Archpaladin Z

More of a Social Justice Squire, actually...

[innerchildabortionclinic]

should i be buying kerrygold ?

yes

[squidwardtelevision]

[moleshow]

[alanshemper]

*gets closer*

[mai-col]

A pair of designs for some totebags.

If you live in the EU, you can preorder them until may 31st (this sunday) on my store.

[mai-col]

Morning reblog !

[archpaladin]

[teaboot]

Can I be honest with yall I don't want to hear SHIT against cishets at pride this year

[teaboot]

"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade

[teaboot]

At this point if anyone is trying to exclude anyone benignly pro-queer from a pro-queer space I'm just going to assume you're a fed or something idk like something something destabilize the movement from within or whatever

[findingfeather]

I am making a VERY big point of the Ally flag in all my pride stuff at work.

Feel awkward about people maybe thinking you’re queer but still want to clearly signal “queers are okay with me”? SURE. LOVE IT. HERE’S YOUR WEIRD FLAG.

Don’t fucking at me about allies right now, they are ALSO actually getting fucking killed over us. Take your puri-gay shitty tent somewhere else mine is great with people’s cishet friends and relatives showing up to have our backs.

(“but what if they -“ shitty behavior is shitty behavior I don’t care if you INVENTED queer sex, if you’re acting like a douche i’ll kick you out. wanna act decent and accept the premises of queer coexistence and freedom, cool, i’m not judging you for feeling ok with the gender title they gave you in the delivery room or being attracted to people with the other standard issue title, grab a pop).

[vaspider]

yep yep yep yep

If you're with us, you're welcome. Sure, sometimes you have to wear the costume before it becomes the clothes, but also, some of the best people at Pride are the slightly confused moms, dads, and siblings who show up whether or not they understand. "Love is love" also means "I don't need to get it to show up for you."

[strawberry-crocodile]

Just off the top of my head, here's some setting assumptions D&D makes thats not even universal to high fantasy, let alone dark/low fantasy, historical settings, urban fantasy, or scifi;

Magic is something anyone can access with proper education and time

There is a pantheon of very real deities who each have different purviews and distribute magic

Combat is generally slow and grindy, and your average player character or enemy can take multiple strikes from a sword and keep fighting.

Characters will get physically stronger and more martially competent as they continue to adventure, to the point of being able to fight enemies like dragons and giant demons.

Magic takes the form of a specific list of flashy and powerful effects, most of which can be performed in the span of seconds and are oriented around combat.

There is an afterlife and people can be revived

Generally speaking a character is going to have to choose between martial prowess, magical capability, and a sort of "everything else" bucket. In particular, a character specialized for combat is going to have little to do outside of it.

Some of these assumptions (leveling up, grindy combat, characters specializing in combat/magic/noncombat) are both very restrictive in the kinds of stories you can tell, and fundamental to how Dungeons and Dragons works to the point that you lose the benefit of familiarity if you try to remove it. (Good luck selling "We're playing 5e but we're not leveling up" or creating an entirely different suite of classes)

I saw someone compare D&D to Star Wars, which is more or less the most popular "scifi with magic" media; Jedi just don't fit into D&D classes; they're the biggest source of player-side magic, and their powers are a small toolkit of subtle, new-age-mysticism tricks; pretty far from wizards, clerics, and warlocks.

I know 5e-Only types will mostly not care but for the sake of my sanity I need this written down.

[strawberry-crocodile]

Yes, you can in fact play D&D 5e with a scifi skin! The catch is though, if you do that, you will just be playing D&D 5e with a scifi skin.

[petterwass]

That's the Rule Zero Fallacy. The fact that you can ignore any rule that exists, ever, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You can use D&D to play any sort of game if you just ignore all the rules, exactly as you can use solitaire to play a tense political scifi game if you want to. You're still trying to use a hammer to saw off a plank.

Meanwhile there is very likely a game that actually does what you want it to do without having to ignore or rewrite the whole game to make it work.

[strawberry-crocodile]

(with smug confidence) yeah the game is great if you throw out half the components and do a ton uncompensated game design for free. i think it's funny that that's not obvious to you.

[rookzer0]

Anadi Warlock/paladin in their hybrid form.

[prokopetz]

The irony of positioning system-obsessed gearheads as the ideological opposite of Collaborative Storytelling wonks who think all tabletop RPGs ultimately have identical creative goals from which the actual text is a mere distraction is that if you actually talk to both, the second guy is considerably more likely to be the one who's never heard of any tabletop RPGs other than Dungeons & Dragons.

[prokopetz]

Like, you can totally see how one would get there. If you start with the false assumption that collaborative storytelling is the central creative goal of all tabletop RPGs, and compound it with the false assumption that all tabletop RPGs are essentially similar to D&D, "the text of tabletop RPGs is unrelated to their goals" is the inevitable conclusion – but you'd have to be tremendously incurious to just let that conclusion stand rather than thinking "hey, wait a fucking minute".

[rasamune]

[neptuniite]

[miirshroom]

Many times when I see people dragging up the discourse that "Mohg is bad queer rep!", I ruminate on how did we get here as a society. That's like saying that "A Devil in a Midnight Mass" by Billy Talent is bad queer rep when (spoilers) it ain't a takedown of queers, it's a condemnation of specific person American serial child rapist and Catholic priest John Geoghan:

"A devil in a midnight mass He preyed behind stained glass A memory of Sunday class Resurrected from the past"

A not insignificant number of child predators have been spawned from the exact same institutions that raise moral panics and endorse kidnapping queer kids to try and "fix" them through conversion "therapy". Why is that never talked about with regards to what was done to Miquella, who was kidnapped and transported to a very ominous setting and attempted to be converted into something else through blood? I mean I already had a pretty good idea about this one - it's because people fell for the conspiracy theory that Miquella used mind control. Because it's easier to understand than the historicity in which the reason we even have words like "charm", "bewitch", and "enchant" to apply to fantasy settings is because people with poor emotional control would use them to appeal to the supernatural as an excuse for their behaviour in a time before psychology was better understood. Did FromSoftware cast a spell of "compel fandom" to get you to play the DLC, or did you make the decision to play because it attracted you? For anyone who has ever experienced the "Heart Stolen" death animation and immediately queued up another run, congratulations: you've overcome Miquella's "mind control".

Now move on to thinking about art as having something that it's trying to express about real world society where "mind control" isn't real, but an awful lot of people act like there are omniscient supernatural forces out there that can read minds and manipulate people.

"Hold your breath and count to four Pinky swears don't work no more Put my trust in God that day Not the man that taught his way I was alive but now I'm singing"

Mohg is not and was never representing the queer community outside of projection by fans who took a liking to his aesthetic and deleted his actual delusional personality. In a most tone deaf piece of irony, the fandom does exactly what they condemn Miquella for by sane-washing Mohg until he's palatable - that is "mind controlling" him as an author "mind controls" all of their characters. Like, in canon this is a person undergoing a religious psychotic break and dissociating from his body into his "Lord of Blood" form. I don't think y'all can understand just how delusional he is until you can solve the paradox of why he refers to the corpse in the cocoon as "Miquella" but nobody else does. But here's a hint: if eating a dragon heart in dragon communion makes a person metamorphose into a magma wyrm dragon, then what does Mogh think that he can transform his body into by partaking in "Miquella communion"? On the symbolic level, Mohg is representing a patriarchal faith system that systematically produces generations of queer kids who are consumed with the terror of being sent to burn in Hell just for being themselves.

"A devil in a midnight mass Killed the boy inside the man The holy water in his hands Can never wash away his sins"

A history of sexual abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church were brought to light in the late 1990's to early 2000's, in the timeframe just before the "Devil in a Midnight Mass" song was released in 2006. It turns out that an institution that teaches people to evaluate the trustworthiness of other people based on the supernatural rather than real psychiatric evaluation manufactures a situation where trust can be exploited.

Mohg is dressed like a Catholic priest, and holds the office of a priest at the head of a cult - alluding to the scandals of the Catholic Church to those who remember that real period of recent history. But on the other hand, I think that I can make a pretty good guess as to why this message isn't getting across. Pop culture fantasy appropriates the aesthetics of religion, and creates cosplays and roleplays as members of these institutions so often that apparently it's just become background noise. The cultural nihilism makes it so that paradoxically people feel they can "never know" if the artists are making a critique of a religious institution or just borrowing an aesthetic superficially for the villains, but are all to eager to interpret the explicit villains as representations of their own subcultures that they live in a bubble about. It's just easier to take these things on good faith, bad faith, kneejerk reactions, and unacknowledged biases rather than putting effort into assessing the psychology of other people.

"Silent night for the rest of my life Silent night at the edge of your knife (Forgive me father) Won't make it right"

Due to cultural differences, I think that most gamers don't quite grasp that religion is not a "cool" superficial aesthetic to the clergy like it is in the online media-saturated space - belief in the supernatural rewires peoples brains. One of the core themes of Elden Ring is how being indoctrinated in the absurdities of faith creates and/or amplifies mental illness. Every Great Rune does this to its shardbearer. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably alluding to how Catholicism historically encouraged gay men to repress their desires, transfer all of their love onto Jesus the Lamb of God, and for some of them those vulnerable altar boys start looking like tender lambkin. And if any form of deviant desire - whether sexual or cannibalistic - is a sin, well, "the Devil made me do it" and "Jesus forgives sins" can become two compatible thoughts. Until you get caught, that is.

"Whisper, whisper don't make a sound Your bed is made, it's in the ground"

[tsscat]

I don’t think people realize what keeping the internet running and producing most tech they use entails like. Physically, labor-wise, energy-wise.

[tsscat]

Purposefully included some older articles here so people can see how baked in this is:

Labor Conditions of Content Moderators (2021)

Inside AOL's "Cyber-Sweatshop" (1999)

Digital Labor and Imperialism (2016)

Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop (2012)

Gig Economy, Algorithmic Control, and Migrant Labor (2022)

The Rise of Cyber-Coolies (2003)

Ecological Impact of Computation and the Cloud (2022)

The Environmental Sustainability of Digital Content Consumption (2024)

Carbon Footprint of the Internet (2010)

I think a lot of times I see people talk about this stuff in relation to AI. It's right to talk about it, but I hate when people act like AI is the only tech that has these problems. What you see with AI now is a reflection of the broader tech and internet industry that has grown for the past 20-30 years.

[anonbeadraws]

Defy the Gods - For the Queen I finally get to show off some of the illustrations I made for Defy the Gods, made by @hecticelectron! I Loved building this room, using recreative illustrations and photos of actual mesopotamian throne rooms, also, did you know, that the longer your skirt, the higher your ranking in this era? Pre-order your copy here!

[orthoscheme]

cubas development of cancer cures under these absurdly hostile conditions reminds me of how powerscalers reduce gokus power by specifying he has just had his limbs cut off and hes in a dark cave with no help + blindfolded in order to level the playing field but everyone still agrees he'd win anyway

[mr-deep-downer]

[sailatina3]

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

[threeninesfine]

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

—J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

[indiepressrevolution]

Now at IPR: Defy the Gods

Enter a world of blood, bronze and beating hearts.

Find your fortune in the half-drowned halls of lost Atlantis. Fall in love in the hunting grounds of giant sphinxes. Slay—or seduce—your rivals in a metropolis of clay, gold and lapis lazuli. A single sword stroke or kiss can change everything.

Defy the Gods is a roleplaying game of daring adventure, ruinous romance, and cursed power. Inspired by Clash of the Titans, Conan the Barbarian and Princess Mononoke, it's sword & sorcery that stabs you in the heart.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Defy-the-Gods-Print-PDF.html

[mythratica]

if you're going to make a ttrpg that emulates genre tropes- particularly if it advertises itself as 'creating [genre] stories'- it behooves you to have at least a passing familiarity with the most important entries in the genre

[mythratica]

as in: if you make a magical girl ttrpg and you dont have the most influential work in the genre listed in your inspirations im not going to take your work very seriously

[mythratica]

thats just the thing: this is about almost every single english language magical girl game i have ever encountered. this is about princess: the hopeful, this is about girl by moonlight, this is about starlight burnout, etc etc etc. just look at these inspiration lists:

there are seven listed inspirations here. of them, two are magical girl shows, in a game purporting to replicate the dynamics of the genre.

nine listed inspirations; two magical girl shows, one magical girl 'deconstruction' fic.

nine inspirations, three magical girl shows. noticing a pattern with which two shows get featured every time?

glitter hearts is the first to finally list a season of precure as an inspiration, so congratulations are i suppose in order. and no madoka, shockingly! anyway, you see the pattern- its very hard to take these games' claims of genre emulation very seriously when the level of engagement with the genre is so shallow. its kind of impossible not to link this with a general contempt amongst a lot of western audiences for magical girls. there's a sort of arrogance at play here, an assumption that there's really nothing to investigate- what's to understand? they're just stupid girl shows (except, of course, madoka magica, which is a Real show). you can do it much better than they can. and of course, you can just fall back on your own favourite (often western) media to fill any gaps. everyone wants what magical girls have, no one wants to watch magical girls!

[marchenshoujo]

That's exactly the problem.

A lot of people are wistfully nostalgic about Sailor Moon but allergic to touching any other mahou shoujo... especially works actually geared at young girls.

I totally get disliking PreCure, I don't like it either! Only the very first Futari wa Pretty Cure looks appealing to me. But, it's really not the only magical girl anime out there. You loved 90's Sailor Moon? The same cast went on to make the only shoujo demographic adaptation of Cutey Honey, Cutey Honey Flash! It's even in the same art style as Supers and Stars. (The original Cutey Honey of the 70's, while concieved as a girl's show to sell clothes-changing dolls, wound up only securing a late night time slot and was reworked into more of an ecchi show for older male viewers, although some young girls still enjoyed the stories! Go Nagai would later go on to make another mahou shoujo series, Majokko Tickle, for a shoujo demographic.)

You like idol anime and magical girls? Creamy Mami! Magical idol anime are their own genre too.

You mostly liked the filler expanding on the characters in the 90's? You liked the slice of life scenes best of all? You like bittersweet anime with elements that make you cry your heart out? Full Moon o Sagashite, about a 12 year old with terminal cancer who gets to be older with the help of the reapers tasked with claiming her soul in one year, which she learns in the very first episode... the manga a little more than the anime, as it goes more into depth into their lives and the soul reapers' past lives, but the anime expands on her idol career and has a different ending from the original author, so it feels true to the characters and satisfying.

You want to see a magical girl anime that's inspired by Sailor Moon, but Takeuchi Naoko also greatly enjoyed it and made fanart of it? Wedding Peach!

You want those early cute witch magical girls without any big enermies to face? Just dealing with everyday things? Marvelous Melmo (an orphaned girl gets the ability to change her age with the help of red and blue candies from Heaven given to her by her dead mother's spirit, but she also later learns she can shrink back into an undifferentiated zygote and turn into whatever creature she was thinking of beforehand! It's sex education for girls in the 70's, but with a lot of comedy and heart too), Sally the Witch (the original! .... I did not see this one, but it's inspired by the 60's show Bewitched!), Minky Momo (although, Minky Momo can get heavy sometimes, it's usually fun, about a princess from the land of dreams trying to bring her planet back in orbit because it's drifting away due to humans losing faith in their dreams... it's also the one where Shudo Takeshi, head writer of the Pokemon anime, famously gave a toy company that wanted to pull the plug on the successful anime that just wasn't selling toys, by having the first incarnation of Momo KILLED BY A TRUCK FULL OF TOYS... she revives in the same episode, but it sure was a loud and clear message... second Momo stars in her own season and is reborn as the biological daughter of the earth couple the first Momo brainwashed Chibiusa-style into believing they were her family.)

You like cute and colourful characters and care a lot about the environment and endangered animals? Tokyo Mew Mew! I didn't watch this one yet, but I really do wanna see the reboot and it was super popular back in the day. ^^ All the designs look so cute.

If you want more modern magical girl anime that are on the cute and chill side, but actually geared at girls and it's not just PreCure, Cocotama is full of magic and adventure, while being very cute... I caught some fun episodes with witches and dragons and quests, but also some Hamtaro-esque episodes where it's just the cute mascot characters navigating a much bigger world and interacting with each other, it's fun!

The sadly short Mewkledreamy (just two seasons, Mewkledreamy and Mewkledreamy Mix) from Sanrio is so sweet it'll give you cavities. A sleepy, kinda lazy, but good-hearted girl receives a sentient plush kitty from the land of dreams and must save people's dreams (so, in a way, kind of like Minky Momo!), while an equally adorable bunch of sentient plush kitties try to corrupt people's dreams and make them act more selfishly by exploiting their weaknesses (so, also kind of like Onegai My Melody--which is what Kuromi was created for!) The art is SO cute and this show seems popular with both male and female viewers, it has something for everyone! There is a magical boy too, later on. ;3;

[prokopetz]

The situation is so dire, I've bumped into multiple unconnected indie tabletop RPGs which purport to genre-blend magical girls with mecha whose authors had genuinely never heard of Magic Knight Rayearth.

[deadgenerations]

the TTRPG space is just full of people trying to make TTRPGs that emulate genres they dont actually like or respect at all - especially if that genre is Oriental and its been that way for a few years. Magical girls get it the worst but Lancer is an example of something similar with mecha and Wuxia is going through a similar moment.

[legendaryvermin]

I think in the case of Lancer at least, they aren't really attempting to do Genre Emulation. It's a 4e style wargame trpg that wants to give you MechWarrior meets og Marathon

[theinstagrahame]

Every time I see this post, something about it grates on me.

I think it starts with the inclusion of Girl by Moonlight as the first example, which I think is a misrepresentation of how those touchstones are presented in the book. "Brink of the Abyss" etc are the playsets within the book, that's not a list of overall touchstones for the entire project. It's "if you are trying to play a game like this, use this playset", which is different from "these are the media I referenced when making the game". A subtle difference, I'll grant, but one that I think makes a difference. GbM doesn't have that overall list, so it is the closest we get, but that's still not interchangeable.

Beyond that, it feels a little gatekeeping to me, but I think framed more academic than usual. I don't really think you need a Complete Historical Education of a Genre to write about it. You just need to be excited and interested enough. You can learn genre conventions without consuming the entire genre.

It feels like the post makes a lot of assumptions about why things were or weren't included. I can't speak to the intents of the designers making these books, but I know that touchstones are usually selective. Half of the time, I feel like I end up including ones that I'm worried people will accuse me of cribbing from if I didn't call them out. The other half, I'm picking my favorites.

And I'm still always learning about media I simply had never heard about until after the book was written.

I'll admit to not knowing the Magical Girl Genre particularly well, but to my mind the prime example is Sailor Moon. It's likely the go-to for most people because that's what was available. Whether it's The Most example of the genre is pretty subjective, and the older shows were much harder to find.

I don't think that a lack of deep, esoteric knowledge hampers my ability to write about a subject. I'm one person with a limited amount of time. I can still write about things that excite and interest me without putting a full college Syllabus in the Appendix. I'll try to research what I can, but the world is a huge place and I've got only so much time. I'll do my best, and hopefully leave room for people to add what they like.

And I'll do it in the same way I can like a band from the '70s without knowing their discography in order off the top of my head.

[the-ampersand]

I agree with you that the original perspective can be gatekeepy, but I feel it's not a problem of "You need to have watched the entirety of the genre to write about it", rather one of "You cannot realistically write about a genre when your only experiences about it are subversions of it or works which hold animosity towards the genre".

Going on with the Magical Girl Genre, I wouldn't even consider writing a game emulating it because the only shows I've watched about it are Madoka, Utena, She-Ra and DoReMi when I was a kid. These are excellent works, but they exist in conversation with previous works that I am woefully unaware of like those presented by previous posters. This does not mean I can't write about the genre, but I should be aware of my own shortcomings within that genre. That should at least make me ponder whether I am equipped to create a work within the genre.

Furthering deadgenerations' point about the subtle orientalism of this problem, this whole conversation changes drastically when you swap "genre" with "culture". We can all agree that orientalism has been a huge problem in the ttrpg hobby and it still is for the most part. It is extremely easy to see that it's not ok for a western person to write about samurai without having previously put at least some degree of effort towards understanding japanese culture. Because otherwise that hypothetical author risks falling in tropes and stereotypes that fail to properly represent the historical period they are trying to write about. Roughly paraphrasing Asians Represent discussion about this kind of behaviour, the problem is not the writing in itself, it is the lack of self-awareness about an author's own lack of knowledge paired with some type of audacity that makes them feel entitled enough to disregard that knowledge in the first place.

Genres, of course, hold less weight to most people than whole cultures. But that doesn't make genres simple or lacking their own structures, communities and expectations. And thus we should approach them at least with a minimum of respect and curiosity before asserting we are equipped enough to participate in it.

(Especially so when that genre is usually related or comes from a cultural minority of some sort as, again, deadgenerations very aptly puts it).

[sirobvious]

yall love to use "gatekeeping" to mean "having any standards or expectations whatsoever for what art you engage with or spend money on."

[ashweather]

theinstagrahame says:

"I'll admit to not knowing the Magical Girl genre particularly well, but to my mind the prime example is Sailor Moon."

Yeah, of course you do. Because you don't know the genre, and you don't know what you're talking about. theinstagrahame makes the comparison, later in the post, about liking a band without being able to list their discography. Buddy, that's not even comparable. These game designers want to make magical girl RPGs without knowing Precure. That's like being a black-and-white filmmaker who makes suspense thrillers and never having watched a Hitchcock movie.

[nonenosome2]

yall love to use "gatekeeping" to mean "having any standards or expectations whatsoever for what art you engage with or spend money on."

Truth.

[jubjubbird]

it's like trying to make a ttrpg about arthurian literature solely by referencing the sword in the stone (1963), bbc merlin, and the vastly inaccurate pop culture understanding of knights... there's something worth discussing about people so far removed from their genre of choice that they don't even realize there are other, much more applicable works they could be referencing. general familiarity does not a staple of the genre make.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

If you make goth clothing, decor, accessories, etc

please

please please please

please stop putting crosses on literally everything.

I know that they're a staple of goth fashion. I know. But not everyone is Christian. Not everyone wants to wear or surround themselves with Christian symbols. There are a lot of goths who would die happy if we they never had to see a cross again. Please.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

This really resonated with folks, huh.

[umbraldame]

Completed another comission for the delightful @paladin-official ! You may be charmed by Livia's sunny disposition and wooed incredible strength but Watch Out! She gets pretty scary when she's hungry...