#the rest is up to fate and the gods

[biohazard-inevitable]

Trying to recreate my sister’s christmas mac n cheese recepie that she cant remember.

May sanji have mercy on my soul for any cooking sins i may be about to commit

[ludinusdaleth]

for the record i think what happens to vax'ildan tonight is whatever liam feels is correct for his character whose story became about the heavy meta knowledge of his journey of grief in c1, and how he feels about that journey of grief now, and any decision made would have weight in liams feelings on his mothers loss

[mellowthorn]

[rexcaliburechoes]

does gale know that he's appreciated? does he know that he's loved? does he know that he's funny and witty and charming and worthwhile as a companion because of his simple existence? does he know that there is fulfillment in following the ambition to live? does he know? can he see the paths laid before him, the paths he is destined to walk, some that end in his death, others that continue on with his life, does he understand the ramifications of his choices, does he understand how his choices have affected the other companions' courses just by asking for a hand?

does he understand how the act of taking his hand grounds him in reality, towards a brighter future?

of course he doesn't; he's a fictional character and he only knows thst he sees in front of him and that is his death several feet ahead of him. he is entangled in the fabric of the universe like a moth in a spider's web, the strands of his ambitions and regrets clinging, gossamer thin yet sticky and strong, holding him fast to the paths that rip him in too many directions.

all he needs is a little push into the spider's maw or free to fly and live another day.

[send-up-my-heart-to-you]

i know i’m late but i heard of the murder of marcellus khalifa williams. inna lillahi wa ilayhi raji’un. may god take him as a martyr and raise him to the highest levels of paradise

god curse the people who murdered this innocent man. they never cared if he was behind it. he was black and a muslim, and in their eyes that was enough reason for him to die

[eldritchamy]

What the shit. Fighting a god in hand to hand combat as a gold dragon using immovable rods goes so fucking hard and it’s the backstory for a character that’s just in the main backstory???????? AMY???

You know how a lot of people, when making DND characters, make the mistake of having their level 1 PC have an elaborate backstory where they're super badass and already recognized as a hero?

When I made Ash I did the opposite. Her backstory is elaborate, yes, but in very mundane ways that inform her personality and how she perceives the world around her, and build up the logic of how she makes decisions.

I made everyone AROUND my PC a super powerful character who had done incredible things, and I gave Ash anxiety about it.

She feels, constantly, that she is inadequate by comparison. Her entire frame of reference is shaped by a bunch of women in her life that are outstandingly powerful, and she's just a quiet girl who makes leather goods and sells them for a living. She thinks of herself as the NPC in other people's more impressive lives.

Her mother, Lailah, is a nearly seven foot tall divine warrior created in Elysium to destroy Pit Fiends. She's an angel of lightning built like an MMA fighter, and she wields a weapon like piece of a lightning bolt (not stylized, I mean a real, glowing crackling arc of electricity that she holds like a staff and can be used like anything from a polearm to a spear to a whip, and when thrown it acts like a Lightning Bolt spell). She is built, both narratively and in game stats, to be an unkillable holy destroyer, capable of fighting MULTIPLE PIT FIENDS simultaneously, and winning. She's a CR 10+ magical creature (she's a homebrewed mix of Deva and Erinyes stat blocks with some unique flavor) with eighteen class levels, 16 in Zealot Barbarian and 2 in Fighter. She has a strength of 27 and a constitution of 25. She's designed to deal HUGE amounts of damage, tank unfathomable amounts in turn, NOT DROP WHEN SHE HITS ZERO HITPOINTS, and keep swinging until every devil in her way is a pile of dust, then use bonus action Second Wind to bring herself back above 0 so she doesn't incur the auto-death caveat on Zealot Barbarian's Rage Beyond Death ability. One of her attuned items is also the very simple uncommon item "Periapt of Wound Closure" which automatically stabilizes you at the start of your turn, thereby resetting the death saving throws she would theoretically have to make each time she gets hit below 0. Also, as an angel, she's innately immune to auto-death effects like Power Word Kill, which closes almost all loopholes that get around her build. She is UNSPEAKABLY badass. I ran a simulated round of combat with her once, and she could potentially one-shot a CR 15 Skittering Horror (228 HP) in a single turn. Her theoretical maximum damage output is like, 456 damage in a turn (granted this assumes all crits and rolling max damage).

So that's Ash's mom.

Aria is interesting. She was always strongly attuned to the forces of nature, and her magic grew quickly. Where Ash grew up with someone she knew would always be there to protect her from anything, Aria did NOT have that safety net, and spent her formative years learning to be more self-sufficient in terms of relying on her own power. So eventually she got sucked into an adventuring party consisting of herself (a tiefling Witch subclass with very strong druid flavor), a tiefling zealot barbarian, and a couple of elf twins who were an Arcana cleric and a Celestial Warlock. Sometime after they had made a name for themselves, they were tasked with stopping a suspected fledgling vampire who had been kidnapping girls and killing a bunch of people. When they arrived, they met Cass, who was very much NOT a new vampire. She was almost 150 years old and had been protecting women from abusers and overzealous debt collectors, and things had gotten a little messy with one or two of them, leading to a lot more attention than she normally got. They start off fighting Cass (Aria polymorphs herself into a dire wolf and lunges directly for the throat, which Cass found amusing and impressive) but realize in the banter that Cass wasn't the real problem, and she ends up being a sort of a lesson for the group in terms of whose word they trust and who they take jobs from (YES THE BACKSTORY'S BACKSTORY HAS NARRATIVE ARCS AND MORAL LESSONS THAT LEAD TO LONG TERM CHARACTER GROWTH OKAY I CAN'T HELP MYSELF). Cass, having a particular rapport with Aria, ends up joining their party as a dhampir Soulknife Rogue/Shadow Monk.

Yes, that's all backstory that I made up for an imaginary campaign that exists entirely as a set piece for Aria as one of Ash's story NPCs. This doesn't even touch on the fact that I liked Cass so much as a character that I gave HER an entire backstory of her own. I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM.

Anyway the team only makes a bigger name for themselves for handling things that other groups can't. Eventually, they just happen to be in the Tenth District when the War of the Spark happens (major established event in the MTG canon), and I basically added some extra "scenes" to it that didn't violate existing canon so I could have that be the climax of their imaginary campaign. One of Aria's partners was a new planeswalker at the time and her spark got harvested by the Dreadhorde, specifically by the god eternal Bontu.

Gods in Magic The Gathering aren't honestly that special? They don't seem to have THAT much power, all things considered. Ravnica's gods are mostly powerful magical animals, and in the most recent Magic Story one of their gods (Anzrag the Quake Mole) was captured in an "evidence capsule" (basically Magic's version of a Pokeball). The most powerful god in MTG is probably the Ur Dragon honestly, unless you count the Eldrazi, but that's a whole other conversation since neither of those actually have the "God" creature type.

Anyway, Bontu was one of the gods of Amonket (basically a plane based on ancient Egypt), which had been conquered by an Elder Dragon planeswalker named Nichol Bolas. HE was the one who actually killed all but one of Amonket's gods, and then another planeswalker named Liliana Vess (extremely powerful necromancer) raised them as zombies for his army, because Bolas had a ton of complicated leverage over her (magical contract that he could invoke to kill her if she betrayed him). So Bontu was a god zombie.

Here's a reference:

Well, Aria was a level 18 Witch at this point since this was the climax of their campaign, so she had access to the Shapechange spell, a 9th level transmutation that lets you become any creature with a challenge rating equal or lower than your character level. And the best candidate for that was an Adult Gold Dragon (CR 17). So Aria goes full berserk and stands up on her dragon hind legs and picks a fight with a dead god that she's determined to make deader, and has a Godzilla vs King Ghidorah standoff with her.

So how do you fight a god that can suck your soul out and instantly kill you with a single touch? You don't let it touch you.

What Aria did was basically inspired by this gif of a Wildebeest trying to charge at a lion:

Or this:

And to be clear, yes, I'm saying Aria was the lion in that situation. She basically did a big dragon threat display to get Bontu's attention, and used the Gold Dragon's weakening breath to give Bontu disadvantage on Strength checks and saves. Bontu charged at her, and at the last second Aria dropped to the ground and then shot back up, clamped her teeth around the god's throat, and used her weight to throw Bontu around and knock her off balance, and her superior strength to grab her by the wrists and wrestled her to the ground so she couldn't get a grip on Aria. She had every part of the god that could have killed her pinned, and used the claws of her wings to pull Bontu's armor apart and tear at everything she could reach while thrashing her around. It was Fen, the Arcana cleric, who thought to use Immovable rods to pin Bontu down so that even if Aria lost her grip, Bontu wouldn't be able to immediately one-shot any of them. So Athena (barbarian) and Cass (rogue/monk) as the two martial classes were the ones who got close enough to handle that while Fen and her sister (Gwen) used whatever holy magic they could to help from a distance.

Now CASS had a problem, because she's a DEX based martial class, not a strength based one. She needed a boost to be able to get this job done. So she drank some of Bontu's blood from one of the wounds Aria had left on her arm to give herself a burst of strength. Except. She had to get real close to do that. And Bontu managed to get a loose grip on her, and tried to suck out her soul.

The magic that makes Cass what she is is very old and very powerful. It binds her soul to her body in a much stronger way than any living creature, fusing the two together to prevent her from dying (i.e. by having her soul separated from her body; Cass can recover from almost any conceivable physical injury as long as there's life energy, in the form of blood, for the magic that keeps her alive to feed on and maintain the seal between her body and her soul). BECAUSE SHE WAS FEEDING ON THE BLOOD OF A GOD AT THE TIME, the magic holding her together basically fought against the magic that was trying to rip her soul out, and it had enough fuel to hold on until Aria's thrashing forced Bontu to let go. So Cass survived the Elderspell thanks to a very weird and unrepeatable set of circumstances (which allows something narratively impressive and legendary to happen without being gamebreakingly overpowered and violating the established rules of the world).

Because of how her magic draws energy from other things, though, there was a side effect: she also accidentally took in one of the planeswalker sparks that Bontu had harvested. So when Cass had healed enough for her soul to no longer be dislocated, her spark activated and she became a Planeswalker. (I imagine a soul is connected to a body mostly through the nervous system, because that's how a brain holds consciousness in it, so a "dislocated" soul is like something glued to every nerve ending in your body being pulled on with an enormous amount of force, trying to sever that connection; imagine trying to pull yourself off the ground when every nerve ending in your body is superglued to the floor by something akin to the Strong Nuclear Force. It SUCKED.)

The team ended up being forced to retreat because of Cass' injuries, so Aria didn't actually manage to kill Bontu personally (or die trying, which in her grief-rage she was fully open to). Right about this time, my bottle scene ends and Magic canon comes back into play: Liliana betrays Bolas and turns the Dreadhorde against him, and Bontu ends up being the one who bites him and rips out HIS spark. Due to the enormous rush of energy of consuming all of Bolas' stolen Planeswalker sparks (tl;dr he was trying to become a god), and with the added bit of lore that it was Aria's team that heavily injured Bontu just prior to this, Bontu exploded in the process.

This resulted in Ravnica playing a game of telephone in the chaotic aftermath of the War. Aria fought a god. She's still alive and that god is dead. Rumors spread and now Aria is misremembered as the one who killed Bontu. Half the plane thinks of her as the "god killer." All she wanted was to avenge her lover or die trying.

Neither outcome happened, and now she's credited with the very thing she sees as her greatest failure. And that trauma has haunted her ever since.

[sieglinde-freud]

hey guys i just beat fire emblem fates revelation again. feels good. what do you mean “beat chapter 18 and continue progression” what the hell is that

[lunarharp]

lazy scribbling of my baldur's gate 3 characters

[cherubchoirs]

All this (absolutely wonderful, thank you for the food) talk about the archangels has me curious as to what you think happened to god? I know Gabriel said that god is dead, but I like to think he meant that in the idealised version that heaven previously upholded were dead.

man i wish i had a good answer/one i could decide on!! i really can't say at all what direction canon will take, but i do agree that god isn't necessarily dead - all that matters imo is that he is absent because i think the game has a lot to say about the presence of god and theodicy as the issue christianity as an institution cannot address. earth has always been full of rampant suffering and god doesn't come, there is no just-world, and i think canon takes that to its extreme end. god isn't on earth, but he also is no longer in heaven and he has never been in hell. so now the world he made is left to deal with his negligence. it's a big reason that i hope he never actually appears, and is relegated only to the testaments (in a similar way that he's relegated to the bible).

for the sake of my au, god is actually dead but not exactly gone - his guilt and anger grew to the point that his internal existence, that of trinity, became disconnected and in disagreement with one another. the father tried to keep his iron grip, but the son finally condemned his constant need to abandon his own creation and the holy ghost, as his will, eventually determined god itself as the root cause of their woe. essentially, he had a catastrophic failure of his own components and his will tried to consume his entity. how he exists now is unknown, but god's corpse can be found far out in the now ruined and uninhabitable places of the ninth sphere though not always in the same place (i imagine this break up shook all of heaven terribly, in a way that mirrors the harrowing of hell - many angels perished in the disaster and much of heaven was destroyed so that now the cities are significantly smaller) additionally, strange reports of bizarre angel-like creatures have come in from the outskirts of the still civilized areas, but no one has ever gotten close enough to examine them.

[takitori67]

I didn't know he's in Samurai Remnant?????

[crownrots]

[dramarants]

I've said this before but as much as I was screaming at my screen, this is an opportunity for ttj to raise roots somewhere that not only includes the love of his life but also relationships without ridonkulous power imbalances among a supportive community and a new way of life outside the expectations set upon him since birth. who knows, maybe he'll choose to embrace his devil god fate lord knows the tension would not only be palpable but sexy af or maybe he'll become the supreme ultimate botanical sword master but he finally gets to be an active agent of his own life, choosing people, values, and goals for his own future, and hopefully, his journey (and lss's own growth returning + learning her identity) will reunite them knowing they're stronger, happier, and simply uplift each other when together. ttj's enduring love surmounted death and five centuries of agony to bring him to her place in the immortal realm, now it's up to them to figure themselves out and truly make it their home.

[300iqprower]

HRU Preview: Gawain

Yeah that's a good rankup all things considered. Should have been survival focused instead of even more unga but hey if you HAD to give him even more unga this would probably be how to do it. Heck i'll probably add the Sunlight based Star Gather thing my own NP rank up for him later.

Just like with Sabby, i'm gonna also show a passive I plan to give him cause it's kinda necessary to show why I made this rankup what I did.

New Passive: Miraculous Baptism (Solar)

While an ally or enemy has the [Sunlight] field status effect: - Increase Defense by 33% - Increase NP Damage Resist by 66%

Excalibur Galatine A+ -> ‘A+’

Deals damage to all enemies.^ Inflicts Skill Seal for all enemies (1 turn). Apply [Sunlight] field effect to self (2 turns). Slightly increase your NP Gauge while field is [Sunlight] each turn (4 turns). <Overcharge> Apply Burn for all enemies (5 turns).^ Apply Spreading Fire to all enemies (5 turns).

[solcarow]

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[m0e-ru]

if you do want my extra thoughts on godhood early or want the same enrichment as i did please please please read neil gaiman’s the sandman or play the god of war norse reboot duology. with me 💜

[visionkept]

But when does a comet become a METEOR ? When does a candle become a BLAZE ? When does a man become a monster ? When does a ripple become a TIDAL WAVE ? When does the REASON BECOME THE BLAME ?

WHEN DOES A MAN BECOME A MONSTER ?