Gnomish Crafting

(they/them) (20+, nb) Blog for interests and stuff- Minecraft dnd gaming writing

[woopercup]

But now I only want you gone

[volcanicflowers]

thought of the day: i think ford prefect sleeps either fully clothed or fully nude no in between

[therosielord]

I’ve been thinking about the differences between Eridian Radar and human sight and the things that Rocky and Grace would find amazing about the other’s abilities.

Rocky’s radar is amazing because he can “see” through walls, he can “see” the insides of bodies, and his sense is full 360 degrees all the time, unlike eyes which have to be pointed a specific direction. He has a much better sense of space and can easily find hidden objects. When eridians “watch” each other sleep, it’s different from humans watching something because they don’t even have to be in the same room as someone in order to watch them. Rocky could be in the next room, working on stuff, and still have sleeping Grace fully within his scope of radar.

But human sight! Sure, we can only see the surface of things, and if the light goes out we’re useless. But!!! We can see things that are 2D. That’s crazy to Rocky, that we can see things that can’t be touched or heard. We can see color, which gives us a wealth of information about things that eridians are entirely unaware of. Grace explains that humans can walk through a forest full of thousands of textures and easily spot out edible fruit because it’s a bright color. And the distance on sight! It’s incredible. Grace explains the concept of lighthouses, and how one small light can guide ships from miles away through a deafening storm. No eridian could hear that far, and even if they could, the noise of the storm would drown it out. And then there are the stars. Humans can see stars!!! Erid only learned about stars recently but humans have known about them since the very beginning because they can just look up and see across the vastness of space with no technological help. They can see the other planets in their solar system. They can see their own star so powerfully that they can’t even look directly at it. No eridian can hear their own star. And when they’re in space, Rocky is totally blind because sound doesn’t travel through a vacuum - but light does! Grace can see just as well in space as on Earth!

Also, and this is a big one: humans can turn off sight. Grace doesn’t think it’s that cool, but Rocky explains that there’s no way to stop using radar. There’s no way to block out sound completely. Humans can cover their eyes and see nothing if they want to. No distractions, no stimulation. That’s amazing.

I also love the idea of Grace explaining the concept of “see-through” to Rocky and telling him about all the types of transparent materials earth has developed over the years. And there are naturally transparent materials, too! Rocky is very excited to learn that water is transparent.

God I just love the fact that Rocky is just as amazed at human biology as Grace is with Eridian biology.

[marisashorror]

Iron Lung Fanart

Ballpoint pen on paper

8x10"

[prokopetz]

The author's poorly disguised fetish

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road

The author's fetish you missed on a first reading because it's so far out of pocket, it never occurred to you that you could sexualise that

[homunculus-argument]

If zombies were real, you wouldn't first be warned by the approaching horde by their smell, by their groans, not even a cloud of smoke of the dust they raise coming closer from the horizon. It would be the flies. Hordes and hordes of insects, corpse-flies laying eggs on the carcasses of people who still walk, eating the eyeballs from their sockets, climbing across their unfeeling leathery skin. And the buzzing. The inescapable, deafening buzzing. Everywhere. Like you did not just kick a hornet's nest, but the very ground you walk on was a hornet nest, and each step caused another explosion of insects.

Insects, corpse flies, the buzzing. Their swarms blacken the skies, more horrifying than their migrating meals. The deafening cacophony of constant buzzing, the horrid noise of the living who feast on the dead who feast on the living. The buzzing.

The endless, inescapable buzzing.

[k1ngrav]

Mr Greenwood 🪲

[rockrockgrace]

He's in a ball!

[consultantsorcerer]

I need an extra panel where grace trips, but the ball keeps rolling and he's just tumbling

[gnomish-crafting]

Thank you for making my dream come true op

[gnomish-crafting]

close up of my favourite bit of my base that came to me in a vision and I'm so glad i pulled off (its also a mob farm)

[gnomish-crafting]

My current survival base! The inside is a nightmare of ladders and pipes

[gnomish-crafting]

update on the top! had some fun adding crazy pipes and whatnot.

the base as a whole is 171 blocks tall now but i have ~100 blocks left to fill before I start running into problems.

[werewhorl]

Small

[werewhorl]

Recent concepts I've sold ⚜️

[ehlonna-makes-stuff]

Maybe a weird take, but I think the old, weird, racist and just whacked-out descriptions of D&D's "always evil" species work if you assume they're in-universe propaganda. Like, the whole "drow are led by women, are always naked, are back-stabbing, duplicitous, keep men as slaves, and have strange rituals involving a spider goddess" might be inspired by the truth, but it sure sounds like the kind of thing an uptight, patriarchal society would write about a group of people they want burn at the stake, right? Like if someone told me that was pulled straight from the Malleus Maleficarum I'd probably believe them. "Orcs and goblins are stupid, violent, cannibalistic raiders who will raze your town and steal your women back to their backwards cave towns" really sure sounds like the kinda thing you read in historical texts about a society when the empire wants to justify colonizing them.

And the fact that all these "evil, barbaric" species always seem to have beef with the high elves, well, kinda points the finger toward whose leaders are spreading the narrative, don't it?

Like I don't blame anyone for wanting to move away from "fantasy racism" in their fun improv game with friends, I think that's great. But you still see "fantasy racism" show up a lot in contemporary campaigns and it always seems to be justified in-universe (except against tieflings, I guess) and that just DOESN'T sit with me

Just give another side to the story. High elves have this whole mythology about how Corellon cast down Lolth and all her children for being a traitor - and that story exists in-universe, and it's probably the first one humans hear. But you really think that's the drow side of the story? Really?? "Thats so interesting that you worship a god of the sun, we worship a traitor spider adulteress who turns us into mutants for failing arbitrary tasks" like FUCK that what's their actual version of the Corellon-Lolth cycle mythos?

[gnomish-crafting]

Hook-A-Book! My enchanted book bookstore on an SMP.

The inside has... a different vibe.

most of the fish have been renamed by ppl on the server, and include wonderful names like "Ford F150" (a big salmon), "Escaped Jellybean", and "Cuck"

[ironmyrmidon]

I love when Arabic loanwords get incorporated into other languages and they keep the al- suffix. I'm studying the gebra. It's a real the batross around my neck.

[gubrillaz]

I love movies bout guys in space who don’t want to be there

[liprairian]

James Patterson books are an invasive species humans brought into library shelf environments because we wanted fast-reproducing, easily-digestible food. But at the time, we didn't know as much about their natural airport environment, which has very few available nutrients. This environment greatly favours the genericalist species like Patterson, so there's very little bibliodiversity compared to the more specialized library or bookstore environment. This means that each species in an airport has an enormously expanded niche compared to just about anywhere else books can thrive - in their natural habitat, Patterson books may be one of only 3 or 4 species competing for available nutrients. In these low-density, low-nutrient environments, Patterson books occupy vast swathes of territory without bothering other species. This history makes it extremely easy for them to outcompete the more specialized inhabitants of the library shelf, who have often been carefully selected to fill ultraspecific subgenre niches.

Left unweeded, Patterson books will expand their territory over multiple book bays, crowding out or even straight-up eliminating space for competitors and sending contributor-author runners out to other shelves. Contained to a single, planned set of shelves and kept strictly pruned, Patterson books can contribute to a healthy ecosystem. But many curators don't know or don't care to do the planning and maintenance, leading to the nightmare of overcrowding and loss of circulation.