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Hey there! This unit, Deric "083" Bindel (zey/zem/zeyr), is a tabletop game designer and artist, and an avid enjoyer of smaller indie tablet
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Caretaker of the Shadows
Some random lined art on a whim. The campaign (D&D -> Pathfinder) is coming to a close soon but I still love Fennel so much. For the heck of it, I'll dump all the lore that I have for Fen and her spooky coven under the cut.
Fen comes from the Avern, a group of nomadic trader-witches who travel in bands of 1-10 roaming the world in search of specific ritual reagents and artifacts. These items often have no rhyme or reason, ranging from mundane, but very specific, household items to tinctures of super rare plants distilled through weeks-long alchemical processes. In any case, most of the items they trade are useless or downright confusing for most mainline spellcrafters but occasionally there comes a time when a high wizard, in desperation, will seek out the witches in hopes they have what they need. Somehow, they usually do have or can get what they need even when the grand armies of kingdoms fail, but the cost in return is often very steep (or esoteric).
Each Coven of the Avern are highly varied but they share a few commonalities:
All are nomadic or form secluded shops.
Their coming-of-age ritual often involves a solo journey to find their first artifact.
They are very insular. Joining a coven after the age of 4 is very rare (but not unheard of)
Stick-and-poke tattoos are an artistic, ritual, and social event. They often have a large, winding tattoo over their entire body. Elders often have full suits.
First names are often object based and change throughout their lifetime.
Last names often refer to their place of birth or induction (e.g. Fen was born on a hill of limestone, hence kiln-stone)
Each group worships a regional Old One, they are often shadowy entities that watch over their small domain. Fen’s coven is bound to Krummholz (Twisted Wood), the one who watches from the treelines and between the trunks whereas a coastal coven might worship a leviathan in the deep. Typically only the Elder will communicate directly with the entity.
Trading (rumors, items, etc) between covens is common on the rare occasion they meet. Payment is usually through favors or an item-for-an-item basis.
Fen’s coven, has a few unique aspects:
In Fen’s coven, young members are named after small plants (Rosemary, Boxthorn, Moss) while elders are named after mighty trees (Sequoia, Larch, Cypress)
Krummholz (Twisted Wood), is a very large humanoid shadow that often watches just beyond the corner of the eye and lurks far from most populated places.
All members wear large coats and robes covered in leaves, plants, and mosses. This helps them hide from the monsters that roam the forests.
They travel through the woods to gather rare herbs and stones. Rarely they find items that, by all logic, should not be there.
The recent surge in magic and the subsequent blight has made it very difficult for them to travel the forest. During a solo journey, the Elder Redwood kun’Gurma has relayed Krummholz has fallen ill and has given them instructions for a ritual to combat the spreading taint. As part of her coming-of-age ritual, Fen has been given the task to find the Carrion Axehead.
Fen is, by all standards, kind of weird. Has no sense of personal space and has a tendency to loom and stare at people. Lots of tattoos spilling out from her back and neck. She was adopted into the coven when she was 3 years old. She has a sister who, somehow, is in another coven. They know of each other’s existence but not their whereabouts or even if the other is alive. (Much later in the campaign, we finally chanced upon her! Named Penstemon, we fully did not realize she was Fen's sister until after we left.)
Krumholtz
Krumholtz represents the dark space between trees where imagination goes wild and paranoia blooms. It is the thing that children speak of when they get lost in the deep forest. An entity that has been here as long as the Duskwield has, it has seen much throughout the years and has opinions and knowledge about the major pantheon of gods and the progression of civilization. I use the term entity as their godhood may be debated. However, given the opportunity they would definitely attempt to dethrone one of the major pantheons and ascend to the prominence of Sylveste and Wydavera (two of the major gods of the setting).
They are physically perceived and depicted as a large shadowy pillar with two beady red eyes and may occasionally be seen with antlers and evergreen crowns. To add to the dismay of lost travelers, they have also been seen with somewhere between 4-8 spindly arms they can use to tear apart trees.
In general, they do not talk with anyone but the most senior members of the Avern but they do occasionally impart lessons of the junior witches or make pacts with the lost travelers of the forest. Redwood kun’Gurma is an outlier as she is seen as an equal in the eyes of Krumholtz and they maintain a casual running conversation with each other.
Being an entity of the Duskwield, they are attuned to and reliant upon the health of the forest. The Blight is a major issue for them and has sickened them with its growing prominence. To this they have instructed Redwood to leave the forest and procure items and knowledge that may be used to contain and combat the spread of the blight. However, even in this diminished state they are still a force to be reckoned with.
Inducted Members
While the Avern, as a rule, are very secretive and picky with who they induce into their ranks, there are occasions where they may welcome a friend or married member. The most common way is for them to meet lost (perhaps purposefully so) travelers in the Duskwield and offer them guidance. Some of these wayward travelers may fit well with the rest of the witches and be offered a place if communally agreed upon and they are willing to fully give themselves to the rituals and rites of the coven. They wear the same robes and hats (often made by their significant other/friends) but keep their original first name until marriage (when they take their partner’s Avern last name).
There are old folk tales about the monsters of evil witches in the Deep Duskwield abducting and ferrying away lost children and young adults. Some of them may be rooted in truth, and of them some of them may have found their ways into the ranks of the Avern.
The other day, I had the pleasure of running a solo tabletop session with PITH, a free set of TTRPG rules by Free Thrall Games over on itch.io.
PITH's a fun, streamlined 2d6 system where characters have to roll over a target number chosen by the referee. Characters are differentiated by player-defined qualities, consisting of their personality traits, motivations, and background. These qualities can get called upon to add bonuses to rolls, in addition to extra bonuses conferred if they use an item to help themselves complete an action.
I picked PITH as my system of choice partially because I was somewhat tired of playing d20 systems, as I have with D&D 5e, Lancer, and FORGE, but also because of its simplicity: the entire ruleset fits on two pages. As this was my first time playing a TTRPG solo, without a GM or any other players, I thought that having as little friction between myself and the rules to be important.
PITH is largely setting agnostic. The rules for resolving challenges and the rules for defining your character are extremely freeform, though there is a short section with optional magic rules tucked in the section for referee advice. I chose to run a medieval fantasy session, but I could easily see the system be used for sci-fi, horror, or even just plain modern settings.
In addition to PITH's rules, I should also say that I leveraged some extra tools to make running the game a bit more smooth. There's a lot of solid oracle tables for answering questions during play in place of a DM, but I settled on CRGE (that's the Conjectural Roleplaying GM Emulator, for those keeping track at home) for my purposes. I'll probably talk about CRGE more thoroughly another day, but for now just now that it helped with setting scenes up and hashing out finer details without having to come up with everything on the fly myself.
Playing the game was fun, even if it took a little bit of getting used to at first! I found that it helped to think of the game as a creative writing prompt with gamified elements to help guide the process rather than a standalone game outright. Eventually, I settled into a flow where I prompted the CRGE tables with some leading questions, filled in the blanks as necessary, and roleplayed my characters as I saw fit under PITH's ruleset.
The session proper was fairly simple. I had two characters, a nobleborn spellcaster and a fighter sworn to defend him since birth. They were traveling in search of an ancient artifact after a vision from the gods, only to be ambushed by a pack of bandits! Terrifying situation, but luckily our erstwhile heroes were able to fend them off thanks to a quick sleep spell and a few strikes of the sword, with the bandits fleeing shortly after their leader fell. Fast forward through a few scenes of self-roleplay and some ominous foreshadowing courtesy of CRGE involving a dead deer carcass, and that's where I left off the session.
PITH has been very fun so far, with none of the rules getting in the way of play. I suspect I'll be picking up on where I left off soon enough, and I'll be sure to keep you guys posted when I play again, hopefully with some more substantial commentary next time.
if i made a video game where you get to pick the gender of the player character i'd make both the options be nonbinary and you can either have they/them or it/its pronouns. those are your only options
uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.
it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually
it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity
this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need
adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups
i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:
open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable
no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever
not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof
Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such
KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.
LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.
I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.
jkr is literally posting upskirt photos to her social media. when will it finally get through to harry potter fans that their support makes her feel confident and correct enough to do things like this
If the holocaust denialism SOMEHOW wasn't enough for you to shut up about your favourite kids book as an adult; JK Rowling just committed a sex crime IRL against a transgender woman.
The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.
I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!
bojack horseman really treated hollyhock loosing a large amount weight from being secretly drugged as something bad and unhealthy and not as something with a silver lining bc she was now thin and then had her gain the weight back with no one making comments about how that was “unhealthy” and appropriately showed the fact that she was traumatized by the event and not secretly grateful other shows CAN NOT RELATE
And this is the same show that showed another character hesitate to take medication to treat her severe depression because of the risk of weight gain and then showed her, after agreeing to take it, fat and happy and mentally healthy and loved by her partner for the rest of the show. It wasn’t a temporary change to make a point then back to status quo, she got fat and stayed fat and the narrative told us it was better for her to be fat and healthy than thin and depressed or dead. And her weight wasn’t a punchline! It just was how she was now.
These two are a married couple. They never wanted kids. Diane gets pregnant. They still don’t want to have kids. Diane gets an abortion. At no point is the abortion blamed for any issues in their relationship. They agreed to it together, and that balloon made me laugh so hard I nearly had an asthma attack.
Tired of trying to be genuinely creative and intellectual. I'm going to invent a vague aesthetic that I can slap a -punk suffix on, market myself as the founder, and put out a series of BookTok friendly speculative fiction novels that do gangbusters because they include a color-coded set of categories to sort one's intrinsic characteristics into. Surely this is the path to the future.
#solarpunk has achieved nothing it's time for geopunk#we've got BASELOAD RENEWABLE POWER and SPARKLY GEM BASED CASTE SYSTEMS#and hot spring episodes
Reviews will include "sort of like the Broken Earth but worse and dumber" and "this amount of geology puns about hardness, cleavage, and subduction should be illegal"
Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.
Taylor makes bagged greens, salad kits, chopped salads, the works. Keep avoiding supermarket greens, but keep an especially close eye out for this brand/supplier. The above list of grocers and fast food chains is NOT exhaustive, so please continue getting lettuce and other raw produce taken off your burgers, sandwiches, etc.
