#half answer

[vanhelsingapologist]

Hey so tell me about Rudolph van Richten. Do you excuse his war crimes?

The Van Richten Conundrum

5e Van Richten is a mess. Let me monologue.

SPOILERS?? FOR VAN RICHTEN??

I think everyone kind of knows that, but I'm gonna say it anyway. He's unbearably racist, he's unhelpful, and he's overall difficult to work with if you play him as written. That's why we have older Ravenloft Van Richten, a character you can inject a little more nuance into.

I know a common interpretation is to nix his prejudice entirely, and honestly? Yeah. I think that's fine. In fact, I think it could make it a more comfortable experience for everyone involved.

However, for familial and heritage reasons, my DM went to me and asked me how I wanted to handle it. They laid out the whole thing (tiger, Ez's family, backstory) and let me decide what I wanted to do.

I decided to read the guides. They detailed a man who was turned to vicious hate because of the loss of his family. It wasn't righteous. It was ugly, even though he believed otherwise. You could see the path, and it didn't make it better. It made it tragic and awful. And then Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani came, and he started to change and learn. He started to feel shame and realized the cycle would continue. He disinherits his previous beliefs and tries to make restitution. I couldn't figure out why 5e, in an effort to clean things up, somehow made him worse when in the original material, he was, for lack of a better word, "recovering" by the time Curse of Strahd would be rolling around.

(Do I recommend Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani personally? NO. Definitely not. I think a lot of stuff in there is awful in ways that are completely, hilariously unintentional. Read it, by all means, and enjoy the story but I wouldn't touch some of that wording with a 5-foot pole.)

I told my DM it was important to me that he had once held those prejudices but that he was at the same place he was at the end of his guide. Tiger was changed to hunt vampires. No weird head in the trunk. Healing and learning were things I preferred to see, and honestly, in our group, I was glad my DM checked my comfort level and willingness to make that call. It made our story a lot richer. I love escapist fantasy, but I'm glad we elected for that approach with Van Richten, because...

I think Strahd (as a module) asks about redeemability a lot.

Mods like the Interactive Tome, I can imagine, likely expand on this. We asked the question "do your past actions make who you are now? Have you done enough to deserve absolution?" a LOT. That was the game we wanted to play. "Who do you become despite who you were?" We asked this again and again. This won't be the same answer for every party. Some people don't want to engage with that, and that's completely valid and fine.

Rudolph van Richten, against all odds, became one of my favorite characters in DnD.

I'll try and give an even longer answer sometime to profile the character my DM played. But this was about the crimes.

Anyway, so, I don't forgive his crimes. You deserve, Van Richten! But I do think they were important in our game. Long, long answer.

[heyitssmimart]

I adore Happy Birthday Mr Baskets, and was so obsessed upon first hearing 'Half Answer' that I did this piece based on the music video for it. I love the artist's low-poly, sort of PS2 graphic style that really just reminds me of childhood, yk?

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

I am incredibly serious right now when I beg you all, please, and if you have Twitter or Tiktok or whatever to please spread the word: click on an author's profile on Ao3.

You want to know if an author has written more? Want to know if they're still writing? Want to see more from them? Want to know if they've written a trope or kink or sex scenario you enjoy?

Click on their name. And look at their profile.

I cannot tell you how many times in the last six months someone has read a new or newer fic of mine and said they (a new reader who has read nothing else I've done) "can't wait to see what you do next!" I've written 50+ fics and over a million words already.

"I don't know if you're still writing..." click on my profile. I am. I literally wrote a 128k+ fic for that ship last month.

"Would you ever do X?" "Please do Y!" I already did. Click on my name and look at my works.

Archive of our Own is a library. It's an archive. Not social media. It is your responsibility to fight back against the laziness that corporate algorithms have trained into you.

Click my author name. Just click it. Just click it.

Before you demand more, or ask if a writer will do XYZ, or wonder if the author still writing, or anything - click on their profile. Click on the author's profile.

I'm not trying to be mean or condescending or anything like that. I'm just exhausted. It's disheartening and frustrating to repeat myself ad nauseam, because someone couldn't take thirty seconds to do the tiniest bit of work to see if I've written lately, if I've written more for their ship, or scan my works to see if I've written what they're asking for. Please. Please. I'm begging.

Click the author's name, and explore before you ask.

[akanemnon]

Ghosts. How do they work?

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[anniebass]

high spice tolerance, my ass

(old man smut)

[arsenicflame]

Bonus round! Do you use a queue tag?

[sieluritari]

A lot of us with ADHD are familiar with the concept of time blindness, but for anyone who isn't: it's a neurological inability to have a consistent sense of the passage of time. If you put me in an empty room, gave me a button and told me to press it when I think it's been 15 minutes, I might press it after..... idk, anywhere between 3 minutes and 2 hours? And if we repeated it the next day the result would probably be wildly different!

But something I've only seen mentioned in one (1) Reddit post, which took some extensive digging to find, is the same effect extending to ALL things measured in numbers. Distance, weight, length, height, amount, space, volume, percentage... For me, small numbers are a bit easier, I could approximate a centimetre probably, but a metre would be much harder and 10 or 100 would likely miss the mark by a lot. Also, anything that can't be easily measured with a ruler or a measuring tape (like weight or volume) is even harder since I don't encounter reference points (like a 1kg hand weight) for those as frequently as I see visual representations of specific lengths.

It's not dyscalculia or anything like that, I'm decent at math (and the OP of the Reddit post was a math major) and I have no other difficulties with numbers, it's just a disconnect in translating real life experiences like sensory input into numbers (and possibly also inconsistent processing of sensory input? Like how the same sound volume is okay one day but hurts my ears the next?), which I think is basically the same thing as what happens with time blindness. For now I've been calling it "measurement blindness" since I've never seen a name for it anywhere, but maybe "quantity blindness" could also work?

I've talked to other people with time blindness to see if they experience this too, but so far none of them have known what I'm talking about. I'd really like to know how many of us are out there and if anyone knows literally anything actually scientific about this very inconvenient phenomenon!

Tl;dr: bc I am wordy:

It's like time blindness but for all things measured in numbers

Not dyscalculia or caused by it

Pretty much never seen it talked about anywhere

Please tell me if it sounds familiar and/or you know something about it, thank

[marbledtaiga]

I can't tell if the orange is hot or just so fucking charismatic that my standards have been irreversibly altered.

I think it may quite possibly just be the charisma.

[l3viat8an]

Stuck somewhere between Mammon can solve a rubik’s cube in like 30 seconds or Mammon can’t solve a rubik’s cube to save his life.

[markscherz]

Hot damn. Great question, I'd love to tell you.

High Fantasy

Look, this rainfrog is called Breviceps bagginsi, so I don't have a lot of choice, now do I?

[src]

Also, I would go with them to the end. Into the very fires of Mordor.

Low Fantasy

Phyllomedusine hylids have a certain weird clown marionette vibe to them. Just look at these Pithecopus rohdei.

[src]

Lovecraftian

The male Rhinoderma darwinii raises his tadpoles in his vocal sac.

Sci-Fi

Gephyromantis pseudoasper sometimes wear handsome stripes—very Space Age™

But more importantly, their calls evoke a battle with laser-blasters.

I filmed this calling male in 2017 at an obscene hour of the morning.

Horror

Trichobatrachus robustus, aka the Hairy Frog, has flanks and thighs covered in weird, hair-like outgrowths that increase oxygen exchange over its skin, and BREAKS ITS FINGERS TO STAB YOU WITH CLAWS MADE OF BONE

[src]

Romance

Breviceps males physically glue themselves to the back-ends of females, and if that's not romance, I don't know what is.

[src]

Comedy

Nyctimantis arapapa are probably amongst the funniest-looking frogs out there.

[src]

Adult

The 'poly' in Polypedates may be a double entendre

[src]

Crime and Mystery

Calyptocephalella gayi is a Galaxy Brain frog.

[src]

Speculative

Myobatrachus gouldii is basically what would happen if you decided to try to build a turtle, but you only had frog pieces in the kit.

[src]

[claraoswalds]

The sky's a burnt orange, with the Citadel enclosed in a mighty glass dome, shining under the twin suns. Beyond that, the mountains go on forever. Slopes of deep red grass, capped with snow.

The Legend of Ruby Sunday // The Sound of Drums

[originalartblog]

-

He calls him small and little all the time, but when no one's looking, an old mocking nickname fondly makes a comeback

[sp0o0kylights]

I'm rewatching S3 and there's a part at the very end of the 7th episode where Mike tells Dustin he couldn't understand half of what he said over the walkie.

Dustin responds by going: "Goddamn low battery"

AND STEVE, our BOY responds by going "How many times do I have to tell you with the low battery!?"

WHICH MEANS: this is a situation that's happened before, specifically, happened enough between the two of them that Steve's bitched multiple times about how Dustin needs to replace his batteries more often bc he lets them go low.

So either somewhat vigilant Steve is canon OR (the more likely scenario canon wise) Dustin bothers the living shit out of Steve with the walkie and Steve just casually accepts this as part of their friendship, and gets annoyed when Dustin's battery dies on the reg lol.

[amphibianaday]

day 1421

[inkzectz]

can you pretty please draw gordon freeman (hlvrai) as a woman

Here u go!!!

One gordie coming right up! ^_^

[nelsaqift]

[tma au] hey remember when this whole thing actually revolved around the dread powers like the source material. yeah me neither