#s: magpie

[londonfalling-rpg]

most wanted faces for the magpie & crosshair skeletons?

Hi there,

Thanks for your interest. Here are some of the FCs we could see working for these skeletons:

Crosshair: Rebecca Ferguson, Natalie Dormer, John Krasinski, Peter Gadiot, Andrew Koji

The Magpie: Vanessa Kirby, Emma D'Arcy, Fabien Frankel

This is not an extensive list, and if you'd like to discuss either option more closely then feel free to message us.

Hope this helps!

[the-magpieprince]

[slashmagpie]

Blood & Snow

Pt. I

Directory: {Pt. II} {Pt. III} {Pt. IV} {Pt. V} {Pt. VI} {Pt. VII} {AO3}

Welcome to my @hermithorrorweek fic! I spent a while trying to figure out seven different fic concepts based on the prompt, and kept coming up blank, up until I decided to combine them all and write a single fic, with each prompt being the theme for a different chapter. Blood & Snow is the result, and at the time of posting it is not quite complete, but I'm excited to share it with you nonetheless. I'm hoping to post a chapter once per day, but later chapters may be delayed depending on how long it takes me to get them written. Some of this builds off concepts I played with in some of my earlier Decked Out 2 ficlets, which you can find in my writing tag. TWs for this chapter include: non-consensual body modification*, unreality*, panic attacks

I. GAME MECHANICS

Game design is simple, really.

Well, no, it’s difficult—but the principles behind it are simple. Make it fun. Make it challenging. Make it rewarding. 

Decked Out 2 is a game.

To be more precise, it’s a long-running, deck-building, dungeon-crawling game. It’s competitive. It has rewards—bragging rights, for one. Trophies, for another. If you win, you can get crowns, and buy things to make you more powerful, to make the game more fun. You get frost embers, which are used to build the deck, and—

Clank is Decked Out’s central mechanic. Trigger a shrieker, generate clank. Easy as that. Taking your artefact will also generate clank, because it angers the spirits of the dungeon. That’s another important thing about game design: atmosphere. Design. Having something that feels cohesive. So—no, max clank isn’t quite as dangerous as it should be, but very few mobs would work to replace the vex, because, well, they’re not the spirits of the dungeon, and—

Hazard is generated every thirty-seven seconds, roughly. It used to be thirty, but that lined up with card draws, and the sound cues were hard to keep track of. So. Hazard is generated every thirty-seven seconds, roughly. Hazard makes the dungeon more dangerous to traverse, by closing doors, raising pathways, and otherwise making certain routes more dangerous or downright impossible to cross. People underestimate hazard at first, but quickly find out that hazard kills. When clank maxes out, that turns into hazard too, because max clank wasn’t dangerous enough by itself, because the vexes aren’t doing their damn jobs—

There were two older systems that got replaced. Not a lot of people know that. Focus could be built up, would synergise with other cards, but it was just—it wasn’t working. It got reworked. No one would miss it. Delve was a difficulty setting, but it was dumb, just press a button to choose your difficulty, that works way better, and—

Game design is simple, really. 

Decked Out is not a game.

Had it ever been a game? In its first iteration, back in season seven, had it hungered the way it does now? Had it slept, slumbering beneath the earth, soaking in blood that would slowly, slowly bring it to life? When the idea had wormed its way into Tango’s head, a sequel—had that been his own thought? Does it matter if it was?

He’d certainly thought it was. Began drafting up plans, re-evaluating what he’d done in the past and putting better spins on them. Decked Out 2 would be huge, would be the biggest project he’d ever worked on, but it wouldn’t take that long. Surely.

…Thirteen months later, Decked Out 2 opened its doors.

Thirteen months. It had started as a hole, as many things do. A hole, a build, a plan, a citadel—Tango had thrown himself into it like he would with any huge project. And at first it had been—it had been a project. A build, a game. A giant hole filled with promise. A castle built in a week. Just Hermitcraft things. The usual.

When had it started? When he’d dug, and dug, for hours and hours upon end? When he’d carved jagged-looking scars into the landscape and dragged the citadel up from them? When he’d started building level one? When he’d begun assembling the redstone? When the ravagers and wardens began to roam its halls? When did Decked Out come alive?

…Had it always been alive?

Okay, better question: when did—

A frozen shard is placed into the barrel. The door lights up, sounds play. The door opens. The hermit—Joe?—begins to take off their armour and items and set up the game. A difficulty button is pressed. A shulker is placed into its slot. The cards begin to filter through the system. A minecart ride, and a pressure plate—

Decked Out turns on.

The Dungeon watches carefully, hungrily. A shrieker triggers. A hazard door closes. The game is running, the game is alive, the game is always alive—

The Dungeon Master floats, untethered, bodiless, watching, speaking, unheard, unseen. His body stands in the dark, empty, eyes sightless and lungs unbreathing. Why would he need to breathe? Dungeons don’t need to breathe, after all. Games don’t need to breathe. And Decked Out isn’t a game, not really, but it still works on principles of game design, and none of those principles require the game to breathe.

So the Dungeon watches, and the Dungeon Master watches, and Joe runs straight into the blood-stained horns of a ravager, and—

And—

Tango tries to blink. To breathe. A hazard door slams open and closed. The wires are crossed, that’s not—he needs to go—an attempt to step forward dispenses a stack of frost embers into the dungeon. They’re not supposed to do that. That’s a bug, he needs to fix—

He needs his hands—

Stone walls aren’t fingers, but they flex all the same, groaning under the strain—

There’s an itching in his legs. Skulk creeps up the walls. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t—

It’s dark. A warden sniffs. A shrieker howls. Stone becomes sinew becomes skulk becomes shadow becomes smoke becomes a soul. The Dungeon Master wrenches open his sightless eyes, and the Dungeon sees—

(Buildings aren’t meant to have panic attacks. Neither are dungeons. Nor games. But Decked Out is not a game, never really has been, and Tango—)

Joe and Hypno stare in bafflement at the flickering availability metre outside of the dungeon. “Tango, fix your game!” Hypno cries, and—

Ha.

Here’s a better question: when did Tango become Decked Out?

[magpiing]

funny headache-inducing guy

(simple lineart version below cut)

[takami-takami]

Okay, so I found this, which on its own is very funny. (General warning so as not to cause a jumpscare: scantily clad Endeavor for comedic purposes.)

But it brought to mind an idea of. What if.

Okay, look, I know* it's January, but what if you showed up to a costume party in the Slutty Hawks fit without having told Keigo first.

* (this will not stop me from having gay thoughts)

- magpie anon ✦

BEST JEANIST IS SERVING

The slutty hawks fit is just the regular Hawks fit I think he'd lose his shit. At first he'd smile a lot like an idiot. Crack a few jokes. But after a while, after he gets a few more looks from a few more angles...

Keigo is the type of guy who can easily conceal how he feels about things. If he wants to. But why would he want to hide how attracted he is to you?

Nah, this man is gonna be all over you at the party. Hand on your waist at all times, periodically stopping to bury himself in your neck and run his mouth against your skin about how cute you look. Plants a possessive kiss against you every so often. Talks how he should give you his jacket more often.

Keigo makes sure you hear him talk, because the bastard is well-informed that his voice alone makes you weak.

The way he'd paw at you for attention... :( Won't you throw him a bone? :(

I think what gets to him the most is "awwww they thought of me... so cute! I want them."

[baylardian-1]

been sitting on this OC idea for my headworld Tenebres for a whiiiiile, not really a new OC but a major revamp of an old character. was starting to dabble with her visuals a bit, she's a rabbit familiar who apprentices under my OCs Juneau and Ethel :)

she's a bright young mage who finds out shes a familiar during a big test or w/e in her prestigious magic school and gets kicked out because she's a familiar (theyre only permitted to study lesser magic)

[mischiefmagpie]

Avernus really changed her….

[many-gay-magpies]

okay as far as season four of teen wolf goes i am like. very confused as to what the fuck kate's motive even is? like she came back from the dead and she's screwing with derek and making her berserker servants kill people but like. WHY. ik there was like that one scene with peter where it was implied she wanted to make the argents great again (aka reinstate them to their former genocidal werewolf-hunting glory) but that doesn't make complete sense to me when she herself is now a shifter. or like maybe she's just that hypocritical idk (wouldn't put it past her). but even with that idk it doesn't make SENSE. why did she kill garrett and violet? why did she try to make scott's pack kill him? why did she do all that just to get derek to open the vault? literally what the fuck

if anyone has thoughts please share im at a loss here

[the-magpie-archives]

so i saw your post about finding a dead body and having had even weirder things happen to you... care to elaborate any?

I do indeed care to elaborate! To start off with, all of this is true, but whether or not you believe it, it's pretty interesting.

So for a long time my friends and I have joked that I'm cursed because wherever I am weird stuff tends to happen. Sometimes this is just normal mundane odd things, weird coincidences or accidental predictions, but sometimes it's worse.

On that particular day I mentioned in my previous post I'd just started season 2 of tma and I made a silly joke about kinning Jon, thought nothing of it! This was back when I was in college so I went in for my classes, everything was fine.

Back then myself and a friend would walk around the city every day after class until around pretty late at night, which in hindsight was quite dangerous but we survived so how bad could it really have been!

Anyways, that day we went into Paddington Station to grab a coffee and upon entering saw a very dead man slumped on a bench. I won't go into detail but it was very clear there was nothing we could do for him. I'm as anti cop as the next person but in that situation there's not much else you can really do, so we found an officer, told him what was going on, and carried on going to get coffee. It sounds dismissive but we really had done everything we could do.

That was one of the most memorable times I've heard the 'Inspector Sans please report' announcement. There was never any investigation or report on the death, the guy looked homeless and like he'd overdosed so that's just not the kind of death that's newsworthy in a big city.

We decided to carry on with our usual daily walk, not really wanting to hang around the station after that. We ended up playing a fun little manifestation game as we walked, in which you basically decide an intention and walk whichever way you feel is right in the hopes of manifesting what you want. We weren't doing it seriously and my friend said we should try to find a celebrity, so I agreed, and we started. Neither of us said it to eachother at the time but we both felt uneasy about it.

We walked through Hyde Park and came out in Knightsbridge where we carried on walking. At this point the unease reached a peak point and we both admitted to eachother that we felt like something terrible was going to happen. Every car stopping and every person shouting felt like it would be the start of something awful, but what could we do except carry on?

We did carry on, for quite a while too. The feeling changed though, and i couldn't for the life of me shake the feeling that we were being watched, being followed, perhaps even compelled. I'm pretty big on spiritual stuff and I've been ghost hunting for years and this energy was NOT one that I liked at all. My friend was dead set on a certain route, down a particular street, and i DESPERATELY wanted to go that way too, but it just felt wrong. I had no reason to want to go that way, there was nothing interesting there!

At that point I stopped and told her I couldn't say why but that we should turn around. She really didn't want to, and i was worried we'd end up outright arguing in the street, but eventually she agreed. The second we turned round and started walking it started to rain. An insistent, heavy shower. It was weird, but that feeling of being watched left almost as soon as we were off that road.

It was around sunset by then, and we grabbed another coffee before splitting off to head home. My friend left to catch a bus, and i went to try and find the station. It had gotten dark, and Google maps said that Green Park Station was only a couple of minutes away, so I headed towards it, but my GPS was screwed up and I ended up taking a weird loop through the park itself and around the outside of The Ritz before I actually got there.

In that maybe 10 minutes of walking around alone, in the dark, even more strange things happened! For a start, in the park I nearly bumped into someone who was loudly chatting to their friend who just happened to be called Basira! I accidentally followed a cop to a little side entrance of the Ritz, and then managed to arrive at the station just in time to witness the aftermath of a bus accident!

Apologies for the long ramble, but that is the full story of that particular dead body, it's one of many adventures of the sort, and is definitely the sort of thing that made tma even more fun to listen to than it already is!

[benjithefox]

Im having a lot of fun with magpie Leon x]

might draw Luise with him next time?

[londonfalling-rpg]

Code name: Magpie

Gender: UTP

Age: 25-35

FC: UTP

Their parents always compared them to a magpie, inexplicably drawn to anything shiny. This obsession with pretty trinkets rapidly spiralled into kleptomania, but with those angel eyes and that innocent face, how could anyone ever have suspected them? It never occurred to the Magpie that they might turn their hobby into a career, but after getting caught up in the world of crime and the Jolly Rogers, they rapidly began climbing the ladder. Presently they're in charge of designing and organising some of the gang's most complex and large-scale heists.

[the-magpieprince]

[jezebelgoldstone]

So since you have such acute good book refs, you know of any gothic horror with focus on gay men romance (trans or not) that feature adult themes, violence (possibly gore), and sexual themes (including dark/ taboo)? I find these hard to find out of original online fiction/videogames, or find it but it's not quite what I was looking for (or badly written) and it's a shame because it's my favourite kinds of stories.

:DDDD

The Magpie Lord by KJ Charles.

First in a series of several short books and short stories. Set in Victorian England, first book features a violent curse and a huge scary old Gothic manor. Main character is a very rich handsome classically demanding romance hero type, who is a gay guy who has been living in queer-friendly China for the last couple of decades and has to come back to homophobic England when his father and older brother die. It is violent, there is some gore, there is some creepy stuff, there is a murder mystery, there is magic, there is some light BDSM and some pretty explicit gay sex. The whole series is great fun.

I haven't yet read anything else by this author, but @lilyhargrave says that their other stuff is good too, and I certainly trust her word.

Honorable Mentions:

Not quite as perfect a match is Prince of the Sorrows by Kellen Graves.

It's gothic, it's gay, but I wouldn't call it horror. There is some relatively explicit gay sex in this and the next book, but though it is a Forbidden Love Story nothing about the sex is particularly taboo. I will also admit that though the first book is a murder mystery, the mystery itself is pretty obvious. That said, there is some violence, some pretty gross murders, some torture, some mental agonizing Etc, and I think the romance is really really great.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Moxiang Tongxiu more widely known on tumblr as MDZS by MXTX

Okay so this one is a Chinese story in a Chinese setting by a Chinese author written for a Chinese audience. It is not Gothic in the Anne Radcliffe sort of way. Further, the writing is very very different from what most native English speakers are used to. All that said, it is a very very very good horror story, it is gross, it is gory, there is so much torture and murder, it is one of the most breathtaking tragedies ever written, it is ridiculous, it is funny, it is a war story, it is a ghost story... it's basically everything. The gay romance is epic and beyond my skill to describe. It is also an extremely LONG story (the official English translation runs at I believe eight volumes?) and I will warn you that the on-page gay sex is confined to the end; HOWEVER, that gay sex is nice and explicit, and features BDSM and CNC and all kinds of nice stuff. Also if you're into fanfic there are like 40k-ish English-language stories on AO3 alone, and quite a few of them are, ahem, veeeeeery nice. There is a fan translation online for free, and the official English language translation is available via Seven Seas publishing.

Another near-match is Captive Prince by CS Pacat.

It is once again not horror, and it is gothic in the romance if not necessarily in the setting. Recommending this one though because there is quite a bit of sex and it is pretty taboo. Bdsm, sexual slavery, Etc is baked into the worldbuilding. The gay romance is also really really good. This one is also violent, also includes torture and a bit of gore, and features a main character who was once a prince and is trafficked as a bedslave and given as a gift to the prince of the neighboring country.

Now. Now. Now we come to what I'm tempted to call both a total miss and a dead ringer: The Last Sun by K D Edwards.

I feel like this one would technically be a horror story if the narrating character actually admitted how horrifying everything is, and wasn't so damn funny. It's got a gothic vibe in a modern-day setting. The main character is an assault survivor, a magic practitioner, and takes jobs for everything from protection details to hired muscle to private investigator. There is quite a bit of violence, some of the magic is rank, the gay romance is great, and there is a mildly spicy though extremely vanilla gay sex scene. All three books feature at least one gorgeous haunted manor. There is once again quite a bit of taboo sexual stuff baked into the worldbuilding, but in this case other than the assault (which happened 20 years ago) none of the taboo sexual stuff happens on-page or involves the main character. I feel like I'm not doing a very good job explaining this book, but this whole series genuinely is one of my absolute favorites and though it's not as good a match as The Magpie Lord, I still strongly recommend it.

Hope these are good for you, have fun and happy reading, and come talk to me if you read any of them!

[gongedtornado]

KANGA THE TERRIBLE.

(ramblings in tag)

[fridayyy-13th]

various doodles of chapter 7 of the wonderful fic We Start With Small Talk by @three-magpies-in-a-trenchcoat that i did while trying not to be sad about chapters 10 and 11 (everyone go read it right now it's so so good)

[ids in alt]

(also, fun note about the skirts: the skirt with the clouds is what i initially pictured jon wearing, and the gray skirt is what magpie had planned! i couldn't decide which i liked more, so i figured why not draw both :D)