#campaign rehash

[lumendelmari]

Chapter Twenty-Seven

A Favor for a Favor

1485 DR / Day 35

The Whorlstone Tunnels, Gracklstugh

Kazimir spent so long staring into the strange abyss of the raucous mesa’s ceiling that Nine had already begun the second watch by the time he finally drifted off to sleep. During that time, the wizard heard many whispers but nothing of consequence. Instead, it was a lot of rumor and grumbling about the current state of Gracklstugh.

The only thing the tiefling heard of note was that several citizens of the duergar city were losing faith in their king’s rule. His behavior of late was strange. The Deepking made laws that had no correlation to Gracklstugh’s current state, for he spent his days locked away in the palace. Furthermore, these strange decrees came through his advisor. But Kazimir failed to see how that information would help their current tasks.

All he wanted to know was where the dragon egg was! And who, ultimately, was behind the assassinations! Unfortunately, it seemed those questions would remain a mystery.

But as the wizard drifted through dream, a familiar sensation washed over him, and even in sleep, he knew he was about to experience a vision. It had been some time since he had had one—not since before the carrion crawler attack, at least. But this time, instead of seeing his companions, Kazimir saw Gracklstugh, and along with it, he felt a crushing weight.

...

To read more of a completed ‘Out of the Abyss’ rehash go to: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35100307/chapters/109100946

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/27/The-Grey-Warriors

[undead-knick-knack]

Bells Hells continue to push Percy to his fucking limit

[utilitycaster]

perhaps unpopular but while I do agree the EXU interlude likely killed some of the momentum, I also...don't mind that the party didn't talk much this episode? I feel like the start of the episode created an opening that not everyone took, though we did have some good moments, but also, for all I adore episode 2x30 and 1x69 re: wake of a character's death, and i do think 3x92's first half was very strong, it feels very right and in-character that Ashton isn't ready to talk about it (and that Dorian isn't really talking yet either).

[papirouge]

"#freepalestine is just a trend 🤪"

they say while reappropriating (pro Palestine) TRENDING hashtags hoping they would go as viral as them lmao

#freepalestinefromhamas

#metoounlessyoureajew

#fromtherivertotheseaisraelwillbefree

#jewishlivesmatter

....but yeaaaah you guys totally think making a cause a trending # is cringe, right?? 🤡

IDK in what world you live, but in the world of warm blooded humans, being against war and genocide will always be a fairly popular opinion. Such causes becoming viral and trending totally makes sense and only blood thirsty heartless warmonger would have a problem with it. Seethe & cope 👋🏾

[thealphapigeon]

Might be joining a dnd campaign in the Future

[thebathtubkeeper]

I made a map!

I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out, I have never edited a map like this before. Hopefully I’ll improve the more I do this lol

The general setting is the (fictional) town of Pinecust, it’s kinda based off the town I grew up in. It was a small logging town out in the middle of the Pacific Northwest forest that had kinda lost a lot of it’s bustle decades before I came along. I’ve had a lot of fun kinda planning everything out and making little pieces(such as the map).

If you have any deeper interest in Pinecust feel free to ask. Or if you have any advice or anything like that for a baby Keeper :))

[freshcut-chetney]

wait i havent watched cr in almost a year and they're STILL having "are the gods worth saving" talks? oh my lord how long is this gonna go on for

[arabella-strange]

there's also this interesting comparison to World Beyond Number recently, where the very aggressive and very defensive wizard Suvi (played by Aabria Iyengar) gets very cold and guarded whenever her long-dead parents are brought up. And Aabria herself said after one ep that this is largely because for Suvi, people invoke the names and lives of her parents -- beloved people who she lost traumatically as a small child, and so did not know -- to corral her, to steer her, to influence her.

Orym recently had a vision from a God who told him a few things:

Fight Predathos -- here's a Vestige 2.0 sword, blessed by me, to fight with.

Predathos is a horror the likes of which will haunt your soul -- here [because you failed your save] is a vision of that howling void, that all-consuming maw of oblivion, just in case you start to forget what's at stake.

My realm is balance, not peace nor passivity, so if you are about balance, we're aligned for now -- Bonus: here's a brief visit from your beloved dead husband, who because of his love of nature and the world and balance ended up in my eternal care. [Cf. Suvi.]

Now, the ep previous, Dorian had pointed out the terror of being without a stable, sufficient moral compass when the stakes are this high. He underscored how scary and desolate and immobilizing it is to not know what will have been the right answer until after it's done.

For me, the meeting with the Arch Heart was -- as Liam said! -- such a gut-punch that fucks Orym over and sets him back so many steps is because of how these threads converge. Suvi, Wildmother, Dorian.

To wit: Orym had one brief glittering moment of feeling empowered to make a right choice, a choice based on a renewed intuitive sense of what "right" means so that the fewest people are hurt and the fewest decisions have to be in their hands (balance). And ~ten seconds~ later, he has to reframe that whole interaction as yet another way that Will's death is a source of ongoing pain and loss. Loss this time not just of Will himself and the love and the life they shared, but loss now also of that same certainty of how to know, deep down, what right even means anymore. On the one side, the howling void of Predathos; on the other, the desolation of separation from love, from certainty, from inner self.

So when Orym said, hollowly, "I don't have a God," I don't think he was lying or rolling back disingenuously. I think he was underscoring why this continues to be so brutally, cruelly painful for him. Because he came into this as an Ashari fighter with a lil touch of druid, not a paladin or a cleric. He didn't start with a God, he didn't become devoted or have a change of heart -- he was looking for the God that spoke to his heart and matched his goals. A God he could -- however briefly! -- trust. And now it seems like that's all gone, all over again.

ORYM IS NOT PRO-GOD.

ORYM IS NOT FIGHTING FOR THE GODS, HE'S FIGHTING FOR THE PEOPLE.

ORYM IS FIGHTING SO THAT THERE CAN A TOMORROW.

ORYM DOES NOT WANT TO FOLLOW THE WILDMOTHER, HE WANTS TO WORK ALONGSIDE HER.

ORYM IS NOT ON A REVENGE QUEST.

ORYM IS FIGHTING TO HONOUR WILL AND DERRIG BECAUSE HE KNOWS THAT THEY WOULD BE FIGHTING ALONGSIDE HIM IF THEY WERE ALIVE.

ORYM IS TRYING TO BE A SHIELD FOR EXANDRIA

[prokopetz]

The thing that annoys me about the received wisdom of "tabletop RPGs are descended from fantasy wargames, and that's why Dungeons & Dragons is Like That" is that most of the time, when people bring it out they're drawing conclusions by comparing D&D to modern fantasy wargames, and consequently getting cause and effect precisely backwards.

The fact of the matter is that tabletop RPGs aren't descended from fantasy wargames – at least, not in the way that this claim is usually meant. When D&D and its contemporaries came on the scene, fantasy and sci-fi elements were a relatively new (and often controversial) entry to the wargaming hobby; the 900-pound gorilla of the tabletop wargaming scene at the time wasn't fantasy wargaming, but historical wargaming; i.e., re-creations of historical campaigns and such.

Fantasy wargaming and tabletop RPGs are less a linear progression, and more two parallel branches of the same evolutionary tree; they both split off from historical wargaming at roughly the same time, and for much of their shared history there wasn't a bright line between them; many early titles that are classified as fantasy wargames due to their publication history would probably be considered tabletop RPGs by modern standards, and vice versa.

Bringing this back around to my grump about getting cause and effect backwards, one of the consequences of this shared history is that many of the features of contemporary tabletop roleplaying culture that are often cited as reactions against the hobby's wargaming roots are actually directly descended from those roots.

The frequent preoccupation with separating player knowledge from character knowledge, for example? That's straight up an historical wargaming thing. When you're gaming out an historical battle, it makes a big difference whether the players' tactics are informed by contemporary knowledge about the situation, or whether they restrict themselves to acting only upon information which the commander of the side they're playing could plausibly have possessed at the time. Whether there existed an obligation to remain "in character" as your side's commander – and exactly what constituted breaching this obligation – is something people literally got into fights over.

Or the whole "rules versus rulings" nonsense? Arguing about whether it's more appropriate to resolve uncertainty with recourse to game mechanics or by deferring to the judgment of subject matter experts is so deeply embedded in the DNA of historical wargaming that it goes all the way back to the Prussian Kriegsspiel.

Like, I'm not saying that these things aren't worth discussing, but I think we've gotta recognise that when we talk about player knowledge versus character knowledge or rulings versus rules, we're not "evolving beyond" the hobby's wargaming roots; we're rehashing arguments that tabletop wargame designers were having two hundred years ago, in some cases practically verbatim.

[bambi-kinos]

Why do you think Paul keeps saying to this day that John was really sweet. He really wasn't. He treated everyone like shit including Paul. Because he feel he has to? Because he was killed and people made him into something he wasn't? I don't blame John for this ). Or but because he was in love with him and that's what he remembers. John doesn"t deserve it. He's even overrated. Both P and G was/is better. I just don't get how someone like Paul who's a better man, artist and person keeps giving J so much credit. I'm not a new fan of the Beatles or Paul. I really can only see it that he was in love with him.

What else is Paul supposed to do?

Idk man I think Paul is just doing his best with what he has. He's never going to get closure on their relationship. He's never going to get an explanation that satisfies him. So he has to work with what he's got.

You have the wrong end of the stick on this, Paul isn't trying to give John credit that he hasn't earned. Paul is trying to move on from what John did to him by focusing on the good moments and remembering who John was before he was brain damaged by heroin and LSD. If your boyfriend has a TBI that changes his entire personality, is that really your boyfriend anymore? Is he really still himself? These are the questions Paul has wrestled with and it looks like he's realized he's never going to get an answer.

So he's focusing on what he does know which is that the John he knew and fell in love with was a sweet kid who sometimes let his insecurities rule him. But he was still a loving person who cared about Paul and was his closest friend for years.

Furthermore: if John was actually the raging dickhead that the internet thinks he is then he would not have had any friends to begin with. People with truly no redeeming characteristics who are assholes all the time don't get friends who defend them even after they die. The truth is that John was not actually a prick all of the time. Otherwise no one could have stood being around him. Paul calls John sweet because he knew the John that was a sweet guy, the guy that Paul loved.

You're also falling for John's own propaganda a bit. John never stopped projecting the image of being a cynical hard bitten street tough that intimidated everyone into submission with his temper. John occasionally admitted that all of this was an act (see his comments at playacting the Teddy Boy image while not actually being a gang member and why he felt he had to do it.)

But the truth is he never stopped projecting the "I'm an asshole you better not fuck with me" thing. All of this "I'm an irredeemable asshole I hate George and Paul!!!" is pure fakery. The very qualities you don't like were fabricated in large part by Yoko as part of a propaganda campaign, and from what I've read in the Dakota Years memoirs, this propaganda was out of John's control from the moment he started the Lennon Remembers interviews. John is just as much a victim of information warfare as Paul is, he just reacted to it differently and used it to barricade himself away from Paul.

That doesn't mean you have to like John or feel sorry for him or agree with Paul's decisions to try and leave the damage behind. You are reacting to the fact that Paul is visibly in pain when he talks about this stuff. He's bleeding in public and there's nothing no one can do to help him. The wounds are permanent. It is, in fact, rage inducing. John isn't here to speak for himself and try to explain. What else can we do as observers except be angry.

But Paul McCartney is 82 years old.

He's close to the end.

He doesn't want to do that, doesn't have time for it, doesn't want to spend his last years rehashing this shit.

Is there an alternative for him? All he can do now is try to make peace with it while he's alive and then he can finally get closure with John when he moves on to the next stop.

Paul doesn't call John 'sweet' for the sake of John's image. He does it to remind himself of the boy he fell in love with in 1957. Because he doesn't have a lot of time left and he wants to spend it being in love with John, not being angry at him. Paul is doing this for Paul. Simple as.

[melljam]

it’s unhinged long post time again! and this one’s about gitae kim >:)

so its assumed that gitae holds some form of resentment over his absent father, gap … (since he did vaguely murder him with james after all)

… but there seems to be some subtle hints that gitae might have also idolized gapryong kim

-> first up: gitae’s pipe being engraved with gapryong kim’s name in chinese (金甲龍) 「link to my post that goes more in-depth about gap’s chinese name」

as i mentioned in the linked post, it seems like that smoking pipe belonged to gap in the past and gitae somehow got ahold of it

so why would gitae keep a piece of memorabilia that belonged to his absent father if he only held resentment for the man? it might have some sentimental value for him, especially since he chose to bring it back to korea with him.

perhaps the motive behind gitae’s possession and usage of gap’s pipe could be comparable to jake deciding to don gap’s gloves

the two of them both hold resentment for gap as a father, while also selectively admiring and emulating aspects of him as a gangsters

-> secondly, on the topic of emulating gap …

jake seems to unwillingly (or subconsciously) follow in his father’s footsteps through his passion for protecting people (which is the symbolic reason he wears gap’s gloves), but he also inherited gap’s moral compass. jake dislikes unfairness or ‘cheating’, just like how gap could never “ignore any kind of injustice.”

also the way that gap is mentioned to never be able to pass by someone in need, while jake constantly gets involved in other people’s business for the sake of helping them (showing up to save victims in 3a and his entire dynamic with xiaolung lol)

by all means, minseon was correct (ofc she is <3), and jake takes after gapryong kim’s ‘good side’

and in the same vein, following in minseon’s words, gitae takes after gapryong kim’s evil side.

he’s selfish, he’s power-hungry, and he has the raw strength to do (or get) what he wants

all of which are also traits belonging to gap, shown through his cheating, his (failed) political campaign, and his strength making him the ‘legend of the pre-generation’

no one truly aspires to be any of the first two traits listed, but what about the third?

to be a legend, in terms of strength (which is very, very important as a gangism lookism character whose ability to succeed is correlated in their ability to fight …)

wouldn’t that certainly be appealing to a selfish, power-hungry man?

and it seems that it indeed was very appealing to gitae, since jinyoung alludes to gap failing to mimic gap’s fighting style in the past

-> “no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be gapryong kim.”

perhaps this was just a one-off comment about gitae attempting to mimic gap’s fists, but it could be indicative of another facet of gitae’s admiration for his father

gitae might have admired the idea of his father being gapryong kim, korea’s strongest gangster, to the point of idolization (which sounds a lot like a certain someone samuel hahah … )

if so, then he might have become obsessed with following in his father’s footsteps and attaining power as a gangster, especially if he lived in poverty as an abandoned child (just like samuel)

perhaps, in a similar manner to samuel, gitae might have grown up viewing himself as needing to be worthy of being gapryong kim’s son, needing to live up to his father’s name.

but is ptj really going to rehash the same backstory for gitae? there’s a possibility, but ultimately, i don’t think so. gitae seems like he’s driven by something different to samuel, something a little less insecure hahah :)

gitae may have found himself obsessed over another aspect of gapryong kim, something distinct from the validation that samuel craved, something like:

-> the identity of gapryong kim

the legend of the pre-generation, korea’s strongest gangster, an all-around powerful man

someone to admire, someone to idolize (only for these guys that is, jake is right in hating gap lol)

what gitae wanted was to be ‘gapryong kim’.

maybe not in a literal sense, but rather to have the power as a gangster that gap held during his heyday, to be a legend in his own right

gitae wanted to lead the life of glory that gapryong kim did, but might have felt ultimately limited by only being an illegitimate son of his

admiration, idolization, and obsession

gitae could have been obsessed with everything that gapryong kim represented, and the tortuously resentful ache of being unable to claim legitimacy to gapryong kim’s name might have driven gitae to commit his ‘ultimate sin’

perhaps gitae figured that the only way to ‘get what he wanted’ out of his life as an unwanted son was to murder his father and idol, gapryong kim, and thus allow himself to create his own legacy, one that eerily mirrors that of his deceased father, gapryong kim

-> additionally, as stated by minseon, gitae went to mexico because he ‘got what he wanted’

it’s very interesting that gitae went to mexico (since lookism takes place in south korea lol), and i think the reason that gitae decided to start a gang in mexico is an extension of his character motivation of power

gitae might have wanted to leave south korea because he was unable to attain the power that he wanted there, to build a legacy separate from gapryong kim’s, but very similar in nature

immediately after gapryong kim thwarted the ‘great threat’ that south korea faced in the past, he went into politics because he realized that was the only way for him to gain true power in korea

gitae didn’t want to follow in the path of the disgraceful politician gapryong kim, but rather the powerful gang leader gapryong kim

in mexico, the magnitude of the crimes, the underground businesses, and the authority that gangs have all fit someone like gitae better, someone who craves greater power and control

-> and to tie it back to the beginning of this post, gitae’s bitter obsession with gapryong kim might be why he keeps his pipe, or why he values that coat so much (since it likely belonged to gapryong in the past)

it’s a little morbid, especially if gitae gained access to gapryong kim’s belongings during or as a result of his murder, but gitae seems to cherish his father in his very own, twisted way

(gitae’s line about the coat being worth a life takes on a whole new meaning if he took it after murdering gap lol)

also, is it just a coincidence that gitae is currently dressed in a similar fashion to gap in his prime?

slicked back hair, black pants, a red shirt, and a black coat (possibly the same coat?)

anyway, thanks for reading my insufferable ramblings !!!

very excited to see what ptj has in store for gitae’s character now that he’s finally back :3

[undead-knick-knack]

Cerkonos the moment he laid eyes on Lieve'tel 😍

[wearepaladin]

Notes: Enjoying the recent trend of actually enjoyable Dark Paladin types that are enjoyable excercises in exploring the archetype and not just a rehash of Vader and other monsters so lost in their pain that it’s the only way they can be. Whenever I manage to actual play in a campaign again I want to explore more of it. I had a lot of fun playing a one shot of Fabula Ultima with some friends and I have a craving for it.

Note 2: I have an idea for a new Homebrew Paladin Subclass called the Oath of the Revelator. Revelators are lorewise their to both solve and create mysteries, warrior prophets who are often the tip of the spear for a new or revitalizing faith, unveiling a truth lost to the world. Mechanically they’re my answer to Inquisitive Rogue, paladins geared to be insightful and perceptive, their divine sense sharper than other paladins, not only identifying greater varieties of extraplanar beings and monsters, but magics and mysteries that they can provide greater revelation.

[nalyra-dreaming]

Hi,I hope we are not too annoyed with all our questions.

I'm new to the fandom,and after watching the show I really thought that Loustat would be the popular ship.I know most people are multi-shipper here,but it's funny how Louis and Lestat are not popular together. It seems like you've been here longer than many of us (books and Tv show)from you observations do you see major differences between fans favorite in the show and the books?

Also,have you changed your opinion on a character because of the show?

Not really to the latter.

I think the show cast the characters perfectly, so they fit for me. :) I like this Louis more, if anything. They enhanced him (though they did enhance them all, imho).

We lucked out so badly.

As per Loustat... *sighs*

You have to understand that Lestat is seen by many as the big bad abuser ™, and nothing else. No matter how often cast, crew, writers and creators have said that we have seen only half the story, no matter how often errors in the tale have been pointed out, no matter how often I have dug out the episode insider with Rolin pointing out the "tinkering" even then... anyone who doubted Louis' tale in any kind of fashion was met with accusations of racism and slurs.

I'm not kidding. I wish I was. I still have comments on my fics that I left there, on purpose. I have the asks here. There are people who call themselves my "number one hate blog".

I don't want to rehash all that now.

But imagine trying to write coming from the books, knowing what will happen, seeing the "seeds" in the show (as Assad called it), reading the interviews, knowing the tale will shift... and being met with something like that.

And now imagine not having the book background, and being harassed on anon, or with comments. And not having the background to defend your ship.

And I don't even mean actual criticism here, if valid or not.

No, I mean harassment. Accusations, death threats. Comparisons to the KKK. Whole campaigns against me, and others. Not kidding. I put my rants into my bio if you're interested, lol.

This is the fandom where I started blocking in earnest, and I come from friggin' Hannibal.

A tale like this, with racial changes in a color-conscious way (which actually brought the difficult topics into play (and I love them for it!)), left hanging for 18 months... that didn't do the fandom any good.

And some of the comments in the podcast didn't do it any good either with the expectations it raised, and which will be now... well. Not wholly disappointed, but... some took that as gospel. When it's not. It will be a bit messy soon, and with what's to come wrt to Claudia, too.

Soooo... that is why Loustat isn't particularly popular right now.

That will change though.

Rolin, as well as Sam and Jacob keep repeating that this show is built around Loustat.

Loustat are at the heart. They are the heart.

The books start and end with them.

The show foreshadows their dance at the end.

I for one am continuing to write for them, even if I have currently hit a wall on my current fic, but I was mightily distracted by all the new content^^ (like everyone else I think^^).

I love that they are so complicated, and messy, and petty, and so, so IN LOVE.

Jacob called it that, too. "Petty and in love".

And they are.

PS: And no worries re asks :) I love talking to you guys^^

[utilitycaster]

@rowzeoli replied to your post “Do you think part of the D20 journalistic bias...”:

I rarely go on tumblr so sorry if you see me spamming your posts tonight, but I really enjoy your perspective and thoughts! I think I'm the journalist you're referencing in regards to the Fantasy High Junior Year article and unfortunately 1) journalists only get access to interview subjects at very specific junctions (usually press day before the series goes out or halfway through) 2) most publications are honestly Going Through It and cutting freelance rates and just not paying to cover AP

​So I'll be totally honest - I post on Tumblr because I assume it is far more unlikely to be seen and so I can vent freely (hence the fairly harsh tone of the criticism in the original post), but I guess this is a chance to clarify. I don't expect anything to change, nor do I expect you to respond; indeed, I wouldn't blame you if you block me after this. But if readership is down (and who knows? maybe it's not and I'm the outlier), this may be illuminating.

The issue with your specific article - which I brought up relatively tangential to the larger point of "at this point I think Polygon's AP/TTRPG coverage is a waste of time to read" isn't really that it's only an early look at the series; and because Fantasy High Junior Year is at this time ongoing, it's honestly entirely valid that there hasn't been a follow-up. It's, well, the "surface-level and factually wrong" issue.

Dimension 20 was by no means the pioneer of remote recording as you claim in your article; that had long been the default of smaller recorded AP shows well before pandemic lockdown for the simple reason that if you're not a media company the overhead is very low - no need to have a dedicated space or even cameras beyond decent laptops. Burrow's End's puppetry? Critical Role's Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Crystal Palace did shadow puppets in 2019. They had diagetic audio on the main campaign as early as 2016. I don't even like Kollok, but that's had complex set design since 2019. Meanwhile premise of the article is yet another rehash of Polygon's "Dimension 20 is CHANGING THE GAME" constant drumbeat, while your actual pull quotes from Brennan Lee Mulligan are him musing that this is simply an entry in an ancient tradition of storytelling and isn't, in fact, terribly novel. The interview fails utterly to back up your point and indeed contradicts it; I get that the timeline was probably tight but this is outright incorrect in multiple places and your argument isn't just unsupported; it's outright dismissed by the very person you claim is proving it. If the premise came before the interview, it needed to be reworked afterwards, and if it came after the interview…I'm not sure what to say, really.

This isn't your article, and I'm putting it here to illustrate that this has been a pattern for Polygon's AP coverage specifically. This article about Worlds Beyond Number is perhaps my favorite example of "this is not serious journalism:" Rusty Quill Gaming, The Adventure Zone, Friends at the Table, and NADDPod are all theater of the mind long-running podcasts (RQG's campaign lasted a whopping 7 years of real time) and that's just off the top of my head; the idea of a long-running edited audio podcast being novel is laughable. RQG and TAZ both started at level 1; I'm not personally familiar with Friends at the Table. I don't actually think starting at level 1 vs. 2 is terribly important in storytelling in the first place other than that a few D&D classes pick their subclass at L2 and that choice can be narratively relevant, which it was in TAZ; however, some classes pick a subclass at L3 so you can still achieve this with a level 2 start (as Critical Role's second campaign does). Both Emily Axford of NADDPod and Griffin McElroy of TAZ have long been composing their own music and RQG is heavily sound designed. These are not obscure pulls, either; these are some of the more well-known names in the space.

At this point, Polygon AP/TTRPG articles - by multiple different writers - simply feel like madlibs: "(actual play show) is groundbreaking in its (thing that other shows have been doing for 5+ years); I especially liked (visual effect) and (incorrect understanding of TTRPG mechanics)."

The people I allude to in the post you responded to as having egregiously uncharitable and sanctimonious takes on Daggerheart (within, again, hours of its publication) are a frequent Polygon contributor and a Rascal editor and they further my mistrust of those publications: There is this constant insistence that everything they like be "groundbreaking" and "innovating" and they will claim this even when it's demonstrably not the case, as the above examples note. As Mulligan says in your article "it’s important to keep new artists with new experiences and backgrounds flowing in," and yet by focusing intensely on high production values (difficult for smaller indie upstarts to have) and by incorrectly claiming that a well-established media company within the space like D20 invented a number of things it flat out did not, this journalism is actively, if unintentionally, working against that goal. As I put it elsewhere, Polygon's bizarre pedestaling of Dimension 20 and simultaneous putdowns of Critical Role (which turn into wild contortions when D20 mainstays like Mulligan or Aabria Iyengar collaborate with CR; for that matter others besides me have observed that Polygon acts like Spenser Starke is two different people, the genius who created Alice is Missing and the knuckle-dragging moron who put out Candela Obscura and Daggerheart) coupled with the obsession with production values over story has the whiff of claiming they're the champion of the little guy for sticking it to the 700 lb gorilla in the space and then focusing on 500 lb gorillas while making it impossible for smaller monkeys to compete because most brand new shows without the name recognition of someone like Mulligan involved can't exactly hire Rick Perry to do their models or Taylor Moore to do sound design.

I suppose a good way to put this, since I've run into this in many spaces, not just AP/TTRPG or even journalism, is that bias on its own in a subjective medium isn't inherently bad; but if something is so nakedly biased against something I love, I will, naturally, turn to it with a far more critical eye, and if its arguments are not ironclad I'm going to start noticing every structural issue in every argument and every tiny mistake. Sure, as a fan of Critical Role, and as someone who feels that Kollok was nigh-unwatchable and that Burrow's End was promising in parts but deeply flawed, I disagreed with Polygon's nonstop mud-slinging towards the former and glowing, verging on fawning reviews of the latter two. But that's not entirely damning on its own; I do get that not everyone will like Critical Role and that some people will love Kollok or Burrow's End for valid reasons. What's damning is the journalism itself is riddled with factual errors and the analysis is so weak that to call the arguments a flimsy house of cards would be generous. The opposite is also true; if Polygon's lead editor were out here repeatedly misspelling the name of one of the main characters in Worlds Beyond Number (note: this has since been corrected) but the articles had compelling arguments, even ones I disagreed with, I'd be far more forgiving, but as is? It's offering me absolutely nothing: it's poorly researched, it's poorly structured, it's poorly written, it's poorly copy-edited, and it shits on things I like seemingly just for clicks. I'm done giving clicks.

I am deeply sympathetic to the pressures facing digital journalism and media and the arts in general; as someone who is fortunate enough not to personally face those pressures and has the income to be a patron, I would love to help in my small way (and I do, at least, financially support a number of the AP shows I love). But the quality of some of this journalism is truly so bad that I can't bring myself to support the institutions putting it out; it's "dead dove do not eat" until such time as someone whose analysis and opinions I do trust cites them (or, perhaps, until there is a sea change of lead editorship). I know that this won't help the crunch, and may make it worse, but I just can't because the quality is so poor. I don't have a good solution to how to write about something that takes a lot of time to watch and process and about which the articles pay very little in return, but the current strategy of bouncing between uninformed provocateur and utter sycophant depending on the show and creators; of drooling over such surface features as shiny production and falsely claiming everything is "groundbreaking" while getting the most basic facts wrong has driven me away.

[deadboydetectives-confessions]

Hi, it's the first billboard anon. I sent that in because it was like 3 AM and I couldn't sort out my feelings or sleep and this is a vent blog so I vented. I can get really in my head about things sometimes, especially "am I doing enough?" kind of stuff, whatever. To be clear, I wasn't judging anyone for what they spent their money on, and I know you can give to multiple causes, etc. I tried to phrase it like a personal issue (because it was).

Anyway, I'm not gonna rehash all I said before, what I wanted to say now is that being able to write stuff down and see people's comments (not on my confession, but on other, similar ones) has helped me sort my thoughts out. So thanks to the people sharing their thoughts and to you Interface for running this blog. Sometimes you just gotta talk about stuff.

(Honestly, when the campaign first popped up I was thinking of the OFMD situation and was kind of scared things were gonna go that way. But they didn't. I should have trusted y'all)

Whether or not the billboard helps the campaign significantly (and I mean, it could! It's not like I'm an expert, so my opinions on that don't hold much weight) it's still a nice fandom achievement and a good chunk of money got donated to charity, so. Only positive feelings left here 👍

Also I think I saw someone mention the DBD for Palestine fundraiser here, and yes I did see that a day or two after I sent my ask in. So point proven, we can do multiple things at once 🙈 but mostly thank you to the people organizing and contributing fic/art/edits and donating to that. We can do so much more together than we can individually and like I said in my previous ask, it makes me really happy to see fandom organize to enact positive change 💜

Man, I should stop sending in asks while sleepy, they get long as hell. Anyway, I hope everyone reading this has a good day/night.

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