Hello, just a page for my ttrpg thoughts and OCs :)
About Me;
I'm a trans man (he/him) named Goose who loves collective story telling and character creation and development. I'm a story and character first ttrpg player, I do not have serious thoughts on mechanics most of the time. I especially love the kinds of story beats that only improv and rng can really make work, and more than anything I love to record special scenes and moments from the games I play in writing or, more often, drawing.
Some tags to check out (will update if new ones are made):
- #yappin - for when i just wanna yap, does what it says on the tin
- #free floaters - any characters that don't belong to any specific campaign
- #hrmmb - characters that belonged to a campaign that never resolved
- #rotisserie baby - characters i'm actively playing. i'm rotating them in my brain at all times
- #goose ttrpg art - any visual art that i draw myself
- #not mine but woagh - any artistic medium that i reblog that i did not make myself
- #TFoA - Campaign world setting I have that I may post about, system agnostic at current.
TTRPG tags active on this page:
- #dnd5e
- #strixhaven drama
- #WotHL
- #TSTSTW
- #TWaBA
- #pathfinder
- #laundry files ttrpg
- #werewolf the apocalypse
I spy something grey. Something grey that was once brown, that was once warm but is now cold. Something that’s fur was plush for a while, until the time and the dank took all that away.
“I spy,” Vesper called out loud this time, raising her voice over the din of nothingness. Sometimes she liked the quiet, but sometimes it was only quiet, and she felt nothing and heard nothing and was nothing for a while. And she needed something.
Her answer didn’t take long, not when she was loud enough. Vesper’s echoes bounced down the dusty cobblestones and the moaning began anew, like her words coming back to her but twisted and terrible.
There.
“I spy with my little eye, somethinnnnnng.” She couldn’t say grey again; that had been too hard for the moaning lost souls in the prison - asylum.
“Blue,” a voice chimed in return.
“Naw, the sky’s just as grey as anything else.” She had her gaze fixed on the skylight, but they moved to the claw marks she’d made in the walls of the cell.
Escape number two, the next obvious way out if the front door wasn’t an option. She really thought that one still had promise, honestly, but she could never get high enough, even at her best. Now her skin was papery, frail and withered, and she felt like her soul creaked when she stood.
A cry broke from the moans, and the voice caught - rasped, cracked - in a way that had earned her ire in the endless days since.
“Shut it, Squeaker,” Vesper snapped, and felt the creak when she crawled to the door again. Felt the cold, reinforced metal of her cell’s bars pressing into her sunken cheeks as she tried to angle left and right, peering out.
“Don’t tell me our fair phantom’s decided to play the game?” The question bounced, too loud for where she was directing it. She wanted to make sure she was heard. “Bit of sky beyond the cloud over your cell, mm?”
Screams, and moans. Sticks - the first prisoner to arrive after her? It was hard to remember - blubbered in a too-wet manner, even after all this time quiet and gone. Vesper felt dried like a set of field rations, but despite all the fits and snapping bones and supposed blood loss, Sticks still managed to make pitifully infantile, wet noises. Squeaker, closest, had went so quick Vesper had resented the fact she had to see him so often. Watch his decay and hopelessness in the blink of an eye, just diagonal to her. There was a gods-be-damned piece of maiden jerky that had lasted longer, and yet he’d lasted barely any time at all. He’d ought to have been embarrassed, really.
She tried to remember the one farther down, nearest the bend to the baths, but her new friend distracted her from digging the memory out of the recesses of her mind. The voice chimed from somewhere she couldn’t see, but it didn’t sound like it came from the Phantom’s direction.
“It is not the sky,” the voice said.
Vesper’s eyes flicked across the hallway, what she could see of it, and she brushed her taught fingertips across the lock to her cell experimentally. Maybe it had changed since the last time.
“It’s supposed to be my turn,” she offered.
“You could not think of anything.”
“Because it’s all grey.” She leaned back to squint at the cell walls. The floor. Touched a puddle. “Water.”
“You are not even trying.”
She hadn’t heard anyone else being dragged in. Had she just not heard? She wasn’t so far gone, was she?
“Observant,” she grumbled - more at her own issue than the friend’s quip. “What is it?”
“Oh no, you are not giving up like that.”
—
She’d distracted her friend with other talk, half to find an answer to the blue, and half to not play the stupid game anymore. Vesper had asked many things and been ignored, but the little things were okay it seemed.
Their favorite color was red, they said. And had tacked on “for now,” as if there was room to remember others in such a grey space. Vesper didn’t mind the answer. She’d found red beautiful for a while, in its own way.
They told her to carve a crow, when she’d stolen a hunk of wood from the leg of an old bench, and she agreed after a while of complaining that she didn’t remember what a crow looked like. She hadn’t been particularly interested with the skies and the beaked creatures, not when things began getting feverish around Manusburg and people would pay handsomely for game smuggled in. People in the Uppers, still wanting to dance in finery while their people in the Lowers rotted and shriveled.
So her friend said they’d describe it to her, and she put up very little fight before she was asking clarifying questions on where the nose was and whether they had teeth like geese.
These questions passed the time, but then she or the friend would suggest trying the door again, or trying the hinges at the very least. The voice encouraged trying to leap from the cell door’s higher step towards the skylight’s ledge, and would grow politely quiet while she tried and failed for a few hours or days.
When her friend stopped talking she could hear the world outside the cell too much, and Vesper found herself chatting aloud to whomever might moan in protest. Defiantly she’d talk louder as she failed over and over, and speculate on this or that. Speculated openly about whether her new friend Cagey’s cagey-ness was suspicious, and how she thought it didn’t do people too much good keeping secrets to rot in a cell, to fade into the background of moans and groans.
Often this would lead to a round robin of similar judgments about the others. No one even had the presence of mind to fight for their honor. It hadn’t seemed to matter to anyone, and she found that absurd. Any motivation was good motivation.
Sometimes she’d hurt herself in an attempt, or would manage to get farther with a plan than expected, and would end up nursing another failure on the cold, dusty floor. She would be quiet then, and Cagey would come back.
“Blue,” he’d remind her. And she’d petulantly announce that nothing was blue that she could see.
“You are painfully unobservant, you know,” he’d coax.
And it would work. She would strain to think of more. She looked at everything in her cell, in Squeaker’s cell, in the cracks of the stones in the hallway. She inspected the threads of her tattered clothes, tried to remember if they had been blue under the grime.
Vesper asked if it was her hair, after a while of staring at the dry, split ends that had lost their luster and threatened to break like straw.
“That is green, are you quite blind?”
“Don’t give me that; it used to be blue. It’s basically blue.”
“That is not blue. Teal, at best.”
“I’m not a fucking artist,” she quipped while rolling a lumpy, apple-sized crow in her hands. “But teal is blue-green.”
“Are you guessing your green-barely-blue hair, then?”
“Yes.”
“Wrong.”
“At a certain point in the game, the guesser’s allowed to give up.”
“Then give up.”
The reply was a loaded one, and caused Vesper to look at the door to her cell again. Flex her creaky, dry hands. Part of the skin had scraped off her finger, revealing more dryness and a little bone. She frowned, and was quiet for a moment.
Another few hours of trying to leap for the skylight came, each attempt leaving her tumbling as nimbly as she could to avoid pummeling herself on the stone. But eventually, likely the way Sticks had gone, she figured that preparation was taking away from the full power reaching the ceiling. So another hour of hitting the far wall before she slumped again.
Her eyes were closed for a while, though she hadn’t managed to sleep after the first year or two. She felt the cracked, rancid hay that hadn’t been changed since she’d arrived here beneath her cheek, and the cold stone beneath that. Ran her nails in the grout, resisting the urge to start prying stones loose again. She was tired. It had been years and she was already tired.
When she opened her eyes, there was a faint glow on the stone. She stared at it, too close to her bad eye. The eye that had been slashed a few years before the Way finally cornered her. The eye that only read things’ histories, and had a poor time doing as much regular seeing as it had when it was naturally brown.
“Are you still there?” She asked, and dust puffed away from her breath, across the floor.
two finished revenges for preceptor & my buddy @goose-writing-and-art !!!! AND ALL THE WIPS AHAGSHGAHSGSHABHABSHSBDBSBBBSDHCJCODKHCBDB IM ART FIGHTING MY DEMONS
sometimes the party face is the kindest or the smartest and sometimes it's the only character willing to take the order back to the counter when it's wrong. thank you to our collapsible goo, hattie (@overstockedterrarium), for keeping the party from collapsing <3
also featuring: osa (@simpgoose), mik (moose), moggie (johnny), and kri'cha (me!)
Stormwind siblings for pride :3
Osa's in a sort of. Label limbo but likes sapphic and queer as descriptors for herself, and Mik is questioning but certainly not straight.
my favorite kind of character is the kind who deep in their soul is constantly screaming LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME and outwardly expressing literally anything else
