#the campaign was Fine

[shaniacsboogara]

liking dnd is so funny because yeah you play the actual game sometimes but mostly you just think about the game and watch other people play the game and slowly go insane thinking about how much you wish you could play the game and hoping that buying more shiny rocks will fix everything

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Guy Bourdin Charles Jourdan, Ad Campaign, ca. 1970

[rennybu]

seek out, sink down

[jimbodyson]

ngl im so fed up. i literally just want to sit and enjoy and talk about the show and all i see on all of my pages are mfs complaining about the most trivial things. they're focusing on some romance this season? that sucks. they did Glintshore differently? that sucks. Scanlan didn't have a mental breakdown for no reason? that sucks. just enjoy something for once you joyless fucks. and most of all let other people enjoy it too. i wish i could see people fucking talk about this season without it just constantly being a barrage of how people hate every fucking change and decision they made. and it's especially frustrating when 90% of the hate comes from people going 'oh, if they do this, this will suck'. stuff that isn't even written yet. or just people who think they know the characters better than the people who created and played them for several years. or people who say they don't hate it and yet every fucking post is them chatting shit on it.

im so tired of things i enjoy being hated that it just feels like a huge slap in the face. or that im just wrong for liking it. just fed up with seeing people being negative all the time. sorry, i really loved TLOVM season 3. no, i don't fucking care that you think the og game is better.

edit: made a separate post but i was very overwhelmed and therefore irritable and angry when i wrote this. while it's still frustrating to constantly see negativity surrounding it as i love it (especially so because i muted all the relevant tags), i was unnecessarily aggressive. sorry. although i would like to add, it's harder to belive some people when they say they didn't go into it wanting to hate it or that they like some bits-- when the only parts they talk about are the parts that they didn't like.

[remxedmoon]

“the eternal wanderer…? even death cannot release it from its plight… hm. did i create a second copy of this card?”

tribeless

1 power - 1 health - 7 bones?

unkillable - when a card bearing this sigil perishes, a copy of it is created in your hand.

corpse eater - if a creature that you own perishes by combat, a card bearing this sigil in your hand is automatically played in its place.

brittle - after attacking, a card bearing this sigil perishes.

hidden trait - cursebearer

this card cannot be sacrificed at the sigil stones event.

[twohats spoilers below the cut!]

“callous, aimless, manipulative. this pitiful beast hides behind a mask of its own face.”

tribeless

2 power - 1 health - no cost

repulsive - if a creature would attack a card bearing this sigil, it does not.

bifurcated strike - a card bearing this sigil will strike each opposing space to the left and right of the space across from it.

hidden trait - shapeshifter

while in your deck or hand, this card will disguise itself as the wanderer.

SURPRISE BONUS CARD!!! or well. not really a surprise if you’re from the discord. still!!!! bonus card!!! writeup below!!!!

this is an ijiraq reskin!!!! or well. they were supposed to be one. their out-of-battle behaviors are pretty different but they work mostly the same in battles

the repulsive sigil is there because the ijiraq has it! but it also counts towards loop’s. general attitude towards themself i think. at least they can’t get attacked (if they don’t attack something with sharp quills that is). in kaycee’s mod, this sigil only appears on the ijiraq and starvation (which can only be played by leshy). probably for the best!

i added bifurcated strike both to set them apart from the ijiraq and because scissors craft! stats and sigils wise, they’re a sidegrade to the ijiraq. the fun stuff comes with their hidden trait!

so! shapeshifter!! originally just called. ijiraq. but it works a little different so it gets a different name shshhh. but i’ll just explain how the regular ijiraq works since it’s a kaycee’s mod card and kinda obscure. basically, it diguises itself as other cards in your deck! while on the map, it’ll show the card’s alt version with a red glow, but in battle, it’ll look and behave exactly like the card it’s mimicking. it only reveals itself once placed on the field! so it’s always a surprise! loop works similarly, but they only mimic sif’s card. because twohats :3

like the ijiraq, loop will swap themself with sif for most card events! though there’s a good few that they’ll just refuse to do. too much to talk about there, maybe i’ll post the talking card dialogue for them at some point? idk

oh, speaking of which!! like sif, loop is a talking card! they’ll still talk, even while disguised, but they’d have slightly different lines and portraits methinks. which does make it a little easier to figure out who’s who but that’s a sacrifice (heh) i’m willing to make. plus it’s just fun.

vulpecula is the name of a fox constellation! for fun parallels with siffrin! the constellation itself doesn’t have any mythology behind it though. just a fox. the reason loop’s holding a goose in their mouth(…?) is because the constellation is sometimes depicted with one! please look at the goose i’m really proud of that goose.

this was. probably the hardest card to draw Period. my usual way of drawing loops spiky face would’ve felt out of place with the inscryption style so i had to improvise! and BOY it was a struggle!! especially since i didn’t have a sketch prepared like i did with the others. i think this turned out pretty nice though!

NO PATCH!!!! REJOICE!!! loop can’t be selected for sigil transfers (because ijiraq) so they don’t have any!!!! i mean, i could’ve hypothetically given a patch to the sif disguise but no. i don’t want to even try to recolor the patch. that would be a nightmare. maybe if i ever find a blank png version of the patch.

if i were to give them a patch sigil tho, i think i’d give them hoarder? which lets you draw any card from your deck after placing loop on the field. as like, a nod to how much QoL they add in isat.

also as a little aside, you can attempt to fuse them and the wanderer at the mycologists. they won’t let you but you can try. similarly, they’ll be counted as kin in the trial of kin! because again. twohats

THAT’S EVERYTHING 🎉🎉🎉 rare cards wise, at least. trust me there’s a ridiculous amount of extra stuff for this au. i’m making an entire campaign. god have mercy on me

no extra alt card art so uh. thank you for reading these!!! isatscryption is like. probably the most self indulgent thing ever for me. thank you so much to everyone who’s responded to these aauauuaa i reread the responses like. every day!!! so thank you!!!!!! 💥

[zethdoesart]

"Dont you have a sister to go kill?"

"No. I have a sister to walk beside."

"...I feel like I set you up for that."

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

I thought it was pretty clear from the outset in the campaign that no one, Guardian or Neomuni, knows exactly what the Veil is or how it does what it does. I didn't get the impression at all that everyone knew what it was but just didn't feel like explaining it. Neomuna folk clearly know how to tap its energies to some degree, but Guardians have done that with the Traveler for centuries and still know next to nothing about it.

I don't think the Veil was studied at all during the Golden Age, and the reason why starts with an "R" and ends with a warsat strike. If the Veil is the "[H]" the Warmind Rasputin directs Soteria to get to safety, and I think it is, his notation suggests he considered it a paracausal object on the same tier as the Traveler, which he called "[O]". However he also talks like it's a thing, not a being, and he was well aware the Traveler was a being. So he thought the Veil was a paracausal artifact of Traveler-type power, but not a being with will or intent. And that would be enough for him to rule that no one was going to study it any further. Rasputin had no qualms about putting objects he deemed sufficient potential threats in (sometimes literal) boxes to keep anyone from playing around with them. He completely sequestered the Anomaly antenna on the Moon, for instance - no access for research, no experiments, no study beyond constant monitoring. He very much took a "better safe than sorry" approach with paracausal power. He would have locked the Veil up and thrown away the key - or planned to use it himself. When he tells Soteria to get it somewhere safe, he does so right after detecting paracausal anomalies that seem to be eliminating inhabited planets. He's thinking about it as a last-ditch weapon; for all he knows, those anomalies might even be other Travelers. Unfortunately it gets "lost" and for whatever reason (maybe the Veil's own shielding?) he can't recover it.

Although the Veil probably reached Neptune via Soteria's launch, the Ishtar Collective wasn't out there yet. Maya Sundaresh ended up in Neomuna, but assuming the writers haven't just decided to retcon the Spire of the Watchers lore already (I wouldn't put it past them), at the time of that launch she was still around to yell at Clovis about Pillorying Soteria. In the Winterbite lore about the IC aboard the Exodus Indigo proper, they're fleeing something nasty - it sounds like beasts of the Collapse - and run towards a Vex distress signal. If the Veil were onboard a ship that fell into Neptune, and the Vex tried to get at it and got messed up by the Veil, that would account for the distress signal, and account for how the Indigo found the old ship with presumably the Veil and maybe some very sad and confused Exos.

(Side note: this means my old theory about the colony ship founding Neomuna being the one Rasputin dispatched with a hold full of SIVA to Planet X might still pan out; the speaker in that loretab could be the Exodus Indigo.)

So most of the Ishtar Collective's study and later use of the Veil likely happened after the Collapse. It probably took them a while to figure out how to hide the city with it, which leaves time for Savathun to have been protecting it as well. If she followed the IC back to Neptune and observed the Veil (side note - was it Sav's own forces attacking the Indigo? that weird "exotic matter spike" sounds like something she'd build) she might have thought it wise to have an ace up her sleeve one day in case she decided to defy the Witness. So she hid the Veil and the lifesigns on the planet until the Traveler kicked everyone out of the system, and by the time the Fleet returned Neomuna had figured out how to hide itself. That accounts for her worm's statement that she deceived the Witness to protect the Traveler for her own ends: she denied it a tool it could have used to overcome the Traveler in order to perhaps one day use it herself.

Once on Neptune it seems like the IC managed to tap and crudely manipulate the Veil's energies, but that's all, and there hasn't been much work on it since. Nimbus knows the Veil's rough location and how important it is, but they aren't even sure how to get to where it itself is kept. When you get into the actual facility there's no sign anyone's been in there since the early days of the City's founding. Even the old Ishtar Collective logo is still around. So there's a very good chance no one in Neomuna knows much more than whatever the IC team was able to work out with a few decades of study, and after that the Veil was woven so tightly into the city's protection that nobody wanted to risk messing with it anymore. Neomuna's plan for Pyramid Fleet defense was for everyone to go into the Veil-maintained CloudArk, suggesting they thought this would keep the Fleet from noticing them. Staying safe from the Fleet would be the number one top priority of the city's founders, since they had no idea when it might return. So if the Veil was their main source of safety, no one was tampering with the Veil.

We should also consider the Veil itself might have had some say in all this. Red thought it wasn't a person, but an artifact tied into a universal web of consciousness must have SOME awareness, at least of the emotions around it. Everyone in Neomuna wants to be safe, and it's spent centuries being thought of as the city's defense. That must have made an imprint on it by now. Maybe even the unified will of all those citizens in a shared mindspace, all focusing on wanting to help us, shaped its emergence. I think we could see Strand because on some level the Veil knew it was under attack and was trying to empower us to defend it. That's why Strand breaches show up right where and when we need them to, and why they didn't before - up until now secrecy plus the Cloud Striders were enough, but now that Neomuna's cover is blown it needs more powerful defenses. The Veil deliberately pulls the weave closer to material awareness, already empowered by the thinning of the line between digital and real created by the VexNet/Neomuna cyberspace, just close enough for us to grasp those first threads.

Ok so I’m gonna give my Take(tm) about Lightfall here. Where the entire internet can roast me I guess.

Full spoilers.

Disclaimers: it’s all my opinion, is clearly not very close to the opinion of various Big Destiny Content Creators, so I’m probably wrong. I could also be giving the team too much credit by inferring some things, sue me I wanna give them the benefit of the doubt and say some of it was intentional.

Listen, was Lightfall flawed? Absolutely, I will not try to say it was perfect or even that some of its plot points were done well.

But…

Look, I can’t help but think about people asking questions that I feel like have answers in either the story itself or the past lore.

The most… detestable thread (haha strand joke) I wanna pull at is the Veil. Now, yes, the fact that everyone seems to know what it is without expounding on it is deeply frustrating. I feel like not enough was said in the story itself. But. We do get some answers. The Black Heart from D1 is a failed copy of it, which likely points to the veil equating to The Pale Heart mentioned at the end of Witch Queen. That by itself isn’t much, but it is a start. Additionally it very much feels like a question intentionally left not fully answered.

Next, the Radial Mast, much like the Veil is something of a MacGuffin, but I think there are drops of info given. One, Ghost detects a strong Light signature when we enter the Typhon Imperator, yet it radiates the orange energy we associate with Darkness in the mission where Rohan dies. I think this points to a blending of the two, which was needed to “convince” the Veil to connect to the Traveler. Which leads to the Witness.

Much like Nimbus, the Witness is one of the few unequivocally good things about the expansion, in my opinion. The Witness is subtle, and I think influences things in a way not really appreciated. Firstly, the Witness remains confident that their plan will succeed despite clearly looking down on Calus’ lack of progress. This entity is omnipresent, powerful to an extent we haven’t really seen, and has constantly possessed our ghosts for various reasons. So I personally believe that most of the plan as we see it was a ploy. That said I think the Radial Mask could have worked but that it wasn’t load bearing towards the Witness’s plans.

We see the Witness egging Calus on, only resorting to threats what their motives are questioned. They have a deep tunnel vision as to achieving whatever it wants—something characters are trying to investigate, another question being gradually answered. And we know it doesn’t care about its Disciples. Eramis is just a tool, and Salvation is quickly made into more obedient soldiers. Rhulk was left to rot in a losing turf war in Savathun’s Throne World. Calus is no different. The Radial Mast was a focused of Dark and Light—which I believe is proved by the twin energy signatures. And so when it’s destroyed, the Witness instead has Calus go down there himself, likely aware that the Guardian would head down there as well. What does this lead to? Dark and Light unleashed in great quantities during the final battle. Which allows the Witness to possess the Ghost and establish the connection.

I think the Witness, as we’ve seen it is manipulative and powerful enough to concoct this scheme, to use both Calus and us as puppets.

Finally, Strand suddenly appearing makes enough sense to not bother me because two things were mentioned. Nimbus stated that they can’t normally see strand. Not like we do, the lines floating around. Additionally, the energy of strand was stated to come from the Veil (a paracausal thing that reminds Ghost of the traveler yet offers darkness energy. Another guess as to why dark and light were needed). I do not have direct sources but I have played the campaign twice, I’m sure I could find these instances. Therefore, only Neomuni were near Strand and its source and there was no paracausal being (especially no Guardians) that could see it or manipulate it.

All told, I think there are subtleties that went unnoticed in Lightfall. I don’t think it excuses the entirety of the expansion, but I think it offers more that was people see on the surface. I’m not trying to defend all of Lightfall, merely pointing out things that I liked that I haven’t seen being discussed by anyone.

[andi-o-geyser]

Is it a little sacrilegious that they're killing the slow burn right before the gut punch of true love's nat 20? Yes. Did I love seeing the 'I open up the door completely naked' scene come to life even though it was (WAY) earlier then I expected? Also yes. I'm trying to go with the flow and am holding out hope that they're doing things differently, and they obviously have less time to work with (which is the most critical thing to understand), but will still pull it off. It's hard because from an analysis perspective there is something so crucially important about Vex's repressed feelings only coming out under extreme duress and still not admitting she loved Percy until they talked later and even then finding their footing in a very different way than we're seeing here?? Like it's kinda throwing me for both Vex and Percy to be so open and upfront about their desire to get together? It's certainly a different take on it that does have an interesting dynamic to explore. At this point I'm trying to trust the process and just enjoy what we're given and acknowledge they're not creating the exact same story as the original.

Eventhoughi'mgoingtobegoingbacktowatchthecampaignafterthistofixthelossofthelongestjuiciestslowburnihaveeverexperiencedbutthatsfine woahhhhhh who said that

[spicyraeman]

her camp chair voice lines make me weak ngl

[traveltobeprovedwrong]

“I have synthetic memories of Derrig teaching Orym when he was a kid and of falling in love with Will, and I have synthetic memories of Will, looking beautiful, training in the hills of that place, with cherry blossom petals falling everywhere.” -Liam O’Brien, 4-sided dive

(Catching up on 4-sided dive and this quote is SENDING ME with it’s parallels to the new animated intro)

[zwoftt]

WEEKLY DORYM MOMOS N OTHER STYFF IN NO CERTAIN ORDER!! the glances robbie makes towards liam and then they don't do any morning scene :( robbie looked so excited and ready for one... its crazy the contrast between dorian and orym, and its shown perfectly in the costumes liam and robbie wore dorian's small "i love your analogies" towards orym when he explains their plan better to dorian during breakfast. orym giving himself more dex???? omg????? dorian look out buddy keyleth and vex talking about vaxxxxxx god it hurtttttssss cerkonos is literally so... UGHGHGHGH!!! (literally foetrgort he was a charatcer to begin with LOL

vox machina. thats it. thats the moment. i didn't clock very many dorym moments in this episode(lemme know if you guys caught anything else)) (so sad)!! but im guessing we'll see more romantic stuff later when shit isn't, yknow, multiple character parties.

[curse-of-dming-strahd]

it cracks me up how often the Curse of Strahd module read-aloud flavor text describes the environment as sad:

the wind is bummed out. the torches are bummed out. the dirt is sad that it's dirt. like listen I know it's a realm of eternal despair but I feel like they could have hit the thesaurus a little harder on this one

though shoutout to the flavor text of Wachterhaus, which may actually have diagnosable clinical depression:

[janedoe297-art]

thank you artfight for giving me a good excuse do paint Wolfgang again 🥹🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

[somegurl8]

Hey guys did you know that tomorrow will make one full year since season 2 episode 39 of Prime Defenders 😁😁😁😁 And in less than 2 weeks from now will be one full year since the end of Prime Defenders season 2 😁😁😁😁

[brookesmartt]

I love Yasha Nydoorin

[sharkpeeko]

had these doodles + snippets of full arts laying around for MONTHS but never posted em. nows the time lets go gamers!!!!!!