MorlockGibbering

I am talking about fantasy and other stuff(?) All of my ideas posted on the internet could be stolen, so all of my ideas can be stolen

[orteil42]

there's this sort of default assumption online that you're meant to have watched the latest defunctland, hbomberguy or dan olson video in a manner i'd compare to "catch the game last night?"

[morlockgibbering]

Gotta remember, most of the people who comment about art and creativity online don't actually make anything. Someone's only an expert on creating art if they actually make art, otherwise they're just a fan.

[morlockgibbering]

Despite my last post about Fafhrd and Grey Mouser having some wild writing, sword and sorcery fantasy does really do it for me. Our intrepid asshole protagonist spends half the text running from fights, then kills a single guy and fucks off. Immaculate, Tolkien could never.

[morlockgibbering]

I'm reading the first Farfhd and Grey Mouser book, and I'm worried that it took itself seriously. There's a group of nomadic steppe horsemen called the Mingols. Farfhd is a big barbarian hero who lives with his mom. All the women in the town the story is set in so far seem to be ice witches who embody the "my bitch wife" boomer meme. The ice witches throw snowballs at people they don't like, and the book takes a step back from that and is like "now I know that sounds dumb, but it actually really hurts and sometimes they freeze them solid"

[tisorridalamor]

Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action. 

 I don’t think they believed me.

[poorlydescribedpterrybooks]

welcome to the club

[amatalefay]

It is so, so difficult to explain to people that your favorite book is about transgender feminist dwarves, Nazi werewolves, and the mystery of a missing piece of really old ritual bread. And Opera saves the day.

[poorlydescribedpterrybooks]

yes, give us those sweet, sweet, terrible descriptions

[rhys1812]

A tortoise who’s really a god, finds an allegory for Jesus and they go on adventures in an ancient greece like place and then a desert 

[thesummoningdark]

The chief of police averts a rerun of an ancient war, partially despite and partially because of being possessed by a dying dwarf’s graffiti

[nightfoot]

It’s like Les Miserables but Javert is the good guy and also there’s time travel.  

[aethersea]

Macbeth but it’s about the witches

[zephyrantha]

Chapter one, the protagonist is hanged. Then he’s put in charge of the post office. Yes, in that order.

[roachpatrol]

it’s like mulan if there were way more mulans in mulan and also pratchett is extra irritated that too many people missed the point of jingo

[hypotheticalwoman]

The bureaucrats of the universe get annoyed at the paperwork humanity causes so they decide to steal Christmas.  Replacement Christmas is done by Death and replacement Death is done by goth Mary Poppins, who is also in charge of the investigation.

[katedrawscomics]

these are all nice and accurate reasons to read discworld if you haven’t yet

[uovoc]

Romeo and Juliet football AU but the other team is wizards

[animate-mush]

Hollywood????

[garrettauthor]

An entire clan of tattooed, hairy, kleptomaniac, alcoholic Scotsmen decide a little girl is their new best friend whether she wants to be or not and she rescues her absolutely worthless brother by discovering the power of selfishness.

[darkravn]

@cosmictwobyfour

[nudityandnerdery]

Someone is dying, journalism is being invented, and part of Pulp Fiction is going on in the background.

[pimpmizziriam]

The universes burocrats want to measure everything so they pay a man to imprison time so everything will stop and they can measure things in peace. Goth mary Poppins saves the day, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is the best Milkman in the world, and chocolate saves the day. Also someone was born twice.

[tanoraqui]

Classic dynastic machinations are happening in fantasy China, to be completely overturned by a gang of elderly barbarian heroes and the world’s worst wizard and best sprinter

[bailesu]

Death incarnate battles a shopping cart for the fate of the world.  

[sashathephoenix]

@grifalinas

[grifalinas]

Phantom of the Opera au, except there’s witches, a cookbook that is thinly-veiled pornography, and Christine is played by a fledgeling witch with multiple personalities who can’t stop being sensible long enough to enjoy herself

[letslipthehounds]

Hidden heir to the throne decides an cynical, alcoholic cop is the best role model in the world.

[brawltogethernow]

Atlantis provides an excuse for a xenophobia-inspired war between Britain and the Middle East but it’s fine because the armies are arrested for conspiracy to cause public nuisance.

[numberlover1729]

the jfk assassination is parodied in the above.

Rain is brought to australia by a lousy wizzard who runs from dropbears, steals a sheep, and invents vegamite

[dduane]

(sigh)(smile) All of the above.

[scribefindegil]

You can defeat Vampire Fascism with the powers of violence, your debilitating anxiety disorder, and a nice cup of tea

[boogerwookiesugarcookie]

the pied piper is a racket being run by some talking mice and a cat but they accidentally invent socialism. then of course there are also the rat horrors

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

there’s a camel

[captain-cargoshorts]

a wizard who knows only one spell is menaced by some luggage. there’s a tourist.

[lancrewizzard]

And while the aforementioned terrible wizard is having an awful time in Fantasy Australia, his colleagues try to find him and accidentally invent sex and the platypus along the way.

[aquitainequeen]

Have you ever wondered about the poor people whose sole role in the narrative is to rush into the room when summoned and be slaughtered by the hero? THIS is their story. Also, it’s a million to one chance that they hit the voonerables.

[viharistenno]

Fairy Godmothers fight fairytale endings with the power of Logic. There is also a very sexy cat.

[lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks]

Fantasy Hollywood is secretly an Eldritch Horror

[starfightervicki]

Wizards are supposed to be boys but this one’s a girl.

[morlockgibbering]

Death is forcibly retired, but more importantly there's an alien invasion by shopping carts and a shopping mall.

[morlockgibbering]

Been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett in the past couple months, and it's big time affecting how I think about fantasy.

Also wild how much of tumblr's culture seems to just be Terry Pratchett's sense of humor. I wonder how many of you are doing it intentionally

[morlockgibbering]

To solve the issue of there not being enough wild sci-fi concepts in modern fantasy, I think there should be fantasy gods that move on after a planet gets made and work on other planetary projects. Dimension hopping is super common in fantasy, might as well pop over to the next habitable planet with a funny gimmick too.

[morlockgibbering]

D&D Setting Purge, pt.1: Timekeeping

I had a lot of worldbuilding ideas floating around from when I ran D&D more often, this is going to be the first of me purging that file so I can do other stuff.

The standard Gnome calendar has 365.25 days, separated into 12 months composed of three ten-day weeks. The remaining 5 days are independent holidays and are not part of a month. Every 4 years, a special leap year holiday, Confluence, is celebrated.

Each season in the Gnomish calendar is associated with one of the classical elements: spring is air, summer is fire, fall is earth, and winter is water. The days of the week are named for D&D's dragons and are as follows: Golday, Stormdusk, Bronzedawn, Jadenight, Copperdawn, Cottondusk, SIlvermorn, Coalnight, Fireday, Redusk

The 6 special holidays are as follows:

Firstday: Gnomish new years, celebrated at the end of winter and beginning of the spring season.

Whistlepig: A festival to celebrate spring, Whistlepig festivities include a council of elders convincing the titular whistlepig to leave its burrow. Methods vary from coercion, intimidation, brute force, or trickery. Most Gnomish communities keep a family of whistlepigs around for this holiday. Killing a whistlepig at any time is said to bring misfortune to entire towns.

Glittergold: a summer solstice holiday celebrating the sun aspect of the high lord of the Gnome pantheon, Garl Glittergold

Wintertide: A fall harvest festival where gifts are exchanged before the coming of winter. Also celebrated is the Feast of Wintertide, a community-wide potluck that cannot be eaten at a table.

The Light Festival: a more personal midwinter holiday, the Light Festival is a family celebration in which the home is lit brightly to banish winter darkness and summon Garl Glittergold back to the sky. Bad children are warned that kobolds will come the night of the Light Festival and steal their shoes while they sleep.

Confluence: every fourth year, Gnomes celebrate Confluence, the day when the Prime Material and the Feywild are in closest proximity. Confluence is celebrated at massive carnivals, where games are played, art is displayed, deals are struck, and of course, feasts are eaten. The most celebrated contest is the crowning of the Fey Courts, both Seely and Unseely. While Confluence is a specific day, the celebration and carnivals can sometimes be stretched up to a week.

[morlockgibbering]

It's cool that trees make exhale water and kick-start clouds and stuff, but if they could cool it with fog, just a little bit.

[morlockgibbering]

I hope they killed the man who decided that goats give the best blowjobs

[morlockgibbering]

The worst part of being a honest-to-gods magical prophet must be how often you don't need to use your powers and just make regular observations.

[what-even-is-thiss]

So many people who wanna argue with me about King Arthur clearly haven’t read the actual medieval texts. I know this because if they actually read the source material they’d know that when it comes to King Arthur, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“King Arthur couldn’t have fought the Roman Empire”

Try telling that to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“You can’t just add in new characters”

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

A lot of that stuff including the lady of the lake wasn’t added until the 12th century actually. Centuries after England was christianized. It was also mostly added by the French poets.

[what-even-is-thiss]

God, I sure hope so.

[morlockgibbering]

A lot of bad people seem to be motivated primarily by peer pressure. It's the sort of thing that you don't see a lot of fictional villains motivated by, but it really seems like negative influences are the primary building block of evil in the real world.

I'll admit, it's not a sexy motivation, banal evil never is, but it seems to be behind a lot of the evil I see in the day-to-day.

[morlockgibbering]

Someone said something at work today that made me realize I've been working at the same place for too long. I've got to get out of here, everything's starting to run together.

[morlockgibbering]

Funny how voice-overs influence how we think about people/characters. I didn't have any preconceptions about this guy, but someone at casting decided that he was a surfer guy from California, so I guess that's what he is.

[morlockgibbering]

Re-watched Dark Crystal the other night, and it's a real shame that Disney owns the Muppets and the Henson Workshop and have done barely anything with them. Dark Crystal is such a cool moody film, with the caveat that you have to ignore the dialogue, which was originally intended as an afterthought. The creature design is great and strange, the settings are cool, and the movie has cool themes of duality and universal connection.

[morlockgibbering]

Moon's Messed Up, Man

So I saw this tweet about making your moons weird in your worldbuilding, and I agree with the sentiment But!

TLDR: The Moon is magic and you don't notice because you live on Earth. If you designed the moon for a story without it being the familiar moon, you would get called a hack.

Earth's moon (henceforth referred to as Luna) is royally fucked up from a top-down view. It's the over-designed OC of celestial bodies. Compared to most every other moon that we can observe, it's completely improbable, but because it's the moon that our planet has, it's the basis for every fantasy moon in skies with only one moon.

First, Luna is massive. While it may have a smaller radius than Mars or Mercury, it has more mass than either of them, meaning Luna is the size of a small planet. As compared to other moons, Luna is the fifth largest moon in our solar system. Not impressive, you may say, until you realize that every other moon comparable to Luna orbits massive gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn, which have masses equivalent to 318 Earths and 95 Earths, respectively. Luna is so huge that it creates readily noticeable effects on the Earth's surface.

Which leads to my second point: Luna creates noticeable tides on Earth's oceans. Every moon orbiting a planet should have some gravitational effect on it's planet's surface, but the moon's impact is so huge that it makes regular and predictable effects that sea life like turtles base their breeding seasons and behaviors off of tides, which, as a reminder, wouldn't happen if Luna wasn't disproportionately large for a satellite.

Thirdly, Luna is tidally locked, which wouldn't be all that strange if it weren't for the face on its surface that stares down at the Earth. It may be just a trick of pattern recognition, but if you were designing a moon for your setting and it had a face on it, your audience would rightly wonder what that was all about. "Why does that moon have a face on it? It must mean something and not be a coincidence" they would say. But no, that's just how our most familiar satellite looks.

Fourth, Luna is the same size in the sky from the perspective of the Earth as the Sun, which leads to the most striking event that Luna is regularly a part of, the full solar eclipse. Because of a quirk of how Luna appears in the sky, it can fully block out the Sun and create an artificial night on parts of the Earth, not to mention the halo of light that surrounds Luna when it does so. Most ancient cultures thought that full solar eclipses were the Sun being eaten by a monster, which, on most planets that support life with a more appropriately sized moon, would never be a part of the culture of your world's cultures.

Compare this solar eclipse on Mars...

To this full solar eclipse on Earth

This is the problem with our experiences on Earth when it comes to world building: our planet is so hugely strange from a universal perspective that believable worlds can never be as interesting and strangely detailed as the world that we grew up on and are most used to.