#so itll be a minute

[ashmcgivern]

Oh hello friends I've been busy. Also tired, but busy working on something I'm very excited about.

I wrote a level 20 Greatwyrm slaying adventure, inspired by Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, and am currently play testing the module. In order to run the adventure you'll need access to the PHB, MM, and FtoD, but the mod itself is going to be free. When done, it'll include somewhere between 6-10 custom drawn maps, about 25 custom drawn tokens, 3 NPCs built with personalities and stat blocks, and a pdf with everything you'd need to run this adventure.

It's built so it can be run as a oneshot or a 6-session adventure, you choose! Each part of the adventure is modular, so you can either swap in and out what you/your players have time for, or play the whole thing. And like I said, it'll be 100% free, I'll be putting in on KoFi or something similar to distribute it but I won't charge a cent for it.

So that's where I've been, and why it's been a hot minute since I've uploaded any art. This has been a project about a year in the making, as I've had time between my day job to pick at it. I'm not sure EXACTLY when it'll be ready for release, but it should be ready before the years end.

The working titles for this adventure are "Slaying Adatok" and "The Paragon of Shatterpeak," not sure which one I'll go with if either of them, but expect to see more as time goes on and as I get through my playtesting rounds!

[xxplastic-cubexx]

beautiful woman gets another beautiful skin more at 4

[lokh]

WAIT SHUROS DAD SAID HE WANTED HIM TO BRING SOMETHING BACK INTERESTING.... AND WHO IS MORE INTERESTING THAN LAIOS....

[trainingdummyrabbit]

kinda haunted.

[wispexists]

Hey, hey pssst.. hatchetfield persona au for cringetober day 17, do you understand?

[kaurwreck]

There's certainly Something about singularities in Bungou Stray Dogs presenting as massive, myth-derived creatures with more than passing resemblances to kaiju given the setting predates its analog to World War II.

Gojira and the kaiju genre were born in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon Incident (in which an American hydrogen bomb test rained radioactive ash on a Japanese fishing boat and much of the South Pacific). Life form singularities (like Chuuya and Verlaine), the Seven Traitors, the Transcendants, Mori's fixation on skill-based warfare, and everything else about the Great War all indicate that skills are akin to nuclear arms.

But unlike nuclear arms, skills are generally framed as intrinsic to their user. They're neurological; as much as part of skill users' wiring as the rest of their synapses. Even for Kyouka, whose skill was inherited but not fully integrated, her skill more resembles hereditary neurochemical wiring than it does nuclear proliferation.

Gojira (1954) ends with Dr. Serizawa's promise that hydrogen bombs would always assure nightmarish, monstrous manifestations of the horrors of war. You'd think Dazai's gift, then, would be the enigmatic focal skill of the series; he's capable of nullifying hydrogen bombs, after all.

But it's Atsushi and his celestial Byakko that Shibusawa calls the antithesis of all other abilities. And, as explained in 55 Minutes, Byakko doesn't heal or regenerate Atsushi, it negates his wounds. Atsushi isn't only a particularly tenacious shounen protagonist, Byakko compels him to stand when he's been cut down. When Atsushi is at the edge of death, Byakko consumes him completely, and Atsushi is lost within him, moreso than even Chuuya is in his Corruption state (Chuuya is fully conscious in Corruption— if Atsushi is conscious, he's either repressing or sluggishly recalling the memory of what occurred). Akutagawa also mentions during the Cannibalism arc that Atsushi's claws cut through skills themselves (even Rashoumon, which eats space). Akutagawa also becomes aware, in 55 Minutes, that Byakko can be triggered by Atsushi's peril, and Akutagawa does so to negate the manifestation of a seemingly transcendant skill that otherwise had utterly defanged them (although he seems sorry to have to do it).

Nevertheless, although Atsushi's Byakko seemingly negates the metaphorical horrors of the Great War illustrated by the others and their relationships with their skills, it's Atsushi who posits that perhaps skills aren't innate. He says to Kunikida, "Maybe they come from somewhere else and stick to us. Maybe they're something we can't understand... I don't really know how to put it into words, but that's how I feel."

Much of 55 Minutes is colored by Atsushi's fear of Byakko and his understanding that Byakko could devour him. His fear is seemingly validated by the antagonist, a manifestation of a skill that seemingly swallowed its human. But although textually consistent with his expressed fear, Atsushi's tone, demeanor, timing, and thought processes from when he speaks that line until the light novel ends aren't. His musings reflect his namesake's exploration of and uneasy relationship with the nature of existence, which he understood to be constructed by one's culture and environment better than most due to his somewhat rootless childhood.

I think it's interesting that someone with a skill capable of cutting through other skills, negating wounds, and antithesizing all skills challenges whether skills are innate at all. And if they're not, what does that imply about the parallels between skills, the horrors of war, and the fear of nuclear holocaust?

It's important to me that the scars of American imperialism and disregard for the sanctity of life are not erased from the narrative when discussing the world wars and nuclear proliferation. So I hesitate to posit anything about what skills may be in Bungou Stray Dogs that is too abstracted from trauma wrought by Western imperialism, Japanese imperialism, or the horrors of World Wars I & II. But perhaps that's it; when Atsushi speculates that skills are something that sticks to you, I'm reminded of how trauma has shaped and informed his own. He is certain that Byakko's negation and restless hunger are connected to his birth and subsequent suffering. At first, I thought we were being teased with his early background. But there's no need to tease; the reason so many characters in Bungou Stray Dogs are orphans directly relates to the Great War and the generational trauma still reverberating in its aftermath, and amid the threat of another, even more destructive war.

Perhaps Atsushi was implying that skills are constructs born not from any innate self, if there's such a thing, but from traumas, experiences, needs, cultures, and environments. Which is to say that skills aren't separable, exactly, from their users, but they're not innate either. They're like our personalities: immutable once shaped in the crucible of our most formative years, but nevertheless reflections of not only ourselves, but of what we need and who we become when confronted by others, in all of their beauty and horror.

Thus, perhaps it isn't Atsushi's skill that's so very antithetical to all others. It's his understanding of it, his ability to cut through to others, his compassion, his cowardice, his curiosity, and his separation from his sense of self that both inflicted him with Byakko and which will allow him to transcend it to become who he desires to be. It reminds me that, shortly before his death, his namesake decided to become a writer. And that although he wrote and lived only briefly, his sincerity, thoughtfulness, and introspective skepticism cut, and continue to cut, with a brilliance emblematic of life.

Anyway. Atsushi is both the main character and protagonist of Bungou Stray Dogs. Dazai knows this, too; even if he can nullify Byakko, he's just as impacted by Atsushi's brimming earnestness as everyone else Atsushi encounters. Atsushi liberates the narrative so that it's not a warning that the horrors of war will proliferate so long as we are capable of mass destruction, but instead it's a promise that hope needn't be intrinsic to persist all the same.

[futuremercifulnerd]

I bugged the Addair monster so i got some up close gameplay of it, would it be worth posting to anyone?

EDIT: OKAY! I finally have it uploaded here! Sorry it took so long 😅 yes i absolutely just badly slapped two clips together

[mspeevee]

The Raichu I made today (not pictured) along w Pikachu (pictured) went home today!

[m00ngbin]

HEY HI GUESS WHAT

TFS CHAPTER 20!!!! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? HALFWAY THROUGH IT THATS CRAZY. Tfs my beloved :3

See that cat? That cat is me RIGHT NOW

[lucksea]

preview of something i am working on

[faaun]

ive talked to a lot of ppl who have taken vyvanse now and i think ik a bit more on how i need to live on it

[romanceddawn]

YuJou Means Friendship: The Longing™

[An edit for the Wish fanfic that @undeadbanjos is writing because I've been obsessed with it! It's not a 1:1 with the scenes as I only had so much to work with, but I hope I conveyed the feeling of seemingly unrequited pining that Yugi deals with for the first 40 chapters ♡]

❕ Please do not repost to any other sites ❕

[laz-262]

havin a nice chat

inspired by this post on twt

[kiwisoap]

It's so fucking crazy that I got back from working in Oregon for 4 months and now immediately am going to Texas to work for another 2.5 months. I'll have spent a collective 3 whole weeks at home before leaving LMAO

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Guess who's the newest Shift Leader at Dunkin??!? It's me!!

[lapdogchase]

appt for a vaccine tmrw and 2 of my 3 friends who drive cant drive me and i think the third has work. should i die