#by extension lmfao

[essektheylyss]

I did just have to explain to my DM what an iDog was, and I am being SO brave about it.

[cozylittleartblog]

swatchvember: "beach episode"

an appropriate use of swatch's powers: drastically renovating the cafe every other month For Funsies! just shove a whole entire normal beach in there. why not. wear the worst outfit of your life. why not

they can't swim

[egberts]

i got an upgrade lol

[avoiltaire]

i can do whatever i want

[39oa]

Jason Robertson for ESPN’s The Point

I have a lot of kids and... people who come up to me and [are] like, "Oh, you're Jason Robertson," and they're Asian and they want a picture. Or I remember going to a game, during the season, and I saw a Filipino flag.

[wizardofgoodfortune]

leave me there, dreaming (dreamling d&d au)

Rating: Explicit Chapter: 1/? Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Dungeons & Dragons, Dream is a Sorcerer, Hob is a Fighter, What more can I say?, Violence, Blood, Vomiting, Corpses, BAMF Hob Gadling, Slow Burn, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added Summary: Hob Gadling, a cavalier of a prestigious order, finds his life turned upside-down when his hometown suddenly disappears from the face of the earth. He was at his lowest when he meets a mysterious, starry-eyed elf, who happens to be the solution to one or more of his problems.

Written for Cara (@staroftheendless) and her prompt, "Dreamling!Knights AU", as part of the @dreamlingnation's winter exchange event!

(read on ao3)

[gingermintpepper]

Absolutely the funniest thing about my current corner of tumblr is that pretty much everyone I've recently followed for Apollo-Appreciating Purposes are either genuinely Hellenist or just rather very into Rick Riordan's Trials of Apollo series which is wild because I know a net zero about both of those things.

[normalenjoyer-png]

figuring some stuff out+some doodles

[pseudophan]

i just lost two followers and it's making me laugh because judging by my most recent posts i assume they were diehard royalists? or at least people holding the british royal family in an unusually high regard? cry about it i guess idk, i do find it funny that you give a fuck though

on this note though of my followers holding different beliefs than me - if you're a terf? please kill yourself! i don't usually give a fuck because i just don't have it in me to start a war with everyone i disagree with but like. truly. if you hold any kind of prejudice against trans people whatsoever. fuck off from my blog lol i don't want you here

[sakialumei]

HOW WE DOIN' AFTER THAT PANEL FROM HELL, BALDUR'S GATE NATION

[essektheylyss]

Okay here's the thing though. Actual play is not like other narrative forms, because the amount of chance involved in the game play means that the ending, in most scenarios, is not already written, and even when it is, as in EXU: Calamity, how you get there is not yet set in stone.

But notably, what is set in stone, the past, only goes back so far. In theory, character backstory is pre-written, but anyone who has played TTRPGs with an emphasis on story and character will recognize that backstory is a lot more fluid than we might imagine, and certainly more fluid than the history of a real person. As you really begin to play the character, you find the ways the backstory doesn't quite mesh, what needs to be cut or fleshed out, and you can make those edits over time so long as they haven't yet been brought out explicitly in game.

But the farther along you get, the more you have to make explicit, and the less leeway you have (at least without significant, usually clunky, retconning) to change that past to suit the future that you're developing.

At the same time, though, the backstory that does get set into stone over the course of the game is still in many ways virtual, in that it is often, if not exclusively, filtered through the point of view of the character's memory. Even in the flashback sequences of this chapter of Candela Obscura, the emphasis tends to be on how the characters remember it, and what they choose to remember—Sean doesn't know, will never truly know, if the children he killed were monsters or not; Nathaniel doesn't focus in his memory on the fact that he tried to save his brother, he only remembers having failed.

In this sense, there is generally an element of unreliability to backstory. Because it exists in memory (even for the players, who usually have not played out every one of those moments as if they were living it, only having remembered it), it is subject to the fallibility that memory always involves.

This kind of restricted timescale, the entire world contained concretely only within the context of game play, is a mechanical reality and limitation of TTRPGs in general, and much like the laws of physics, it's not really malleable. One could play out certain pieces of backstory, but cannot ever live the entirety of a character's experience, and even then, the larger context of that experience will always exist outside of the world until it is made concrete in the course of the game.

This is the brilliance of Marion's breaking of time. The manipulation takes advantage of the fact that this memory is only a memory, because even as played out between him and Jean in "Flesh and Blood," it is still filtered through how the Marion of the game remembers it, and not a concrete experience.

That ability of the Medium, to manipulate reality and change oneself in the process, as though it had always been this way, is a mechanical acknowledgement of the already slippery flow of time in game play. It is a beautiful mechanical form of retcon that doesn't feel like a cheat or a copout, and it's simultaneously a very clever way of managing the tension between these limitations of form and the common fantasy archetype of diviners and seers.

Using it to then literally rewrite the past, because the details of the past are still fluid until they are explicitly written, is nothing short of poetic.

[54625]

dude

[necrophiliak]

I found you via tumblrs orbit system and you sounded kinda nervous about your ocs, so I’m gonna appear in your askbox and shout “yaaaay ocs!”

a idk if its nervousness per se and more just a combo of hope tht ppl will like+care abt them and me being awkward/not knowing what to say (but 40k ppl have been super nice ive never actually had ppl care abt my ocs before outside of my close friends ToT and they arent into 40k)

anyway. um yeah. ty tho 🥺 i rly appreciate it

[two-hands-toward-the-sun]

///

[jendoe]

ELISSAVET COUSLAND & CARVER HAWKE — if there is anything i believe in, it's you.

template by the lovely @marivenah!

[scorpiusmalfoylovesoscarwilde]

I'm an academic weapon (I'm using the library for the first time this school year)