More art to celebrate Undertale's anniversary, this time an art trade with @fairymistrose and our characters (Laima + Phoe) with Frisk (and skelebros)!
I did a bonus piece with Nerra too, was supposed to be a doodle but I got too into it. Halfway through though this I remembered Nerra doesn't actually give off heat.. oops lol
Hey, I wanted to take a moment and say that I really enjoy the blog! Thanks for all the time and effort that you put in it!
I was also wondering if you might be able to provide some help? One of my players has been trying to make a patron that has a strong theme of sorrow and woe; without dipping into Fae territory. They’ve reached out to me to help and I’ve got absolutely nothing! Any ideas or concepts you might be able to make?
Monsterhunt: Thousandfold Sorrows
The hardest part of moving on is finding the way forward
A spirit of the plane of mirrors, Thousandfold Sorrows hunts those riven by great grief and loss, harrowing them with visions of a moment from their past from which they are unable to move on. Pain, shame, false hope, as the victim's mind is fractured by a multitude of emotions reality starts to go with it: different versions of their life playing out the possibility of what could've been.
Adventure Hooks:
A tragic cart accident goes even more awry as an out of control wagon runs into a girl walking down a busy market street who proceeds to shatter into thousands of mirrored shards infront of all the onlookers, horrifying the boy she was out on the town with. Stranger yet, the girl's description matches that of a young woman who went missing from her job at an antique store some weeks ago, as well as numerous other incidents all around the city. As it turns out, the shopgirl has fallen victim to Thousandfold Sorrows while she was lamenting wasting her youth in the dusty old shop instead of out there living life. Now she wanders the labyrinth of the mirror dimension, and the only way to get her back is to convince one of the impulsive duplicates that've slipped free in the previous days to take her place.
Seeking to undo the mistakes of the past, an aging mage has summoned Thousandfold Sorrows to ruminate on a tragedy from his youth, where the lives of his closest friends were sacrificed in the process of averting a magical disaster that would have ravaged the countryside. Increasingly desperate to know if he really did make the right choice, the mage has had Thousandfold sorrows run through endless permutations of events, eventually causing a chain-reaction of mirror magic that's split the local area (and nearby village) into three time lines: The present, the idealistic past, and an alternate version of events ravaged by wild magic. Caught in the middle, the party must discern the boundaries between truth and illusion and overcome paradoxical hazards in order to set the land right once again.
Like many creatures of the mirror dimension, Thousandfold Sorrows does not bear explicit ill towards those it haunts, instead existing in a state of perpetual reflection from a very limited viewpoint. It can communicate only through flawed reccolection, asking questions (sometimes radically inappropriate ones) about what its quarry WANTS as it desires to understand. One could perhaps say that it is hyperempathic but when that empathy is focused on something the quarry would really rather be left alone, conflict and tragedy will invariably ensue.
For the asker: Using Thousandfold Sorrows as a warlock patron will require your character to create a rough outline of their character and something tragic in their past, then have the mirror spirit relfect it back at them over and over and over as it tries to empathise. As for actual stats, I'd recommend searching 3rd party mirror magic and the unearthed arcana subreddit.
If you're not feeling particularly mirror focused, I could also recommend a number of possible patrons:
An engine of doom, pushed beyond its appointed rest
The Demon queen of despair and decay
A corrupted pagan god of being trapped in pain
A number of patrons in the "Compendium of forgotten secrets: awakening" one of the best and most thematically interesting warlock books out there, give it a google.