyone will say so. in the same way that in Plato's dialogues there are not just arguments but characters and situations, and in the Zhuangzi there are not just ideas but "striking images" "the darkness of the Northern Ocean, the bird Peng, the cicada and the dove, the giant gourd and the useless tree" which, for Møllgaard (2005), adds up to a "speculative rhetoric" ("borrow[ing] the term coined by Pascal Quignard") which the arguments about language and understanding cannot be extricated from, in the Caliban we find witches burned at the stake, women in bridles, the trossfrau platoons of sex workers marching after soldiers, heretics living communally on the outskirts of society, and so forth, a speculative rhetoric made up of some things which happened often, some things which happened rarely, and some things which Federici made up. as academic history we find it to be false and dismiss it trivially. but it was ultimately not the inflated figures that made it so useful to communist trans women (we virtually all read and loved it even though it is expedient now to pretend otherwise). perhaps we have not yet begun to really read Caliban, or we have forgotten how to read it. so you should read it, not alongside serious histories about the witch trials and early capitalism, but alongside Nietzsche's On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874) and books about hermeneutics. you must begin a new reading of Caliban and the Witch, the coordinates of which we do not already have on hand.

[canmom]

I’ve been wondering how best to publish some of my fiction. itch is a good option for interactive stuff, and I don’t like paywalling stuff at all so I’d prefer to just put it on a website, but the idea of living off writing fiction and making games is quite appealing

anyway what with the recent news of Patreon narrowing the kinds of nsfw content it allows, I heard about Sponsus which appears to be a very practical alternative with some good principles behind it (a well-optimised website, using Stripe to process payments without making them vulnerable to pressure from payment processors, very simple fee structure) and I’m considering making one.

This is kind of an interest check.

For now, I’m making enough money to live on through my work for the American education company, but while it’s not truly possible to escape the churning of M-C-M’, it would be nice to feel like I’m working for myself and those I can support directly, rather than having to spend most of my energy making a venture capitalist even richer. Still, I certainly wouldn’t ask anyone to prioritise donating to me over people who more urgently need help.

There’s some dangers. A major one is turning something I currently do for the fun of it into an obligation might suck the joy out of it (this has kind of happened to a degree with physics writing for that company so... that’s a worry, but writing fiction would be self-motivated and I could change tracks as I desire). And I’d very likely make less money (like, even absolutely brilliant writers like Charity @porpentine get less on Patreon than I currently make - I don’t expect to become the next hardcoded girl). So, it would be a supplemental income for a long time, which I’d try to pay forward (to people here in London, and to peoples’ fundraisers online) if I don’t end up needing it.

The writing I’d immediately try to support in this way would be things like:

interactive fiction: I have a couple of projects in the works, linked through a Thirty Years War/Caliban and the Witch inspired early modern setting, with alchemy and jellies and religious conflicts and primitive accumulation.

...one concerns a trans trossfrau-led insurrection in the midst of a civil war (a joint project with @baeddel), and the ‘saint’ who champions her cause. you may have seen the amazing [nsfw] illustration by @velocityvsreality some months back!

...the other a visual novel about swordsmith who dies to their own soul-eating sword. we learn about what happens after only through the characters who manifest inside the sword. this is a collab project with writing contributions by @desert-gurl and fantastic interface art by @velocityvsreality; I would of course split any money I receive with them

I also have older projects I’d like to bring back... for example, there’s one about a cyborg girl with an interchangeable body descending into an alien ruin, I have some ideas for one about mecha

the ordinary kind of fiction: the project I’m most excited to work on right now is a currently novella-length and growing project called VECTOR, about horny trans lesbian cyborg swordfights, infrastructure girls, states shaping desires and probably a bunch of other stuff by the end. I’m trying to decide whether to serialise this or polish it up to post in one complete go

games: I like learning about graphics. Still seeking modes of interaction that can match plain old clickable text for emotional resonance, but I will be making prototypes and playing around with Rust, Piston, WASM, Vulkan and other such things for now.

posts: I will keep trying to write interesting text posts, about communism, gender, anime criticism, game design, roleplaying, computer graphics, physics... If you’re on here, hopefully you’re into that kind of thing. (I’ll also keep migrating posts to my github site for easier access.)

livereads: whatever happened to that Umineko readthrough? or the Animorphs one? let’s bring that back huh

All of this is stuff I absolutely plan to write and publish (in some fashion) anyway, but if I had some kind of support for it, I would be able to devote more time to it and maybe one day think about writing full-time. It would also ease the tension between “I should try and make a living off this if I like it so much” and “I don’t like paywalling anything”, letting me put stuff on the internet for free without worry.

So... would you potentially be interested in supporting such a thing? Does this sound like a good idea or a terrible one?

[sartorialadventure]

German Renaissance fashion (click to enlarge)

1. 16th century German dress based on the art of Lucas Cranach 2. 16th century German Renaissance gown by Evergreen Artes 4-6. 16th century 7-8. 16th century kampfrau by Zeitenmode 9. 16th century Saxon court gown 10. 16th century kampfrau

Landsknechte (German plural, singular Landsknecht) were mercenaries from the late 15th to the late 16th century. Knecht, meaning servant, helper, or stooge, was also used for the paid foot soldiers that were to be known as the Landsknecht. The format of the German mercenaries was inspired from the Swiss army, as was the dress fashion.

The tross were the camp followers who traveled with each Landsknecht unit, carrying the military necessities, food, and belongings of each soldier and his family. The tross were made up of women, children, and some craftsmen. The name of the women traveling with the landsknecht came be known as kampfrau or trossfrau. Neither is a period name even though today they are used to describe the group of “females hanging with the landsknechts”.

The fraue was the person the Landsknecht was legally married to, even though they also had a sort of fake marriage that happened when the leaders tried to regulate the number of women following the tross. Since the war campaigns usually started during spring, this kind of marriage was known as a may marriage and the wife known as mai fraue. Whure was a women who wasn’t married to the man she followed, kind of like a modern partnership with a man and a women. Dirne was the prostitute who made her living by selling her services, and they even could be found in the payrolls as a legal worker during the war campaigns. Some men left their wife at home while they in the field had a mai fraue or a whure who helped him and took care of him during the war campaign. The women also took part in the looting of the battlefield as a way to make some extra money for living. Some of the women also had a professional role in the camp as neterin (seamstress) or lautenschlagerin (lute player), etc.

The most popular theory about the elaborate dress is that it started as loot from the battlefield, and was then altered to fit the new wearer. A new leg replaced the old one, a piece of brocade became a trim, etc, which can be done easiest by slashing the parts that might be too tight. The style of dress later developed and eventually became so flamboyant that Kaiser Maximilian I exempted it from the prevalent sumptuary laws as an acknowledgement of their “…short and brutish” lives. One theory though claims that Kaiser Maximilliam had trouble controlling the Landsknechts and therefore gave them the freedom to dress as they wanted rather than seem like a weak ruler. (From a great source on kampfrau clothing!)

[weirdlet]

Alright, got our next homework assignment for our PCs- describing the moment your character lost their innocence. This is not necessarily sexual in nature; the examples were given featuring the orcish trossfrau, with one gal having bottle fed a piglet to slaughtering weight and then hesitating with the knife and making a hash of it, leading to her resolving never again to hesitate on the deathblow. The other more bookish one’s loss of innocence was her journal being burnt along with other books because ‘the pen doesn’t strengthen the tribe!’

Need to figure out what Glory’s loss of innocence was- when did he cease to be a child with a child’s understanding of the world?

[brickhousewench]

My New England based group, Das Geld Fahnlein, is looking for a few new history nerds to join our Fahnlein. We’ve trying getting new members the historically accurate way, but it takes so long for them to fully mature.  ;-).

Please help us spread the word across social media by liking and sharing our recruiting images.

http://www.landsknechtguild.com/recruiting/

[anamelessfool]

Thank you have a little WIP here:

Edelweiss Ghoul stopped counting all the kills after the first one. Humans tend to run together when a ghoul runs them through. A swift downward chop of the greatsword renders them all dumbly surprised at best, shrieking at worst. There is a limb or two suspended in the air for a moment before the spray of blood, and they’re down on their knees falling forward into the dirt. Weiss never had time to check if they were still breathing before moving onto the next. That would be the trossfrau’s job while she collected rings off their dying fingers, or the young trainee’s task to grant the kindness of slitting their throats. No, he didn’t have time. There were plenty more to kill and a schedule to run on.

He didn’t care for it. But he was surprised how many humans did.

The more I'm here thinking all about the medieval things the more I'm thinking about a possible Edelweiss Ghoul spin-off adventure. Like, a longer one than the others I've written. Maybe a standalone. The canon ghouls included in the story would be Mountain Ghoul and Aurora Ghoul.

I've already established that certain historical events of great emotional and cultural impact affects cosmic order, and at those moments entities freely walk the earth. In the midst of all this, Edelweiss Ghoul's Papa Emeritus goes mad and they're not even sure if Mother Imperator sent them on this mission to be rid of him. She may even have another Papa without the previous one's knowledge, but they're hundreds of miles away from any sort of home.

I personally have a very vague understanding of the 1520s Holy Roman Empire and the mercenary subculture and I want to research more. It's like at the death of Medieval thought and the tumultuous beginning of modern concepts. It's a brutal, ugly life of adventure and possibly cosmic weirdness.

[luenelsdesign]

A detail of my future bumla (trossfrau 16th century dress). I really like how these slits look like on 16th century costumes and during the design process of my bumla I added a few lines with slits.

[bax390]

#inshot 🤗 #picoftheday #renaissance #16thcentury #livinghistory #kampfrau #trossfrau #Germanrenaissance #historicalsewing #traditinal #historic #landsknecht #roideloiseau  #Traditional #costume #photographer #photography  #bax #bax390 🤗 https://www.instagram.com/p/B2zgULojDw_/?igshid=1npxskxkyfget

[demonindistress]

Proknekt på marsch, Vadstena.

[olovs]

Finished my second solo project in school. It's a trossfrau! Based on a costume made by Emelie Sandström!