#mum Brennan?

[glassrooibos]

Look I can’t draw stoats ok IM SORRY OK I still love them

[jedi-starbird]

Obi-Wan: *getting upset cause he got an answer wrong in the quiz at the back of his animal book*

Qui-Gon: Calm down Obi-Wan! It's not a test!

Obi-Wan, on the verge of tears: You don't understand! I want it to be a test!

[lostinhewe]

so much fairytale media atm buy holy cow i am genuinely terrified for pinnochio’s mum. she just eats Ylfa’s grandma, like is this character gone now?

i bet she’s just going around eating mother figures 

[princessdarth-vader]

genuinely forgive me for spiralling abt this thing i just made up but the concept of rolling on the relationship track potentially giving people a stress token is making me want to see riz snap all the more. i think it would be so appropriate to the whole like "the moment he slows down he will break" thing for him to finish these huge challenges and successfully pass all of his classes for the year with flying colours and have a chance to take a breath and use that to try and, for the first time in months, reach out to his mother.

and then it just all comes crashing down and he takes a rage token and fights with sklonda and logically he knows that this rage isn't helping but he's so angry at this system that forces him to work himself to death and sklonda is just. there in the moment; a face for him to yell at. and even if it's not fair he can't control his anger. in the moment he suddenly feels much closer to kipperlilly than he ever has. who sees what she considers an unfair system, and is pissed at the people who enforce it and benefit from it.

idk obviously there are larger plans for the rage tokens as a whole (tying into ankarna, probably pushing them closer to like, being this corrupted being) but it would make so much sense for riz, after everything else has fizzled down, to just crash into a wall and break.

[olauivers]

brennan and his mum on the last adventuring party of "D20: A STARSTRUCK ODYSSEY" was so cute?? I almost cried

[house-of-ivy]

i know we were all sad lou couldn't play amethar bc plot amour but omg was it worth it to get lou playing a DELI SANDWICH LORD say to MANTA RAY JACK "who tf r u??" in a tent with his other PC and his sister.

[poncivalpishpuff]

My NeverAfter OC (warning spoilers up to ep 6ish)

Princess Catrìona

 Sister of Kate Crackernuts

  (Kah-tree-nah) The Scottish Gaelic name for Katherine (Kate)

The story of Kate Crackernuts

"Kate Crackernuts" is a Scottish fairy tale collected by Andrew Lang in the Orkney Islands and published in Longman's Magazine in 1889. The tale is about a princess who rescues her beautiful sister from an evil enchantment and a prince from a wasting sickness caused by dancing nightly with the fairies.

In the original version, both sisters have the name “Kate” and are the same age.

First Neverafter (Ep1-3]

Closely follows the original tale, with the dark times coming after their story ‘ended’

Both grew up in a Small forgotten kingdom bordering Jubilee

Catríona is the daughter of the King and Kate Crackernuts is the daughter of the new Queen (The Stepmother)

The Hen-wife and the Stepmother on the third try trick her into losing her beautiful head and switching it for a sheep’s one when she is 18

Kate grabbed Catríona's human head and they ran away to fend for themselves, where they came upon the kingdom of Jubilee

Kate finds that one of King Cole’s sons is sick, and goes on to watch him for three nights, following him to the Green-hill where faeries force him to dance the night away

Over three nights Kate gets the cures for her sister and the prince

Kate Crackernuts reunited Catríona with her human head and healed King Cole’s sick son from the wasting

The sick, now healed, son marries Kate and the good son marries the ill, now healed, Catríona [Their Happily Ever After]

As the war came to Jubilee they fought alongside their husbands and died on the battlefield at the age of 24

Present day post merging of the two lives:

The faeries of the Green-hill bring back Catriona into the new world

as something (the Stepmother) has reached Kate first,

they didn’t want to summon either of the princesses, but the princes have disappeared, due to Jubilee not existing, in this new version

the Mother Goose putting Old King Cole in the book, and his kingdom disappearing from the Neverafter [fairies and Catriona don’t know this]

in this world the Stepmother has stolen her human head and locked Kate away somewhere, stopping them both from escaping together

The second world Catriona had left her father’s castle on her own scared of her Stepmother who stole her head and of what the people would say of her sheep head.

Neither sister completed their set stories

Fairies task Catriona with finding the source of the stories going missing and bring it to them, for Catriona and Kate cannot have their happily ever after if their princes doesn’t exist

Throughout her journey in her second life, she has started to doubt the sincerity of the fairies, but for the major part still sees them as the preferable side and an opponent to The Stepmother

Returned around the same time as PCs despite dying much earlier than the group, the faeries were reluctant to employ a princess and spent more time trying to find other methods, the reluctance is noticeable to Catriona when she is in the in-between with the faeries of the Green-Hill

we'll see what happens in Tuffeton, but I think she would be tailing the party after hearing news of the disappearance of the massive spider that had taken the village previously

Her new body/skills

the stepmother still has her human head and in turn, Catriona now has the head of a ewe with curling horns she can use to ram her opponents. [Minotaur reskin]

she speaks with a sheepish lisp as she had to reteach herself how to speak common as she initially could only bleat when her head was stolen

she can speak to any type of sheep, and understands some goat tongue

This Catriona has been wondering the Neverafter after running away, studying magic as a force to rescue her sister, and combat the Stepmother [3rd level Fighter Eldritch Knight]

Break down of her Image

The head is of a Scottish Blackface sheep, where the ewes also have horns The armour is believed to be dated around 1515 from Greenwich, England, and belonged to Henry VIII The sword is a European sword dated around 1400AD The page is from a 16th Century manuscript written in Latin, Scots, and Gaelic

Again all original art and character designs are by Giuseppe Lama

[gendernutralghost]

I think I'm just going to go cry for an hour

[longfurbybitchboi]

Brennan's mum characters are the best mum characters in media, change my mind

I think about Sklonda finding out about the tattoos all the time. Just. Brennan’s face, voice, words, intonation… so perfectly mom

if there's one thing about brennan lee mulligan, it's that he is way better at (and fond of) playing an exasperated mom than you'd think (unless you know how much time he's spent working at summer camps)

[bog-owl-riel]

no one talks enough about how insane brennan was for casually dropping at the END of fhsy that a previous incarnation of ayda was a parental figure to garthy o’brien (“my mum’s name was ayda aguefort, too”) while also saying at the beginning that garthy is a sort of parental figure to ayda in this current incarnation…

and then having garthy struggle with that was such a good move bcus imagine your mom dies and is reborn the same person but with NONE of the memories you made together and then you spend your adult life without your mom but at the same time raising her as your own child… THAT’S SO UPSETTING 😭

[islandoforder]

a mum as a paladin is so good, brennan just going “bless on my kids and myself” the second the background music gets spooky, using divine sense to find his kids is just. so good.

[talenlee]

Lessons Lee Mulligan

I want to be better at running tabletop games.

I’m not bad at it, by the way. I haven’t had to contend with players giving me complaints any time in the past… maybe fifteen years. The games I run generally receive praise and players show up because they want to play them. I am currently on a break from running a game though you know watch this space, but I still think of myself as a storyteller, a game runner, and it is with that in mind I have been gritting my teeth in frustration at how good Brennan Lee Mulligan is at it.

I don’t have any malice for the guy. I admit, I had a wildly incorrect read on him as a person when I first started watching him. Somewhere along the way he mentioned that he’d never had alcohol or drugs, and I immediately started to edge him towards the ‘formon or exvangelical’ basket. Then in the Starstruck Oddysey campaign he mentions his mother’s name and his godfather’s name and I realise that actually he’s basically indie comics royalty, and that was quite a thing to realise.

Quite frankly, finding out how his mum feels about him and what she did for him as a child makes me feel very distressed because it seems so impossibly nice and good in ways that disorient me. It’s like watching Bluey, I can’t understand a world where a dad is that nice to his kids.

Still, Brennan Lee Mulligan is good at being a storyteller, dungeon master, game-master, whatever term you want to use, in a way that makes me want to take notes. Some of it is unuseful and unapplicable – I don’t have a custom mini maker on hand and can’t afford one and don’t even get to play on a physical tabletop any more. Some of it is the comical pointlessness of the system that he uses – watching D&D 5th edition involves needing to know almost nothing about the game, because all that really matters is if a number rolled is high or low, and he’s used it for murder mysteries and criminal heists just fine, because whatever else the system is doing, the focus on what the story demands is all it needs to make function.  Instead I want to focus on things Brennan does that I think I can use in my own games.

I suppose just in case, I’m going to talk about some minor details from a Dimension 20 campaign, Fantasy High that talk – obliquely – about spoilers for the first and last episodes. You might not want to read this if that’s a thing for you.

He’s Very Good At Actual Improv

Shock, horror, the guy who ran an improve school and has had years of playing around in improve performance with his friends he trusts is really good at it. The ability to build on what others are doing, enabling them in how they do it, and to trust them to not fuck up what you’re telling them, or the vibes you’re putting onto your

This isn’t a radical diagnosis of his storyteller abilities. Brennan’s job involves numerous other types of web show, including appearances on Game Changers and Make Some Noise which are both shows built out of improvisational comedy.

What can I extract from that though?

An immediate thought is that Brennan is careful with word choice and is extremely unselfconscious about others. Commonly in his dialogue you can hear the phrase you see that they say, which is obviously, when extracted, gibberish – at best it’s padding. It’s also, and this is important: fucking fine. People don’t make supercuts of him saying that, they make single big cuts of the thoughtfully constructed improvised monologues, which are delivered with the high dudgeon of a preacher. I think those are like lego constructions – he knows the pieces, he knows the structure to fill them out, and fills the spaces for them piece by piece.

General knowledge and presentation is useful for this skill. Be aware of a wide variety of ways people communicate, for example. It’s not like Brennan is a master of voices – you generally can tell you’re hearing Brennan say something when he voices an NPC – but the fact he has a swathe of different ways of talking, a bunch of Different Guys to dream up and get mad at – is a useful part of the skillset.

I don’t have players (at the moment) who are avidly into this kind of thing. But recognising the players as audience to experiences, and not players antsily waiting their own turn, is useful. I think Brennan treats solo interactions with players away from the group as if those interactions are interesting and fun for other players to watch, and part of that is, I think, built out of treating engagements as performances. They aren’t things to get out of the way, they’re the material players and people are there to watch.

He Does Put In The Work Ahead Of Time

I have a theory about the conclusion of the first Dimension 20 campaign. It’s not provable and I honestly don’t care to hear Brennan’s take on it, because it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. What matters is what it tells me about what’s possible.

For those of you unfamiliar, Fantasy High’s first campaign was centered in a magical high school for adventurers. It introduced the players to the character of Arthur Aguefort, a delightfully reckless wizard with preposterous power in the field of Chronomancy that seemingly is always one step ahead of whatever his silly actions indicate. In this same story, there’s a prophecy, keeping a dreadful villain contained, and that villain’s containment is breached at the very end of the story, and then there needs to be stuff around that prophecy. It’s a pretty good story, especially in the way that Arthur’s plan is seemingly derailed by the player characters dying in episode 2, and then he sacrifices his life to bring them back. At the end of the story, Arthur comes back to life, in a big dramatic moment that gives everyone a chance to refresh mid-fight with a boss that’s otherwise a bit beyond their abilities. Cool story, cool bit, and it all dovetailed with the prophecy, because of the specific character who died getting a miraculous natural 20 at the last moment.

Except.

I think that with the way the prophecy was worded, and with the secondary details and characters connected around them, it would be entirely possible to conclude the prophecy and defeat the baddie if any of the other characters had been the person to do it. The character who triggered this refresh didn’t have to be who it was, anyone could have done it and the explanation of the prophecy would work just fine, thanks to some homonyms. If I’m right, not only is this a cool mentalism trick that makes Brennan look psychic, but it’s also an example of the powerful advantages of being prepared ahead of time for a spreading network of possibilities.  

I don’t do as much prep work as I want to do. Or rather, more correctly, I don’t do as much prep work for my games as I want to have done when the time comes to run the game. The difference is pretty subtle, but it’s present. Part of it is, I think that prep feels both easy and boring, the deadliest mix of things for my kind of player mindset. When introducing players to locations I so rarely have lists of things like NPC names and random traits on hand for them to grab a stranger off the street to talk to, and keeping those characters distinct from one another is easier when I have those tools on hand. Having short descriptors of places, lists of street names, just the detritus that makes up a place, that would make life easier for me when trying to organise details and let me use a lot of anchoring details.

Making those lists, however, is pretty tedious!

What makes this even funnier in the context of the now is that really, ‘make me a list of descriptions of NPCs for a steampunk street in Vienna,’ is exactly the kind of thing that a large language model software system would be really good at but doing that runs the risk of generating characters that sound boring, and I’m not wild about the idea of engaging with those systems where I don’t have to.

Conclusion

If you’re like me, an older millennial who’s never succeeded at much of meaning, and you see cool people doing things around you that you think ‘oh wow I’d love to be doing that,’ you don’t have to let it fester in you and make you sad. You can take their examples and use them as guideposts for how you can do the things you want to do. Engineering someone else’s success is impossible, but you can at the very least recognise what it is about how they work that excites you.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[rainecreatesstuff]

I am a lesbian and as such the only man I’ve ever been attracted to is Brennan Lee Mulligan playing tired bad ass mums

[ratsdontmurder]

yk what’s really interesting about the whole rage subplot in fhsy: The Bad Kids are getting angrier.

Like we can sort of gather that the students of aguefprt are getting angrier, like even if we don’t know exactly what’s going on with the whole rage crystals and stuff, like clearly something is happening. But it’s fascinating seeing it manifest unconsciously in the bad kids. Like Adaine is so angry about ol 4 dogs as well as how shitting the wizard classes are for poorer students (so fair of her). Gorgug of course has dealt with his rage in a massive way. Riz not generally angry but did get genuinely angry at the min max of it all. Kristen is also being confronted with not only a direct foil to herself but also someone exterting power over her brother.

And like rage doesn’t necessarily have to manifest in anger like anger and depression is side by side and like Fabian is so sad and so stressed and like should be angry at his mum for ignoring him like to me that’s what Brennan is trying to get out of him.

Like Rage as an idea is oddly unifying for them all as well as their deep love for each other

[siobhanbooks]

Why I think they are the way they are, Tyrs edition:

Imogen - Unable to get into a relationship with the love of her life (Garrick Tavis) because she watched her mum and sister die and can't open her heart up to love someone like that again. Hates the Sorrengails because she had to watch her older sister be executed for the cause whereas she knows that Brennan abandoned his younger sisters and let them believe he was dead for 6 years.

Garrick - Unable to get into a relationship with the love of his life (Imogen Cardulo) because he watched his parents be executed and can't open his heart to love someone the way his parents loved each other because he can't handle the grief of losing them.

Bodhi - Never thinks he's good enough/perpetually tagging along because his mum was always second to Fen, especially in the Apostasy, and he's always been younger than Xaden, therefore never feels like he's strong enough or good enough.

Xaden - Struggles to be vulnerable, especially to Vi, because his parents weren't in love and his mum left when he was 10 therefore he never really had a good example of relying on someone and being emotionally vulnerable, also his dad was the leader of the Apostasy who couldn't be vulnerable or weak to anyone.

[blake-wyatt]

Few questions I have left after finishing Iron Flame - SPOILERS ahead!

Brennan's death and Naolin:

He mentioned multiple times that his mother sent him to die and didn't care (this man's mummy issues put Xaden's to shame) - his level of rage and betrayal seems to suggest he died fighting venin he was unprepared for due to his mother's lies (it's likely he believes she knew he was going to face venin where he was deployed and still chose to protect the institutional lie. Knowing what we know about her I doubt it but only therapy can save Brennan now).

So. Was he drained by a venin and did Naolin siphon power back in him and drained himself in the process, dying? Did Brennan take power from the earth to maybe mend his dragon and did Naolin use his signet to save Brennan from veninism (channeling the power Brennan took back to earth) thus burning out? Or, did Naolin turn venin to save Brennan? Did he also turn for love and almost killed Tairn in the process?

(If Tairn/Sgaeyl had a nickel for every bonded rider who turned venin to save a Sorrengail they'd only have two nickels but its weird it happened twice)

Why was Nolon trying to mend Jack?

He clearly knew Jack was venin and his mission was to "mend the soul". It also looks like General Sorrengail asked him to (he writes TO HER to confirm it doesn't look like there's any way to reverse the process once you've turned).

Why was the General interested in curing venin? Especially if its a long process that takes incredible resources and almost killed their one mender. Seems like a bad military strategy.

Also!!! Why did they allow Jack to go back to class?! Was it part of a controlled experiment? Was Varrish a venin too (therefore: still alive) and influenced that? Did Nolon believe he had in fact cured Jack? Did they lie to Lilith Sorrengail?

Where is Xaden's mother?

Guys. If this isn't the biggest Chekhov's gun I have ever seen.

So allegedly good old Fen Riorson (honourable leader of a righteous revolution, beloved by his son and hundreds of Tyrrish people) entered a political marriage, which makes sense for nobility, and his wife hated him and Aretia so much she ABANDONED HER SON. Waited until the legal end of her contract, packed up and left. Never to be seen or heard of again. Even after her husband died, Aretia burned, and her only son was left alone and scarred.

Let's say this is a Zuko's mum case - so she's valid for leaving an oppressive situation she was forced into; and valid for abandoning a son she never wanted to begin with; valid for not making contact after the rebellion failed for fear she'd be killed; valid for not checking in with Aretia once it was rebuilt. But. WHERE IS SHE.

She's Poromish nobility. (Hopefully Xaden and Cat aren't related 👀) The fact we know nothing about her makes me think she's going to be a big player going forward.

Why did the Venin want Xaden?

We now know Violet was just experiencing Xaden's nightmare. And the Sage was working on their generals behalf to turn Xaden and use Violet against him (if Varrish is venin and alive, it makes sense - he knew Xaden's weakness, and the whole point of Violets torture was to trap Xaden and force his hand). But. Why?

Violet has two dragons, the only known signet that destroys venin and the key to protect Navarre against them. It made sense for them to want her. But...Xaden?

He's powerful but less than either Lilith or Violet. He has key knowledge but less than Brennan or Melgren or any head scribe. Undoubtedly, his second signet will be weaponised and it's useful in an information war but IF they knew what it was then they don't need mind workers.

Guys I know y'all think Violet's "twin" is at the head of the venin army but I fear...it might be Xaden's mother. And if he finds out, this is the only thing that would tempt him towards the dark side. Man thinks he failed every woman in his life and that's why they stopped loving him and left. It would only take a little maternal manipulation to convince him to stay venin, join his mother and somehow use it to "protect" the people he loves. ESPECIALLY since venin works like Borg and he'll be influenced by the whole psychic network.

Now that these are off my chest I can rest. See you in January unless I manage to sell my soul to Malek and get a proof before then.