#wyrd west au

[askmerriauthor]

Inspired by this poll here. Bonus points for your idea on how things might shake out.

[techmomma]

hey what if there were the ruins of a big tall-masted ship just out in the darkest place of the deep woods outside of town would that be fucked up or what

[crayonurchin]

After hearing the kind, generous Mr Tiberius talk of wanting his... -ahem- borrowed teapot back from his brother Mr Ajax, young mister Cammie thought he could gain more good favour by retrieving it from his employer and giving it back.

And that’s how he learned that Mr Ajax, Mr Cyrus and Mr Tiberius are all dragons- and that when you steal from a dragons’ hoard, very, very bad things happen...

Upon the advice of Mr Tiberius, he was instructed to return the teapot, beg for forgiveness and stroke the ever-loving shit out of Ajax’s ego. Possibly, it could result in him keeping his job.

Cammie knows a thing or two about using words to keep employers happy- but now knowing his employer is... well... a dragon... those tears aren’t entirely crocodile.

bonus picture under cut ft Wolfy

[jade-mod]

Been a while since I’ve had the time/energy for au shenanigans!  As one of my longest-running D&D characters, Boffin is always a go-to character for me to slide into them, as he’s had a lot more time to develop than some other characters, and also has the unique distinction of having slightly different iterations, as his “original” campaign and “main” campaign differed in several respects.  Usually I put him in in his prime, where he has seized some sort of power, if not created a position of power for himself completely from scratch.  Rarely (possibly once), I used his original iteration, who retired to run a tavern.  But what if he never attained either of these from a lifetime of adventure?

For the wyrd west au (western with fantasy elements), Boffin is a retired bounty hunter and hunter of dangerous fantastical creatures, with not much to show for his long life other than a few artifacts, plenty of stories, and a cozy hobbit-hole (likely built into the side of a burial mound- it’s free real estate. Boffin’s never cared much for the dead, nor been afraid of confronting the un-dead).  He says he wants peace and quiet, a long-deserved rest, but really doesn’t know what to do with himself in retirement, and might go looking for trouble just to have something to do.  Nothing’s managed to kill him yet, but perhaps if either of the dragons that moved into town start being a problem for anyone other than each other they would put up a good fight- maybe that would be enough to put an end to Boffin’s restlessness, if not his life.

of course no westerner would be complete without an iconic steed, and Boffin’s is sure... something?  “Triceratops” is... supposedly a unicorn of some sort? (primary boffin did have an actual Triceratops mount at some point, but I was very tickled by the idea of this three-horned beast instead so here we are)

It can communicate telepathically if you look into its weird goat-eyes, but doesn’t really have a lot to say (similarly to the simple-minded dinosaur it was based on, when we tried to communicate with it using a speak with animals spell in-game)

[zenaquaria]

So I reckon Eliana, for the Wyrd West AU, has a place near an emptier side of town where she raises Continental cattle breeds. Cows built to take the climate for the area and with protective instincts against the native wildlife. At least enough to prevent total losses, by and large. 

She’s prolly not got a HUGE herd, maybe 50-90ish or so any given time. A smaller operation than the flat-land ranchers 100+ head herds since she’s the lone cowhand most of the time. Enough to live off of. Maybe a small handful of other production animals. Chickens, dairy cows, etc. Like 6-8 Barred/Plymouth Rock chickens and three dairy breed cattle. Just to spitball what she might run on the regular. Have some goods to trade/barter with for the things she doesn’t have but needs. o: 

Be a good place to help out for local folk needing a job for however long, I reckon! o: No experience necessary; she’ll teach! xD

[askmerriauthor]

@techmomma

[inconspicuous yet overtly intentional throat clearing]

Consider:

Victorian England: 1837-1901

American Old West: 1803-1912

Meiji Restoration: 1868-1912

French privateering in the Gulf of Mexico: ended circa 1830

Conclusion: an adventuring party consisting of a Victorian gentleman thief, an Old West gunslinger, a disgraced former samurai, and an elderly French pirate is actually 100% historically plausible.

[skepticaloccultist]

The Thing About Mundanes

I have been asked occasionally what it is I mean when I use the word "mundane" to describe non magical people. It is often compared to the term "muggle" from the Rowling-Potter universe, but unlike the term muggle a "mundane" is a more specific thing to western society.

While all people can practice magic, a mundane is a person that through cultural conditioning or self delusion not only does not believe in magic, but can not perceive magical events. It is a state of psychological blindness to the unreal.

Most of the way through the development of human culture societies and cultures each had a system of magic they ascribed to. Many of the variables would be similar to other cultures, and the influence of cultural ideas about magic would shift as people wandered the earth, trading with disparate peoples, exploring the parts of the world their own culture had forgotten about.

Since the Age of Enlightenment there has become a cultural norm in the west to dissuade people from "believing" in magic. When such European Post Modern ideas are questioned by showing that wide swaths of humanity outside of western culture still believe in magic, these entire cultures will be dismissed as "primitive" and "barbaric."

This sense of cultural superiority belies a vector of control over both the cultures the west interacts with, but also and more dominantly control over the citizens of the west themselves. Cultures who believe their concept of reality to be absolute, in the face of an ever evolving understanding of what the universe is and how it got here.

So we find ourselves with cultural norms that include continually pretending to believe in something magical towards children, but eventually "revealing" that such fables are fiction. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, all tales told only to later retract our support for these magical beings. Eventually children are conditioned that nothing magical is real. We engrained generations of children that the fables adults tell are false, and that magic does not exist in this world.

We are left with a western culture of PTSD victimized people who find it hard to come to terms with the magic that is very much alive in the world. Their minds block out the experiences of the wyrd, and if they do not have the strength or capacity to sublimate these experiences when they do happen, they are further traumatized and often driven mad.

Make no mistake, this is not a small marginal group of people I am referring to when I say "mundanes", this is the vast majority of western society, some billions of humans that buy into the post Platonic rationalist version of what is the real.

As those who walk the path we encounter many who claim to be on the path but are not. These are the often "occult enthralled" who find themselves drawn to the imagery and aesthetics of magic (skulls, pentagrams, goat heads, black clothes), but lack the discipline and patience to see through the necessary steps in mastering the craft. While often these are not mundanes, they are more cosplay witch than anything else.

A mundane can not be convinced of the existence of magic and trying to do so is a waste of breath. In general, as a practitioner of magic, one should never attempt to convince someone who doesn't believe in magic that it is real. The fewer people on this earth that believe in magic the better. The last time western society believed in magic openly witches got burned.

So regardless of if its your best friend, family member, adult mentor, or younger sibling, when faced with a mundane there is nothing to be gained by debating them. They suffer from a kind of trauma and if you have any success you may in fact be doing them real mental and emotional harm.

Thus the term mundane is intended to define a specific set of people who we must often encounter if we happen to live in the EU/US/CA/AU and anyplace else the disease that is the English language has infected. (Though Nigeria does seem to have a resistance to such colonial linguistic infections.)

Mundanes are not the enemy of the magically inclined. They are victims themselves of a society wide attempt to dissuade common people from believing in magic in the hopes of reining in the wayward magical efforts of commoners to shape the evolution of public discourse through the practice of magic.

James I the King of Scotland and England himself passed laws, fearing the power of a handful of women accused of trying to wreck his voyaging ship. They were tried and hung; Lest we may think we could derive some fealty from society if we opened their eyes to the reality of magic.

Mundanes will deride those who believe in magic, ridiculing anyone seen to have questionable behavior or aesthetic. They will attempt to consign anyone they see as believing in magic to being "loony, crazy, insane" while ignoring the fact that some 5 billion people on the earth believe in magic and live in societies that openly defer to magic ideas and superstitions.

Pity the poor mundane for they can not see the shape of true reality. They may point and jeer but their minds are merely closed, traumatized as children and living in a state of denial. Those that walk the path must remember that these are broken individuals, from a broken society that we do not have the power to fix. Only to watch it burn.

[askmerriauthor]

@techmomma

Old Ed: "Necromancers make some pretty good ranchers, gotta be honest. Excellent at recyclin'."

"I've been through the desert on a horse with no name; it felt good to be out of the rain" ~

i also posted this on twitter but i have a feeling it will flop there, idk why :(

[techmomma]

I can never quite decide if dragons are a rarity because of low birth counts or because of the whole. dragonslaying craze in the medieval period. might even be a mix of both.

But the idea I’ve kinda been rolling with is that from about 500-1200AD, there was the big ol’ dragonslaying trend. Slaying dragons had happened a few times before then, but was sort of a rarity, but became the big popular thing during this period. 

Big dragons who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, either move their hoard or give it up, were slain. The ones who survived were either the biggest, baddest motherfuckers around, or were young dragons with small hoards they could up and flee with. 

At the end of this period is when dragons really started using their trump card, their ability to become human, as a means to slip into obscurity--siring many half-dragons as a result of uh. Not telling partners about what they really were. Which is why most humans thought that dragons were all killed, and supernaturals thought that they were an extreme rarity, until relatively recently when supernaturals started becoming more commonplace. Dragons took full advantage of this and just sorta bided their time, as they are want to do. It was so much less hassle to just pretend to be a rich human. And hey! Look at all the perks you get! 

But because most dragons still kinda keep their identities on the downlow, that’s why so few full-blooded dragons have been born in the last couple centuries. Momo might be the only one born in like the last fifty years. It’s fuckin’ hard to find a goddamn date nowadays. (Dragons will undoubtedly take advantage of Tindr in about 130 years.)

Now finding out someone is a dragon is sort of like... finding out there are living descendants of like Henry VIII or Louis XVI. More of a, “Huh... y’know that makes sense they’re around but that’s weird.” 

(And yes dragons will think themselves as important as descendants of deposed monarchs will.)

[techmomma]

oh my gah he try so hard

[techmomma]

not pictured: a rug on fire, a coat eviscerated, two horses spooked, a hole chewed through someone’s door, a charred stool in the saloon, an upturned spittoon, a man missing a shoe, said shoe half-eaten, TB face down on a counter with a glass of whiskey still in his hand, a squirrel corpse lovingly deposited on someone’s doorstep, and gouge marks three inches deep in the blacksmith’s wall.

Meanwhile, Momo, somewhere, dead asleep:

[techmomma]

subtle, boys

[techmomma]

Stupid things about these dragon boys:

All of them will insist they do not chase light reflections, but there is at least one liar (Momo)

If you were to give TB a squeaky toy that makes dying prey sounds he might be the happiest boy in the world

When Momo has too much energy sometimes he starts clawing the rug and TB has to chase him off. “EY EY EY KNOCK THAT OFF MISTER”

Dragons are obligate carnivores by nature, but can eat vegetables in human form. Most tend to eschew vegetables anyway as humans. (TB doesn’t like the feeling of how plants move through him; Momo is more tolerant.)

Despite being an obligate carnivore as a dragon, TB is still TB and picky as hell so farmers tended to find only the... ah, offal of cows when TB had a snack back in the day (if you’ve ever watched a bear daintily pick at fruit with its claws, it’s a bit like that). He is valid.

At first, loggers kept finding claw marks and giant bites taken out of tree trunks (thanks Momo) and it scared the bejeesus out of them. Now they’re mostly annoyed because that means the tree is unsalvagable.

Momo has probably been spotted a few times and some people think he might be the scary thing in the woods. This leads to some interesting conversations, as Momo also thinks there’s something lurking in the woods.

[techmomma]

Getting frustrated with coloring them and honestly, I really like this version with only the volume shading, so figured I’d post this while I’m still fucking around with the colors (and thus, may never be satisfied).

While TB’s probably quite a bit more open about his sexuality and gender in this little town than say, elsewhere in the “civilized world,” he’s still sort of partway in the closet. He doesn’t exactly care about your human styles and still remembers when men wore dresses and called them kilts, and is thus terribly angry that men cannot still do so without getting tarred and feathered most of the time. For the sake of keeping his business afloat and not losing potential business opportunities, he keeps his nonbinary, gay nature turned down and sticks to fancy masculine clothing, even if he’s still bending the rules as much as he can get away with by dressing many decades out of date and adding as many shiny things as he can get away with before he’s called a fruit and he loses business deals. 

At his parties, public and private, he will always be dressed in tuxedo and masculine formal attire, tophat and tailcoat, the obvious host and in plain view. He may be a terrible flirt with men, but any displays of affection, besides those for his grandson, are kept private and secret.

But sometimes, if someone very special shows up to one of his special masquerade balls, TB will retire early for the evening while the gala is still ongoing, citing something about age and drinking too much. A little while later, a new face will join the crowd. Completely anonymous, another nobody, unannounced. She doesn’t turn heads, and goes by without a sound. Dressed in fine velvet dresses and tiaras that sparkle in the candlelight, soft white silk opera gloves and flowing trains. She is an older woman who carries herself with a nobility and decorum that has been mastered for years, steel-grey eyes behind a glittering mask. She weaves through dances with a palpable grace and a delicate touch, an old pro on the ballroom floor.

When not dancing though, she is almost glued to the hip of an older man dressed like royalty, touching hands and linking arms and touching kisses to his cheek. If Ainsley is recognized, he never quite explains who she is as she remains silent, gracefully avoiding the subject with a knowing look to the woman, as if this were some terribly amusing game between the two of them. If pressed, the only name he’ll give is “his Poppy.”

Momo is always happy to see the woman; he knows that for once, his grandfather is doing something he longs to do, and in a way, be himself behind a mask.

(The painting I very clearly edited for the background is “An Elegant Soiree,” by Victor Gilbert.)

[techmomma]

a whole family of stinky dragons!! some stinkier than others!!

[techmomma]

momo can be a silly dragon