#bag a legend

[zeefaring]

how it feels to research an impossible theorem

[dandelioncasey]

Hmm. I am. Uncomfortable.

[snippity]

Here's my character lineup of the Bag a Legend NPCs! It's not my favourite writing-wise but it's the one closest to my heart.

Design notes + pics split into layers under the cut:

april:

she's described as short and stocky ingame so i did give her a body type to reflect that more accurately compared to her ingame art. also let me have this one i like butch women

made her a bit older as well. there's text saying she has experience with infernal ammunition (like that used in the war against hell), making her at the very least in her 40s

fun fact she's 4'10" here. i did use a height chart as reference

sinning jenny: not too much to say about her since she has a canon design as well and i didn't really deviate here. in my mind she's tall to contrast april being short though

mother superior:

she has a gold and beryl mask at the end of the ambition which i thought was cool so it's there

holding an ankh because she's originally from the second city - you can see the influence too by how jenny's rosary resembles one. the mask itself was also ever so slightly inspired by egyptian death masks

that's meant to be a pistol in a holster but you can barely see it

scarred naturalist:

wanted to show off his real identity as a snuffer, so i had some of the snuffer tentacles/flesh peek through the skin

gave him a green waistcoat partly to show his connection to the vake

remember the bit where he ripped a guys upper lip off just to wear his mustache. i didn't until a friend reminded me

the vake: looked at fallout deathclaws and venus flytraps for inspiration! i'll be honest i personally think making the masters just straightforward anthro bats is a little boring so i took some more liberties with it. that's a liver it's holding. whose? who knows.

[the-dye-stained-socialite]

you like Vake hunters because you hate the Vake

i like Vake hunters because i want to fuck the Vake

we are not the same

[thedeafprophet]

I find it really interesting the insights we get into veils when pretending to be it during BaL. Speaking as someone with chronic pain, the way the texts describes the way it hurts to speak and pain in general just was particularly poignant to me

I just think veils is a fascinating character in its own right, with just how much complications there are behind A Killer. This bleeds into the way I made my own BaL character in response

[peliginspeaks]

Sick in bed so I am thinking about Hallowrove and her relationship to poisons, as one does. Specifically what going through BaL did to it, turning a curiosity and a bit of rashness into something more like a nervous compulsion to keep ahead of a possible threat that quickly faded into improbability.

(mild TW for unhealthy habits/self harming behaviours)

Hallowrove is not, as a rule, a paranoid or preparatory sort of person. For most situations, monster hunting or otherwise, their strategy is more reacting quickly to threats and thinking creatively in the moment, rather than preparing for possibilities before they happen. Poison, however, is not a thing you can just react to. You can't fight it like a combatant. You can't run from it like a rockfall. You can't outwit it like a monster. You can only endure, and wait. Perhaps you'll die. Perhaps you won't. The outcome was decided from the minute it poured into your veins.

So, of course Hallowrove hates that. Of course when the nuns of Hunter's Keep came after him with poison, when he realized that everything he touched and ate and drank was fair game and he might never get the chance to react, what once was a passing curiosity and an occasional game between him and Scaleflats at parties turned into dosing himself regularly, to build enough tolerance to push the inevitable into being less so. Being slightly ill and slightly weakened - even then in the thick of it - was preferable to having no tolerance and ending at the mercy of a hit he couldn't dodge, so it became almost comforting, downing the latest concoction and knowing that no matter how much pain it put him through it would still be slightly less than the time before. It felt like having a cushion to the fall, for a person whose life was strung on the high wire between the horror that hunted him and the horror that was trying to train him to defeat it. It felt like an extra card kept up his sleeve, a way to react instead of feel the fear.

And then the nuns were gone. The Vake was dead. No more reason for the poison, right? She could go back to curiosity, back to tiny swigs of unknown things just to see what they do, back to batting back and forth false slights with a friend...except for maybe whoever the Masters might hire to silence her about the victory. That could still happen. And there was always the monsters, with the venoms they carried, and those weren't the same as the poison she drank but it had to help a little bit, surely? And, well, perhaps she just likes the taste of amanitas and would like to be able to eat them with no consequence, and what if she has some other enemy she doesn't know about, and there was always that feeling that never quite went away, of a safety net, of some faint power and security that once grasped felt like danger itself just to let slip from her hand again. It wasn't...illogical, surely. There could always be more reasons. It was just better to be cautious, is all. To not overthink it too much. To just...down the vial and feel worse, to feel better when she got up again.

It's not a thing they think much about, anymore. It's been two or three years since the Vake, and they'll miss a dose sometimes, and feel safe enough to have no real need to make up for it. But they'll still throw out the cream if the bottle seems moved a little to the left from where they last put it, and they can't remember why, and their "curiosity" these days never quite seems to be satisfied enough.

[waterlogged-detective]

Boots' flawless Vake catching plan, thwarted by his good kitty status...

Bonus:

[hahaheart1]

ALMOST FORGOT BUT

I completed my ambition!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now all of London is in my debt >:D

[the-masterless-press]

IT'S OFFICIAL: BETTY HAS COMPLETED HER AMBITION!

God, it has been a very arduous journey. But thanks to Christmas events I have been able to do it

Get fucked Veils

[im-ej-arts]

first three of my bag a legend lineup! this i would like to affectionately call "doesn't matter if they're out of their prime they will kick a millennia old bat's ass"

more to come soon!

individuals:

rowan asher, the frigid-hearted professor, owned by @the-avaricious-meddler

samuel weatherbee, the laconic captain, owned by @house-of-mirrors

and finally; betty horvat, the bumbling pugilist, owned by me!

[incorrectfallenlondonquotes]

BAL Player: [noticing a pocket watch] Hey, I had one just like that.

Light Fingers Player: Yeah, your dead body was buried with it.

BAL Player: You stole that off my dead body?

Light Fingers Player: Well, your dead body wasn't doing anything with it.

[asleepinawell]

sensing a theme in the ambition tie-ins in firmament

[drholmestuck]

holy shit i just need 2400 echoes for 60 copper cipher rings and then I'LL FINISH MY AMBITION this is so exciting

[maybesdaughter]

BITES YOU BITES YOU BITES YOU

[demansiabites]

Bag a Legend

[thedeafprophet]

I feel like every disabled flondon player has a moment in the game that felt personally targeting with the unintentional ableism (ie. The seats on the train scenario, ableist physical assumptions with labour, body horror, etc. etc.)

But for me personally it's still that shitty moment in Bag A Legend where Mother Superior directly excludes a deaf person from a conversation via the hearing and purposefully blocking any attempt at lip reading.

Like that was such. A direct moment of ableist behaviour from a character (and uhhh hit quite close to home) that truly shocked me out of nowhere.