#rivalen tanthul

[aureliaen]

rivalen tanthul, or shar's favorite chewtoy. once again, happy birthday @shadow-djinni 💚💚💚

[shadow-djinni]

handful of Rivalens I've doodled over the last couple weeks, feat. practicing a new coloring style

[bi-colored-corn]

[bi-colored-corn]

He doesn’t get any substrate.

[shadow-djinni]

for ff writer friday on monday talk about your rivalen/shadovar fic ideas + wip!

you've already heard about all of these in dms lmfao

anyway this month's obsession is the Saddest Man in Faerûn over a century running, Rivalen Tanthul, one of the Princes of Shade and Nightseer of Shar (one of her highest priests), who has the deep misfortune of also being her Chosen. for those of you following along at home, you do not want to be Shar's Chosen because one of her immediate goals becomes making you miserable.

and because I have a brain that never turns off the damn thing has already spat out ~3 (depending on how you count one of these) fic ideas.

it's game canon for Shadows on the Moonsea, my homebrew dnd campaign set around the Moonsea in 1492 DR, that our party's wizard (Warden) had a pretty formative encounter with Rivalen as a preteen. I technically have two WIPs poking at this from different angles: the second-person present tense "game flashback" I'm writing for @bi-colored-corn that's walking off into full fic territory on me, and a third-person past tense (hopefully shorter) one from Rivalen's POV of their meeting, or rather the aftermath of it. Warden's fic has a tentative title (With the Light You Gave Me), but the one from Rivalen's POV is still untitled

there's a line in Shadowrealm by Paul Kemp, the third book in the Twilight War trilogy (on page 62 of my pdf), which—and I do feel the need to preface this, I don't actually like Kemp's writing and the only good thing in this series is the Tanthul Family Soap Opera—talks about Rivalen's [spoilers] murder of his mother at Shar's command that lives rent free in my head, which says that Rivalen "had feared his dreams and slept fitfully for months" afterwards. now if you know anything about me you know that I love angst and dramatic irony more than anything, and the fic premise is basically "Rivalen wakes up from one of these horrific nightmares and ends up going to his father, Telamont (who does not know that Rivalen murdered Alashar, Telamont's wife and Rivalen's mother), for comfort". no title yet, this one is still in fucked up idea stage

the last one is, technically, a bg/3 fic (in that it features/has a POV from Shadowheart, bg/3's Sharran character), pre-canon and hewing much closer to broader Forgotten Realms canon, wherein Rivalen pays a visit to that game's Sharran enclave and gives homegirl an early crisis of faith. this is because I love inflicting tweens and teenagers on a man who is So So Filled with existential dread more than anything. it's very funny. look the future in the face and feel guilty about it you nihilistic bitch (affectionate). bg/3 people do not take this as an invitation, I won't be writing any more bg/3 fic and I don't like your game. title is Sweet to the Lady

anyway. fic ideas be upon ye

[thecosmicweb]

sorry to be dropping unannounced into your ask box but!! saw in your tags that you wanted to read more about Rivalen and I Have A Rec List

sourcebook material is thin on the ground, most of it's in Lords of Darkness for 3e in the Shadovar section. for novels, Rivalen makes appearances in the "Return of the Archwizards" trilogy by Troy Denning (late appearance in The Summoning, more prominent in The Siege, the first two books in the series, though I recommend the whole series quite highly, it's very well written!), a cameo at the beginning and end of Mistress of the Night by Don Bassingthwaite (very brief, two scenes only, but also incredibly endearing). his most significant appearance is in Paul Kemp's "Twilight War" trilogy (Shadowbred, Shadowstorm, and Shadowrealm), in which he's a major character having THE best crisis of faith arc I've read in a hot minute, though I recommend Kemp's work with the heavy disclaimer that he can't pace for shit and his actual main characters are kinda boring. I categorically do not recommend Godborn, the Second Sundering novel by Kemp that wraps up the plot threads from Twilight War, even though Rivalen appears in it; the pacing is even worse and Kemp makes some deeply ableist decisions with his writing. the main Twilight War trilogy is where the good stuff is.

happy reading!

- shadow-djinni

leaving this here incase anyone else wants recs on some rivalen content (and so i don’t forget about it being in my inbox LMAO) again tysm for this , this is so helpful