So, I have DMed for years now, and a couple years back I started work on a new setting for my players.
It is inspired largely by Greek Mythology, fairy tales, and European folklore, and I have been DMing this setting for around a year and a half, with my party being 9 levels into the campaign. It's important to note: It's NOT a retelling of greek myth, it's just inspired by it.
Anyways, I figured "why not leave a tumble on my tumblr rambling about it?"
So, that's what this is. If that's the sort of thing you are interested in reading, I guess have at it!
So! Istoria! A long, long time ago (read: around 500 years), Istoria was a standard dnd setting, with planes, afterlives, gods, all that good stuff, all with a vaguely Greek theme. All that changed, however, when mortal mages started getting a touch uppity. You see, the main idea for the setting came about from the Titanomachy in Greek mythology; I thought "What if the wheel turned around one more time, history repeated, and the Olympians found themselves at war with mortal mages?"
Enter the Theomachy! I will probably make a whole tumble about this at some point, but that's for a later date. For now, all you need to know is the mortals really stood no chance. UNTIL! They heard from an oracle a prophecy that the Olympians could be defeated by one who slew the Ophiotaurus and burned its guts on a ritual fire! Now, wielding the power of fate, the mortals actually had a fighting chance!
And fight they did! Until finally, the Olympians were defeated, and the age of mortals would begin! Small snag, though; it turns out the gods were actually doing something, and were actually kinda important to the general maintenance of the cosmos.
With the gods dead, a dark corruptive miasma spread across the land, causing general chaos; the miasma made the laws of reality simply not apply any more. Clouds became heavy as mountains, crashing into the earth, the ground would heave like the tides of the sea, the shallowest puddles became as dark and crushing as the depths of the ocean, liquid fire rushed from the mountaintops, animals became monsters, and every fearful thought would become tangible, and attack with murderous intent.
So, the guys that killed the gods were like "Ok, our bad, we need to fix this. We're powerful mages, let's see what we can do!". They sought out the final resting places of each of the gods, and took the divine power from their bodies in the form of mighty magic items called Divine Authorities. Using these Divine Authorities, the mages were able to stop the miasma, and restore some kind of stability to the world.
But even with divine magic, the mages were still mortal. So, they decided to each found a Magician's Guild, each specialising in a different form of magic, and led by a single Archimage, who would inherit the Divine Authority from their predecessor.
Now, after all that chaos, the world looked quite different to how it used to. All the various planes had collapsed into Istoria, making one chaotic mess of wild magic. Over time, this tangled mess of conflicting elemental magics sorted itself into what are now called "Realms". These realms are areas where a specific type of magic is most prominent.
For example, there is a boiling scar that goes deep underground, where the elemental plane of fire crashed into Istoria; that place is filled with elemental fire magic, and is referred to as the Pyriphlegethon, the realm of fire. High in the skies is a mist that glows sky blue in the light of the sun, where floating islands are suspended by solid clouds; that is where the elemental plane of air crashed into the world, and is called the Welkin realm. These realms are functionally similar to the planes that formed them, but with the key difference that they are finite, and physically a part of the normal world that one could travel to, if they so wished.
Now! Smash cut to 500 years later! The chaos has all settled, and the Magicians Guilds are an everyday part of normal life. It was a strange transition, going from a ruling pantheon governing the cosmos, to mortal mages working a 9 to 5, but mortals are nothing if not adaptable. In fact, the king of Arcadia is hosting a revelry in honour of 5 centuries of peace! But behind closed doors there is plotting afoot, and it's possible the peace that has held for 500 years is about to come crashing down...
And that's where the campaign started! Now, it's important to remind you that my campaign is INSPIRED by greek myth; it is not a retelling, nor is it intended to be accurate to the ancient Greek religion. It's like Percy Jackson, or Disney's Hercules, in that I took the parts of it that I wanted to tell the story I wanted to tell. For example, I wanted Heracles to be a character, but he is very much a character I made, with a Heracles coat of paint; he's not a demigod, because Zeus isn't in the picture anymore, instead he is a Goliath, because it's a dnd setting and I felt that was a good fit species-wise for the world's strongest hero.
And, that's the setting! There's more stuff, like the different guilds, the cyclical nature of history, how fate ties into the campaign's story, but all that is for another day. In the meanwhile, thank you to anyone that read this far, and I hope you have a beautiful day!
I've not seen Beyblade since I was like 6, but if you told me that, in the lore, planet earth was canonically a giant celestial Beyblade and that's why it spins, I'd probably believe you.
Look, I'm not saying we're all in a simulation, I'm just saying things DO start lagging if there's too much stuff in one spot, or if things move too fast.
I've not once actually wanted to click an ad I've seen. Literally every time it happens, it's because I was aiming for a skip, or a tiny close button, and miscalculated. And every one of those times, my next immediate move is to take a deep breath of frustration, and close whatever window got opened.
So I guess what I'm asking is, what's the point of this song and dance?
Everyone has their own tastes for pokemon, but I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the unsung backbone of the pokedex:
The pure, 24 carat, weapons-grade FREAKS.
The weirdos who don't try to be cute, or cool, or powerful, they just exist to make people take a second to digest "wow, they really made a pokemon that's just a mime."
For as long as there's been pokemon, there's been weird pokemon. Whether you're walking in the forest and spot a pink lizardy thing with a tongue that's too big to fit inside it's body, or you're going fishing and hook a fish with the colour scheme of an acid trip and the most uncomfortably human lips you've ever seen, you will find them. Quietly chugging away, making the world feel just a little bit stranger.
So, next time you see a pokemon that is just a little uncomfortable to look at, I want you to appreciate that pokemon wouldn't be the same without them, and tell that Mr Mime that you're glad they made the cut for the game.
P.S. now that I think, the same argument can be made for the mundane "literally just a rat" pokemon. I guess it really does take all types, you need the mundane AND the bizarre, because they provide the two extremes that other pokemon are compared to.
Sometimes I wish I was born a cute anime girl, sometimes I wish I was born a gender neutral lego minifigure of a person, and sometimes I wish I was born as an amorphous cloud of thought, but not once have I woken up and thought "gee whiz, isn't it great to be a clumsy disabled human"
I respect Shroomish, because you can turn his whole face upside down and nobody who didn't already know what a Shroomish is meant to look like would notice anything was amiss.
I can't do that. Turn my face upside down and everyone would be all "How the hell did they turn that guy's face upside down?"
Absolutely floored to discover that the maker of death note is homophobic.
How do you write a series where two young men have several minute-long pauses in their dialogue where they're just staring into each other's eyes in silence, and then get shocked and appalled when people read romantic tension?
Please sign my petition to officially add to the Oxford English Dictionary the word "Beaving", meaning "The act of constructing a dam", thus making those that construct said dams "Beavers". If we reach one million signatures, we-
So, okay. In the Anime, Nurse Joy is one of a couple of NPC families, probably an in-joke about being based on an RPG. In the original series, they were all identical individuals who were related (through marriage inexplicably sometimes) who shared the same name.
Not only are they physically identical, but they also have regional variants, which honestly are just like clothing style and hairstyle differences as art changes aside, they still look similar enough between regions that a hairstyle change could make them pretty good ringers for one another.
But, then in Diamond Pearl, they delivered this shocker:
We met Marnie and Page Joy and their father, Karsten. The implication is that
1.) Nurse Joy genes are passed down matrilineally. Anybody can have a child with the Nurse Joy and there is a chance they'll be like a clone of the mother.
2.) Joy is in fact their last name and that too, is passed down matrilineally. Having a living father does not stop them from having the last name Joy.
Now, Horizons/Pokemon SV gives us a unique specimen. A teenage/young adult delinquent Nurse Joy. Now, the Mossui Town Pokemon Center Lady isn't CONFIRMED to be a Nurse Joy relative and as far as we know, there's no other nurses in her region that resemble her.
In the most recent Japanese episode, we also see a Grandma Joy, confirming in fact that Nurse Joy does age, but also she's a Kanto Nurse Joy with a unique hairstyle compared to even the Joys at the same Pokemon Center.
But, then there's Molly. Molly is the first Pokemon Nurse who's a main character. She's IMPLIED to be a Nurse Joy as she claims to come from a family of Pokemon Doctors and is seen eventually working for Pokemon Centers.
When she as a young Pokemon Doctor, she bore a passing resemblance to a Galarian Nurse Joy, but notably, has always had a distinct design from the identical Nurse Joy family, which grew more distinct when she became independent and decided to travel the world treating Pokemon rather than stay at a Pokemon Center.
However, despite being a distinct design, she shares the basic physical features of a Nurse Joy as well as the voice actor, implying some manner of relation.
Finally catching up to the subs and Gramma Joy is in fact Mollie's mother. Both her and Mollie are 100% confirmed to be specifically Johto Nurse Joys, despite Mollie's distinct rebellious fashion sense.
I got new questions though as it seems Mollie refers to the Pokemon Center in Uiro City as her Family's Pokemon center which makes me question how Nurse Joy's divide labor. Far be it for me to suggest, but I think a little bit of nepotism might be going on in the Pokemon nursing system.
Outside of Mollie tho, we do see this one Nurse Joy off duty sporting a completely different look in her civvies in Kalos, suggesting against previous evidence that the Nurse Joy look is more a uniform than anything else.
And, Journeys has an episode where the fact that they can't recognize a girl all grown up to be Nurse Joy is a plot point, which also involves a real time visualization of the girl growing up where at no point does she look EXACTLY like a Nurse Joy, Marnie and Page style, until she's an adult.
one of the nurse joy ancestors fucked a chansey thus accounting for the extremely stable and homogeneous physical and behavioral traits passed down through the generations
If a tree grew to be real big, it must've lived through dozens of storms over the course of its long life.
It must have avoided being struck by lightning hundreds of times.
Meaning, what are the odds that the ONE TIME it gets struck by lightning just so happens to be the time you are climbing it? Gotta be astronomically low, right?
Q.E.D: Climbing the tallest tree in the area is the best thing to do in a thunderstorm, because that tree clearly has experience in avoiding lightning.
If I could fly, I would literally never touch the ground again. The earth would not know my touch until the day I die, and my body falls to the ground. I would be floating when I fall asleep, and I would still be floating when I awaken. My primary entryway into my house would be my bedroom window. I'd fly all sorts of different ways, too; right side up, upside down, loop de loops, ominously hovering while T-posing, you name it. Anyways,
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