#is it so bad to want people to stop dying??????? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

anim-ttrpgs · 2 days ago

Text

I want to provide an example of a dungeon crawl for the people who have only been exposed to dungeon crawling through shitty D&D5e modules or bad games of telephone about what classic dungeon crawling looks like.

I’m gonna try not to go into too much detail just because if I do, I’ll be here all day and night because this campaign is so good and all of the characters have so much depth but I still have to give context. (welp, i made it pretty fucking long anyway, but I think it paints a clearer picture that way.)

This is an mildly homebrewed* AD&D2e “troupe campaign” with rotating DMs starring a fictional band of mercenaries called the White Company(not to be confused with the actual White Company or the other fictional White Company) in an alternate history 1390s-1430s England with elves and wizards and shit. I’m really getting to put my Masters in medieval history and culture to good use for once. There’s a rotating cast of characters, as parties are formed from the larger pool of characters in the White Company to undertake mercenary jobs.

*one of the biggest homebrew rules we use is that there is no magical resurrection. Instead of dying instantly with the expectation that they can be magically revived later, characters who fall to 0 HP must receive medical attention from somebody who has the Healing skill immediately, and make a Constitution-based roll to see if they can pull through. If they don’t die, they still permanently lose 1 point of Constitution and must spend weeks or months recovering before they can fight again.

This is happening in a real 1979 D&D adventure module, adapted slightly to fit our setting, but it’s still genuine classic dungeon crawling. The DM is sticking closely to it and just presenting the sandbox for the PCs to do stuff in.

TL;DR: (also spoilers. Skip the TL;DR if you want to read this as a narrative without knowing what happens)

A classic dungeon crawl is not just a dull slog through a bunch of rooms full of monsters and back-to-back boring slap-fight combat. One may encounter:

>yes, monsters, definitely. Some will be out in the open, some will ambush the party, and some will be easy to ambush by the party, but rarely is fighting and killing them the only option. Combat happens either when the party screws up, or when they initiate it on their own terms.

>other adventurers looting the same dungeon

>hidden treasure

>monsters that are basically a trap and puzzle themselves and can’t be fought by just making attack rolls at them

>monsters that can be talked to and negotiated with

>environmental storytelling that can also be hints about hidden traps, monsters, etc.

>boobytraps

>secret doors

>plenty of moments for the characters' personalities to shine

(END OF SPOILERS)

The White Company is currently under the employ of a certain castillan who is having to fight against a pretender to his claims to his lands. The lord that this castellan owes fielty has noticed that a certain village has stopped paying their taxes, and asked the castellan to deal with it. The castellan told the White Company, currently on his payroll, and the White Company sent a small group of mercenaries to either investigate or rough the peasants up until they pay. (Medieval mercenaries nor classic D&D adventurers were exactly heroes. Members of the White Company have engaged in some real moving acts of heroism in this campaign but that’s a different story.)

The White Company party consisted of 8 PCs, because AD&D expects bigass parties. We‘ve had parties of up to 13 PCs before in this campaign, because this is before D&D got embarrassed about its wargaming ancestry. This might sound scary but honestly AD&D2e does not make it hard for a player to play multiple characters at once. It’s expected.

Anyway, they passed a ransacked wagon on the road while traveling to the village. When they got to the village, everything was just fine, no great plumes of smoke or burninated peasants. So they asked the village headman what the deal was, and he was like “What do you mean? We sent the taxes last week.”

Well, that was the ransacked wagon. Here I’m going to start really fast-forwarding.

The White Company mercs did some investigating and found out who sacked the wagon, kicked their asses and ran them off, and discovered just the slightest hint that there was more to this story..

More investigation, a discovery that there’s a greater conspiracy afoot, a fight with two spies that left Elora the Elf bedridden under the care of the local barber-surgeon after getting stabbed in the gut(one party member down.)

Fast-forwarding more. They discover that the old abandoned fort that’s full of monsters is actually where a contingent of the bad guys have made their forward operating base. This abandoned castle is supposedly full of monsters ever since the calamity that made everything full of monsters but that’s another story too. God I’m bad at brief stories. Anyway the bad guys have some tricks for avoiding the monsters on their way in and out apparently.

So, it’s time for the White Company to assault that abandoned castle. That’s a dungeon, and now it’s dungeon crawling time. Using a huge amount of money they found during the investigation, they subcontract some more mercenaries, a party from the Badger Company, and also convince the village headman to levy some peasant militiamen.

Now the party is 24-strong, almost half of that being archers.

I’m fast-forwarding some more. They had a little.. incident where they ran into a group of adventurers trying to loot the place, mistook them for the bad guys, and shot two of them with crossbow bolts. Luckily, and due to the medical skills of some of the party, those two survived, but one of them will be on crutches for a while. After that embarrassing misunderstanding, they find the way down into the lower floors of the castle, but before they go, they want to make sure there’s no chance of anything coming behind them, so they investigate every room on the upper floor. Ordinarily, going around provoking everything in a dungeon and having back-to-back combat encounters would be inadvisable, but they’re 24 men strong. They find a room full of giant rats and shoot them to death with crossbow bolts. They find a giant lizard thing asleep on a rock and shoot it to death with crossbow bolts. They find a giant snake in its nest and shoot it to death with crossbow bolts. Then a giant tick drops from the ceiling and bites into Abigail, the youngest White Company member present, right through her mail armor. They stab it to death but its sucker thing is buried deep in there and they can’t just pull it out because it’s got barbs. She was at very low HP after the initial bite and just ripping the thing out could easily nick the artery and kill her. Luckily, Herr Rike(Fighter-Thief) and all around unpleasant woman, is also a barber-surgeon, and several of the spellcasters can provide a limited amount of magical healing. She had to strip down while the men averted their eyes and stood watch. While Abigail, teary-eyed, bit down on the shaft of a crossbow bolt, Rike was able to carefully cut the thing out of her, with magical healing coming right after to ensure that this doesn’t, well, completely disable the use of her arm. After a few moments of recovery (accelerated by the magic), Abigail got dressed again, and soon had the gruff men of the Badger Company clapping her on the back and congratulating her for making it through that. “We’ve all been there!” “Yer a real mercenary now!” “That’ll put some hair on yer chest, figuratively!”

(I’m making sure to include all this stuff in detail to dispel the myth that “dungeon crawling means no roleplaying.” That part kinda was “back-to-back combat” but only because the party went out of their way to find every monster, all of which could’ve been avoided otherwise.)

Each of these encounters lasted like 1 combat round and less than 15 minutes of real time even with that many characters, because AD&D2e combat doesn’t fucking suck.

There was some treasure to find too, pretty valuable stuff, but for the sake of this not being even more overly long the only thing I’m going to mention is a large jug of lamp oil.

Descending the stairs, a man and woman of the Badger Company were suddenly dropped down on by two acidic green slimes. The party quickly discovered that these could not be conventionally attacked, especially not while they’re clinging to the distressed Badger Company members. Slicing and stabbing the slimes with swords does nothing obviously, and risks further injuring their allies.

Thinking quickly, Abigail has the idea to try scraping and shoveling the slime off with her shield, which kind of works, and everyone with a shield follows suit. The slimed Badger Company mercs survive, managing to avoid total disfigurement too, but are in no condition to continue. Their armor and helmets and weapons have been ruined by the acid and they’ve lost a lot of skin. Everyone whose shield was used to shovel off the slime also lost their shields as the acid ruined them.

The man and woman that got slimed had to go up stairs and wait for the return of the larger group, it was a really good thing that the party checked every corner of the upper floor and killed anything that could be a danger to two unarmed and critically wounded people. Herr Rike was the one who told them to go upstairs as she poured water over their wounds, washing away acid and chunks of melted skin, and, sarcastically in her horrible voice, said that everyone would vouch for the woman’s virginity.* Herr Rike’s voice “sounds like a saw.”

*In the Middle Ages, an unmarried woman’s virginity was pretty important to her societal respect, and if she was left alone with a lone man for too long, someone may call her virginity into question. Of course the joke here is that everyone knows that no matter what, they aren’t going to get it on while bits of their skin are still sliding off. None of the Badger Company thought it was very funny.

With the slimes pooled on the ground, they were hardly a threat, they’re super slow and you could just sorta step around them, but they still needed to be dealt with to not become a problem later. Herr Rike went back upstairs and got that jug of lamp oil and poured it on and around the slimes and lit them on fire. That killed them.

So now the party is down two fighters and nearly all of their shields.

It’s dark down here obviously, and several people are carrying torches. Going is a bit slower in the poor lighting. Herr Rike makes a Detect Noise* check. She hears something like faint grinding of stone to the east. This huge band of armed and armored men coming into the castle has definitely made a ton of noise, so Rike’s impression of this sound is that the bad guys have heard them coming, and hid behind some kind of secret door in the stone walls. She tells everyone to keep a look out for any weird cracks in the walls.

*AD&D2e doesn’t have Perception like D&D5e. If it’s in front of them they can see it, if it’s making noise they can hear it, if it stinks they can smell it, etc. However, characters of the Thief class can make a skill check to listen closely for the chance to hear extremely faint sounds that wouldn’t normally be audible.

They check a few yards to the west first, finding two sturdy doors with fine, brand new inset locks on them. Rike tries, but fails to get through these in any way, so they move on to the south and find a long hallway full of cell doors. In the cells are months-old rotten corpses with visible wounds in most of them. It doesn’t look like the starved to death. The stench is almost overwhelming so they turn back and go north to the last door.

To the north they go through a room filled with, like, garbage. Dirt, broken bits of wooden furniture, rotten animal hides, and even what might be feces. Everyone is checking the ceilings carefully now too after the tick and the slimes, and this ceiling looks like it’s on its way to caving in, but not any immediate danger. They go to a door on the far end of the garbage room and open it. All the while, Herr Rike is checking for traps both passively* and actively. There don’t seem to be any traps, but the stench of the next room still hits them like a wall and makes Abigail and some of the others gag. It smells like “unwashed flesh,” in modern terms, it smells like a Magic: The Gathering tournament in there. Rike is unphased, and hisses out into the darkness “Come out, I can smell you.”

*Like I said before about perception, the main way to check for traps is just the player asking the DM “does my character see any weird stones on the floor ahead? Can he see a tripwire behind the door? When he opens the door, can he nudge it open with his sword while standing to the side in case anything shoots out?” and so on, but Thieves can also make skill checks to passively notice them on top of that.

After a few seconds, there’s a loud, low growl from the far corner. “I can smell you too..”

An enormous, grotesque figure steps into the edge of the torchlight. He’s easily nine feet tall and looks like if you took an already large man and stretched him out in all the wrong ways. He’s wearing a loincloth and a huge cape of animal hide, and carrying a full sized halberd that he’s big enough to use as a one-handed weapon. He scrapes it along the ground menacingly, making a horrible sound, but not the same sound that Rike heard earlier with her Detect Noise ability.

Rike doesn’t back away, but holds her crossbow casually in the crook of her arm. They’re about 10 feet from each other. She says in her hoarse, raspy whisper. “So, you can talk. Do you have a name?”

The hulking monster growls his answer. “Lubash. Do you?” He sounds almost as bad as Rike.

“Yes.”

“Hmph. Rude not to answer..” he grunts in annoyance.

“What are you doing down here, Lubash?”

“I guard this place for the people here. Eat people who come in.” He grins, showing jagged and pointy teeth. “Great gig.”

“Congratulations. Do you know who you work for, Lubash?”

“Do you?”

“No, we’re here to find that out.”

“Good luck...” He grins again.

“Thank you, Lubash. Are you going to get in our way?”

Lubash Points his halberd towards the doorway where Rike stands, looking behind her at the dozens of armored men carrying swords, polearms, and crossbows. “No. I go out there, I die. You come in here, you die.”

“We can agree to those terms. Where do that door behind you lead?”

“That’s my pantry.”

Rike nods. She’s not 100% sure that she believes him, but there’s no dice roll for that in AD&D2e, so it’s up to logic and the DM’s description of Lubash’s body language. She decides that even if he is lying, that she would rather not press him and get in the way of that halberd until she has exhausted all her other options. “One more thing, Lubash. Do you know your bosses are holding out on you?”

“How?”

“There’s a dozen corpses in the cells down the hall. They aren’t letting you eat those?”

“No, those aren’t mine, here before I got here. Nasty, rotten.”

Rike attempted to weaken Lubash’s trust with his bosses, but seemingly to no avail. She said goodbye to Lubash and closed the door, then she sprinkled more of the lamp oil all around the floor and flammable objects of the garbage room, and left the other door to the garbage room just slightly open, propping the jug up on top of it, so that if Lubash tries to follow them, he’ll get a nasty splash and then go up on flames at a brush with one of their torches. Plus, the shattering of the jar would alert them.

Now despite the smell, the path of least resistance was south, past the wall of cells with dead bodies in them.

Rike moved forward, noticing nothing out of the ordinary except a greater amount of dust in the mostly empty room further down compared to the rest of the place so far, as if no one had been down there in a long time. It wasn’t exactly *obvious* in hindsight, but she should have known better still. As she stepped into the room down the hall, there was a faint flash of light as she seemingly crossed some kind of invisible line, a magical trap! Someone with more knowledge of magic might have been able to see more of the signs if they were in front, but it was already too late. There was a shuffling sound from the cells as all twelve of the corpses rose to their feet. Most mercenaries immediately realized what was happening, and everyone quickly readied their weapons, falling into formation shoulder-to-shoulder with the archers and spellcasters in back, and three men in reserve watching the doorway with the jug in case Lubash decided to try and make a move for them while they were preoccupied. The line was close to the cell doors, with gaps where every other man stood a few feet back, creating mini chokepoints and kill zones at each door where each one corpse would trickle through and have to fight alone against three mercenaries rather than meeting them all at once. Ceridwen, a druid spellcaster, cast a spell, Fairy Fire, which highlighted the first row of walking corpses in the dark, giving the party a bonus to attack rolls against them.

The dozen walking corpses stood and shambled forward slowly enough that the mercenaries got 2 rounds to act before they were upon them. They shot a volley of crossbow bolts and arrows. The projectiles sunk deep into rotten eye sockets, chests, and shoulders, but at best it just made some of them stumble. Another volley. Even more hit this time, with a couple of criticals for what should’ve been massive damage, but the undead just kept walking forward until they reached the line of spears and swords. In mechanical terms it seemed that they took reduced or possibly even zero damage from piercing attacks like crossbow bolts.

Both players and characters started to get pretty nervous as we started rolling for all these melee attacks and it started to seem like despite stabbing big holes in them with spears and slicing off hands and arms with swords, the undead just didn’t stop. It was the last melee attack of the mercenaries’ round that finally “killed” one. One of the mercenaries using a quarterstaff managed to crush one’s head against the stone wall and it finally stopped moving. Seeing this, those that had them, which was quite few, switched weapons to clubs, thinking that the only way might be to bash them with bludgeoning damage. After another round, another corpse was “killed” with a sword, but it’s still possible that they only take half-damage from slashing weapons. Chrysanthemum, another White Company fighter, brought her weighted grain flail down on another corpse, shattering its skull with such force that flecks of bone sprinkled everyone around. She let out a girlish squeal of disgust.

Piercing weapons were definitely a no-go after one of the corpses just kept walking down the shaft of a spear after being impaled, and grabbed the spearman’s neck, pulling at it until it ripped a small hole in the front, dropping the man into a pool of blood. Another woman was hit so had in the head by one of the corpses unnaturally strong blows that she would’ve surely died if not wearing a helmet. She could still stand, but had to swap out, an archer from the back drawing his sword and stepping in to take her place. One of the other militiamen grabbed the bleeding man and hoisted him backwards out from under the feet of the melee, where Ceridwen quickly got down on her knees to bandage the wound, even though it seemed futile. For his trouble, as his attention was momentarily averted, the militiaman who pulled him back was lunged upon and grabbed into a bear hug by another corpse. He could hardly yell as three ribs cracked in quick succession.

Rike beat that one’s skull in with her baton until it loosened its grip, but she and Abigail still had to pry its arms off before the critically wounded man could be dragged off the front line. With was another round of chopping and beating the remaining corpses down before the coast seemed clear.

The whole combat sequence lasted maybe 6 rounds, and took about 45 minutes of real time, even with over 30 combatants total to make rolls for. It was a nail biter, and would’ve been much worse if the mercenaries hadn’t made such good use of positioning and formation.

Rike quickly went to see to the wounded with Ceridwen. Putting her ear to the crushed man’s chest, she could tell that he hadn’t punctured a lung, but it would still be best to move him as little as possible. She then set to helping Ceridwen carefully clean and bandage the other man’s neck wound. She tended to him last because, having seen the wound happen, she knew that if he hadn’t bled out of suffocated before she got to him, that would be the only indication that he could be saved.

It might as well have been a miracle. The wound exposed part of his trachea, but just missed the jugular and carotid. As long as it was kept clean and bandaged, he had a chance to live. The men cheered and praised God as loudly as they dared to in this place.

As Rike stood up from him, she commanded four of the men to make a stretcher out of an old tent and carefully carry the crushed man upstairs. She jerked her head to the side to indicate the bleeding man, the motion just for an instant shifting her mail gorget and helmet’s visor enough to expose the rough, pale scar tissue across her own throat, speaking in her raspy whisper of a voice. “He can walk.”

The party regrouped after taking the wounded men upstairs. (Again, really really good thing they made the call to hunt down and kill everything on the upper floor.) This hallway was the furthest east they had been, but it seemed to be a dead end. Rike and Ceridwen set to work looking for that secret door. It took about half an hour of searching (in game time, like 1 minute of describing their actions in real time) before Ceridwen found something. She pulled it, and a wall nearby slowly slid down, exposing a narrow passageway.

The funny thing was, the sound of that secret door opening was absolutely not the sound that Rike hear with her Detect Noise ability earlier either, and the dust and cobwebs beyond indicated that this secret passage had not been used in months. So, like, even though they thought they heard a secret door, they were wrong, and it’s only through dumb luck that they stumbled upon this. Like a broken clock.

That’s where we left off in the last session.

Sorry that was long as fuck but I hope this paints a clearer picture of what a classic “dungeon crawl” is actually like to those of you who have never experienced one.

Oh and if you’re wondering the DM told us later that those walking corpses take normal damage from Slashing and Bludgeoning attacks but always 1 damage from Piercing attacks.

"D&D can do anything" and "I don't like dungeon crawls, I enjoy real role-playing" are two statements that often go hand-in-hand and the ironic thing is that the latter statement betrays a very shallow understanding of role-playing while being really snobby. What's even more hilarious is that it's like baby's first RPG elitism, like yeah most people go through a "I like real role-playing" phase but to go through it while putting on airs about the dungeon game while at the same time dismissing dungeon games is real funny.

Anyway, wherever people pick up the idea that dungeon-crawling, the playstyle most supported by D&D, is somehow pedestrian, it very quickly leads to bargaining, like surely if dungeon-crawling is actually bad and for babies then D&D must be capable of so much more, right? Well, truth is, not really, D&D kind of sucks for things besides that.

Where a lot of people go wrong at this point is contending that therefore D&D must be flawed as a role-playing game: like, if it actually kind of sucks for most playstyles besides dungeon-crawling and we've already decided that dungeon-crawling isn't real role-playing, then surely D&D must be bad as a role-playing game?

The issue of course is that most people don't ever interrogate their starting assumption of dungeon-crawls being bad. And truth be told most people who claim to hate dungeon-crawls have never actually played a dungeon-crawl. At most they've played a dungeon-crawl themed linear succession of combat encounters. (I remember this: once when I posted about dungeon-crawls being good, actually, someone responded with a "well I can see the appeal but personally I couldn't enjoy a game that's just back-to-back combat" which is a whole misunderstanding of dungeon-crawls as a genre.)

Anyway so the great thing is that once you re-examine your assumptions about what counts as "real role-playing" and conclude that a dungeon-crawl is as much real role-playing as whatever the fuck Critical Role is doing then you find whole new vectors of being a snooty blowhard and it rules. You can make fun of D&D players in so many new ways,

690 notes · View notes

butchvamp · 3 days ago

Text

turning over my final thoughts now that i've finished the game... my interpretation reconciling with the game we got and my big takeaways on agency and choice and redemption... Solas and Varric have always been contrasts of each other, with Varric focused on the here and the now-- he's made mistakes but he keeps it pushing, he wants to help the people he can, and he knows he can't do that if he gets hung up on all of the "what ifs." while Solas, on the other hand, is completely compelled and consumed by his regrets and desperately wants to fix his "mistake," regardless of the cost, regardless of how selfish it ultimately is. and now with the reveal about the titans you get an extra layer of guilt from Solas in these interactions with Varric in inquisition, questioning why Varric does the things he does, and why isn't he more angry? why doesn't he care? all the wrong questions to ask Varric, who does care, but Solas is projecting his own feelings of rage and despair (and, of course, guilt over the titans).

this whole game is about accepting your mistakes, taking responsibility for the choices you make, but also letting go of your regrets and respecting other peoples' choices, too-- thinking particularly about what's said in the Fade prison about Harding (or Davrin) choosing this path, about Varric choosing to care in the way that he does and trying to confront Solas at the start, and how Rook blaming themselves and shouldering this guilt as the sole responsible party takes away their agency and their choice to do these things, their choice to live in this world and to try to make it better. i think it really wraps up nicely with a few of the other companion quests, like Emmrich's, accepting death and honoring others' sacrifice and letting them rest. Harding's quest, where she can harness her anger and compassion and choose to move forward, rather than turning inward like Solas and obsessing over before.

and then of course there's Solas, who we know never wanted a body, who was forced to fight and twisted from wisdom into pride-- who never chose this, and what choices he did have were always between a rock and a hard place. i think this is part of what skews his view of the world and makes it hard for him to accept both Varric's and Rook's perspective-- this loss of his humanity and autonomy through violence. but he does have a choice now, even if he doesn't realize it, and he's choosing to hold onto this idealized vision he has of the world before, he's choosing to ignore Rook and Varric and the Inquisitor before them and act like he is both solely responsible for what happened and also the only one able to fix it.

but there are people in this world now who are doing things to fix it, Neve's entire plot is about how much Dock Town sucks, she's cynical about it but never ever would she abandon it or choose to destroy it. there are people here that are living fulfilling lives even in this horrible world and they deserve to have that choice. it's not Solas's to make. Varric understood that the best, having lived in Kirkwall and seen all the things he has, the good and the bad. and either way bad things are going to happen, people are going to die-- as Solas said, people are always dying. but Varric wanted to make it better regardless, he didn't want to start over, because there are things worth saving even in a bleak world like Thedas. people like him and Neve and Harding and Davrin and the others will always choose to keep moving forward and try to make it better for everyone, regardless of their mistakes in doing so.

Solas tries to justify himself by holding his own mistakes over his head-- he even says "To stop now would dishonor those I have wronged to come this far." the inquisitor interjects with "Even if those you've wronged ask you to stop?"-- the inquisitor who had something similar happen to them, forced into a role and forced to make choices between a rock and a hard place.

this is one of my favorite exchanges in the game. and then Mythal appears and breaks his chains-- "I free you from my service." and faced by Mythal, the Inquisitor, and Rook (and by extension, Varric)-- all people he betrayed-- he can no longer hang onto that justification, and he is forced directly to face his regrets and the horrible things he's done (things everyone standing in this circle has done)-- and find peace with it as they have, accept their forgiveness, and ultimately make his choice. i do think Solas's redemption is well-earned, especially after playing through inquisition and now veilguard in these leadership positions, making choices that do result in people dying, no matter what-- the Inquisitor especially has potentially felt exactly what Solas has felt. but you have to choose, you have to move forward, and you have to keep choosing over and over and over again and it's not easy and there will be consequences, but there are things worth fighting for and there are others choosing to stand beside you that will share the burden and help, if you just let them.

#datv spoilers #okay final thoughts on the game i think. i really loved what it tried to do even if it didn't quite get there in game #again this is just my interpretation. not trying to say anything Official just sharing my thots as a mostly casual fan (yes. really)#i can see what they were trying to do even if i don't personally vibe with all the choices they made #i do think it's obvious that the inquisitor was meant to be the one to parallel solas. rook is a false equivalent imo #but still compelling!#they had to work with what they had so i respect it #and of course we lost something with the veil always remaining intact. i think... again with what they had to work with #they did a good job course correcting and still trying to insert something valuable here even if it wasnt their original vision #i know a different argument could be made regarding varric and solas where varric is 'passive' and solas is the one #pushing for something better even if it's risky or dangerous. thinkin of those trick tweets specifically #but unfortunately that's not the game we got #but i do think both of them are pushing for something better just in their own way. again people die no matter what ending we get #there is no winning in that regard #da posting

21 notes · View notes

six-white-venus · 3 days ago

Text

i've been staring at a blank page for months now, searching for the right words. the ones that used to flow out of the tip of my pen with a gasping cry of 'finally, finally' are nowhere to be found. the thing is, right, poets cannot thrive in mediocrity. cannot bloom, cannot scream all things beautiful without a laugh or a sob stuck in their throat. no one wants normal, you see. because normal is everywhere. but beauty? beauty is found in the reckless and jarring and the glittering night sky. but you can only write about the blue sky for so long before you get sick of it. can only bleed in paper till your wound closes, can only laugh till your breath runs out. and just like all things do, those moments end. that's what makes them worth of poetry- their fleeting, dream-like nature.

no one wants to read poetry about the days you waste scrolling through your phone or the assignment that you got a B- in. the thing is, right, just existing isn't worth of poetry. there is no way for a poet to thrive in a life of mediocrity and i'm afraid that's exactly where i find myself.

it makes me sad sometimes. i find myself missing the taste of copper in my mouth and the angry purple of the bruises on my knees. i hold my worn-out plush in my hand and wonder where it went- the joy it once used to bring me. my favorite t-shirt no longer fits me. i fold it up clumsily and think: have i outgrown greatness too?

but most of the time, it doesn't bother me. because you never really stop being beautiful despite what you might think. maybe you don't write as well as you used to. maybe reading your works no longer makes people overcome with an emotion that feels larger than life itself. and i've come to find that that's not so bad. not everything has to be booming and bright or miserable and black. you might not be great but your smile, candlelight soft and tired, is real. your wounds no longer make you feel like you're dying but your joints do ache terribly during thunderstorms.

the thing is, right, you will always be a poet. maybe not one that everyone adores or understands, but a poet nonetheless. what's beautiful to you might not be worth a second glance to me. what makes your day might be nothing worth remembering to a stranger. just because something that means the world to you means nothing to someone else doesn't make it meaningless.

keep a hand on your chest. feel your heart beat, steady, steady.

thump. thump. thump.

being beautiful is not what makes you alive.

thump. thump. thump.

you breathe, and therefore you are.

#i think i have a thing for posting every two months #i would say more about this but im tired and sleepy so uh. hi. yeah #my writing #prose poetry #words #writeblr #prose

18 notes · View notes

ultyso · 1 year ago

Text

It’s so hard to focus on anything anymore. Everything is so heartbreaking. I hate these stupid uneducated countries governments supporting I$rael by backing them with millions to keep murdering. I hate they took our tax paying money to support them murdering more people. I hate all these companies supporting them with millions. I hate all these celebs supporting them and signing petitions in support of them. As long as all of these greedy fuckers have their dirty money, they don’t care. They willfully allow in the genocide of Palestine. Heartless.

Hearing how they’re now bombing journalists and their entire families in Palestine. Bombing hospitals, safe houses, and schools. Bombing where aid are trying to help the civilians in Gaza. How they warned Palestinian civilians they were going to bomb an area and told them to evacuate on specific roads, then they had the audacity to bomb where all those civilians went that was claimed to be safe. Tell me that wasn’t on purpose, a trap. How can anyone see this as anything but genocide?

I$rael is shoving so much propaganda at you all to try and make themselves look good. They aren’t! They are killing so many innocent people. So many children. So many babies. So many animals. And countless people are on tiktok laughing and happy that this is happening?????? How absolutely twisted do you got to be to praise the death of innocent lives especially children’s lives? Palestine has no running water, food, electricity, and army, yet they are seen as the threat???

This same kind of shit going on with Ru$$ia and Ukraine but ohhhh countries around cared about that and were quick to support Ukraine. Now why is that? Oh because they’re white. How can so many people UNDERSTAND the issue with this war but then be completely fucking stupid with I$rael and Palestine? Mindboggling.

How can anyone keep looking away from the issue? How can anyone be neutral about all of this? How can anyone willing support them? How can these people who cried about their own innocent children being harmed be JOYOUS that innocent Palestinian children are dying? They should UNDERSTAND the pain of not wanting kids hurt but they don’t care they take pride in it. They want the Palestinian children to suffer. How heartless do you fuckers have to be to DESIRE death upon children????? How little humanity does everyone have?????

How many damn Palestinian people have to die before people wake the fuck up and show an ounce of care??? We are seeing in real time the genocide of Palestine. This is not okay it was never fucking okay.

Please be informed. You can start here: https://uscpr.org

Educate yourself. Show compassion. Share the word of Palestinians. Do not let them be forgotten. From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free. 🇵🇸

#free palestine #I’m so fucking upset about all of this #I hate how heartless and unempathetic so many are #UltySo Vents #is it so bad to want people to stop dying???????

10 notes · View notes

moeblob · 6 months ago

Text

I'm on an OC kick and also super indecisive so I spun a wheel (thank you for choosing for me, RNG).

Ricardo is a body guard and is bffs with Marlo. Ricardo's current job is watching after a celebrity's daughter who the public doesn't know even exists. She's just a teenage girl vibing with her mom and getting texts and calls from her dad (who loves her a whole lot and keeps her out of the spotlight very purposefully) and has this bodyguard and his weird friend. Marlo is just vibing with his best friend.

(Also Marlo would absolutely laugh if he heard Ricardo say "someone called me eye candy and it wasn't you and now I think you should call me that")

#my characters #i have an ask in my inbox that has me obsessively thinking about drawing fanart #but i just dont have the energy for what i want to draw for it #its been a rough day guys im dying (allergies and lacking sleep)#(why are allergies so bad today i ask after shoving my face into a cat while knowing im allergic to cats)#there are some prices i will always suffer and pay in life and the cat allergy is one of them you cant keep me away from a cat #im shoving my face in their fur and you CANT STOP ME FROM IT and also they kept bothering me #anyway i got to bed at like 6am after a lot of zoomies and restless legs and then #woke up with both cats in the guest bed with me and man i will not know peace for a few days #worth it tho bc i love them and i will take suffering if it means cattention #i dont really have much to say about the ocs tbh theyre just buddies being guys and then theres a teenage girl sometimes #and people suspect ricardo is her dad and she cant really say no my dads (celebrity) since thats the entire point of rico #so she makes sure its not troublesome for him to have people assume things like that and hes just #idc im in love with my best friend and hes not giving me any kids so not like anyone will start drama if im not with your mom #but he is also ! friends with the celebrity and his wife so he does just go on Family Outings with the wife and daughter #and sometimes marlo because the wife knows of him and invites him sometimes but she treats #rico and marlo like sons instead which is a bit weird to the daughter but she likes her weird fake brothers slash dad and question mark #marlo dyes his hair pink if that matters and has been doing so for a v long time

29 notes · View notes

fairyofshampgyu · 1 year ago

Text

Crying over gyu :(☹️ I love him😭

#his music taste 😩>>#he’d literally love Jeff Buckley I’ve been saying this for so long and also the carpenters #pls let me give you refs omg we have the same taste #also crying bc he’s literally the only pretty person ever #his hair ☹️😭😭😭#HIS MOLES #I LOVE HIS MOLES SO MUCH #Omg we both have a mole on the left near our mouth that literally means we’re soulmates 😍😍🤞#also him talking about how he doesn’t get why people judge people over mbtis #and saying how everyone is very different and he doesn’t judge people from the start like that SO TRUE #WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO STOP USING 16 PERSONALITIES IM SO SICK OF IT 😭😭😭#use cognitive funstions instead or soemthing 😭#I want to have deep conversations with beomgyu so bad like #he’d literally be the best person to have late night talks with im so upset he’s not my friend #ALSO WHEN HE LIKE SCOFFED AND SMIRKED AT SOOBIN AND SAID SOMETHING LIKE ‘YOU KIDDING?’#DYING WHY IS THE ONLY FINE PERSON TO EVER EXIST #I’m so in love with beomgyu 😭😭 I’m so upset idk him platonically curse the people who know him irl and are friends with him 😪😪

76 notes · View notes

lord-squiggletits · 8 months ago

Text

Something else that makes me sympathetic to Pharma's situation is like. Idk if there's an actual term for this or if someone smarter and more academic wrote it about some real life context that actually matters.

But, so we've already established among Pharma stans that the circumstances at Delphi were blackmail/torture with no real way out that wouldn't involve Pharma being responsible for people getting killed (either killing patients for the deal or having everyone die bc he failed his end of the deal).

And I feel like while "he's still in the wrong because he killed people" is part of it, another sort of implicit part is the idea that Pharma should've been willing to take more personal risk, maybe even risk dying? I mean, Ratchet does ask "why didn't you just detonate it near the DJD" (to which Pharma responds that he did try to get Sonic and Boom to do it, but they refused) so like

Idk I feel like we do have this social notion of martyrs as a very romantic ideal, people you can praise for being so brave and strong and righteous that they ended their own lives for their cause, while you can also coo about how sad and tragic it is that dying is what it took for them to do the right thing. But at the same time I feel like in reality, having an expectation that people become martyrs is kind of a toxic social norm bc like. It's very easy to demand that others sacrifice their lives for some Ultimate Moral Good when you yourself aren't experiencing the same hardships as they are. And ultimately it is kind of fucked up to tell someone "the moral thing you should've done was risk your life/kill yourself" because asking someone to pay their life to do the right thing is no small request. And sure, the typical response would be to call them a "coward" for caring more about saving their own skin instead of doing the right thing... but again, death is a really scary thing and self-preservation is a really strong instinct, so it kind of feels like having this binary view of "you're either a Brave Hero who sacrifices your life for everyone else or a Dirty Coward who's too scared of dying to do what's right" is kind of fucked up?

I guess the best way to describe it is that if someone willingly gives up their life as a sacrifice to others, it can be a noble thing because it's a choice they made willingly, but if it becomes a Moral Standard that in order to be a Good Person you have to be unafraid of throwing your life away and if you aren't willing to die you're a Cowardly Bad Person, that's when it becomes toxic.

Idk, I guess how this ties back to Pharma is that he was never in a position where he expected to make these kinds of moral decisions/ultimatums. He's a doctor who doesn't even get into combat, his job is to heal and not to kill, he's behind the front lines in a hospital that's supposed to be a safe, neutral place for him to heal people. So in the face of suddenly having a "murder people on behalf of me, or I murder everyone you swore to protect" ultimatum thrust upon him, I understand why Pharma wasn't """"""""""brave enough"""""""""" to "do the right thing" (whatever that would've been in the case of Delphi). You could argue that maybe a frontliner soldier accepted the burden of possibly dying for their cause and they've become used to it as someone who lives that reality every single day, but I feel like for Pharma, who's a doctor and a protected non-combatant (from what we can tell), that sort of risking of his life/living with the fact his life could be snuffed out any day isn't something he would've been prepared for at all.

And for me personally, from an outsider's perspective, it strikes me as kind of unethical to go "oh well he should've just detonated the bomb himself even if it killed him" bc again, there's a difference between witnessing a moral conundrum as a bystander versus being the person living with it and being under time pressure where it's do-or-die. Just as part of my personal standards, I feel like death is such a huge consequence/burden of someone's actions (literally you are no longer alive, any potential you had left is cut short, you cease to exist on this plane) that it feels rather callous to go "Well you should've just been willing to die for your beliefs if you really cared that much!!!"

#squiggposting #pharma apologism #this is only like tangentially related to pharma honestly #not to compare blorbos to real life but like. it reminds me of this phenomenon where privileged ppl in privileged countries #will tell ppl living in zones of war and strife 'oh well if you don't like your gov so bad just revolt against them'#like oh yes tell me how easy it is to stand up against the threats of torture and death #surely the only reason people would want to avoid that is bc they're cowards or don't want to stand up for their beliefs #contrary to what nationalism would have ppl believe. 'wanting to not die' isn't a moral position #everyone wants to live. no one wants to die. it doesnt make you a bad person to be scared of dying #esp (going back to blorbo's) in a situation like pharma's where every option he had ended in death #the death of his patients or the death of everyone at delphi or his death personally #on top of the fact he's a noncombatant who hasn't been desensitized to violence/risking his own life #and is dealing with a trained group of killers that he can't possibly match on physical terms #so yeah actually i don't blame pharma for what he did #he made shitty decisions in a shitty situation but was ultimately a victim #also if you want to view the blackmail deal from a framework of abuse #it is also fucked up to basically tell someone they werent brave enough to just kill their accuser or ask for help #isnt the entire point of such situations that the victim is both powerless to stop the abuse #and too afraid of asking for help/thinks they cant ask for help. and thats why they dont just get out #idk sometimes the best moral judgement is to forgive someone or view it as 'complicated'#sometimes regardless of the good or evilness of their actions the best choice is to not make a judgement #or to err in favor of a forgiving/'i cant speak for your experience' judgement #anyways the fact is that the rosy fantasy of being a brave noble soldier who sacrifices for the cause #rarely stands up to reality where youre just terrified and powerless and dont know what to do #and suddenly the rosy glow of The Noble Cause isnt comforting in the prospect of horrible torturous death

14 notes · View notes