The prince, most of the way through hauling himself over the balcony, gazed in some peturbation at the grizzled man clearly just waking up from a nap in a comfy armchair placed just so to catch the afternoon sun. As his eye scanned the room he took in the battered suit of armour juryrigged onto a dressmaker's dummy in one corner, the extremely large sword propped up in another; they finally came to halt on the man again who, having apparently moved with cat-like stealth that someone his size should not have, was now in front of him and offering him a hand.
"Ah. I fear I must have taken a wrong turning, I do beg your pardon for disturbing you," the prince said as diplomatically as he could, "I meant to rescue Princess Imelda-"
The man smiled congenially. "Right tower, wrong time - here, let me help you up, that can't be comfortable."
The prince did his level best not to squawk as the man lifted him by arm and shoulder over the balcony railing, setting him gently on his feet. "What do you mean, wrong time?" he asked, a little sharper than intended despite all his princely training after the indignity of being scruffed like a kitten.
The man held out his hand. "Sir Biddeford. I'm...well, I suppose you could say I'm tower-sitting for Imelda."
"Tower sitting?!"
"Do you want a drink or anything?" Sir Biddeford appeared to let the prince's breach of manners roll past him. "I've brought up a couple of nice vintages, or there's water or apple juice or milk in the ice box - nice little bit of wizardry that."
"Look, sorry, could we go back to the whole tower-sitting concept?" The prince pinched the bridge of his nose, the beginning of a headache starting to form.
Sir Biddeford shrugged. "Suit yourself." He plopped himself back down in the armchair - although the prince couldn't help but notice the lack of noise, the grace behind the gracelessness.
"It's like this, lad. I normally do dungeons, but when I saw this tower as I was riding past I thought, 'Biddeford, no one would have built a tower with no doors, it's just not efficient if you want to keep anyone inside without having to put a lot of teleportation spells and the like, I bet there's a secret door somewhere."
He waved airily, "And it took about ten minutes to find it and get it open, because no one had thought about the way the ground got worn by the servants-"
"There are servants here too?" The prince was still bristling at 'lad' despite himself.
"Not right now, obviously," Sir Biddeford replied. The prince had barely drawn breath before he continued, "They only come once a week to do laundry, restock, and spruce up the place, although I've been helping out there." The prince spluttered at the impropriety. "Anyway, Imelda fancied a bit of a break from the tower, and I had been thinking of a holiday for a while, so...here I am, she has my horse and travel gear, and she should be back in...a month?"
"A month," the prince said flatly. "One. Whole. Month."
"Or thereabouts, we didn't set a specific date." Sir Biddeford shrugged.
"I did not travel across hazardous mountains and through perilous forests to go home without rescuing a sodding princess!" The prince exploded, stomping one foot in emphasis, the heel of his riding boot clacking solidly on the flagstones.
Sir Biddeford shrugged again. "I'm not really the rescuable type, I'm afraid...there are a couple of empty rooms further down the tower, I'm sure no one will mind if you stay until Imelda gets back."
The prince's eyes narrowed. "You're making fun of me, aren't you? The King will hear of this, this outrage!"
"Suit yourself." Sir Biddeford settled back into the armchair with all the self-possession of a cat claiming a favourite cushion. "Close the window on your way out, if you don't mind? The afternoon breeze gets a bit feisty."
The prince spluttered some more. He didn't close the window.
Imelda let the horse amble its way to the tower, not feeling any particular urgency to returning. That being said, once she was close enough to see the field it stood in curiosity did lead her to gently urge it to a lope; as the pair of them slowed, she took in the small wooden barn, the start of what looked like a solid kitchen garden - and sitting on a comfy recliner on a sun-trap veranda that had definitely not been a feature of the tower previously, one Sir Biddeford.
"Imelda!" She hadn't been sure he was even awake, but he was waving to her with enthusiasm. "Good trip? Sassy behave herself? Can I get you a drink?"
"Sir Biddeford. Biddie." She gestured at all of the improvements to the tower. "What on earth has been happening while I've been away? Mother sends her regards before I forget, by the way."
"Let's see...quite a few princes, some of whom were absolute charmers, a few knights, two shepherds, a goose girl, a surprising number of people called Jack..." Sir Biddeford counted them all off on his fingers. "Some of them stayed, some of them chose to rescue each other, I persuaded all of the charmers to go and complain at your father, and the ones that stayed...well, they're enjoying a bit of a holiday and learning from each other, really."
Princess Imelda regarded him steadily. "...you've turned my tower into a holiday camp for questers?"
"Not intentionally, but...yes, I suppose I have." Sir Biddeford shrugged.
Shaking her head, Imelda slid off Sassy's back, taking care not to drop the staff that she'd acquired on her trip. "I suppose I better clean Sassy and myself up, and then go and see how we're going to decide who actually gets to rescue me..."
"Hmm." Sir Biddeford eyed her thoughtfully. "Staff of the Ice Serpent?"
"What, this?" Imelda held it out to him proudly, the sun glinting off the translucent stone embedded in the tip. "I had a run of good luck on one of those dungeons you mentioned. Then there was a wizard doing a sort of outbound school for her students who didn't mind an extra assistant, you know how it goes."
"Any good?"
Imelda's smile was fierce. "Well, she said if royalty didn't work out for me she'd be happy to take me in as a full-time student..."
"Hmm." That seemed to be it, Sir Biddeford already paying more attention to his horse than to her, until he casually added, "There are a couple of dungeons I always meant to have a look at, but they were as much magic as traps."
"Are you...I literally just got back, Biddie," Imelda replied, clamping down hard on her sudden excitement.
"All the more reason to head out now before anyone sees you," Sir Biddeford said pleasantly, "There are a couple of questers with good heads on their shoulders and it won't take me long to put together supplies - meet me by the crossroads in, oh, fifteen minutes."
A lifetime of princess training could not repress the irrepressable grin. "Father's going to be furious."
"I'm sure he will be if he notices - now go on, scoot. I'll bring your bags on Sassy."
Perhaps bordering more on a skip than a scoot, Imelda scooted.
I think that if a story ever pulls a line like "You could have destroyed your magic with a stunt like that!" or "Pushing ahead with your magic too quickly can have dangerous consequences!" then the story should be obligated at some point to show me these magically disabled people.
All stories should have more disabled people, honestly, because disability is a basic part of being alive! What am I supposed to think of any given fictional community if I never see any elderly people, any retired people, any injured people, or any disabled people?
But seriously, a lot more fantasy stories specifically could really stand to show people who have been burned by magic to various degrees and are now living with the consequences. I'm too used to the protagonists fainting and sleeping extreme recklessness off without issue.
One of the (many) cool things about Wizard of Earthsea is in like the first act of book 1, the MC shows off to his peers by doing super advanced ~dark magic~, it horrendously wounds him on a physical, spiritual, and magical level, and the rest of the book (and sequels tbh) revolve around living with the consequences of that event.
I'd also like to shoutout Millenial Mage, which shows us one of those magically disabled people before the insane stunts begin getting pulled, right in the first book. Master Himmal had the Great Idea of altering his keystone (the 3d gold spellform in your back that every mage needs to actively control the flow of magic) so that it would constantly tug his gate open a little wider, 24/7, increasing the amount of magic that flowed through and thus his power. This worked great, until his soul broke and now he's got to use a magical prosthetic to keep things under control enough to work magic or be around people.
Tala immediately asks if that idea could work if they were more careful about it, which more or less sums up early book Tala. She learned wisdom by process of elimination, she did.
Will give some more examples below the cut. Mild spoilers for later book details. Nothing serious, but it will spoil some worldbuilding surprises and I do really recommend it, even if it's sadly stubbed on Royalroad for Kindle Unlimited now.
A lot of Mages wind up "disabled" by simple inability to control their auras after Binding, having to rely on the same prosthetic Himmal does. Can't have uncontrolled magical auras around mundanes (or indeed less advanced mages), so they wind up soulbinding an artefact to do it for them. It does mean no more magical progress, but tbh stretching the last decade or two of your life into centuries is still a good result. Over-reliance on artefacts in general can also stunt your advancement, and we see one man who inherited a rather fancy staff too early essentially treat it like one of those WALL-E hoverchairs, never learning to "walk", magically speaking.
On the nastier side, Master Jevin was young when it was fashionable to make your archon star, the magical object you use to soulbind things (your own body first, usually), out of exotic materials. He picked a sphere of wood from an incredibly ancient magical tree... which then had more influence over the soulbonding than he did. It had no will of it's own, so he was still in charge, but he was still a walking, human-shaped tree now. Particularly painful because human inscriptions are spellforms of gold/silver/copper in human flesh, or occasionally bone or organs. Gold in wood needs an entirely different spellform to do the same thing, meaning his options were more or less "get an inscriber willing to make a whole new catalogue" or "suck it up and learn how to inscribe yourself". Oh, and did I mention the next 3 stages of magical advancement either don't help or made the problem worse? Jevin had it rough.
Tala herself loses limbs like they're attached with hand-tight screws, but her inscriptions are heavily built towards defence and healing, so most of the longer term damage is mental. This lasts many books, until she manages to have a run-in with something that can erase the very concept of her having a left hand, such that "healing" would be more like extremely experimental and ill-fitting body modification of the sort she can't really tolerate. She was rather grumpy about the prosthetic for years after that, although she eventually advances enough to decide "no, actually, fuck you, I can have exactly the number of hands I bloody well want to have". Which is six, kind of. It's complicated.
i think y'all are missing a trick with Kathryn Janeway and Eleanor of Aquitaine given the Katharine Hepburn/Kate Mulgrew crossovers, but the request was for Janeway with a fuckoff big sword as an Angevin so here we go -- she got stuck in a holodeck program with the rest of the crew and she likes swinging a sword maybe a little too much 🤏
Me for the last 15 years: Starting a timer when you have to wait for something or stand in line can be helpful, because no matter how impatient you feel you can check the timer and remind yourself it has not been several eternities and has in fact only been five minutes.
Me setting a timer when I got to bag claim just now: I'm so clever! I will now be reminded that it's only been five minutes and bag claim usually takes about twenty!
Me looking at the timer thoughtfully: ...another Very Neurotypical Moment With Sam, it appears.
Someone tagged this post "#it’s all fun n games until baggage check takes over an hour" which is 100% legit; a common sentiment in notes is that sometimes you don't want to know how long something has taken. But that is one of the reasons I started doing the stopwatch thing in the first place!
On the one hand, timing something is about reminding myself "No, it's only been five minutes," but it is ALSO about knowing when something is taking way longer than it should.
If I'm put into an exam room in a doctor's office, I start a timer. Because I have been forgotten about in a doctor's office before, I get nervous that I'll just be sat in there forever, and the timer tells me "No, they haven't forgotten you, it's only been 10 minutes." But it also tells me if I have been there longer than appropriate (generally more than 40 minutes) so that I know when it's justifiable to flag down a nurse to find out what's going on.
At bag claim, because I know it usually takes about 20 minutes to get my bag, I don't get concerned until the timer passes the 20 minute mark without any bags appearing. At that point I know I need to take off my headphones and start paying attention -- looking at signage, maybe asking someone if I'm at the right carousel. Maybe don't worry yet, but start double-checking. Perhaps the delay is unavoidable and it'll just be an hour, but at least, having asked, I KNOW it'll be an hour, and the timer will tell me when the hour is past and I should maybe check in again.
Now, if the bags do start showing up before 20 minutes but my bag hasn't shown up by the 40 minute mark, I know that again it's time to put my head on a swivel, and at the 50 minute mark it's time to go speak to someone in the baggage claim office. This has more than once helped me locate my bag when it's accidentally been sent to the wrong part of the airport. There is no point at which, without the timer, I would go "man this is taking a long time" and then actually go ask, because I wouldn't actually know how long it had been.
The timer both prevents me from worrying before I need to and tells me when to start worrying -- essentially, because I'm both perpetually impatient and also infinitely patient, I've outsourced my patience to a stopwatch. And because I time a lot of things, I now know the average time a lot of things take, which helps me calibrate my concerns appropriately. Ten minutes is a long time to wait for a burger from McDonalds, but it's actually on the short end of the time it takes to get a burger from Shake Shack. It's not a long time to be on hold with the HR office of my old employer, but it's longer than I'd usually be on hold with my pharmacy. Et cetera.
I know I say this all the time but I still find it hilarious that I didn't know I had ADHD until I was forty years old.
just want to add that I've started timing myself doing everyday chores and tasks and having a more realistic, personalized idea of how long things take has helped a lot with my time blindness.
I only just started, and it's not yet habitual, so there's only a small bit of info, but it's already made it easier to avoid rushing or getting stuck in waiting mode because it takes out a lot of the guesswork.
And it lets me have grace for myself when something is really taking it out of me. I'm right, this *is* taking forever and it isn't usually this hard, so what's going on? Do I need to rest? Eat? Did I forget my meds? Am I overwhelmed? Etc.
I feel like a scientist gathering and applying data.
Showers on typical days only take "about ten minutes" (me, 2025), therefore, I CAN shower before my appointment that's two hours away.
Contrary to popular belief, doing a quick tidy takes "less than half an hour" (me, 2026) and will not take the better part of a day. I don't need to dread or put it off because I can start a 20min episode and I'll be done before the credits roll.
The proposed estimate of "10-30 miserable minutes in the cold when the warm blankets are right there" (time blindness and depression, 2024), is erroneous, and based on pre-medicated data. As tempting as it is to go straight back to bed after peeing, my research shows that brushing teeth, including "prep and cleanup," rarely takes more than four minutes and may even improve morale and momentum when getting up for the day.
This is awesome and hey guess what: you ARE a scientist gathering and applying data!
I'm super proud of you and everyone who is working to keep their lives together in the face of disability and the general horrors of the world right now. Keep up the great work! And if things slip a little that's ok too. None of us are perfect. Just keep taking notes...for SCIENCE!
Congratulations! I'm going for Worm myself first, but honestly there's only so many brass lollipops I can bear to make. What does the current Stuvier grind look like?
so every tuesday at 11 AM UCT I run around and grab all the world quality updates for the bone market, khanate, and sous, and dump them into the official discord to save people the effort of trudging across the sea/up the roof/back to their lodgings to see what Bones are Hot this week. and my actual favorite part of doing this is seeing people's reactions to the news.
usually it's just like a few "huh, thanks" on most weeks, but every so often you get a lineup of world qualities that's So Profitable or So Rancid, and people react accordingly:
"the boot salesman is here? god finally I can get rid of all these femurs"
"ancient primates? why did it have to be primates? I can't use my ribcages for those!"
"holy shit, it's amalgamous spider week. it's FINALLY amalgamous spider week! time for me to drop everything and make so many roof popes!"
and as someone who hardly ever plays with bones, I can never quite tell which pronouncements will produce apathy, joy, or despair. I like that, honestly. it brings back some of the mystique of hearing people talk about such vaulted pastimes as "orphangrind" or "worm milking"
"I'm not desperate enough to make amphibian mammoths, and I think the most menace I could get on an amphibian without doing three tails on a prismatic frame nonsense would be 5 or 6"
"Amphibians can't take tails so you can't do better than 4 unless your ambition is Bag a Legend"
Surprise! You’ve been Isekai’d into a D&D World… but it’s specifically a 3.5 Edition D&D world and due to a weird Glitch in the system you have been assigned not just a Base Class, but also one of that edition’s weird and wacky Prestige Class as well! Spin this wheel to see what you got!
(I added a short little summary for each Class explaining the basic gist of it. Although obviously you can also look them up to get more detailed info)
So…how are you feeling?
HELL YEAH THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME
This class is perfect for me! (complimentary)
This is pretty cool!
Not bad but… could be better
Some parts of this sounds GREAT and some sound TERRIBLE
I’m pretty sure I’m gonna die but at least I’ll be cool as hell until then
Well, I’m gonna hate being this Class but at least I’m gonna survive
I feel utterly indifferent about my Class
This class is perfect for me… (derogatory)
This isn’t good for me, but… could be worse
Yeah, this sucks
OH MY GOD THIS IS HORRIBLE I AM GONNA BE MISERABLE AND THAN I’LL DIE
okay so actually I need to rant about identities and tags because HOLY shit that’s some actually amazing narrative and philosophy forward game design. Like, the fact that as you choose to embrace tags over a long campaign your identity is slowly built off of how other characters see you?? I’ve never seen anything remotely like that in a ttrpg and it’s such a genuine breath of fresh air that reminds me why I love this medium
I am also very normal about it, and I'm already getting brainworms about how it's been playing out in my game.
What I like most is that it's integrated so cleanly as well, such that even "powergaming" (however you care to define that) nessesarily requires engaging with it thematically. Tags being pulled by other players provides you chances to embrace them (replacing Identities you will most likely lose even if your playbooks don't encourage treating them like an mtg mill deck), but also some very vital bonuses that get better if you're closer with the person pulling them.
This is all further encouraged by the fact that the usual PBTA thresholds have been raised ever so slightly, such that without Heat and Tags being pulled you've got a pretty rough statistical reality in front of you. "Without the support of your fellows to help patch you up and push you forward, you will consistently fail" is a rather nice thematic statement to communicate purely through the core mechanics! It also gives the inevitable infighting caused by the other core mechanics even more weight, as scrambling for status and inflicting Tags on each other begins to shape the player dynamics further. It's delicious drama fuel, which is exactly what I want out of a game like this!
It's always funny to me when people give their blorbos all the same "correct" far left political views which while I understand the urge to make these blorbos as progressive as possible as political commentary, there are some characters that I feel in my bones are 100% centrist, pro-ai, pro-capitalism or absolutely refuse to vote and its supported by the source material. As a narrative tool these features are still great for being political commentary, even if the character never changes.
Every single time someone makes Q question whether England should have a monarchy, which happens a rather baffling amount given that he works for the British government.
(I still stand behind him being anti-crypto, though. You cannot convince me the head of MI6 cybersecurity would be chill with putting his life savings into Bitcoin.)
You can work for a government and have opinions about how it could be improved. How you express them might vary, but thinking the Windsors are a different entity from the crown/state isn’t that weird.
There are a surprising amount of anti-monarchists in the civil service. It's way, way more common than non-Brits think, I suspect. Trouble is, civil service workers aren't permitted to have political opinions in public, lest they be misconstrued as the opinions of the civil service as a whole. (True fact: I have friends who cannot comment on the news on Facebook, or even loudly in a public place, or inform anyone of who they intend to vote for - but get them in private and they go on long rage filled rants about the idiocy they see every day.) While I don't know for sure, (as, alas, I never did get round to applying for their translation staff after university) I wouldn't be surprised if there was a similar, or more stringent, rule in place for MI5/6. So Q can believe any number of things on his own time, but not give any outward sign of it in public. The UK does not have free speech protections, remember.
I mean, I knew that was true back in Ye Olden Olde, but the UK has had so many reforms of how power and governance work that I was sure that must have been added at some point. They seriously never did??
The limited right to freedom of expression only came in 1998. And that, as far as I can tell, only happened because the European Convention of Human Rights made it mandatory.
Holy shit. I genuinely thought you guys had passed a law about that.
I'm sorry, I'm kind of gobsmacked. Like there's part of me that's just like "you're European, isn't freedom of expression just like...a given, in Europe?" I can't believe the UK never instituted it.
Look into our slander and libel laws, if you want a real horror moment. Or the case studies on the wiki page I linked, cause they are horrendous.
But yeah, it's why people peacefully protesting, holding signs saying 'abolish monarchy' at an event the king was at, shortly after his coronation a couple years ago, were arrested and charged.
That's fucking wild. And actually explains....a lot. Like I remember a few years before QEII died reading an article about how the country would proceed when she did, and reading that BBC presenters literally kept a black jacket and tie laid away at work because when they got the news it'd be "quick, cut to commercial, go change," and thinking it was a bit odd but also that I could kind of understand, because if I was getting news like "there was just a massive gas explosion on the street housing the Smithsonian Institution" I would not want to receive it from a woman in a professional-but-cheeky bright pink dress, but like...holy fuck. You're literally not allowed to not be in mourning.
Okay, here's the bitch of the thing. So much of this sounds reasonable (yes, it is good to make the showing of snuff films illegal, yes, anti-hate-speech laws are a good thing) that I'm forced to assume British courts are deliberately misusing laws intended to prevent harm, or deliberately interpreting them with an overly-broad brush in order to further an agenda.
I will say I did some wiki-walking from this article and I see what you mean in some of the specific cases it led me to, and the state of libel laws is atrocious.
Oh yeah. If you want an example, The Private Eye is a generally very strong satirical newspaper that regularly does proper journalism along with dragging essentially anyone and anything that doesn't hide fast enough. You aren't even safe if you're minor, they'll come for local councillors in backwaters with just as much vigor as members of parliment. Ian Hislop, it's editor, is the single most sued man in English legal history, because they are fundamentally opposed to ever shutting the fuck up, even when prodding into the affairs (mostly metaphorical, probably literal at least a few times) of the most aggressively litigious sorts of people in the entire country.
Must be good job security for their legal team though, I will say. Only people in the whole country who've probably never worried about layoffs!
Just started my first game of Girl Frame yesterday, and I have to say it's going great! Our Handler decided to do the Prisoner's Dilemma as a trust exercise. Free communication and one (1) Permission slip up for grabs was all it took, we're all getting Punishments apart from the CONSUME pilot. I highly recommend it as an icebreaker to anyone reading!
On the wider story side, I'd just like to voice my love for how efficiently you used the background setting. We aren't allowed to read the Handler bit and so there's a pretty limited amount of information to be had, and yet it paints such a fascinating picture with that limited amount. I'm such a nerd, but I'm actually more hyped for the dynamics on a societal level that we'll get peeks at, even if they're Permission expensive or through the limited window of missions. The personal level is also fascinatingly warped, especially the Mockingbird's social issues. Having so much fun with that play, despite it pretty explicitly taking away from the assumed baseline of ability.
Thank you for your work, and I look forward to seeing more of it!
Steal your Handler's pdf and read that section without permission, I'm sure nothing will go wrong :D
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