#game night of the gods

[tigerlilynoh]

For the WIP ask game: Game Night of the Gods

Sam, Dean, Castiel, and Charlie are made the avatars/pawns/characters in a game of Dungeons and Dragons orchestrated by Gabriel and four gods. I’m writing it as absurd garbage candy. I’ve given myself permission/the challenge of going as stupid and vulgar as possible with it. There’s no explicit sex, but it does ask important questions like, “Do Dragonborn have a cloaca?” … That’s the level of content I’m shooting for with this incredibly-fun-to-write train wreck. It’s been my silly sandbox when I need to get away from the angst that heavily populates my other works.

The goal is to finish writing part one (a complete story arc), then post one “session” every Friday night to AO3. Parts two and three are being worked on at the same time, but with a lower priority since part one is capable of being a standalone story, so I won’t feel bad about releasing it on its own in order to get something out sooner. My stretch goal is to also post some supplemental materials including character sheets, character artwork, dungeon maps, monster stat blocks, etc.

Snippet from part one, specifically character generation:

Gabriel’s disembodied voice smugly announced, “Tiefling.”

In an instant Sam’s body had changed. The basic skeletal structure of his face and overall proportions were the same, but that was about all that could be said for the similarities. His skin was rust-colored. A large pair of horns protruded from his hairline, beginning with a red hue, very much like his skin, that faded into a dark purple as the horns curled and tapered like a ram’s. White paint linework contrasted against the dark horns. His eyes were solid black and his teeth were fangs. From a new slit in the back of his pants descended a tail nearly five feet long.

Sam yelled at the sky, “It was ten fucking years ago!”

Both Dean and Charlie’s mouths hung open in shock at the transformation. After shaking the stupor from his mind, Dean managed to say, “What the hell?”

Sam glowered, making his black eyes glow a bit as if there were embers inside. “It’s a joke. Tieflings have some devil or demon blood in them. I’m gonna murder Gabriel.”

[mushramoo]

I am losing it

[ascensabyss]

[cosmocove]

ur afraid of being corny but i was born on the cob

[night-crawler08]

I guess I have a type??

[tfemthanatos]

She’s such an angel

[egophiliac]

he's coming

I'M NOT READY

[vaguely-concerned]

I think there is no better illustration of the more intimate, internal angle veilguard chooses to approach its characters and themes with than the fact that like... listen in this game we get to follow so much pain back to its source, and we find it really does permeate everything in thedas today on a level that evokes a kind of cosmic horror. the bones of the earth itself are broken open and drenched in trauma; the world is mired in suffering down to the core and the marrow. as above, so below. as outside, so inside. on the big scale, and the small. all of creation is a throat gone to bloody shreds from screaming in agony, when you allow yourself to listen. (maybe that's why we usually don't, or can't, bring ourselves to listen.)

...and yet the thing that makes me personally so desperately gnaw-my-own-arm-off sad that it feels like I could die from it is that in a run where you save minrathous, lucanis never gets out from the ossuary in his mind. what's worse, no one even knows he's in there. he's still in there. and there is no rescue on the way, because he's locked down so deep inside himself this time that there's no way for anyone to even understand there's a need for it. would he be able to welcome one, if someone did realize it and tried to reach him? You know him -- you can open the door, but he won't walk through. He won't move. There's nowhere to go. the way he says 'it doesn't matter what I want' with such utter, leaden, final resignation in the wrecked treviso cutscene is going to haunt me forever. it makes perfect sense to me you can't romance him after that, I'm not sure he's ever really here completely in that version of events, at least within the timeline the game takes place. he's just standing in the shitty awful ossuary torture room all alone, and no one's coming to find him.

and what is that, next to the millennia of suffering screaming through all of history and creation? well. nothing, of course, not really. a single plucked string in an endless deafening symphony of despair. one singular trapped and broken soul among the untold millions that have gone before and the untold more that will surely come after, that are being made as we speak in the conflicts and tragedies unfolding through the game. but more importantly it's also everything. to me. and to the game too. the game says this also matters. just as much as anything else, this pain matters and deserves to be loved and comforted. even in the face of all the suffering in the world, beneath the systems perpetuating all the banalities of evil, for good or for ill sometimes, we matter to each other. and what would be the point of anything, if we didn't? that's where hope lives. as long as you're alive, the right key might still arrive to gently open the locks of your mind, the right hand might reach out one day and you will bring yourself to take it. you don't know what tomorrow's going to be. if in the meantime the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other -- isn't that enough? isn't that everything? why does this one guy saved mean the world saved to me, a little bit? hello. hello. hello. there's stuff going on in the deep here.

when I say that the deep thematic spine of this game is so good and solid that the occasional clumsiness and false tones of the writing on top of it simply cannot hurt me... I think this is part of what I mean. works for every single one of the characters of course! lucanis' is the predicament that speaks to me most viscerally. for. uh. personal reasons there simply is no time to get into at this juncture lol. but just as much the idea that davrin can die before he could see the world freed from the blight and the need for wardens, or that harding can get cut down right at the beginning of a great revelation that could change everything and heal things no one had even dreamed could be healed. all of them are like this. each and every one of us has a world and so many stories inside that matter, and it's not to dismiss the larger systemic forces and evils that create so much of the suffering in the world to focus in on that for one installment of the series -- only to view it from a different angle that brings other things to light than what we're looking for normally in this series. it's worth looking at what's actually here.

(have you ever heard the poem 'good light' by andrea gibson? it's very good. you should check it out if you haven't, you can find it on youtube. it has these lines:

Come make it count Our finding each other like we found God Come root for the salt Come believing we can heal it all, even everything Even everything that has ever been done I know how much the pain of this world weighs But I can still tip the scales in light's direction Whenever I have your name on my tongue

and yeah. I think that's basically what I'm trying to say here.)

[thewatcher0nthewall]

"Who are You? "

The Black Gate at Nightfort

[the-kipsabian]

saw a take so fucking rancid on twitter i almost deleted the entire app from my phone jesus fucking christ

first of all ao3 is an archive site. this is like going to the library and saying "oh i dont like this" on every piece of media you find that you dislike and thinking they should be stamped with some sort of a marker just cause you didnt like it

you can always click back and leave. fic writers owe you nothing to explain themselves and their creations. if they have mistagged or miscategorized fics, then i understand, however there are report tools for that instead of yelling at the artist tbh

im not saying free works arent necessarily above criticism. but this is just. fucking wild. its common courtesy to just enjoy stuff (or fucking leave if you dont, the back button is free) and if the artist specifically asks for critiques, then give one - constructive that is, shitting all over someones work is not proper criticism, mind you

i just find it fucking wild people are treating art and archive sites as social media these days like this and everything needs to be policed and ~catered to the algorithm~ like. no. ao3 doesnt have an algorithm. you should be able to fucking tell what you like and what you dont like and steer away from that kind of content and let people fucking be with their art. they dont owe you anything (except trigger warnings i'd argue, but i know some people disagree with that as well for some reason), and imagine how much more energy you'd have if you only engaged with things you liked and spent time looking at instead of going to places where you dont enjoy yourself. let alone spending time telling other people you dont enjoy what they enjoy. what a fucking life

[mushramoo]

something abt a creature being made from the grief of a man who lost everything and took that pain out on the people around him. and that creature only knowing some fragments of tear-stained memories from family that it never knew and never will. going through the motions of the man it came from, trying desperately to feel fulfilled by the values that aren’t from it. something abt that photo reminded it of who it was EVEN FOR A SPLIT SECOND. memories that it never had. PAIN THAT IT NEVER FELT! longing for people it NEVER KNEW.

something about a creature made of Afton’s pain and agony, that only remembers the desire to see his kids again. I AM GOING PRIMAL

[chloesimaginationthings]

Who do you want FNAF to collab with?..

[kawoid]

C0IN

[cannibalisticskittles]

so much of the wigmaker's job continues to stay with me but especially this bit.

like. do you think illario hearing lucanis brush off the possibility of his death again and again contributed to illario giving lucanis to zara.

because yes, of course there's jealousy. of course there is. lucanis is primed to get everything illario wants and nothing illario does seems to change that in the slightest. he can never be good enough, not when there's lucanis to measure up to.

but. not only does lucanis not actually want what's coming his way (he does not at all want to be first talon but they both know caterina DOES want this and lucanis could never tell her no), he's also throwing himself into these jobs with such disregard for his personal safety that there's a sense of inevitability that surrounds the idea of his death.

this conversation feels like... it may not have been discussed like this so clearly before, but they've at least poked around the edges in the past. thought about it. and this moment might have been a turning point, in a way -- illario coming to terms with the fact that lucanis really just will. not. stop. for ANYTHING. his cousin WILL get himself killed doing this and lucanis won’t have any regrets. he’ll leave illario to go this alone. (no one to follow after anymore.)

i wonder if he started to think -- if lucanis is going to die anyway, maybe it’d be better to have that happen sooner, rather than later.

lucanis wouldn’t be happy as first talon (+ honestly, maybe this part is a stretch, but illario seems to see that what lucanis is NOW isn’t so much ‘happy’ as it is ‘obedient and content to accept the scraps that gives him’), and he’s GOING to get himself killed doing this, anyway…

so yeah, he could wait it out. wait for lucanis to do something foolish enough that he can't just walk away from it. maybe he’ll even last long enough to be made first talon (if caterina can bear to loosen her grip from the title) and be miserable for a while. years even, maybe! before lucanis, again, does something he can’t walk away from.

or.

illario could cut through all the pointless waiting and get right to the point. go straight to where this was always going to end up. and if illario is in charge of this, maybe he can benefit from it, and salvage one good thing from this whole mess, instead of being caught up in it later down the line.

(which then might tread into the territory of anticipated grief, too – lucanis' loss will be agony, but, if illario controls when and how it happens, he can control his grief. …except he hadn’t accepted the inevitability of lucanis’ death quite as well as he’d thought and when he gets sloshed at the wake, real grief seeps through the cracks)

just... something about this conversation. both of them viewing lucanis’ death as a foregone conclusion. lucanis accepting that easily, and illario struggling with that more -- and maybe having that shape his actions. not exactly a healthy expression of grief, but since when has anything this family done been healthy?

[buttercupshands]

have a transparent Loop because I actually put efford into this one out of allllll the sprites I did today just because.

[artuurle]

Hello! I absolutely adore how you draw Hector, and your Grujaja art has wrecked me to my core with love. Fabulous big little guys. 100/10 would recommend. Anywho, I keep looking at your art of Hector popping his own head off to diss himself and can’t help but wonder: do you think he would ever (post A LOT OF HEALING) do silly stuff with his ability to go to pieces?

yes 100% he does after he gets in a better headspace unfortunately its very commonly used to mess with his boys in my heart and soul. This is because all the bizzyboys are silly little guys including him.

This dude sucks lets kill him.