my pen is mighty, when i get around to using it

Call me T / Christian / Math grad student I like D&D, making slow art, and stories about time travel. Have fun while you’re here!

[charlataninred]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[meraarts]

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

[eater-of-hopes-and-dreams]

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

[blitzlowin]

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

Goblin Men (Canines)

[charlataninred]

I am in love with you /p

[the-thread-of-the-infinite]

What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time

[death-of-the-endless]

Oh, love that story, adding it to the list: 20. Princess Talia and adding a few more contenders 21. Thyme 22. The Monster under the Bed 23. A Meaningful Death 24. Humans are unstoppable…until they aren’t 25. The Monster under the Fridge 26. Antler Guy 27. Cleric slamming healing spells

[death-of-the-endless]

Adding a few more I remembered:  28. The Frog and the Scorpion 29. HSTHETE 30. The First Witch in the World 31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by Forests  32. A Faerie taking a Name  33. The Dragon on the Farm  34. Synovus & Menace  35. Raising the Anti-Christ  36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)  37. Doctors without Borders…in Space!  38. The Villain-Wrangler  39. The Last Contact  40. The 100 Parent-Point Children  41. And the Heavens Wept  42. The Night Gentleman  43. The Serpent God and their Priestess 

[knottahooker]

44. No One Showed Up for the Last Storytime

[joyful-soul-collector]

45. Lilly of Envy

[marisatomay]

Happy Pride

[thereigning-lorelai]

This is Dr. Captain Ryland Grace reporting from the Hail Mary.

[softichill]

I loooove ominously giggling when I'm getting my friends into smth new. They ask me a spoilery question and I get to do this

[angstyastro]

These miis getting diagnosed today

[7-inches-of-satanic-panic]

k but imagine Rocky wanting to learn about how humans became the apex predators of their planet so he has Grace “hunt” him in the biodome as an experiment and during it he thinks Grace isn’t trying or taking it seriously which is bad bad bad because this is for research purposes

only for Rocky to get more and more tired as the experiment goes on just to realize that Grace isn’t which makes him panic so he puts as much distance as he can between them and finds a (hopefully) safe spot to sleep and when he wakes up the human is crouching over him like “got youuu” and Rocky has never shrieked so damn loud before in his life

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide (or was furnished with) a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[roycohn]

idk man when i was a kid i remember a lot of adults saying "if you can read and follow directions, you can cook" so i was like yes i can do these two things. doesn't seem that hard. and it wasn't! so it just always surprises me when i see people of any age who are capable of reading and following directions bemoaning how impossibly hard cooking is. like i know i'm always on this hobbyhorse but it just seems like a lot of people have never developed basic life skills and instead of going "oh wow that's embarrassing, i should learn and catch up" they instead get defensive and turn it into a learned-helplessness thing where they CAN'T POSSIBLY be expected to learn something that's SOOOO HARD. and suddenly somehow we're the oppressors for thinking it's weird that a grown adult can't grill themselves a cheese.

[sunfloweraroace]

Got a new batch of screenshots from the new game changer episode!

I was a bit sad when the episode ended right after all of those rule transfers but I’m glad Josh was put out of his misery (even though he’s the one who insisted on keeping his rules)

[depsidase]

[sparks-theastronaut]

I've read one (1) chapter of Project Hail Mary and my spiritual connection to Ryland Grace has only deepened

Like Yes Bro figure yourself out step by step but ignore the name thing

(Obviously there are other reasons why I relate to him immensely but we're not there yet ☝️)

I could be a scientist if I wanted to. A middle school science teacher. I could do it

I won't tho my heart lies in art or whatever

[the-haiku-bot]

Like Yes Bro figure

yourself out step by step but

ignore the name thing

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[cats-in-the-clouds]

i like it when an evil character dies unrepentant and that itself is narratively framed as a great tragedy. when their death scene is very uncomfortable and sobering instead of triumphant for the heroes. when it’s less about what they’ve done and more about what they’ve failed to do, less who they were and more who they failed to ever become… yeeeaaahhhh

[koobiie]

i feel strongly about this

[ailurinae]

[insecuregodcomplex]

[kn0wmore]

[kaijuerotica]

convinced if i keep digging in deeper i can find a secret way out that's not through. haven't found it yet but i think i'm close

[byjove]

Imagine going on a movie date with a girl and she shows up to the movie theatre with a big huge fuckoff suspiciously large purse so you assume she’s maybe sneaking in snacks but the movie starts and you look over and she’s in the middle of a knitting project. She gets up halfway through the film to use the bathroom and accidentally knocks over her bag and balls of yarn go rolling down the aisle in the empty movie theatre like tumbleweeds and you have to go running after them. I think I’d marry her.