While I'm working on another comic, I'll show you the cover for a comic about a ritual. In the end, I chose a name with a very thick metaphor of rebirth
Part 1
💬 14 🔁 159 ❤️ 920 · Anyone is better than Vess DeRogna, so we can hire a wizard from the street, right? Right?!!
Part 2
💬 19 🔁 88 ❤️ 685 · No! You hired a student and he failed!
In fact, this ritual had no chance of success. If you have a different opinio
Mairsha: Okay, I'm going to say Conjure Woodland Beings.
Matt: What are you conjuring?
Marisha: I don't know.
Matt: You have to know what you're doing.
Marisha: Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. You know, there's not a list of what you can conjure in the book.
Sam: No, there's not.
Marisha: And it's very unfortunate. And it's some kind of fey creature. So what's a fey creature that's a challenge rating of two that would make sense? That's really scary?
Laura: Fairies?
Marisha: Or I can also summon like eight fairies if they're a low enough, you know--
Matt: I hate conjuration spells, by the way guys, so you all know. The worst spells in the whole game.
Sam: I will say this, to be fair to Marisha, the spell does say, your DM will have a list of the creatures.
Matt: Does it really?
Sam: It does, at the end of the spell.
Matt: Fuck that spell.
Everyone else:
Marisha: Yeah it says, "the DM will have the statistics."
Sam: It says the DM will have the creatures.
Matt: Fuck that spell. Conjuration needs to die.
the mighty nein battle plan is actually so good to be honest. they get shit on for being unable to follow plans but it's only short term plans they're bad at. battle plans? oh they have lived and learned. the clerics got attacked when they were wandering off alone in a jungle so they make it a point to always split the clerics. even while travelling, jester-eagle isn't allowed to carry caduceus. never put beau and yasha on the same target unless there's only one enemy to make full use of their sentinel and reactions. split caleb and fjord apart so one is within reach to make a counterspell. have beau go first so veth can have sneak attack. the two wizards casting haste on allies and the clerics casting bless to give support. fjord and veth moving in to tank on the frontlines when it gets rough. the fact that fjord learned cure wounds despite his limited spell list even though he already has healing hands as a paladin. that makes the nein having 4 (the clerics, yasha, fjord) members who can restore health. 3 people (clerics and caleb) who can revive the dead. when beau went unconscious against the specter in rumblecusp, fjord and yasha were able to heal her and bring her back up even before it became the two clerics' turns. they said fuck you we're not losing anyone ever again.
DMing is hard. I acknowledge this. Weaving a story with words for long periods of time means you’re gonna say something silly sometimes when your brain blips. And it’s not your fault that it’s so silly that your players share it around turning it into an inside joke, immortalizing your brain fart moment forever.
My DM was narrating a scene between our tiefling rogue and the NPC she was romancing. He was trying to set the mood for their first kiss, up on a tower overlooking the city, looking into each others eyes. They’d just been on a romantic date, there was a bottle of wine between them. And this was their moment.
The NPC leaned in to kiss the rogue and the kiss was, according to our DM, “long and normal.”
The entire session went off the rails. We became ungovernable creatures of hilarity. How long is normal?
We are informed normal is six seconds and we devolve even further into chaotic paroxysm of laughter. The DM desperately tried to rein us in but for the rest of the session everything took a long and normal amount of time.
My betrothed and I would kiss each other while counting to six in our heads then declare afterward, “Ah yes! Long and normal!”
I accidentally told my school team about it, reasoning that they’d at least never meet the DM who lives out of state. They’d say we needed the scene to be the long and normal length, or hold a pose for a long and normal time.
At the end of the year I invited them to my house for a celebratory meal and was surprised when my DM joined the DnD video call early. My teammates looked at him, expressions slowly spreading into evil grins. “Long and normal!” They greeted him.
He turned a look upon me of utter betrayal while I hustled them out of my house.
A tale of seven friends, who became eight, then nine.
after several years of working on it off and on, and just in time for the animated series, I finally finished and framed my mighty nein flower embroidery piece!! details and explanations under the cut
Caduceus - probably the simplest one, because I did his first and at the time I didn't plan on doing everyone. I did add beetles for him!
Fjord - Cloven Crystal for Uk'otoa (uk'otoa) of course, flowers for the Wildmother.
Molly - 8 petals + 1 eye in the center = 9 eye shapes. There's crabgrass around the base of the stem. I was pretty proud of how the sword turned out, and there's the clover he gave Yasha to its left.
Yasha - large black flower for her, smaller flowers for her collection. The smaller flowers are colors that represent the people closest to her: Molly, Beau, and Caleb. Lightning for the Stormlord.
Beau - her staff and sash, with vines wrapping around.
Jester - Lollipop flower for her spiritual weapon, and bees (hello, bees!)
Veth - three flowers, for Veth, Yeza, and Luc. Two are yellow, for Yeza and Luc, and one is green, for Nott. Plus buttons, of course.
Caleb - The petals are meant to look like flames, and the center of the flower is a dodecahedron face. Paw prints for Frumpkin, and little amber dancing lights.
Essek - I redid this one like three times but I like how it turned out. Parasol that Jester gave him, dancing lights, and then two flowers, for the two beacons. One flower is wilting, and the other blooming, for second chances and new beginnings.
And the braid at the top is made with one color of floss for each of the nein :)
Elves have acute sight and superb hearing and it logically follows that their sense of taste is particularly delicate, precise and sensitive.
Which means you just know they are cooking up the Blandest Food ever created by a species. Nursing an elderflower cordial like it's a long island iced tea. Tucking into a bowl of garden peas and fanning their mouths from the spice. Lembas bread? whitest bread of all time. two seconds in a medium sized spice market would leave elves physically gasping for air
In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.
And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.
I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.
And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.
Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.
Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.
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