'Tis Naught But A Ruse

If you came to this blog expecting the details expecting the details of a kickass campaign from a kickass DM, I fear you'll be disappointed. I'm currently putting together and preparing for my very first campaign so this blog is where I'm going to store as much information and inspiration as I can. Hopefully once my campaign is underway, I'll have some original content to post, so if that's up your alley, you might want to stick around. Or not. I might be horrible at it. We shall see.

[macabremoons]

fantasy is so fun until you have to name your countries and make a map someone please end my misery

[halfbit]

all you need to do is come up with 3-4 unique names. then come up with a meaning/translation for those names. now that you know what they mean, you can combine their elements with eachother and add new random sounds in.

eg: "mir/miel" means lake in my conlang, "da" means hill, and "guu" means bear. now that i know that i can name something daguu/guuda (bear hill) or guumir (bear lake). and i can go "hwa" (which means white but in this case pretend i came up with it at random) sounds good with "guu" so what if i name something hwaguu or hwaguumir? and then just repeat the process

some of the things i recommend having words for when it comes to naming locations:

- hill (you can have so many variants that mean hill)

- lake

- river/creek

- valley

- directional words (north, east, south, west)

- road/path

- forest/wood

- clearing/plain

- rock/cliff

it doesn't have to be extremely overwhelming! you can just start with a few small and common words and slowly expand

[halfbit]

countries are definitely a bit harder then average place names, but they usually name themselves either after the people who live there or something symbolic!

a fun little read, sometimes only covers their exonyms in english though, let me see if i can find one that goes into country's names in their native languages

still not quite what i was looking for, but covers groups of people!

this is closer to what i was looking for, it shows the countries' endonym and english exonym next to eachother which is a good start, but doesnt provide a translation of meanings. better than nothing though

[macabremoons]

country names... have meanings... oh my god that makes everything so much easier

[canary0]

Saving for reference.

[witchy-cardreader]

Probably bad DND ideas

1. Everyone is a lycanthrope & it‘s the full moon (or the day before)

2. some kid gets kidnapped & the party has to save him! the only catch? they‘re drunk as hell, because they wanted to party

3. dnd, but for each check you pull a tarot card

4. every time you fail a check or an attack roll, you take a shot

5. the lower your number, the higher it really is. eg. a 1 would be a 20. better keep your mods down!

6. the dm makes their characters for them. they don‘t know their stats, just race & class. chaos ensues.

7. every time they roll a d20 they have to do that many push ups

8. all their characters only speak one language, and none of them speak the same language

please dont use these

[that-crazy-australian]

@thelockenessmonster

[thelockenessmonster]

XD

[probablybadrpgideas]

Did someone say bad rpg ideas?

[aliveria]

a big ass thieves cant collection for my dnd game. some of it inspired by all those ‘hobo symbols’ and stuff you can find on the internet 

[valentinemichaelsmith]

keg.

[yoslash]

[eddarota]

I know very well this is just the skeleton of a whale…but all the same it looks damned creepy.

[probablygoodrpgideas]

It’s already past midnight at my place and I am so tired I can barely think but anyway: Put women in your game. Both as NPCs, player characters (no your masculinity will not die from playing a female character), and players. If you have no women at your table, seriously ask yourself “why”

[pomrania]

Have female enemies too! There’s no reason why the group of bandits can’t have an even gender split, or just happen to be all women, the same way that in many games they “just happen” to be all men.

[probablygoodrpgideas]

This!

When I don’t prepare anything I end up making the villains male most of the time (notes say “1 cultist” I say “He attacks) so that’s something I have to work on myself

[portentblue]

Why not just let people run their games how they want instead of policing how private games are ran? Fuck.

[probablygoodrpgideas]

Imagine getting angry at people telling you that maybe you could put women in your game

[char-portraits]

Fantasy Classes series by Forrest Imel: Warrior, Warlock, Priest, Paladin, Druid, Mage, Ranger, Thief

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

These are called White Whale 3, also from Lucky Hand Dice. I love all the clear glittery sets of theirs! These have a beautiful dense pastel shimmer 💖💖💖

Five more days til their campaign!

[amnesia-jack]

I’ve been making stupid shop logos for my D&D game tonight because why not

[delicatebirdbouquetsworld]

[gametee]

Real Gemstone Dice Sets Now on Black Friday Discounts, with Free Gifts - [HERE] Which one resonates with you?

[galahadwilder]

A sudden, terrifying thought

When you see an animal with its eyes set to the front, like wolves, or humans, that’s usually a predator animal.

If you see an animal with its eyes set farther back, though—to the side—that animal is prey.

Now look at this dragon.

See those eyes?

They’re to the SIDE.

This raises an interesting—and terrifying—question.

What in the name of Lovecraft led evolution to consider DRAGONS…

As PREY?

[dorito-and-pinetree]

I know this isn’t part of my blogs theme but like this is interesting

[haiku-robot]

i know this isn’t part of my blogs theme but like this is interesting

^Haiku^bot^8. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes. | @image-transcribing-bot @portmanteau-bot | Contact | HAIKU BOT NO | Good bot! | Beep-boop!

[kappagecko]

@howdidigetinvolved

[perfectlygenericblog]

The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole

This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.

(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)

But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.

For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.

Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?

A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.

Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.

[nathanpikajew]

this is some good dragon discourse right here, 10/10, and i dont mean to derail the whole thing away from the eyes, but i feel obligated to mention that in many stories and accurate to some reptiles, dragons have an extremely acute sense of smell/taste which would definitely help narrow down the depth perception issue. things smell stronger the closer they are. and i feel like i read somewhere that a blind snake can flick the air with its tongue and track its target mouse with no trouble at all. gotta imagine the “great serpents of the sky” had some pretty advanced biology. enough to make field of view win out against depth perception.

anywho. cool stuff. fear the dragons even if they are the prey cause they still beat us on the food chain.

[prokopetz]

Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.

In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.

Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.

Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:

1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.

2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:

Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.

Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.

Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.

As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

💖✨💖✨💖

[kauriart]

Portrait OCs, Gifts & Commissions

Look at all these (mostly) Dragon Age babies! It was such a joy and pleasure to draw these, and I’m so happy to finally have enough to consolidate into a single post!

Keep reading

[we-are-rogue]

Human rogue by F-Martinez

[porcelaincloud]

My cat: comfortable, hasn’t moved in 3 hours

Me: gives one (1) pat

Cat: my rest……… it has been,, disturb ed……..I ………..can no longor……lay here…. must go…..