One Nice Bug Per Day
RMH
The Bright Sessions
Color Me Curious
The Bowery Presents
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Mike Driver
noise dept.
official daine visual archive
Sade Olutola
Doug Jones
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occasionally subtle
if i look back, i am lost
h
NASA
Product Placement
The Stonewall Inn
đ
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@for-gilded-cups-are-empty
This is Gilded Cups Are Empty, who this whole blog is named after. Technically a Katalepsis OC, member of the Yellow Court, but the costume was also recently used as a trickster Fae of the Baneth court who was *incidentally* obsessed with theater. And managed to buy a chair. In exchange for a promise. A promise to later sell the chair back to its owner.
Still dont know how i pulled that off
I beg you: do not give your VtM setting a Prince.
If you're running a standard Camarilla game, or, especially, a political intrigue game, try deliberately not creating a central figure of authority who can simply arbitrate disputes and declare what is and isn't permissible. It very easily, even unintentionally, turns into GMPCism.
You have this extremely powerful NPC sitting at the top of the political hierarchy, and whenever the players do something interesting, the Prince can effectively go "No." Suddenly this character becomes the GM's veto button. The coterie can scheme, investigate, negotiate, threaten, betray, and maneuver all they want, but ultimately there is some 300-year-old vampire in a mansion whose opinion supersedes everything they've done.
Instead, make the political order unstable. Take away the obvious final arbiter and let the players discover what actually happens when nobody has the authority to settle things.
Maybe a Sabbat raid killed half the city's elders three months ago. The surviving Kindred are desperately trying to reconstruct a functioning hierarchy, but nobody has enough legitimacy to claim the throne.
Maybe the Prince disappeared, and the Primogen are now fighting over whether the position should even be restored.
Maybe the city is a newly established domain where a handful of Anarchs have carved out territory and everyone is still pretending there are rules.
Maybe the old Prince technically still exists, but has become so weak, isolated, or politically irrelevant that everyone has quietly stopped obeying them.
Maybe there are competing claimants to Praxis, and the coterie's actions can genuinely determine which one wins.
Or don't even make the city a coherent political unit. Give the characters a dozen overlapping power structures: a Ventrue banking family that controls mortal finance, a Brujah neighborhood militia, a Nosferatu information network, an old Tremere chantry that refuses to recognize the city's new government, and three Anarch barons who all insist that their territory is independent.
Now suddenly everything matters. If the coterie pisses off the Ventrue, there isn't a Prince they can appeal to. If they kill someone important, there isn't necessarily an elder who can simply declare the matter closed. If they make an alliance, that alliance can actually change the balance of power. If they convince two factions to cooperate, they have accomplished something that might genuinely reshape the city.
Most importantly, the players become political actors rather than petitioners.
VtM is at its most interesting when authority is something characters have to negotiate, manufacture, contest, and sometimes violently enforce, not an NPC sitting in a tower who exists to tell everyone what the rules are.
Take away the Prince. Watch the consequences become 200% more consequential.
Lmao the central setting complication of my Cam chronicle was the prince being a Nosferatu powerful enough to essentially not make any appearances. Like, empty throne that the primogen were too scared of trying to sit on, cause the last guy to try got to see a sunrise.
And also the local Nosferatu were collaborating across sect lines to pit everyone else against each other and keep them weaker than the prince and too distracted to effectively undo his rule.
My players decided the prince was fake or dead and the primogen were just pretending because they were ruling thibgs in his absence and didnt want the Cam to send a new one.
Which tbf that would almost have been a cooler plot hahaha.
opened up ravelry to look at patterns and the very first thing i saw was
The Garment by Robert Cole
I had to immediately look for myself and I feel like this post needs the addition of the very first line in the pattern description
Robofuckers of the world unite I need to find smth that I know Iâve seen before
Like. You know the vibe of a robot/android/etc with transparent skin or flesh-analogue around the torso and stomach, so u can see the spinal machinery and all? That kinda thing Iâm Sure itâs on Tumblr but finding good results is very hard for me with this placeâs search
Ftr even like real-world counterparts that deviate off the human form are ok here Iâm just looking to get a sense of the material visually bc I know itâs never like a hard shell
this is one? just not the one i was lookin for
Ooooh both of those are good for sure. I feel like thereâs some out there with, like, the transparency almost all the way to the collar but that might be misremembering. These two do fs help with the vibe though!
went looking for more, cause i like looking at cool cyborgs
Robofuckers of the world unite I need to find smth that I know Iâve seen before
Like. You know the vibe of a robot/android/etc with transparent skin or flesh-analogue around the torso and stomach, so u can see the spinal machinery and all? That kinda thing Iâm Sure itâs on Tumblr but finding good results is very hard for me with this placeâs search
Ftr even like real-world counterparts that deviate off the human form are ok here Iâm just looking to get a sense of the material visually bc I know itâs never like a hard shell
this is one? just not the one i was lookin for
Robofuckers of the world unite I need to find smth that I know Iâve seen before
Like. You know the vibe of a robot/android/etc with transparent skin or flesh-analogue around the torso and stomach, so u can see the spinal machinery and all? That kinda thing Iâm Sure itâs on Tumblr but finding good results is very hard for me with this placeâs search
Ftr even like real-world counterparts that deviate off the human form are ok here Iâm just looking to get a sense of the material visually bc I know itâs never like a hard shell
im pretty sure theres a specific artist who does this tons, but i lost track of after escaping twitter, ill go look for em
I'd be down with more "modern witches" if they were less all about indigenous cultural appropriation and more about bubbling cauldrons and cackling into the night
"I want to reconnect with my precolonial european pagan roots" then stop selling dreamcatchers on etsy, you should be eating turnips and yodeling.
*Boogie Street* Shakes - Disco Elysium comic
"AND NOW YOU SEE THEM IN THE LIGHT, BROTHERS. THE INVADERS, THE UR-FOLK TRAITORS, THE SERVANTS OF THE LOST AND BROKEN MESSENGERS OF DĂR THEY CALL DIVINITY.
SEE HOW THEY HAVE CROSSED THE ASHEN RUBBLE THE TRUE ENGINE HAS MADE OF THE FIRST SIEGE-WALL, AND THOUGHT NOT ABOUT HOW THE WRATH OF THE TRUE MESSENGERS THAT LAID IT LOW SHALL NOW BE CAST UPON THEM.
SEE HOW THEY HAVE CROSSED THE URUK HORDE AT THE SECOND WALL, THAT SECOND TEST OF OUR MIGHT THAT WE HAVE SURPASSED SO LONG AGO, AND NOW LIMP BLOODIED AND BLIND TOWARD OUR BASTION.
SEE THE HATE IN THEIR EYES, FOR ALL THAT WE STAND FOR. ALL THAT WE LOVE.
LET US SHOW THEM GREATER HATE. LET US SHOW THEM, IN THIS PLACE, AT THE HEIGHT OF OUR MASTERS POWER, THE FIRE OF IT.
LET US SHOW THEM CATACLYSM. LET US SHOW THEM ARMAGEDDON.
LET US SHOW THEM A SINGULAR, FINAL, APOCALYPTIC FIRESTORM!"
-- Dârathon Miklan An'khet calling to the power of Mephisto in his Sermon on the Dais of the Final Bastion of the Betrayer Gods, 4th Era year 12
Higgledy piggledy, turning and turning as gyres are widening, centers unheld,
things fall apart and thereâs anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and canât be compelled.
Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.
Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.
Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!
Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:
Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze thatâs as blank as the sun;
sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.
Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,
shambling slowly but revelatorily, slouching towards Bethlehem, there to be born.
what doesnt kill you is still valuable data points for a graph im working on titled "how to kill you"
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
Excuse me???
you are right and you should say it.
Is this the face of a man who would put his own infant in front of a plow to avoid going to war?
Absolutely not
You know who would try that shit?
Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?
You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?
The last thing Penelope's suitors ever see:
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you canât not have servants in those times but many modern readers think âbut I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servantsâ and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldnât it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing youâll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc heâs not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
The best reversal of this is when you have a gang of sorts, people pretending to be nobility to pull of some caper, and they had to draw lots or smth to decide who is the servants and who is the nobles, and after dark when thereâs no more guests to entertain and no more charades, everyone switches back into their lowborn registers and the âservantsâ take the utter piss out of the ânoblesâ in light hearted revengeâŚ
Iâve seen thibgs of this vague caliber lile, a handful of times at best and I always love it
