#adventures in the citadel

[buttoneyedbee]

I loved growing up and processing my vault with Finn and Jake, 'Escape from the Citadel' has one of my very favorite moments from the entire show and I wanted to paint it and hang it on my wall (and in my feed) for my first post in a long while

[impossible-rat-babies]

/showleft anyway it’s all of eyrie’s children !

from L to R: aoife, sver, ol’ver, bijou, bisha and halvi

[namedafterflowerstournament]

Botanic Tournament : Main Bracket !

Round 5 Poll V

(Amaryllis and fern)

[vhvrs]

i talk abt/ draw summer so little but she is like. my fav fav i love her sooo much n i love the specific niche she presents to the story that i rarely ever see in media but also rnm does a LOT of casual things u rarely see in long form media I LOVE HER!!!!!!!

[honourablejester]

Starfinder Adventure Concept: The Silent Citadel

While I’m on the topic of Space Dwarves, I want to go back to some Starfinder thoughts I had back in this post:

“I’m probably not going to manage to be more intelligible than this, but. Space dwarves. In flying star cities. Hyperspace-capable flying star cities. The concept makes me so happy I want to eat it. You could have a lost dwarven star citadel fighting eldritch beasties in the Drift. There are canon Star Citadels in the Diaspora asteroid belt, mining and trading with the other inhabitants. The cities can move. You could park a Star Citadel anywhere one could reasonably survive. Or find the haunted remnants of ones that drifted where they couldn’t reasonably survive. You could have a player character who’s the last haunted survivor of a fallen Star Citadel, or one looking for their home Citadel that went missing while they were crewing a trade ship, or just a gruff dwarven asteroid miner who goes home to a Diasporan Citadel when they can to say hello to the family.”

Starfinder dwarves and their Star Citadels, city-sized Drift-capable mobile space stations, are just so cool to me. So cool. Starfinder dwarves just built massive star castles and sailed out into the void in them, and as a concept I still want to just eat it. Seriously, I’m vibrating at the thought.

And in terms of a seed for an adventure, I do want to go back to that idea of finding the haunted remnants of a star citadel that drifted somewhere they could not survive.

And the recent Drift Crisis event has added a nice set up for that. Because the citadels are Drift capable. And the Drift recently crashed, and randomly flung anything that was in it at the time out into a random point in the universe (or, you know, ate it, and it’s drifting around in the Drift, with all the alienness you’d find in there).

But I kind of want … I don’t want the Drift Crisis itself to have been what killed it. I think I want the Drift Crisis to be the thing that discovers it, but I’d want a bit more mystery in the dead star citadel itself. So.

A Pact Worlds ship that is caught up in the shockwave of the Drift Crisis gets spat out into an unknown, silent star system, an incomprehensible distance from the Pact Worlds. The system appears to be mostly uninhabited: a small dwarf (ha!) star, barren, rocky worlds, a vast asteroid belt. Maybe a couple of distant moons look sort of habitable. And the system is empty, or the system appears empty. There are no structures or evidence of habitation, at least as Pact Worlders would understand it, anywhere. Until they notice something in the asteroid belt. There’s something in there, a constructed thing. And they’re aeons from fucking anywhere, and they’ve no idea what just happened, and their ship is damaged, so they start limping towards the only thing that looks like civilisation in the area.

It's only when they get close enough to get a proper scan of the thing that they realise it’s familiar. Not necessarily personally, but from a Pact World POV. It’s a Star Citadel. It’s very clearly a good old fashioned Golarion dwarf Star Citadel. And it’s silent. It’s dark. It looks dead as the grave. But it clearly didn’t get spat out of the Drift just now, like the ship did. It’s been here a while. So a) how did it get here? And b) what killed it?

And c) how ‘dead’ is it really?

How long has it been here? How did it get here? Which Star Citadel is it? Is it an unknown Citadel? Is anyone alive in there? If not, where did they go? Is there anything in this system that could sustain life? Can the Star Citadel still sustain life, and if so, why was it abandoned? Is there any evidence of damage? What the hell happened here?

Some of the Star Citadels, like the Ironstar, sailed out into the Vast in a continued Quest for the Sky.

“Ironstar. The largest of the dwarven Star Citadels, the Ironstar is a massive space station equipped with a Drift engine and ruled by a council drawn from the leaders of its major churches, clans, and guilds. It travels through the Vast on a centuries-long Second Quest for Sky, seeking a mythological promised land for its dwarven inhabitants.” (Starfinder Core Rulebook (3rd Printing), Pg 462).

So some of them went far. And they’ve been going since Triune dropped the plans for Drift engines 3 centuries ago. But maybe …

It might be fun to find evidence, mineral traces, radioactive half-lives, some form of scientific dating, that suggests that this Star Citadel has been drifting in this system for a lot longer than 3 centuries. And that’s impossible. Even if Star Citadels existed during the Gap, they wouldn’t have been Drift capable, as that technology was only possible after Triune ascended. For a dwarven star citadel to have made its way all the way out here, wherever the fuck ‘here’ is, before Drift drives, either it’s been moving on reaction drives for a really long time, or it was using some other form of FTL drive, or there’s something stupid like time travel involved here somehow. The Gap was thousands of years long, it’s sort of feasible that it could have come out here the old-fashioned, generation-ship way. Which, if it’s a pre- or intra-Gap citadel, would explain why it’s unknown. But that’s an amazingly unlikely circumstance, isn’t it? But then what are the alternatives? Did the Drift breaking also break time? Did it fling a modern Star Citadel out here some unknown number of centuries in the past? (And if it did, is there a risk of something doing that again, to the other shiny new ship in the area?) Or did a dwarven star citadel out in the Vast find something … else? Or build something else? Some other artefact or technology that would let either a pre-Gap citadel cover distances that only Drift technology has allowed since, or that would allow a modern citadel to travel in time?

Basically, I want every ‘rediscovering a haunted deep space hulk’ plotline ever, but with dwarves. Are the dwarves still alive in there? Are there ghost dwarves in there? Is the citadel dead and empty, or is it now the home of other things?

You know that standard dwarven plot of ‘dug too deep’? That, but in space.

And why this system? Why did it fetch up here? Why did our ship fetch up here? Was it random chance, the Drift breaking, or is something calling ships here? Is the system as empty as it seems? Are there dwarven survivors in the depths of that silent citadel that can give us answers? Or a dwarven AI, a ship’s computer, or in this case citadel’s computer, that could give some answers?

The Star Citadels are … It’s not like a ship. That’s a city. That’s a whole city-sized space station that moves, and a race of tough, hardy, determined, bloodyminded people that built them and flung them out into the stars at least partially in an endless religious crusade to find a mythical homeland. They’re big, they carry a lot of people, and they go far. And they get into weird shit. And in the midst of weird space shit, it’s still dwarves in there. It’s still stubborn, pragmatic, dogmatic, bedrock dwarfishness that’s going to react to the weirdness.

I really cannot over-emphasise how much Starfinder dwarves, their whole concept, makes me so deliriously happy. The idea of fallen Star Citadels is … that’s a city-sized dungeon for you to park in whatever weird, horrifying ass-end of lovecraftian science-fantasy space your little heart desires. And it’s full of dwarves. It’s just. It’s excellent. It really is.

[fogaminghub]

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[entropicallyfavorable]

Finally listened to the Second Citadel finale and I have FEELINGS

[azuremliam]

Working on the mock title cards again for Bug World! Its honestly really funk coming up with how to do the titles :)

[pad-si-ew-and-me]

Vietnam on film, April 2024. 10 years on and this country still amazes me.

[johnny-2000s]

I figured out the perfect first film- join me to put it to script!!

[clarity2electricboogaloo]

What the FUCK do you mean the weird baby thing I saw in adventure time episodes years ago was the lich

WHAT DO YOU MEAN??

[adventuretimetournament]

Escape from the Citadel: As the Lich frees the prisoners from the Citadel in order to create an army, Finn finds that meeting his biological father is more than underwhelming.

Joshua and Margaret Investigations: When Joshua is poisoned by a strange beast, it's up to the pregnant Margaret to concoct an antivenom.

[severevoiddragon]

D&D Story Time!

I run a D&D club for 12 11-15 year old boys. It's during term time (so nothing during holidays), but due to multiple factors I can't run it this half term, so a couple weeks ago was the last session for a good 3 months.

The party is currently in 3 groups, due to it's size. We have the 13-15 year olds (plus 2x 11yos) in one group, who are. amazing at the game. They know the rules, they are great at action economy. Im having to heighten the challenge for the monsters because otherwise they'll be lvl20 no probs. This group will be called the Mephits.

The other 2 groups are 3x 11yos, who I will dub The Hobgoblins, and 2x 11yos, who I will dub The Goblins. (These names are based on what monsters they were, or had been fighting) In the last session of the term, one of the Goblins was not able to come, so we just had one boy fighting 3 goblins. He was rolling so high that he was winning. Wow. I'm impressed. The Hobgoblins, however, could not even get a hit in.

And then, it happened. A failed roll and one of the Hobgoblins was unconscious. This wasn't the first character death at this table, though that one was from PvP. A story for another time. We will call this player A. Now, A was very eager and I had no idea if he would break down if his character died. This was his first adventure in D&D. So, he was rolling death saves for the rest of the day. The first roll. A fail. Oh no.

The Mephits, who were working out a puzzle, were trying to decide if they wanted to run and heal the Hobgoblins, since they were low, but the Mephits decided to keep going with their puzzle. They were too far away anyway.

Round 2 of death saves approaches. A success. I breathe a sigh of relief, but we're not out of the woods yet. I am not trained to deal with crying children. The Goblin is still winning against his goblins, I'm very proud of him. The other two Hobgoblins still fail to get any hits in. The Mephits continue with their puzzle.

Round 3. A fail. "EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!" A shouts, an exact mimic of the meme. I am getting worried. The Goblin continues to beat the goblins, and there is now one goblin left. One of the Hobgoblins gets hit. He goes down to 0. This was the same player who has had his character die before. I will call him B. I am getting very tense and trying to work out if there is anything I can do behind the scenes. There is not. The Mephits are now severely debating going to the others. Since they are in the other part of the dungeon, it would take at least 2 turns to sprint to the other side. One of the Mephits goes. He spends the next 2 rounds sprinting.

Round 4. The whole table is waiting. A success from A! A has 2 successes, and 2 failures. It is up to Round 5 to decide whether he shall live or die. B fails his save. At this point, while most of the Mephits are still doing their puzzle, the last Hobgoblin is still fighting, the Goblin is still fighting too, everyone is waiting to see if A and B will live or die.

Round 5. A rolls his die. We all watch. "ITS A NAT 20!" A yells. Everyone cheers. We have run out of time for the session, and must continue in September. I breathe a sigh of relief.

B asks if he can speed run his rolls. I allow it.

A success. Good.

And... A nat 1.

I feel so sorry for him, but he seems ok. "I get to make a new character sheet again, yayy" B says. He looks happy still. He now has all summer to think about his new character.

Idk what the point of this story is, but I felt the need to share the thrilling end to my D&D Club.

[retrocgads]

USA 1990