#dawncaster

[kristensdexscore]

i think fabian killing that hydra was buddy dawn's gay awakening. no i won't elaborate

[t4tozier]

deeply self indulgent senior year fabuddy durdawn buddy character study outsider pov drabble under the cut what’s up

Fabian watches Buddy down a—is that real beer? Yeah, it must be, it’s sticky golden-amber mead dripping down his chin on either side of where the cup meets his lips—

The cleric tosses the drained cup to the side, steadying himself in a fighter’s stance as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. If Fabian were paying close enough attention—and he isn’t, shut up, Kristen—he’d be able to see the burning coals in Buddy’s hazy eyes, the slight uptick on the side of his mouth as he scans the crowd. “Hey, Durden!” he yells suddenly, and with an almost cartoonish efficiency, the crowd parts to reveal the poor kid in the middle of a massive fantasy bong rip. Fabian’s eyes flick back to Buddy, and for a second, he thinks he sees a true, genuine grin of mirth—but he must imagine it, because before he can blink, his pretty pink lips turn up into a sneer.

“C’mon, Durden!” Buddy’s insisting, crackles of red light circling his fingertips as he steps closer. Fabian feels his hand go to his cutlass, on him even now. “You think I’on’t know what you been sayin’ ‘bout me behind my back? You got some’in t’say, say it to my face.” But despite the threat of magic Fabian can nearly see thrumming under Buddy’s skin, it doesn’t go beyond that; his words hang in the air, crystallizing like honey.

Fabian means to keep watching, to determine if Buddy’s going to start some real shit or if it’s all posturing, but suddenly Gorgug appears from nowhere—surprisingly quiet for someone so tall—and touches his shoulder. “Adaine’s having a vision. I think it’s important.” Fabian nods, eyes still glued to Buddy as he prowls towards Max. “Fabian!”

“Okay, okay!”

Fabian finds them later in his basement, exchanging heated barbs between wet, open-mouthed kisses. Buddy’s in Max’s lap, lavender hands running up under the hem of Buddy’s soft-looking tee and squeezing, scratching, grabbing the freckled flesh beneath, and they’re both moaning—louder than appropriate, practically performing for the rest of the stoners still taking up every square inch of Fabian’s basement, but they’re both clearly too intoxicated to care.

“Alright! Party’s over!” Fabian announces, just a touch too loud to be casual. There are groans of displeasure, but most only need one warning to start their slow ascent to the rest of the manor. Buddy and Max, however, do not.

They’re not even listening. Buddy’s moved down to Max’s neck, sucking dark purple bruises that should blend but instead only bloom on his skin, and Max is going for Buddy’s jeans, and Fabian knows that if he sees any more of the cleric’s body that he’s going to actually lose his mind—

“You two! Out!”

Buddy does look up, then, blue eyes glazed over with liquor and lust. “Oh, but, Mr. Seacaster,” he drawls, vowels long and honey-thick, “we were jus’ gettin’ started.” Fabian feels an insistent pulse between his legs, and immediately knows that this can’t be allowed to stand. This is his house, and he is the master of it, and he cannot and will not let some haughty Highcourt human playacting at being a rebel ruin his reputation of Maximum Legend.

“Don’t make me drag you out myself,” he warns, and he thanks Captain Seacaster below that Buddy’s level of inebriation means he doesn’t notice the frayed edges around his words.

“Alright, alright. Goddamn, we’re goin’,” he mutters, clambering off of Max’s lap; Fabian’s momentarily surprised at his curse, before getting the distinct feeling there’s one god in particular Buddy’s trying to damn.

Durden, to his credit, looks faded to the stars, sluggish and pliant with gorgonfern without the confidence or adrenaline of bad baby milk to back it up. He just grins dopily at Fabian, giving him a two-fingered salute as Buddy drags him up the stairs and pushes him past the host. “Great party, man!” he calls behind himself.

Buddy, though, lingers. Fabian’s got a couple inches on him, and he spends his sweet time dragging his eyes up each one. “You gotta be quicker’n that next time, Mr. Seacaster, if you wanna claim your prize.” His words are slightly slurred, but the gleam in his glazed eyes and the uptick of his lips shows the challenge for exactly what it is. “Y’all have a good night, now.” And he slips past Fabian, after Max, leaving the faint scent of campfire smoke and popcorn in his wake.

Fabian doesn’t mean to. He tells himself it’s just to make sure he doesn’t find them in another dark corner of the ship fifteen minutes from now. But he watches Buddy until he leaves, smoke and butter and something metallic on his tongue, and makes a mental note to have the Hangman bar Max Durden from the next party he throws.

[snake-author]

See him polished and lovely

Redraw of Dawncaster!! I finally gave him the luster and shiny he deserves!!

[highfiveheroes]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

"What’s your alma mater?"

"The Aguefort Adventuring Academy in Elmville, if you can believe it," Buddy sighs.

The deacon pauses in his paperwork, looking over again. "You said it’s your ten-year reunion?"

"Surely is."

"Isn’t that…do you mean to tell me you went to the Academy when all those crazy plots were going on? Geez, what was it—fifteen gods, by the end of it?"

"No," Buddy says sharply. "Five."

"Only five? Well, dadgum," the deacon hums. "But you were there?"

"I was there," Buddy says, suddenly exhausted.

-

or: Eleven years after the disaster that was the end of his Junior Year, Pastor of Helio Buddy Dawn is faced with the chance to go back to Elmville for his ten year reunion. And it shouldn't be such a daunting offer, except Buddy Dawn has never learned to keep his heart off his sleeve, and mistakes have always been his boone.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Tribes of Twilight

Tribes of Twilight - the Dawncaster TTRPG, Sunforge, 2023

Dawncaster is a deckbuilding phone game with a fantasy bent. If you've played Slay the Spire, it's vaguely similar, with more story and slicker graphics. Not the world's best-written story, but for something that's mostly there to tie together card mechanics it's surprisingly decent.

The tabletop game was created by Sunforge, a fan group for the game. They gathered together some people with D&D experience and some pretty great artists, got permission from the devs for a semi-official tabletop RPG, and threw together a seven-month project for this that actually successfully made a game! Normally that kind of thing takes seven years! The project also ran someone $34k in credit card debt (sadly not that unusual), generated a HobbyDrama thread (slightly unusual), and resulted in two restraining orders (wait what). Now the one remaining person who's involved keeps it up to date under a different screen name to maintain anonymity.

The tabletop game hews very closely to the digital game. You have three stats (Dexterity, Intellect, and Strength), and six classes that are either single-stat or a combination of two of them. Abilities are named after the cards. The game is level-based, theoretically open-ended but generally 1-10. Level-based abilities are technically available to every class, though really you wouldn't bother to pick certain ones up for certain classes. Niches are less about classes and more about weapon choice and abilities.

The digital game uses randomized abilities and takes about 2 hours to play through. The design team luckily realized that rolling randomly for your next set of abilities was less than desirable in a campaign-oriented TTRPG. They let you pick your abilities, and then threw a few d6s into the mix to add some randomization on your damage. You still get some randomization in what you can do every turn, which the book explains away as abstract tactical opportunities.

The art is pretty great. It's comic-book dungeonpunk, which is a pretty typical aesthetic these days, but there's something on every other page, and there are recurring characters throughout. Honestly it's on par with WotC's work.

Despite all that good stuff, the game is currently massively broken. One of the unfortunate effects of a 7-month development cycle is that the game is thoroughly unbalanced. They duplicated some of the phone game's abilities directly, which means there's a "+1 action options" ability right next to a "+2 action options" and no reason to choose the +1. By 3rd level you can set up an infinite loop of actions. Super-fun in a roguelike; utterly baffling in a tabletop RPG. There are no tactical options, so you're in the back-and-forth roll-off scenario. The setting is also extremely sparse. Most of it is written purely from what you can see in the phone game with nothing added. There's also a bunch of in-character fiction vignettes that have a very "original character do not steal" feel. In short, it's undercooked by a lot.

Most print copies of the book and the official rights to the original text were repossessed as part of dealing with the credit card debt. The remaining developer is slowly working through fixing all the mechanical issues issues. It's a slow process, exacerbated because no one in the community wants to playtest the "cursed" game. Also they have to rewrite all the text. If you want to read a copy, your best bet is finding someone who reviews RPGs and borrowing it.

[adelaide-swiftheart-sso]

A meeting, of an interesting sort

[thereisnomadnessanymore]

The Life That Shines Anew

The commission illustration for Eyindriel

World of Warcraft | Original Character | Leyloriel Dawncaster

[t4tozier]

trick or treat!

your absolutely amazing idea of fabian being jealous of buddy dawn/max durden perchance <3

okay this did in fact get some creative juices flowing so ykw happy halloween. thanks anon :) original post here

cw for mild reference to underage drinking

“I ain’t seen Max ‘round tonight,” Buddy casually comments as he sidles up to Fabian, keeping him carefully just inside his line of sight while taking in the rest of the party at large. It’s an instinct Fabian himself has adopted between training and retraining, getting as much lay of the land as he can in the short pockets of time they get before the battle really pops off. He doesn’t like Buddy being in Seacaster Manor as on edge as he is. Fabian still wakes up frequently in a sweat from dreams of the senior Hangman once again breaking free of her moorings leaving her port for the sea in the skies, but that’s different. This is his home, and Buddy hadn’t even been there for that whole ordeal anyway, so really, he should have no reason to be worried at all. But, then again, Fabian supposes he should just consider himself lucky that Buddy’s decided to stop causing fights at lo-fi study nights.

“Oh, you haven’t? That’s a shame, I’m sure you’re very disappointed,” Fabian replies too quickly, covering by taking a very nonchalant sip of beer. Max, he thinks, is a stupid name; it’s no Fabian Aramais Seacaster, but nobody else could be, after all.

“Oh, so you’re sayin’ this is news to you, then?” Buddy asks, the hint of a laugh on the razor-sharp edge of his voice. “You ain’t got nothin’ to do with the very deliberate exclusion of Mr. Durden from your open-invite party?” He sips his own beer—it strikes Fabian, though perhaps it should’ve been obvious, that he might be trying to avoid corn products at all costs—and shakes his head. “For a man who’s s’posta be Maximum Legend, Mr. Seacaster, you’re awfully transparent with your motives.”

“What’s that, now, Buddy?” Fabian says innocently. “I’m afraid I don’t catch your meaning.”

Suddenly, Buddy’s expression turns hungry, almost feline in its calculating chill. Fabian’s mostly gotten past the acute fear that rises in his chest when he thinks of Leviathan and its aftermath, but something about that look sets his pulse racing like it did under Whitclaw’s gaze—except this time, it’s sending all the blood directly belowdecks. “If you had wanted me on your lap instead’a his las’time, all ya had to do was ask,” Buddy purrs, looking up through his lashes at him; he’s gotten taller since junior year, but Fabian’s still got a good few inches on him at least. He just appreciates any advantage he can get in this situation.

“And this time?” Fabian murmurs. He can feel himself leaning down without permission from his brain, inhaling that smoky, buttery scent, and he sees the flash of shatterstar red in Buddy’s eyes but he’s a little too drunk to care—at least, not until Buddy grabs his face just before Fabian can close the gap entirely.

“This time, sugar…you’re gonna have to try a little harder’n that.” Buddy pats his cheek, fingers grazing the bottom of his eyepatch. Fabian inhales shakily, good eye glancing down to Buddy’s lips and back up. Instead of meeting his gaze, though, Buddy’s looking over his own shoulder, seemingly at nothing. He starts to roll his eyes, but catches himself before they make the full circuit, and instead trains his lidded gaze back on Fabian. “Duty calls, Mr. Seacaster, some’n I’m sure you’re well aware of,” he drawls with a light sigh, rolling up his sleeves as flames that smolder from the inside out like glowing embers encircle his wrists. “I’m no bard, but you ‘n’ me are gonna tango soon enough, I think.” He smirks at Fabian, wiggling his fingers; the flames trail up his arms, and by the time they lick the nape of his neck—Fabian has the strangest urge to do the same—whatever’s left in his father’s ship of Buddy Dawn disappears into some other plane of existence with a burnt-caramel scent and a dragon spicelike sting at the back of Fabian’s throat.

Buddy, Fabian reflects as he nurses his beer for the remainder of the night, letting the party flow naturally around him, is hardly the naive boy from Highcourt who poured water into a beer can at his first high school party to fit in. But he’s no longer the rageful, idiotic puppet Porter and Jace had forced out of him, either. Angry still, perhaps, but not ruthless. He doesn’t follow orders anymore, doesn’t let anyone tell him what to do. Fabian isn’t sure what it is that’s manifested this intoxicating new confidence, this steadfastness, this danger in Buddy Dawn, but he knows he wants to find out.

And, after all, what Fabian Seacaster wants, he gets.