#utbs tag

[mjparkerwriting]

Find the word tag

Thanks @jasminewalkerauthor for the tag! I haven't done one of these in a long time.

I'll be using my most recent WIP: tech/UTBS. My words are light, wander, imply, and moment.

light

Raithe’s light hands slid up Gera’s chest and around his throat. “I could choke you out right here. Leave your boy to find your body.”

wander

Why else would he want to see her? Bellamy let her brain race and wander into places she hadn’t allowed it in before.

imply (no imply, but I had simply twice)

Rahel was no longer a future miner or mother or anything. She was simply a Disturbance.

moment

It was a war Gera himself had fought in to win the title of Commander. In those five years between that war and this moment, Gera had brought back the thing he believed maintained the peace he remembered as a boy.

Gently tagging: @sunlit-gully @toribookworm22 @dandelion-jester @sugar-phoenix and @talesofsorrowandofruin

Your words are: leaf, maybe, commit, and doubt

[s0ckh3adstudios]

Me and my buddies finally put together our own cast of fallen kids! Including Clover and Flo, of course.

Joining Flo and Clover in their unfortunate line-up of soul-lacking kids is Cas (from @capt-summer), Bentley (from @silviaflowers), Huck (from ME!! MY BABY!!), and Daisy (from @atlasdotpng)

[utb-art-dump]

Ceo of Hillview

Bonus colourless version:

Character by @not-poignant

[silviaflowers]

They're singing Happy Birthday!

(You just want to lay down and cry.)

Happy late birthday Flo Fielding! I will always be your number one fan /silly

(Flo by @s0ckh3adstudios)

[capt-marty]

NEW INTRO POST

MARTY / CAPT or Captain / KAZ / OTHER NAMES

SHE/HIM (+ others) ------ Multi-fandom ------ READ MY STRAWPAGE

Gonna try to keep this blurb short:

Hey. I'm capt-marty on the tumblr. Why did I say it like that. Whatever. Ok. I tend to ramble a lot and such, and while I am an artist, I don't post much art on here! Most of my blog is reblogs! I'm multifandom, but it's very easy to guess my hyperfixation at any given time (like guess right now- hard, I know....)! I am a minor (16+) and am a fictionkin / otherkin! More about that down below mwuhahahahahahahahhahahaha

I FUCKIGN LOVE MY QPPS @silviaflowers + @cow-inthe-closet RAHHHHHHH <33333333

CLICK READ MORE FOR MUCH MORE INFO, RAMBLING ETC!

Okay HELLO!! I don't really make my OWN posts here much, I mostly like reblogging and using it to consume media from my hyperfixations! I do do art, though!!! Wow!!! If you follow me expecting for art I may not be able to give that to you....

Fandom wise? Well. Too many to write down. I like a lot of things! I will keep this as a hyperfixation tracker! SO! AT THE MOMENT:

HYPERFIXATION(s): Danganronpa (v3 and sdr2 mainly), Epithet Erased, the OSC

OH YEAH. Like, for some reason a majority of the things I ship are. QUEERPLATONIC! So if I start reblogging ship art there's a good chance I ship them as qpps

My mutuals are all very cool!! Speaking of, I joke around with my friends on here a lot- most of which being inside jokes. So if you're randomly confused by what on Earth I'm saying it's PROBABLY THAT AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

ALSO. Speaking of social things. I'm very! Bad at conversations! So uh. If you reach out and I seem really weird. That's why. I also have bad anger issues and tend to seem very blunt and stuff so if i appear rude IM SO RRY. I'm also extremely chaotic and strange / unhinged in convos but I try to reign it back if I'm not super close with people /silly

Oh yeah! I have some tags on here too. I shouuuld probably put those here...

TAGS: #captain chattin (for rambles- used to be #summer speaks), #my art (for my art), #my ocs (my oc stuff- art from other people, etc), #utb (collab ut story with friends), #om (collab osc story with friends), #me an silvi + #me an mason for stuff that reminds me of my qpps, #fav and #fanfav for favorites, #me for things that just resonate for some reason?? or that I just feel a connection to

I am a fictionkin and an otherkin like I mentioned up there! My kinlist can be found here if you're curious. Fictionkin is a huge huge part of my identity

Im that guy constantly wearing sunglasses irl

UHHHHHHH I'll add more later. Because I'll probably think of more to add. But for now that's all I think!

I ALSO PLAY PONY.TOWN!!! I'm on there sometimes I've been less active lately tho

Mwuahhahahuehehehe

[destroyusall]

Things are occurring…

[s0ckh3adstudios]

HGHHGHGNHJGJHGNJTDJTHNGFKRGSFMKTDHNKFMKHETNOKPHTOEKJNSROKPESRTNMTJNFOPKDRHNKKOEGOEKPGKOPRHZKORHKNGMKOTGNKKRSHKNDGODNK

Clover and Flo sibling moment real

@s0ckh3adstudios drew some wonderful art of my older Clover design with their Integrity OC and I simply had to contribute! Their sibling dynamic is everything to me.

Some bonus doodles from practicing drawing Flo and thinking about their hilarious dynamic.

[not-poignant]

Ok i cant keep it in my soul for any longer. WHY ARENT MORE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THE GOLDEN AGE THAT NEVER WAS?? i know its a bit of an older fanfic now but I’ve read all your stories and all your fanfics (im absolutely obsessed btw) and never in my life have i ever seen anywhere such chemistry as between TGATNW Pitch and Jack. That fanfic altered my brain chemistry, remoleculerized my being and changed my life trajectory. If you have any, just ANY scraps of tgatnw pitch/jack content that you forgot about or something, just know theres at least one person out here thats feral for it. (I would die for a pitch perspective of any kind)

(Also tgatnw pitch kind of reminds me of utb gary??? In the way that they’re both most peak alpha males i can think of)

Hi hi anon!

Tbh people were talking about it a lot more when I was writing it! You can always check out the TGATNW tag for the kinds of things we were talking about and the fanart and stuff :D

I have such a soft spot for that fic though, like, I think it's probably my favourite thing I ever wrote for The Rise of the Guardians, and it has some of my favourite worldbuilding. It's one of those 'wow I really should've put 80% of that story and worldbuilding into an original novel because I think it would've done something good for my writing career' but I'm also very chuffed that it gets to be something in fanfiction that we all just get enjoy however and whenever we want. :D

Unfortunately I'm a very WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) author in that I don't write lots of drafts or scraps of things and leave them on my computer. If I have something that's worth sharing, I will find a way to share it!

And yeah I definitely have different character archetypes I like writing, and Pitch is very similar to Gary! Even down to both of them having lost a loved one and walling themselves off emotionally to any new relationships as a result of that, and hurting the people around them because of it. Literally such a *clenches fist* baller archetype :D I'm definitely not done with it!

[buffskierights]

New Fic Alert

Hey, do people still follow me here for my fics? Idk what the tumblr algorithm looks like these days but if you see this and you like pirates, geraskier, morally gray characters, and more pirates: I’ve continued my one-shot fic Under the Black Sun in the moon bleeds red (for those who fear the dead)

If you read UtBS and are like “but wait didn’t Jaskier die at the end of that?” you might notice that I’ve removed the “Major Character Death” tag from it and added “temporary character death” to the new fic. So hah! Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

That was mean of me, please read my fic. I promise it’ll have a happy ending.

Please?

[undertalebrittle]

(Narration ripped from @euro-starling's response with permission)

There's a feeble knock at Phasicor's door. It's practically inaudible at first, but it repeats after a pause, getting slightly more determined each time.

The door opens to a lanky figure in prime position to knock for the nth time. It's a pale-skinned humanoid wearing a long lab coat and a fishbowl on its head. (What this is meant to represent is entirely unclear.) It quickly rights itself and does a small bow, catching the fishbowl midway as it tries to slip off. It says nothing, but holds out a little plastic pumpkin basket, clutching the handle tightly in its hands.

(I love your fingers good sir but how the tarny do I make you hold a door)

[mjparkerwriting]

Last Line Tag

Thanks @lilithorrorwrites @sugar-phoenix @jasminewalkerauthor @sophielovesbooks @mrbexwrites @autumnalwalker and @runeseaks for the tag! Everyone wants me to share, I guess.

I've been working on something new--UTBS. I started writing this in November and I'm around 14k words in, which is very nice. Since I'm super late and was tagged a few times, I'll break the rules and add more than just the very last line.

Here she is!

Bellamy chose her words carefully. Though the Commander was a fair man—kind, even—she knew how dangerous it was to go against him. The warm light that lived in his dark eyes went dim. His face grew cold and hard. The wrinkles that had always been able to hide in his smooth skin deepened, aging the Commander by at least a decade. Something inside of Bellamy jumped. She gagged as she swallowed the excess saliva that had found its way into her mouth. The Commander floated around the room, circling Bellamy. His purple robes dragged on the filthy rug. With every rotation she sunk deeper and deeper into the floor, watching the Commander double, triple, quadruple in size.

Nothing grand because this is just where I left off--right in the middle of a chapter.

Gently tagging @kainablue @rickie-the-storyteller @kellshaw and @paintedbutton

[s0ckh3adstudios]

Guess which OC's are apart of the same story

[utb-art-dump]

UTRBW/UTB related art requests are open!

Blog where I'll eventually gather and organise all my utb fanart 👍

Drawings based on Underline the Black on ao3

All characters are by @not-poignant

Tags for easy navigation:

#efnisien doodles , for efnisien drawings

#gary doodles , for gary

#utb au (eventual drawings of au's of my own making within this au lol)

Will update this once I post more and organise/add more tags

[sweatygentlemenwerewolf]

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[shield-of-wesnoth]

Analyzing why BMR Episode II’s “Forest Confrontation” scenario felt bad to play.

In my previous post, I rambled in the tags just a little bit about how there’s a scenario in BMR’s second part that felt especially unfair and unfun at the time I played it.  While I’m in the mood, I thought I’d explain why and dissect the scenario a bit in the process. I haven’t played it in a few years, this applies at least to the 1.14/1.15-branch compatible releases, so if the scenario has changed dramatically since then, uh... I didn’t know that.

The give context, the BMR/Trinity series is hard.  They’re expert level campaigns, so of course I always brace myself for a challenge in that case, but it feels safe to say that they are especially hard for various reasons.  Despite being one of the older campaign series at this point, there are still several points at which I feel they’re more reliant on luck than strategy... maybe this is because there’s no walkthrough, maybe I have yet to find and watch any replays of people successfully beating them, or maybe I’m just not as good a strategist as I think, but by categorizing the campaigns as “expert” even the dev admits that they are objectively difficult. If you haven’t made an attempt at BMR in the last several years, modern versions introduce two massive new mechanics: An inventory/equip system for your heroes and units, and limited recruit quantity campaign-wide.  Because Wesnoth campaigns’ design generally are supposed to run on the KISS Principle, the fact that these mechanics are present at all could be enough to make the campaigns “expert” on their own, as they are nonstandard and require the player to adopt vastly different strategies (compare: UtBS’s RPG elements and unusual day/night cycle, and SotA’s unusual zombies and game progression).  In theory, I really like these mechanics!  I enjoy inventory management in LoTI and Five Fates, and forcing a player to carefully preserve their army throughout a campaign as they receive a trickle of new available recruits sounds like a fascinating challenge that could drive me to better-tune my unit survival strategies!  Unfortunately, the campaign still plays like it expects you to have a massive army that you can replenish as you have more gold (or to, as I said, be very lucky).  Let me elaborate a bit, now...

“Forest Confrontation” is a level that I got stuck on, and had to cheat to get past it at all (fun fact: my first experiences learning WML were making its sequel Trinity (at least the version for 1.6) easier!); I immediately got stuck on its following scenario “Fort Kuhle” for similar reasons and stopped playing, but this post isn’t about that one.  When I get stuck or make a bad enough mistake, or get unlucky enough in a Wesnoth scenario, I’m not shy about going back a turn or five to try something different.  The officially recommended Wesnoth experience from back in its early days is to roll with the punches and never reload from a mid-scenario save, but the “landmines” and punishing positive feedback loops in many campaigns have all but completely made me give up on that play style.  I try to avoid having to reload too often, but sometimes I may feel my hand is forced if a scenario is arduous enough... and when it’s too much even when I try over and over, even save-scumming mid-turn, I crack the thing open in Notepad++ and try to see what I’m missing.  What I found in Forest Confrontation’s .cfg had me fascinated and offended.

Forest Confrontation is a 48-turn long (on its easiest difficulty setting, of course), winter-themed level with a river down the middle with Fog Of War where you have to defeat two allied enemy leaders-- one Loyalists and one Outlaws-- while constantly keeping the Loyalists from reaching your camp.  You start with 350g, Loyalists start with 100g + 15 income, and Outlaws start with 100g.  The Outlaws start with a few Thieves already on-map, but this isn’t too weird.  As you are playing with the Ukian faction, you technically have the terrain advantage here.  Sounds fairly normal and straightforward, yeah?  Not quite.

General Burton-- the Loyalist leader, has a nasty little mechanic working in his favor in the scenario’s code.  Literally so that-- and I quote-- he “has a big army”.  And remember before I explain it your army’s mechanic: You have a campaign-wide maximum total number of units you can recruit per type, this number is only increased by making progress.  If you need another Ukian Dog mid-scenario, and you’re out of Ukian Dogs because you recruited them all and your others died, and there are none in your recall list, you’re going to have no dogs until you find more dogs or the game decides you can have a few more later.  It’s more “realistic”, very interesting, and makes every single death utterly devastating.  Even if the campaign weren’t winter-themed, you’d constantly be walking on thin ice!  Sometimes you’ll find some minor NPCs who want to join your cause and thus strengthen your army with more recruitables and recalls, but this isn’t all too common.  I can’t say it doesn’t fit the story’s bleak mood.

“What is this nightmare mechanic, then?”  It’s several smaller things, actually, but I’ll give you the big one, first.

In the scenario code, there’s a variable called “b_deaths” (presumably abbreviating something along the lines of “Burton’s deaths”), and an event tied to it on turn 4.  The first thing this specific event does is give Burton 200 gold because of course it does.  The second thing it does is set b_deaths to a value of 12 (20 or 28 on the harder difficulties). This is vital for the meat of the mechanic to work, in another event that depends on it.  This event is programmed to go off every time one of Burton’s units dies if b_deaths is greater than zero.  And so every time it activates, Burton receives 21 gold, and b_deaths’s current value is reduced by one.  This means that, on the campaign’s easiest setting, Burton gets a 21 gold gift for each of the next twelve units of his you kill after turn 4... or a total of 252 gold on top of the previous 200 he received on turn 4.

As a programmer, I find this very cool and a pretty genius concept.  It indeed does give the enemy the appearance of magically always having the bigger, unending army (subtly enough to where it could just be mistaken for income, too!), and could provide great incentive to flee in scenarios where you have to run to a checkpoint instead of staying to defeat enemy leaders.  Unfortunately, this scenario isn’t one of those, and as a player this was an absolute nightmare to have to go up against.

It all sounds pretty nasty, yes?  There’s even more that makes it worse!

Remember that river that both you and the enemies must cross in order to get at each other?  The scenario objectives hint-hint at you to “get to the river as soon as possible and avoid letting the enemy across,” and they are not screwing around with that advice.  Every time you or an enemy crosses it, it increases one of two variables-- each representing you and the enemy having crossed the river a certain number of times.  This does something with the rest of its event, of course... If the Outlaws get even one unit across the river enough, then Burton receives-- for free-- 3 Horsemen and 2 Knights.  But if before then, you have at least one of your own units across the river, then instead the Outlaws get (for free) 2 Outlaws, 3 Trappers, and 2 Thieves.  Once the Outlaws get six of their units across the river, then for free Burton gets 4 Knights and 1 Grand Knight, and the Outlaws get 3 Outlaws and 2 Bandits.

A fun fact: You don’t actually have to defeat the Outlaws to win!  It’s just Burton.  They flee if you defeat Burton first, and then you’re victorious. An unfun fact: If you do defeat the Outlaw leader-- which would make sense to do, since they’re also attacking you and are weaker than Burton-- Burton gets a free Dragoon and Iron Mauler right next to him.

And of course, once you get your units close enough to Burton’s keep, he receives 54 gold for good measure.

Have I also mentioned that the AI is set to aggressively press for your camp (and you will lose instantly if enemy troops invade it), and just as aggressively defend Burton himself?  No?  Well, it also does those things.

And so, Burton can receive a maximum of 451 gold’s worth of units for free.  Burton is essentially guaranteed to receive 506 gold throughout the level on top of his starting gold, base income, and village income unless you somehow take him out before his army obscenely fast.  None of the units he gets for free are loyal, but 500+ gold is nothing to sneeze at.  And remember: No matter how much gold you, the player, save up, your recruit amount is capped.

You have that seemingly-merciful long turn limit, but with Burton having a 15 gold income bonus compared to yours while he relentlessly pushes across the river, not much can come from its hypothetical benefits.  Where in other campaigns you could hunker down on the defensive for about a day or two to build up your troops, protect your base, and enlarge your army, the recruit cap you have combined with the bountiful boons Burton has make that idea pretty impractical.  He’s just going to take his big income, increase it with all the villages he can get on his side of the river, and steamroll you as hard as he possibly can.  You can’t even be content to chip away at his troops at the river’s edge as they swarm you, because that gives him more money for more troops! He is inevitably going to overpower you.  You cannot reasonably maintain enough troops to defeat him or hold him back, nevermind keeping enough alive for the next scenario.  You can recall your veterans from previous scenarios, but recalling is expensive, and losing experienced units that may have useful gear hurts really bad.

Oh yeah, the equipment system!  It definitely helps out a bit, and makes individual units more valuable and memorable, but not enough to withstand scenarios like this one.  Not even close.

So, that’s the problem!  All of that “ruined my day” so to speak, and really tired me out.  When I forced it to be more tolerable and finally moved onto the next level, only to see that it was yet more incredibly wealthy royal army that I had to take out with my feeble forces, I was done.  I want to finish it someday, but I haven’t picked the campaign back up in years. What could be done to “fix” this?  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t!  The computer I played that round of the campaign on is dead, so I can’t check what exactly I did to the WML those two-ish years ago (I’m pretty sure I at least removed Burton being able to suddenly get an Iron Mauler and Dragoon, though).  Even cutting out the biggest of Burton’s bonuses wouldn’t make it perfect; it’s something that would take a lot of testing and tweaking to really narrow down the main issue, not even getting into the rest of the campaign... Forest Confrontation has some cool novel mechanics backing it up, and interesting well-crafted ideas, it just feels awful to deal with and impossible to truly win.

I try and keep an open mind about game design.  Sometimes a creative vision is for a really hard game, and that’s valid!  But I honestly believe a lot of veteran UMC Wesnoth devs fall into a spiral of solipsistic difficulty-- where eventually they’re getting so good at the game, at their own campaign, that they’re compelled to make it progressively harder and harder until it’s nigh on impossible for anyone of different skill levels to complete.  It becomes punishing rather than challenging.  The player feels less like they’re missing something and more like the design is intentionally unfair.

When you get good enough at the strategies, it becomes harder to test for possible player mistakes yourself.  You can be utterly blindsided by something unwise that a player chooses to do!  Something that could possibly screw them over for the entire rest of the campaign, giving them a cruel, slow end that you absolutely did not intend!  I’ve had this problem even while trying to make my games intentionally easy!  In this case, having playtesters give feedback over time is incredibly valuable.

But... BMR has had plenty of time.  Either everyone having given feedback over the 10+ years isn’t bothered by the difficulty, or the developer doesn’t care to make it easier even on its easiest setting.

A lack of forgiveness for mistakes in gameplay is really pretty evident throughout the author’s work.  In Trinity it’s incredibly easy to get overpowered by foes in the earlier levels, especially when you’re playing as the humans’ team.  Every time I’ve beaten the “Join the Dark Side” scenario in BMR part 1-- the only campaign in the BMR/Trinity series that I’ve been able to fairly consistently win over the years-- I always feel more that it’s out of frantic luck than careful strategy, and I’m still unsure what the intended experience really is.  In the long-abandoned Tales of the Setting Sun, your small handful of troops become immortal only after the first scenario, and even though I managed to get to the end and “win” the thing after having had one of them die at the beginning, I really, really felt it during the entire campaign that I was meant to have kept them all alive.  I’m not sure if it’s intentionally so malicious, but it feels like it is, and that’s kind of the problem.

Believe it or not, I like a challenge in Wesnoth.  Beating the 1.13 branch version of UtBS without a walkthrough was one of my proudest moments after spending nearly my entire childhood stuck on the first two scenarios, but I still want to go back and beat a different version of it someday, because I feel like completing it right when the Desert Elves were first overhauled meant that it hadn’t been properly balanced and I didn’t get the true experience.  Even when I cheat, I don’t want to bring out all the big guns at once.  I may only tweak one or two things-- usually just enemy starting gold-- to level the playing field slightly so that I can (hopefully) continue through the rest of the campaign without having to get so drastic; it’s if I can’t win even then that I have to resort to meddling with AI, income, free enemy units, and enemy gold bonuses all at once. I know that a scenario being hard and seeming hopeless does not make it impossible.  The first scenario of Northern Rebirth still daunts me, but having seen a relative just barely scrape by it without guidance has proven to me that it’s certainly not quite as awful as I’d feared.  As a younger teen, when I followed walkthroughs, I was able to make considerable progress in UtBS and FtF-- proving to my young self that they are balanced if you know what you’re doing.  I’ve had moments when I was struggling in a campaign, fearing the worst, only to discover with awe that the designer had not only intended this, but that the strategies they’d guided me towards with their design had benefitted me even as I thought I had no hope of completion!  A balanced campaign is a magical, wonderful thing to experience.

I like BMR and Trinity.  I want to like them so, so badly.  Their coding, artwork, and worldbuilding is some of the most impressive in Wesnoth UMC, has been for years, and continues to be.  As I said way above, I can’t say that these design decisions don’t suit the vibe the campaign has!  In this chapter, you really do feel like you’re playing as just some guy leading a ragtag group of untrained militia through the bitter cold, in a seemingly-hopeless fight you’ve stumbled into against the vast and powerful forces of a corrupt royal military, while unknown dangers lurk around every corner.  It’s immersive, and goodness knows that marrying themes and mood with game design is quite a challenge in its own right.  Ever since I first found out about them, I’ve avoided reading ahead into spoilers, and been determined to finish them.  It’s been at least twelve years since then, trying them on and off, and I thought I’d have improved enough by now to be able to complete the series with minimal cheats, but... it just hasn’t happened.

I assume that, if a Wesnoth campaign is well-designed, that it can technically be beaten by anyone who knows how to play the game, regardless of skill level.  At least, if they had a walkthrough to follow to guide them through the beats.  I feel like, even if BMR and Trinity did have walkthroughs, that I’d still be needing some serious luck to reach their endings.  Like even if I followed it to the letter, some minor human error that made my gameplay not perfectly efficient would come back to bite me at the last second and keep completion just out of reach.  If many campaigns have what ESR calls “landmines” and “tomato surprises”, then the BMR series installments are minefields that are also full of assassins sneakily attaching time bombs to your back.  Or maybe I just happen to suck even though I’ve been playing Wesnoth since I was seven years old.  Who knows, really?

BMR and Trinity have changed a LOT over the years, and with these changes, re-balancing has to happen to bring everything back into order to make it “playable”.  It just feels to me like BMR hasn’t caught up with its own ambitions.  Forest Confrontation could be a cool scenario!  The bridge collapsing if too many human units (not dogs!) stand on it at once it is a cool touch, and Burton dissing his mercenary ally by calling him a “little hussy” is really funny.  At the very least, while it’s completely unreasonable with its challenges, BMR moderates its edginess and expletives gracefully.

tl;dr, to quote your protagonist Lorenzon himself, from a later scenario that I accidentally clicked on while trying to find the file for Forest Confrontation:

“We are still outnumbered.”

[destroyusall]

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✦ PYRRH / JACQUET - GNC - 18yo ✦ (Other monikers; Pyrrhicpunch, trnd.vxii, RippBlipps, DESTROYUSQLL)

Commissions / Queue / 16+ preferred

Alo and hello! I'm Pyrrh, and I like drawing and doodling vague anthros. I tend to be very experimental with my art style, and like greyscale and tender blues.

I also love writing, which you will find mostly in the below tags.

Notable Tags

Blacksommar / UTb; media pertaining to my worldbuilding project, pertaining to denizens, the umbrellas they fall under, and how they navigate civilisation after civilisation crashing. START HERE

General art; media unrelated to Blacksommar / Ultrablue. Usually commissions, adopts, etc. Jacquet.txt; Personal thoughts.

✦ My page and media is trans/queer positive. I do not tolerate intolerance, nor zoo/pedophilia/adjacent content.