Rapier and Dragon

UK // 24 // she/they

[vaporwavesimulator]

women wear suits better than men and thats just a cold hard fact

[two-thirtyy]

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.

[taykoutmccleod]

reblog if its friday and you made it

[trixic-frankenman-deactivated20]

[garnetislovegarnetislife]

love the idea of mira being initially against keeping derpy and sussie on the grounds of them not knowing what they are, but being outvoted by rumi (whose grown exceptionally fond of them) and zoey (who thinks they’re so fucking charming).

and mira eventually goes to zoey in particular (bc whatever yeah sure of course RUMI is fond of them, she knew them for longer than mira did but why is zoey so charmed by them, other her being zoey who loves everyone and is such a sweetheart it makes miras heart hurt sometimes thinking about the ways in which world has hurt her and the more she thinks about the more it already makes sense but STILL) and asks her whats so charming about their new weird spirit animals. and zoey stares at her like “babe. derpy is just rumi, but as a big blue tiger.”

and mira would argue but then she thinks about derpy, and the quiet, polite way he picks up things he knocks down, and the way he stares with his big, dumbass smile, and the noises he makes when you pet him in just the right spot, and how just stretches out on top of them no matter how inconvenient it is to have him there, and the way clings to them when they try to get up, and how much he loves to nap.

and then she thinks about rumi, and how shes always been so quiet and polite, and how she has that big, dumbass smile she pulls out whenever she’s really excited about something, and the noises she makes when they scratch or massage or rub just the right spot, and how she loves to nap atop them no matter how inconvenient it is (the inconvenience never really mattered to mira or zoey, her bridging the gap any time she would before the idol awards always felt like a win to them, and now that she’s doing it more, the idea of holding their girlfriend couldn’t be anything further from an inconvenience to them), and the way she clings to them when they try to get up (they were always way more reluctant to do that before, because those instances were fewer and further between, but now they have the security of knowing they’ll get to have rumi in their lap again soon, they’ll even get to hold her in bed), and how (now that she’s loosened up and isnt so deadset on achieving the golden honmoon, and is taking better care of herself) she’s developed a love of napping.

hell, they even stretch out in the same way and yawn similarly

and she realizes that zoey’s right.

“but,” she stutters out, “how are you so fond of the bird?”

and zoey laughs and drags her down for a kiss (very pleasant) and then says “because, jagiya, hes just like you” (unpleasant)

and then zoey laughs again when mira and sussie, whose been beefing with mira since he arrived and who was in the room with them just hanging out, both let out identical squawks of indignation and storm (or fly) away at the exact same because theyre both so offended

[cabbagedotexe]

Members of carnivora paired with their common ancestor, a miacid. 

[centrumlumina]

#let’s evolve with mama

[monstermonger]

He's worried about stepping on flowers. He loves nature.

[chipthekeeper]

one of the most Bells Hells™ conversations that ever occurs, I dare say

[bob-artist]

My brain: You have so many tight deadlines. So many things on your weekly schedule. So many important jobs. You have to get important work done!!!

My hands:

[bob-artist]

It's a

Canada Griffin

[aliasmard]

blood runs thicker than water

[rialtostation]

pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with "the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right" and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes "now consider the vast power of grief in this setup" it never really stops considering

[catgirlbignaturals]

It also has a scene where the robot uses a boat as a baseball bat. That also fucks tremendously.

[prokopetz]

I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.

[prokopetz]

I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:

As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.

The rules of Dungeons & Dragons is not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (And again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)

In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.

(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)

The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.

The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.

A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.

Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)

Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.

Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?

So get to work!

i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.

To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).

The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.

Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.

[iamthedukeofurl]

I feel like a lot of D&D's supposed flexibility is simply due to marketing/idea of D&D as the Ur-RPG. It's like, the Call of Cthulu system could be divorced from it's Lovecraftian Horror subgenre to be used for a game about bootleggers about as effectively as Dungeons and Dragons could be used to run something besides a sword-and-sorcery dungeon crawl. You ignore some of the mechanics and rework some of the others, sure, but it works well enough.

But if you're NOT playing lovecraftian horror, why would you use Call of Cthulu instead of a more specialized system for the game you INTEND to run. But D&D is thought of as basically synonymous with RPGs themselves. The Default RPG is Dungeons and Dragons, it just so happens that this means the Default RPG Campaign is a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. The root of it is that rolling dice and telling stories with your friends is Fun, such that even a system ill suited for the game you're playing can still result in a good time. This isn't the wonder of the system, it's that rolling dice with your friends is fun.

[selfship-quotes]

I love soulmates but also this-

[qilingxiong]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[apathetic-revenant]

demon: YOU HAVE SUMMONED ME, MORTAL. WHAT DEAL DO YOU WISH TO STRIKE WITH THE POWERS OF HELL?

roomba: [is a roomba]

demon:

roomba:

demon:

roomba:

demon: man c’mon you gotta work with me here a little bit

[poppetawoppet]

roomba: *slowly spells on floor* K N I F E

demon: ahhhhh I see. You have heard the legend of Stabby.

roomba: *vibrates excitedly*

[colby-jac-cheese]

demon: *lovingly tapes a knife onto the roomba* no charge

Roomba: >:3

[broadwaytheanimatedseries]

I love it when tumblr posts become so legendary they just get referenced in other tumblr posts

[geocaprican]

It’s not just the jpegs we play with like dolls

[unhappytogekiss]

a new reality tv show called So you think you can write Doctor Who

twelve episodes, twelve contestants - a mix of annoying middle aged sci fi authors, fan fic authors and random people off the street

a variety of against the clock writing tasks, big finish scripts, ability to interact with actors without shouting at them and challenges where you have no budget or doctor for an episode

judged by solely by christopher eccleston

this is how you find the new doctor who showrunner

[mothermara]

remember to bury the dead with a phone, everyone. these days the ferry terminal at the river styx wants you to download a fucking app

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[simaethae]

so on the subject of stolen property, i’ve seen various arguments on this point but it is in fact true that inheriting something from a relative, when you know full well that it was stolen, does not make it yours.

this clearly goes doubly so for powerful magical artifacts, and especially for artifacts which are strongly implied to contain part of their creator’s soul!

you can talk about consequences - maybe the artifact in question has benefits for you, maybe you’re not convinced its rightful owners would use it responsibly - but talking about the consequences doesn’t erase the fact that whatever benefits you think you’re getting are achieved through wrongful means.

which is why i, too, think Frodo should have given the One Ring back to Sauron. thief.

[ashleynef]

Hahahahaha here comes the law student nerd ready to complicate your wonderful post, op.

(Really this is just pretext for me to study for my property final in a week, so thanks yeah)

Because according to the principles of common property law, the matter of who actually owns title to the One Ring becomes really complicated really fast.

Buckle up babes for the pedantic law lecture no one asked for.

(more under the cut)

Keep reading

[maneuverability]

EXCELLENT

[violent-darts]

The best part of this is: trust me I guarantee Tolkien knew this much about the Common Law (English mediaevalists end up knowing ridiculous amounts about both Common Law and mediaeval Catholicism whether we want to or not), and indeed if you look at the text, this was relevant to the story. 

It’s part of the reason that Sauron is as terrified of Aragorn’s potential claim on the Ring as he is of Gandalf’s or Saruman’s or Galadriel’s - if not more. Because in Middle Earth this shit matters. This is a world where a broken oath will literally bind your unhappy restless soul to the earth in spite of the dictates of the literal creator of the universe (who designated humans as Passing Beyond The World when they die). This is a world where a damn oath is responsible for Everything That’s Wrong With The First And Second Ages. 

Oaths, ownership, duties, rights, things owed and owing: this shit matters. 

And sure Aragorn is also direct line from Lúthien, but so is Elrond, and so are Elrohir and Elladan. So is Arwen. But what none of them have that Aragorn has? Is a rightful claim to ownership of the Ring. 

So much of what Aragorn spends his time in the second and third volumes doing is Establishing Claim - establishing that everything that Isildur owned, he now owns. Why? Because it means he has power that is absolutely needed. “Isildur’s Heir” isn’t a woo-woo floofy-high-concept thing: it’s a literal matter of rights, duties and authority. 

When he takes the Palantír from Gandalf and uses it, his companions are aghast, but he reminds them that he has both the right and the strength to use it - and the Right is actually important. Saruman was, face to face, stronger than Aragorn (never doubt that) and Sauron completely pwned him, but Saruman had no right to the Seeing Stone, no more right than Pippin. 

But the Palantíri belonged to Aragorn: he’s not only Melian’s ever-so-great-grandchild, he’s also Fingolfin’s ever-so-great-grandchild, and since the Fëonori died out with the poor Ringmaker, the only competition Aragorn could have for ownership of the Stones are Galadriel and Elrond. (And that’s only if you are going right back to the maker-rights, and ignoring the establishment of the Stones as the property of Elros’ line rather later). 

It matters. It changes how power works and doesn’t work. Aragorn’s status as the Heir is in fact grounded in these ideas, which play a hugely powerful part (in fact the fight over who rightfully owns the Silmaril Beren and Lúthien brought out of the dark is part of the bloodshed that makes it so that in the end the Silmarils themselves actively reject the last two living sons of Fëanor, negating their claim). Because Aragorn is the rightful inheritor of everything Isildur ever had, he can use the Palantír. Because he is the rightful inheritor of everything Isildur ever had, he can summon the Dead. And because he is the rightful inheritor of everything Isildur ever had, he stands equal to two of the Ainur, to the oldest member of the Trees-blessed Noldorin royal house, and to his own much more powerful (straight up) relatives as a potential claimant of the Ring. 

And that is why Sauron is willing to take the chance to catch Aragorn, and (he thinks) ensure his capture, rather than attacking him earlier on when there’s a chance that (even if Aragorn can’t possibly WIN) he could still escape and then bide his time before the next Ring-War and learn to use the damn thing. 

But. It’s also important when it comes to Frodo. 

Frodo uses the Ring twice, and lays open claim once. Both of the times he uses it are on Sméagol, both times overwheming him and in the second case cursing him (“if you ever touch me again you will be thrown into the fire”). We get both moments from Sam’s POV, where the physical reality of Frodo is replaced by an image of him as a much larger figure, alight from the inside, robed in light, and with a “wheel of fire” at his breastbone. 

Frodo does not have any genetics (so to speak) more special than any other hobbit. It’s not like Aragorn vs most humans, where there’s actually a legit difference because most humans were not, at that point, descended from a Maia. Frodo’s just this guy. 

The only thing that’s really special about Frodo in terms of the Ring is that, like Aragorn, he’s the other person who has a viable claim. It would, as it were, have to go to the judges to figure out whose claim is better. 

And this is why in the moment that he claims the Ring, in the Mountain, Sauron is fucking terrified. It’s why he drops everything else, even the issue of trying to keep his mindless drone-fighters going, even the maintenance of his actual control of weather, of light, of whatever fight he and Gandalf have going, to get his best servants back to the Mountain now now now now. 

Because Frodo having an actual rightful claim on the Ring means he can, in fact, use it. Not well, which is why Sauron can paralyse him for that moment it takes for Sméagol to strike (and carry out both Frodo’s demanded oath - “save the Precious from Him” - and his Curse - “if you touch me you will be thrown in the fire” - at once), but he could. This tiny little person is a threat to Sauron, in the heart of his own home, because he has the right to have and use this Ring. 

The tricky thing about Tolkien is that whatever his flaws (and he has many), the one thing he’s never unclear of is that the concept of right and might are actually separate. Just because you are strong enough to do or take a thing doesn’t mean you have any right to do it; and just because you aren’t strong enough to enforce your right, doesn’t mean it goes away. 

…/UTTER NERD

[thatgirlnevershutsup]

I had a nerdgasm just reading this.

[butyoutoldmeiwasfunny]