#i am so grateful for the regulars who keep the discord alive

[not-poignant]

Had a question. I've been in the Fae Tales Discord server for several months now, but a lot gets sent in it, and I don't have the time or energy to keep up with it. I end up basically lurking and reading what gets said without replying much beyond sticker replies. I feel bad about it, but I get really anxious whenever I try to be more active in the discord. It seems like you're all quite tight-knit and full of knowledge and wit. Is it bad if I just read along and don't say much? I can try more if that's better

Hi anon!

There's actually a ton of lurkers in the Fae Tales Discord and it's perfectly fine! I only know some of them when they emoji react to stuff and I love that. (Seriously we have some regular 'emoji react' lurkers and I get so excited when I see them reacting to stuff).

Fae Tales and my writing in general has always drawn in quite a few people with high anxiety and social anxiety, so it's only natural that the server itself would be totally fine with people who have to lurk. That's normal!

In fact, it even says in the rules:

"You can expect spoilery content if you haven't read everything (even outside of post-update-spoiler-chat), people talking too much about media, fae, politics, fandom, general silliness, a lot of lurking (you are also welcome to lurk), and a queer-friendly atmosphere."

Lurkers being welcome is codified into the rules and has been since the very beginning. Trust me anon, the only reason you don't realise you aren't alone in your social anxiety is because the other lurkers aren't talking ;)

(Also, it's perfectly fine to just chat once a month, or once every few months too. This happens! Though the chat might seem tight-knit, and some of us do turn up daily, there are folks who only chat once or twice a week, or once or twice a month, but have just been in the chat for so long that they're familiar.

Some folks turn up like 6 times a year. Some turn up once. Some just emoji react when it suits them. Some only visit one or two channels and have the rest muted. There's absolutely zero judgement no matter if / how often / when etc. you decide you want to participate. Folks can test out de-lurking and then lurk again, folks who have never lurked can try lurking for a while, and so on. It's literally there to work for you, in that sense. I'm sure you have way more knowledge and wit than you realise, but I can understand having social anxiety in group situations absolutely.

Imho, if you have high social anxiety, you can just mute it and then check occasionally for excerpts and fanart, because a lot of fanart gets posted there that never gets posted on Tumblr or even Instagram - and same with excerpts, so it can just be a good way to intermittently access things you wouldn't normally see otherwise)

(Also for folks who didn't realise there was a Fae Tales Discord / Discord for my writing, it's here!)

[digimon-digital-adventures]

Minor Update and Building Enemies

So this post has two parts. One, making sure everyone following knows that I’m not really updating the tumblog much anymore and I’m much easier to reach on the Discord linked in the pinned post. I know this is probably frustrating but I’m just not cut out for regular posting here anymore because I’m old tired and have a full time job now instead of doing a lot of this work on my down time. So things will continue to be sporadic but I’m still available, just not really here on this site. If you don’t want to join the DDA discord that’s fine, you can reach me at TM93#4119 on Discord too.

I know this kind of sucks, and I know I started getting popular via tumblr and still have a backlog of messages (and if I haven’t gotten to them I’m sorry, I legitimately don’t even know how old they are anymore. I am eternally grateful for what everyone here has done to help get the word out about DDA whether you joined our Discord or not.

Second this has been a long time coming, but DDA doesn’t lend itself well to a fullblown bestiary or monster manual. So this post is going to lay down some guidelines and set up some future posts I have planned about making enemy encounters in DDA.

So first things first; how do  you design an enemy for DDA? It’s recommended to prioritize Health as your survival stat and Accuracy for your offensive stat, if that hasn’t been gone over I can ramble about that for a bit.

Effectively, Health as your primary survival stat makes you easy to hit and able to survive bigger hits, but still makes the numbers players can toss at you bigger. This allows players to feel strong and important without breezing through things too. This isn’t to say Dodge and Armor should be ignored, just that if you have to pick a big survival stat, Health is the way to go.

As an aside for this point; be very careful when taking Combat Monster on an enemy who prioritizes Health. It can get out of hand very fast and should be weighed more similarly to a lower end Boss Quality when an enemy takes it.

Offense is a bit different; we really only have two options between Accuracy and Damage, but of the two Accuracy scales a bit worse after initially hitting. So this allows a bit of variance in how much damage you deal while still being threatening (but not so threatening that you’re liable to oneshot an unlucky player outside of big outliers).

So now with those two key theories laid out, we can dive into what we’ll be sorting enemies into; general roles! This is similar to how players will fall into build archetypes between Strikers, Tanks, Supports, and the like, but we’ll try and branch out a bit as stages go up.

Striker: this role is primarily about dealing damage to threaten the enemy. There’s several sub-roles between where you like to be on the field like melee strikers vs ranged strikers, or frail strikers that don’t have much durability vs bulky strikers who are kind of like miniature tanks. Almost every Digimon will like to be a Striker as a secondary role because being able to deal damage is just a good idea, but primary strikers will often branch out into other roles themselves as options open up more.

Tank: this role is about being very difficult to take down while keeping allies alive. This is usually done with a taunt or interceding to make you the most appealing target on the field, but there are other more creative ways to tank. When categorizing enemies I’ll try to make three broad types of tank between the meat tank, the dodge tank, and the control tank. Meat tanks are your standard ‘big hard to take down’ type monster, dodge tanks survive by being hard to hit in the first place, and control tanks are a bit of a hybrid between a tank and support who keep you locked down between grappling or battlefield control to attack them first.

Support: Support is an incredibly broad category I use a lot, but effectively it’s anything from buffing allies to debuffing enemies to controlling the field. These Digimon exist to help make their allies lives easier in one way or another, effectively making the other party members more dangerous by extension. This category may need more breaking down but I’ll be sure to cover the archetype the best I can.

Other: some enemies won’t fit into an easy classification, being very generalized, or just plain wacky. This won’t be gone over much in these guides but know that you could make something say, just built for movement that doesn’t do much damage or support otherwise, or a Digimon built to make skill checks.

What to expect going forward: I’m going to be making a few posts that I plan to get to eventually (hopefully in the next month because it’s been a repeated topic on the Discord) all about enemy templates using these roles going from Rookie to Mega. Each one will be about a specialized role, and I’ll be treating them similarly to how I used to do the Digimon Spotlights. I’m doing it this way to help make sorting through all this a fair bit easier. I’ll also probably try to make a downloadable pdf for people to take on the go but that’ll take a bit longer.

[heisthemaskiwear]

i have lived so much, truly never denied myself anything i wanted for the most vibrant years of my life, that i feel like i know the flavors and the magic and the wonder that life holds and i could never imagine anything more beautiful.

life is just total random insanity that we shuffle into some form of order like ants building a nest. and we know that some random event can intentionally or unintentionally end it all and we cant prevent it, but we control what we are able to and carve out our lives in this cold, random universe.

and we make it warm and we make it love and we are the gods of it. if you want to be an apathetic god and create nothing that is all you. you are your own ruler. the master of your universe.

but i choose to be discord, i choose to be random chaotic love and goodness, i choose to embrace the filth and ugliness in this world and still try to show warmth and light to those around me and that is how i live with myself.

the only thing that keeps me going every. single. day. is that at least one person per shift tells me how much i have helped them and how grateful they are for me. i am told on a semi-regular basis that god intended for this person to speak to me and that i am an angel and a blessing.

i give my all to these people. i give every ounce of who i am. people who are crying, scared, hopeless. people who are suffering financial loss because of an issue they can't solve. people who need to recover memories. people who want to speak to their loved ones or video call their grandchildren but cant. people who don't understand whats happening or why and its been a hindrance to their lives in a very real way.

bringing happiness to others, helping to fix their issues, truly being the reliever of burden, knowing that my warmth and care and love extends all over north america. maybe further. it fuels me.

because that is what the world is missing today. it is missing vessels of light. it is missing truth and unbridled care for your fellow struggling human beings. your fellow man.

and if you see no purpose in your life, and you choose to become bigger than yourself, and you dedicate yourself to bringing light to others, maybe you yourself will begin to shine inside.

because if i didn't i don't know if i would be alive today.

[hoodoo12]

The Music of Sherlock Holmes

Several years ago, I was involved in the Sherlock fandom. It continues to regularly appears on my dash, and I am happy people are still into it. I personally some of my best writing was for the fandom. Below the cut please find a story I wrote for it. I was never in the Johnlock camp, so you won’t see that here. What you will see is a character study of John Watson, and how what he must put up with living in a flat with Sherlock Holmes. 

It is horror. There is death. And more than  a nod to Lovecraft . . .

Enjoy!

Sherlock kept strange hours. That wasn’t anything new to his flatmate. The detective didn’t care a whit about proper etiquette regarding when it would be appropriate or not appropriate to play his violin, and that wasn’t new to John either.

But lately, lately, the middle of the night serenades were a bit too much to bear. The tunes weren’t melodious. They were barely music at all, all screeching strings and wild notes, played with frantic fingers and a ferociously sweeping bow.

Many times John crept down the stairs and listened outside his flatmate’s bedroom door. He always meant to knock, but as if Sherlock could sense he was there, the noise would cease.

John wasn’t sure what was going on, and during the day Sherlock kept to his room, barely exiting for any length of time.

However, when John happened to notice that the cup Sherlock set on near the sink—tea courtesy of John, of course—had bloody fingerprints on it, he jumped up from his chair and rushed forward to catch his flatmate’s sleeve before he disappeared behind his door again.

If it proved that he’d been watching the detective like a mother hen, he didn’t care.

“You’re bleeding,” the doctor said, as if Sherlock didn’t know, or hadn’t noticed.

John took Sherlock’s wrist and maneuvered his hand around to examine the raw fingertips.

“The blood feeds the strings,” Sherlock answered. He said this plainly, as though it should be obvious, and not at all cryptic or worrying.

John sighed and didn’t rise to the bait of asking him to clarify. “Sherlock,” he admonished, “you need to give that violin a break.”

That startled the other man. “No! I cannot!”

“Sherlock—“

“I cannot, John. I cannot.”

The repetition of denial was odd, with its solid emphasis on “cannot” instead of the more expected, stubborn “will not”. The conviction behind the words was undeniable. John tried a different tactic.

“Well, the music you’re playing is certainly something different. Are you composing?”

At the pseudo-praise and sincere query, Sherlock relaxed a minute amount.

“No . . . these compositions aren’t mine. An envelope arrived with handwritten sheet music inside. Not a full score—pages of the sonata are missing. But the note attached to them insinuated that perhaps I could fill in what had been misplaced, and that is a mystery I cannot ignore. I have done my best, and will continue to try.

“To my personal failings, I don’t read much German, so I have only been able to translate a portion of the note.”

“Let me take a look. I know a bit of German myself, I could help—“

“No!” The interruption was immediate and sharp, even more so than the refusal to stop playing.

“Sherlock—“

The detective twisted his wrist out of the doctor’s grip, and retreated to his room. The door slammed shut, and the lock engaged, signaling the finality of the conversation.

John sighed and wondered what he should do.

That night the music was worse than before. John wasn’t aware a stringed instrument could produce such grating, harsh sounds. He pulled a pillow over his head and hoped exhaustion would claim him.

He did not see hide or hair of his flatmate for several days following. The midnight music had continued, but even John with his untrained ear could tell they were less powerful and stuttery in their execution. Was Sherlock succumbing to his own fatigue? Was the detective finished with whatever compelled him to keep playing night after night?

It was near ten in the evening now. John wondered if his flatmate had eaten anything in these past days. With a sigh of resignation, he put the kettle on and went about preparations for tea. While he waited for the water to come to temperature, he grilled a cheese toastie. If Sherlock declined both, at least he would have done his part as a concerned friend.

With plate and cup in hand, John went to Sherlock’s door. He used his knee to rap on it, and to his surprise, it swung open several inches. He’d expected it to be closed and locked, and stood for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to enter.

When Sherlock made no acknowledgement of his door opening, John pushed it wider. No complaints about the door, and then no complaints about the room being invaded.

The room was dim but not pitch black. After several moments, the streetlights outside provided enough light for John to see by. Colors were muted, but not completely washed away. It was chilly; John figured it was due to an open window.

John found Sherlock sprawled face down on his mattress. John paused for a moment, to determine his flatmate was both alive (the slight rise and fall of his chest was evidence) and sleeping (the deep and regular pattern of breath showed that). From the unkempt state of the bed and the smears of blood in various places on the sheets, it was obvious he’d continually opened the wounds on his fingers without bothering to attend to them. The detective himself was also scruffy and unwashed.

Carefully and quietly John set the food and drink on the bedside table. When Sherlock still didn’t move, he even more carefully and quietly crossed the room to the desk and music stand near the far window.

Papers were scattered haphazardly across the wooden desk. The sheet music that Sherlock had mentioned was on the music stand; John could see that the staff and notes were faded, and where his friend had scribbled in new ones. Some he’d simply filled in to make the original more legible, others he had crossed out and added other notes altogether.

There was no name on the arrangement.

John turned his attention to the papers on the desk. They were yellowed, brittle, and a few had the same disturbing smears and smudges that adorned Sherlock’s sheets. The cramped foreign words had been written in a spidery hand, and John strained to read any of it.

What little he could translate made no sense, and a dull ache started in his brow.

“It’s not that there’s no light, you know.”

John jumped. “Jesus, Sherlock!”

Sherlock was sitting on the bed now, watching him with hooded eyes. He didn’t say anything more, until John prompted,

“What do you mean, it’s not because there’s no light?”

“That headache that’s brewing,” he replied dismissively. “You were rubbing your forehead like you do when you’re getting a headache.”

John hadn’t been aware he’d done that.

“It’s what the words say, John. Even if you can’t read them all, they wiggle into the deeper crevices in your brain. The primal side of you, the lizard brain, senses the danger, even as your higher faculties do not.”

That dull ache hadn’t dissipated, but it hadn’t grown worse. John wondered, briefly, if it was because he wasn’t looking at the paper any longer. Then he chided himself that that was ridiculous.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded, irritably.

Sherlock didn’t get up. “The music, John. The music is the key. It creates its own symphony—no, discord! Cacophony! It uses horrid noises that worm through to our time, our space! Every night it makes its attempt! Perhaps the night is easiest for it to traverse the stars, slipping through the dark matter to our atmosphere, but that is a puzzle I have no energy or resources to devote to right now. It hates its place, it hates our harmony with our world, it wants to come here and—it doesn’t want to take over, per se, that’s a human trait and it is beyond the scope and breadth of humanity. It wants to fill our space with the same dissonance it must live in—“

The detective’s voice had grown in timbre and urgency. John snapped,

“Sherlock! That’s enough!”

He’d been in the military; he knew how to override other voices and shut them down.

Sherlock complied, in part.

His voice lost its pitch. It did not lose its fervor.

“Herr Zann was so close, John,” he whispered. “He almost succeeded in closing the gate! But he stumbled—I don’t know if he lost his concentration, or a string broke, or—“

John glanced down at the paper in his hand again. A name at the bottom caught his eye, “Erich Zann”. Obviously the man who wrote these notes and probably the music. Obviously the man who had become Sherlock’s obsession, and somehow managed to tip his friend dangerously close to the edge of collapse and what sounded like insanity—

Who this man was meant nothing right now. John had to calm Sherlock down; get him to eat something, bathe, and actually sleep instead of this catnapping that he’d been doing. He’d use force or prescription drugs if he had too; Sherlock was plainly distressed.

He dropped the paper and turned back to Sherlock completely.

“Come on, Sherlock. Let’s get you up. A shower will help, and then we’ll talk about all this—“

A deep thrumming sensation made the hairs on the back of John’s neck rise. It wasn’t a sound, not really, just a feeling, just a suggestion of sound that took up residence in his ears. Then came a slight pain, like diving too deeply underwater without equalizing the pressure in his head. That pain quickly escalated and John clapped his hands to his ears and doubled over.

“It’s here!” Sherlock cried.

His flatmate’s voice sounded far away.

In a flurry of movement Sherlock was out of his bed, knocking John off balance in his rush to scoop up his violin and throw back the curtains of the window. He set bow to strings, and countered the thrumming with his own noise.

Walls and doors had shielded John from Sherlock’s previous nightly musical endeavors. Now he suffered the full force of the abuse Sherlock whetted out to the instrument: squeals and shrieks and notes that couldn’t possibly have a name or position on the scale. John alternately howled and grit his teeth and struggled to right himself.

The sounds continued, even as he made it to his feet. The noise that Sherlock produced clashed with the unearthly noise that flooded in from the window. Both sounds collided inside John’s head, until he could no longer separate one from the other.

What could make such horrific, unnatural sound in the center of London? With the mattress at the back of his knees for support, John turned to see.

The cityscape, with its the familiar tops of buildings and light pollution, was not there. In its place outside the open window was a yawning blackness, too solid to be the night, too full of flitting shapes and visions to belong in this universe. Impossibly, the silhouette of Sherlock furiously sawing at his violin was visible against the nightmare outside.

Something in John’s mind, something with the strongest survival instinct possible, turned him away. He fell backwards onto the soiled bed, the disharmony seeping in and filling in all the spaces between his cells, and he knew no more.

When he awoke, he couldn’t open his eyes immediately. He cried out, panicked, and rubbed at his face. His eyelids had been crusted shut. After he picked them open, John recognized the dark brown flakes under his fingernails.

Blood.

His cheeks were stiff from the dried blood. Both sides of his neck were coated in it too; he’d hemorrhaged from eyes and ears. The sheer amount of it stuck him to the sheets. He carefully peeled himself off so he could sit up.

Sherlock’s room was filled with sunlight. A breeze ruffled the curtains, and over the din of traffic, John could hear birdsong.

Sherlock was not in the room.

The detective was not in the flat. With growing dread, John searched every room, and then searched them again. Then he tripped down the stairs to pound on Mrs. Hudson’s door. He ignored her shock and questions as to why he was coated in old blood and demanded to know if she’d seen Sherlock go out.

She hadn’t, but he knew that. He’d found his flatmate’s jacket and wallet and mobile phone in their customary places upstairs. Sherlock never left the flat without them.

Wearily, and still ignoring his landlady’s worry, he climbed the stairs again. He made his way back to Sherlock’s bedroom and sank onto the bed.

He would never have the skills Sherlock had. He would never have the brilliance. He scanned the room and tried to put it all together: the papers from the desk and the sheet music were scattered. Sherlock’s violin was in one piece, but looked worse for wear with a crack in the bridge, scorch marks like it had been burned along the lower bout, and dark, blood-stained strings. The bow had been splintered; its horsehair frayed.

There was no evidence of the detective—no fibers from torn clothing, no drops of blood, nothing to point to where he had been spirited away to.

“You stupid fool,” John said aloud, to no one. “You should have let me help. The man wrote his music for a viol, not violin. It was right there in his notes! And you, you with your stubbornness, you with your refusing to let me plaster your fingers—the blood on the strings, the blood on the strings was enough to throw it all off, to tip the balance—and now you’re gone and I’m . . . I’m . . .“

He realized he was shouting with a cracked voice, and weeping.

Sherlock was gone. John would never even come close to what he had accomplished. He didn’t have the resilience Sherlock had, confronting this thing night after night. He had never picked up a stringed instrument in his life, but knew if he were to carry on what Sherlock had attempted to contain, he would have to try.

And if—when—he failed, he could only hope that he would meet up with the Consulting Detective again.

fin.