hi folks! amidst all the housekeeping i've been doing, it felt like a good time to introduce myself again and make a new pinned post.
about me
my main blog is @persnickety-peahen, so that's where all my follows will come from. i'm in my mid-twenties, happily married, queer, and neurodivergent. you can call me C or any variation of either of my blog names, and i use they/she pronouns.
some of my favorite non-writing activities include listening to podcasts, baking, taking wiki walks, and playing Stardew Valley. lately i've also started teaching myself how to do pixel art because i have reached the level of blorbo hyperfixation that i physically needed to have a new artistic outlet, and pixel art is both really cool and a lot easier for me to actually do as an aphantasiac* than other digital art mediums.
*i have aphantasia, a neurological condition characterized by the inability to produce voluntary mental images; in simpler words, i have no mind's eye. this has significant impacts on diverse areas of my life, especially my autobiographical memory and spatial reasoning, as well as how i perceive and interact with art and literature.
about D&B
i've been enamored with writing from childhood, but since university, a lot of that energy has gotten channeled into TTRPGs instead. hence this sideblog merging the two!
right now, dungeonsandblorbos is mostly where i reblog things from the wider writblr, whumpblr, and TTRPG communities (including pretty dice!), but i'd like to start being more active on here this year. original content includes stories from my big four campaigns (more on those below the cut), out of context session notes, and other kinds of mentally ill blorbo-posting. someday i might even get around to posting some of my pixel art or an actual narrative recap of one of my campaigns!
i'm tag-game friendly, and my ask box is always open, so please feel free to send me asks about any of my characters or campaigns, D&D/TTRPGs in general, or even about aphantasia and how that affects my writing and TTRPG experience!
current ask games
not-so-nice ask game (has some whump vibes)
red ask game (real mixed bag; some cute questions, some mildly violent ones, you know how it is)
to keep this post from getting too long, i've put my story/campaign info and additional notes under the cut. thanks for coming by!
my stories/campaigns
Ruins of Runet
Status: Temporary hiatus
System: D&D5e, homebrew setting
Tags: #ruins of runet, #ariel sentera alvedes
Short premise: Six hundred years after its sudden disappearance caused a worldwide societal collapse, Magic has returned to the world of Runet. The gods, however, are still gone. Several powerful factions have promised great rewards to any party that can successfully uncover the truth behind Runet's new magic, and help them claim its power for themselves—but perhaps there's a good reason that magic disappeared in the first place.
Genres: Medieval fantasy, Existential horror, Eldritch horror
Rating: Mature
General content warnings: strong language, mature humor, immature humor, alcohol consumption, some sexual themes, some religious themes, fantasy violence, blood and gore, body horror, major character death. Posts will be individually tagged with any relevant warnings.
Full campaign and character intro: link
Curse of Strahd (homebrewed)
Status: Indefinite hiatus
System: D&D5e, Curse of Strahd playbook + a metric shit ton of homebrew
Tags: #curse of strahd homebrew, #cerris dalca, #meow meow milo, #dos holy boys, #cos memes, narrative tag TK
Short premise: The once-prosperous valley nation of Barovia has been trapped in the Shadowfell for roughly the past 400 years, and its immortal king Strahd von Zarovich cursed with it. For now, at least. He believes he's found a loophole—and the perfect party of would-be heroes to unwittingly help him.
Genres: Medieval fantasy, Gothic horror
Rating: Explicit
General content warnings: strong language, mature humor, drug and alcohol consumption, some sexual themes, some religious themes, fantasy violence, blood and gore, body horror, child endangerment, unintentional cannibalism, and oh my god so much more. Posts will be individually tagged with any relevant warnings.
Full campaign and character intro: link
Cauldron & Kettle Questing Company
Status: Completed
System: D&D5e, Acquisitions, Inc. playbook + a bit of homebrew
Tags: #cauldron & kettle questing co., #jun vyardes, #jun and tim
Short premise: Acquisitions, Inc., is a wildly profitable adventuring company with a long track record of success, both at its main branch and across its many subsidiary locations. Sure, sometimes they mistake a group of newbie interns for an experienced party and set them on a quest to stop a chaos-worshipping cult hell-bent on tearing a rift in reality and destroying the universe as we know it, but hey, as long as they get the job done, who cares, right? Maybe they'll even get a raise out of it.
Genres: Medieval fantasy, Corporate fantasy
Rating: Teen
General content warnings: strong language, mature humor, immature humor, drug and alcohol consumption, fantasy violence. Posts may not be tagged due to the generally mild nature of most of this campaign's content.
Full campaign and character intro: link
The Orphic Uprising and The Amazonomachy
Status: Completed
System: Cypher, setting based on Percy Jackson series
Tags: #confusion crew, #nina grayson
Short premise: After a simple game of Capture the Flag at Camp Half-Blood goes horribly wrong, a ragtag group of demigods are called upon to save Olympus—and more importantly, their loved ones.
Genres: Urban fantasy, YA
Rating: Teen
General content warnings: strong language, mature humor, immature humor, fantasy violence, teenage protagonists, second-hand embarrassment. Posts may not be tagged due to the generally mild nature of most of this campaign's content.
Full campaign and character intro: link
housekeeping/additional notes
if you'd like to be added to my list of people i @ for tag games, please interact with this post: i'm back bitches (friendly)! link
if you'd like to be tagged in posts related to one or more of the above campaigns or characters, please let me know in a comment on this post or the relevant intro post, or by sending me a message!
if you are a player or DM from one or more of my big four campaigns, hello and happy to see you!! please bother me as much as you like and send me a message letting me know so i can follow you and stay connected!
i may periodically update this post; e.g., updating links for active ask games, updating the rating and content warnings for active campaigns, or adding links for new campaign info posts; so feel free to check it every few months :)
most tragic thing about wanting to see more stuff of your oc is that the c is o and YOU have to make the stuff. devastating. why can’t art of my beautiful baby just appear in my hands. just materialize under my pillow, like from the tooth fairy
he's beautiful i literally need to put him under extreme psychological stress. i need to put him in extreme physical pain. i need him curling up in someone's arms for the feelings of safety and comfort he hasn't received in ages
Humans have existed for like 2 million years. Horses have been domesticated for only 5000 years. Take moment to appreciate how lucky you are to have been born at a time where you can hug a horse.
I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:
Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.
Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.
In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.
D&D is not a universal entry-level game.
All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.
D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".
Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.
They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.
So how does Hasbro square that circle?
Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.
Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.
The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.
The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.
The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.
Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.
(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)
The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.
In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.
It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.
Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.
That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.
I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:
As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.
The rules of Dungeons & Dragons is not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (And again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)
In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.
(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)
The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.
The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.
A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.
Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)
Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.
Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?
So get to work!
i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.
To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).
The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.
Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.
Every poll on this blog is about fictional characters only. This request was sent to us and we made a poll in response to it. Send any Blorbo-related question you want to our inbox and we’ll make a poll on which people can vote with their own Blorbos in minds
Dungeon room contains barrels of gunpowder, lamp oil, sacks of flour, lard, olive oil, charcoal, dry hay, wood shavings, stacks of paper, jugs of the sticky alchemical "Meletisian fire", just keep going on describing how stupidly flammable the room is. There's no particular payoff. The enemies in the room neither use fire or are vulnerable to it.
There will be payoff because no player will be able to resist
💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Bracers of the Fire Giant Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement) ___ This pair of bracers are always warm to the touch. While wearing them, you have resistance to fire damage. 𝙎𝙘𝙤𝙧𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙂𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙩. You can use a bonus action while wearing the bracers to tap your fists together and duplicate the effects of the “enlarge/reduce” spell (enlarge option only), targeting only yourself and without requiring concentration. This version of the spell also increases your body temperature and the ambient heat of any metal that you’re touching: you deal an extra 1d8 fire damage with any attack you make using an unarmed strike or metal weapon, and any creature within 5 feet of you that touches you, hits you with an attack, or ends its turn there also takes 1d8 fire damage. This property can be used twice, and it regains all expended uses of it daily at dawn.
___
✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for as little as $3 a month!
