Shared Soul

[vexwerewolf]

I’ve been wracking my brain for a while to try and make a Melee and/or Grapple Manticore build. Just standing directly next to things and being a menace. I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on something like this. Thanks for reading regardless if you respond to this one. Love reading your stuff.

Luckily for you, this concept did spark joy.

-- HORUS Manticore @ LL6 -- [ LICENSES ] IPS-N Blackbeard 2, HORUS Manticore 3, IPS-N Tortuga 1 [ CORE BONUSES ] Improved Armament, Titanomachy Mesh [ TALENTS ] Duelist 3, PANKRATI 2, Skirmisher 2, Brawler 1, Combined Arms 1 [ STATS ] HULL:4 AGI:2 SYS:0 ENGI:2 STRUCTURE:4 HP:19 ARMOR:2 STRESS:4 HEATCAP:9 REPAIR:5 TECH ATK:+1 LIMITED:+1 SPD:4 EVA:8 EDEF:10 SENSE:10 SAVE:13 [ WEAPONS ] FLEX MOUNT: Chain Axe FLEX MOUNT: Chain Axe HEAVY MOUNT: Nanocarbon Sword [ SYSTEMS ] Synthetic Muscle Netting, Lightning Generator, Beckoner, Siege Ram

I call this one YOUR PUTRID FLESH WITHERS UNDER THE UNBLINKING GAZE OF MY DIVINE CONTEMPT. We're making a Manticore build; this is not the place for subtle or pithy names.

This is a melee-only build, which I normally recommend against. I think it's good for a build to have at least some sort of ranged attack capability, but in this case, there's just no room for it. We're ride or die here, and diluting the build by hedging our bets is just going to tip the scales towards "die."

You are not particularly fast, so we've got the Pankrati valiant charge and Beckoner to help you close gaps. What you want to do at that point is slam in as fast as you can and try to connect with a Main melee attack (Duelist gives you an accuracy to help with that) - not your Heavy, one of your Mains. You then immediately use Duelist 3 to spend the Blademaster die you just earned to free-Grapple the target, and then you use Titanomachy Mesh to follow up the free-Grapple with a free-Ram (and because they're Grappled, Brawler 1 turns on, making your Ram more accurate, and because being Grappled causes them to become Immobilized, Pankrati 1 also turns on, making your Ram EVEN MORE ACCURATE). Knock your enemy Prone but do not knock them away.

To summarize: your target has taken Main Melee damage from you, become Grappled, then been rammed Prone. Because Grappled causes Immobilization, they cannot use their regular movement to stand up from Prone, and because of Synthetic Muscle Netting, unless they're larger than you, they cannot ever gain control of the grapple.

If they don't have weapons or abilities that knock you away, they have two real options to get away from you. The first is to spend a quick action trying to escape the grapple, which they can fail, wasting the action entirely. Even if they succeed, they still either need to crawl away provoking your Overwatch (use your Heavy for this) or use their entire regular movement to stand back up, then their other quick action to Boost away, again provoking your Overwatch.

The second, if they're the same size as you or larger, is to Ram you back. This is more effective, since your Evasion is low, and knocking you away will break the grapple. This still only leaves you one space away from them, which is still within Threat of your Nanocarbon Sword, and unless they have a modifier that deals damage on Ram (which, to my knowledge, no vanilla NPC does), they've spent 2/3rds of their turn just getting 1 space away from you and standing upright. If they decline to move away from you, you can just stand up on your turn and Skirmish 2 spaces towards them to do the whole thing all over again.

If they are a melee class, their best bet is to focus you down, but with 2 Armor and resistance to two types of damage, that's harder than it looks - and if they're focusing on you, they're not attacking your team's squishies, which is the whole point of the Defender class.

If they're a ranged class, they're fucked. With you up in their grill, their attacks against everyone including you become inaccurate. Artillery NPC classes don't tend to have much HP, and rely on staying far away from players. If a weapon has Ordnance, they can't even fire it at you at all if they're in engagement.

On your next turn, if your target is still grappled, activate your Lightning Generator, and then Barrage. Your attack sequence looks like this:

Chain Axe -> free Ram (Duelist 3), no knockback -> free Ram (Titanomachy Mesh), no knockback -> Nanocarbon Sword

Against unarmored targets, this has a damage floor of 9 assuming all attacks hit, and will slam for 5 even if all your attacks miss. Lightning Generator will do different amounts of damage depending on whether you're in the Danger Zone, but Charged Exoskeleton will always trigger off of Lightning Generator (if you choose) and will always deal 2 AP.

Note that if you're in control of the grapple (which, thanks to SMN, you usually are), you can still make your standard move. This means you can drag your victim 4 spaces towards or away from your friends.

When you turn on your ult, enemies have an even more miserable time, because now not only are there two forms of damage you're resistant to, you're also resistant to Heat (which means you can Overcharge for half price). Worse, any Heat or Energy damage you take now increases a doomsday clock.

Be warned that this build only has 19 HP, and even with 2 Armor you're not going to last forever, but on the other hand, enemies must focus on you or you'll just be able to tear them apart one by one.

[flagellant]

My Anger, or: Dinner Is On The Table And I Am Holding A Knife

(URL of asker censored to protect their identity from the current TERFs going around like a bad orange blight.)

I don't usually like responding to these sorts of asks. But I guess the question "How do you manage to have any faith in humanity left at all?" is one I'll keep getting asked, so here's my answer. I wrote an essay about it. Read it if you want, skip it if you don't, but it has my answer.

===

Are you hungry? Food is my love language. I don't let people go hungry. Food is my love language. You need to eat well. I'm not going to let you not eat well. I made you this, I hope you like raisins. I can’t let you be hungry.

I don't do this because I am nice. I am furious. I am enacting with every loaf of bread and chicken breast and crushed almond nuts an act of terrible, irrevocable rebellion against the state. When I feed people I am throwing a brick at a cop at Stonewall, I am refusing to allow a system of cruelty to keep those around me hungry. I do this because the only way people will know that they're allowed to eat when they're hungry is if they're fed when they're hungry.

I love you. Have this half of my orange. Take a handful of chips. I made too much bread. I love you. Here, I have an extra banana. I don’t like this flavor, do you want it? Sure, you can have a bite, do you want some too? I love you recklessly and relentlessly and without reason. I love you violently and unrepentantly, have this apple, have this pear, have everything I can ever afford to give you and some of what I cannot, because I love you and therefore I must hate what makes you hungry.

I love you, and therefore, I must hate what makes you hungry.

Food is my love language. I won’t let people go hungry.

    -Untitled poem, self. September 19th, 2022, 4:56pm.

Nearly everything I've written for the past four years was just saying the same thing over and over again differently.

In reincarnation matter is not created or destroyed. It is a fermenting apple fallen from the front yard tree, it is the soil mulch it becomes growing the next apple on its branch. It is made of cycles and closed loops. Reincarnation is an airplane in the sky which will never land.

There are smaller reincarnations, though. The memory of something so strong it aches your jaw? The heavy heart heaving blood across its body even after the running was done? The ghosts in that blood, the people you never became seven years ago? There are loops within these loops. The circles are more than circles.

I started cooking only a few years ago. The first thing I ever made was bread. Challah bread, and it was warm and motherly and raisin-filled. But the first thing I remember cooking was ciabatta. Me and mine would tear off hunks of loaf with our hands and stain our mouths red with laughter and vinegar. I am no longer theirs and they are no longer mine but that is my memory of them and I. My memory of that life is one where I knead the dough and bake the bread and laugh with them over and over.

All this is to tell you that every poem I write has been the same for four years, over and over, smelling like plastic armrests and ginger ale. It is all just saying in newer and stranger ways that I love you. I love you, I hope we both eat well.

-”Little Cramped Florida Apartment First Saturday Where I Found Milk And Honey”, self. January 6th, 2022. 11:49pm.

    This last iteration of this narrative was the only one with something worthwhile to say. Anger is overwhelming for me. Let me tell you how I see myself in Sisyphus, pushing a hopeless boulder up a mountain. This time I will try to keep a better grasp on my boulder, which is that anger I am always, always feeling. I wish I could say, “I wish I was not an angry person”, but that isn’t who I am. To let go of that fury would leave me cold, and alone, and unsure of what to do. But those who are always angry have a duty to control that anger, make it a prism from which light can shine into and out of more brilliantly than before.  

    The past year has been about understanding who I am when my back isn’t against the wall. In some ways it’s more terrifying, having the responsibility of making a good life for myself from good foundations. But I remember with every second what it was like to live a life without the luck I’ve been given, and I see the people that get denied it every day. If anger is powerful, I want to use that anger. I want to wield it and make something so angry that everybody will be angry with me. An anger in a single direction, with one edge like a knife, to cut the world down the middle and into a better shape, and hand it to everyone like halves of an orange. I only have two hands to make any piece of art with, and I will only ever have (at most, at my most fortunate) two hands. But I don’t stand alone in being angry at this cruel, foolish world, the one which looks at children and teaches them “You are not worth anything, you have no value or sanctity just because you are human,” and laughs and calls us childish when we say we deserve better than that.

    Because that’s the most formative thing about me of all. The selfish, bitter dregs of feeling hurt and betrayed by the world. The incredibly egotistical idea, “I deserved a better world”. Look at my past self and all of the cruel, flailing, foolish things I did–some on purpose, some not, all causing harm anyway–and think about what I could do about it.

    I think that, on one hand, yes. I deserved better, objectively. There are things in my narrative that no one deserves the agony of. Beyond that, perhaps I deserved better circumstances.

    But I think it doesn’t matter what I deserved in the past, good or bad. What matters more to me is not making the same mistakes in the future. I can’t allow myself to resent the people around me for being maybe a little bit more lucky than I was; there’s art to be made that could change the world. All of it is made out of anger. All of my past, all of my future, it can only ever be anger. Anger that creates, anger that cuts, anger that hardens, anger that stands in front of other people and walks the line for them.

    Anger that stands in front of other people and walks the line for them. I’d almost like that to be the narrative I make for myself. To make a world in which I can say that the events that formed me most are not the ones which hardened me like lava to obsidian, proud like a boar. Instead, a world where I met its hard edges as gentle as I dared. You may have wondered why I sounded so different in the poems I write than the person I am, and the truth is almost simple.

    I learned to write poetry to put to words all the things that I feel which I’m unable to understand or say. That’s the narrative I’ve been trying hard to tell you all, all this time, the one I want to write so badly and yet have no idea how to.

    Writing about anger is so easy for me, except for that one kind, the kind I think I know for certain most defines my narrative, because I can never talk about it except in poems. It lives in me somewhere deeper than anything else, deeper than my heart, deeper than my soul. It can only come out in art, not in words. That anger lives in my belly and it growls like a great black dog every time it thinks it sees someone being hurt. I think that says the most about me that I’ll ever be able to say.

    So we come back to the beginning for the end. As I wrote before; “There are loops within these loops. The circles are more than circles.” I had to try and write this essay three different ways, and this is the third way, the only one worth reading. It’s the only one where I’m angry in a way I think might do good in the world.

    I really hope that whoever reads this can agree.

[dragonladdie]

Racism/appropriation of indigenous ppl is RAMPANT in the furry community so let me say some things:

STOP calling ur characters w*nd*g*s. You don’t even have to change the design, just stop calling them that. Call them like. Skull deer or some shit there is no reason for you to be using that word.

Stop using “spirit animal” in referral to ur fursona. This is obvious idk why it even needs to be said.

Stop making “two wolves inside you” jokes. The “two wolves inside you” is in reference to a racist made up native proverb from a white dude.

You aren’t appreciating cultures by doing things we tell u to stop. If you want to appreciate: buy from indigenous ppl, respectfully learn about cultures, listen to native people, and DON’T MAKE EXCUSES.

[prokopetz]

Concept: starship where spooky stuff keeps happening and everybody thinks the ship’s AI has a screw-loose, a suspicion that’s not at all allayed by the fact that the AI’s denials of responsibility are extremely unconvincing, often to the point of claiming to be unaware of things that are happening right in front of its sensors.

In truth, the ship is really just haunted. The reason the AI is acting so suspiciously is because ghost’s brainfuckery doesn’t work on non-biological intelligences, so the AI literally can’t perceive it.

[thefaceless96]

Interestingly enough, there’s actually an expansion to a board game I play where this is going on.  Though it’s more like Lovecraftian Hallucination Monsters instead of ghosts.  The AI just sees all the crew going full crazy cultist and yelling about monsters and it has no idea what’s going on.  Here’s a link: https://www.miniaturemarket.com/asmnem02-vs.html

[normal-horoscopes]

Curious: has there been a line or a passage in Amber Skies that's really stood out to y'all?

[necromancatrix]

Lots, but I shared this bit when I was trying to get a friend to read it: It was a sound that reached into those oldest nerves that bypassed all rational thought in service of the single burning instinct to survive, and plucked them like a cello string.

[thefaceless96]

Gods, the entirety of chapter 75 spoke to me.  I am just a very big fan of Kali getting into the zone.  But if I had to pick a specific line that I love, it’d be from chapter 56,

‘The ram fired, space-time warped before her as her punch missed with devastating force. The thing had tripped, and was currently sliding on its belly, mouth-first, at her friends. The whiff sent the student spiraling sideways through the air, her drained arm flailed numbly as she got a really cool badass concussion from glancing her head into the wall. ‘

[writing-prompt-s]

Science fiction is full of first contact stories, but is there a such thing as LAST contact?  Decide exactly what that means, and write about it.

[elidyce]

It was too late, when the humans came. They were a young species, still exploring outwards, vital and thriving. 

We… were not. 

War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course… we used genetic manipulation, and cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss whether we should commit a mass suicide, or simply wait to fade away. 

And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few. 

“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.” 

It is custom to avoid the races that are dying – once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a dying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one, with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.

But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught, when we tell them we are dying, and try to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us. 

Keep reading

[weirdchristmas]

[monkeywiki]

limp biscuit

[thefaceless96]

Sedated Almonds

[thefaceless96]

The result of the first Sorcerer punished by the Sorcerer’s Council for defying their laws, the Renegade was cast into the primordial chaos for her attempts to control it, but there she drank deep of the twisted magics and grew strong.  When the Iron Queen attacked the Council, she seized her chance and tore her way back into Ur-Eden, creating a rent in the world that became the Twisted Kingdom.  In the wake of the Council’s Defeat, the Kingdom quickly inserted itself into the culture of Ur-Eden and became a staunch ally to the other kingdoms.

[thefaceless96]

The Seers of the Celestial Kingdom tried to be neutral in the face of the Council as their philosophy demanded, made all the more surprising when the High Seer attained a seat on the Council.  The High Seer died along with most of the Council when the Iron Queen attacked their fortress, but he left behind a construct to rule in his stead.  The Seers are now able to remain neutral, but some wonder if this outcome was a part of some plan by the High Seer...

[publishinggoblin]

Silver and Gold | The Normal Tarot

Reprint of the original Normal Tarot with silver foil, and the introduction of the gold foil Normal Tarot 2.

Not to be /that guy/, but it sure seems to me like you’ve not pledged for one or both of these awesome tarot decks. Hmmm, tssk tssk.

We are $3,000 away from funding. If this isn’t fixed tomorrow, I will have to consume you all alive.

The Normal Tarot is a 99 card tarot deck, featuring:

A reimagined major arcana with kings and moons and books

Seasons in place of suits with 3 ladies and 3 knights each

Five wild cards with a lantern and a well, a ghost, and an observatory

This deck comes in gold foil and gold edges by @charminglyantiquated​.

OR

This deck comes in silver foil with silver edges by @uglymelon​.

Or maybe both?

There are no bad choices here. Help us get to our goal, hmm? We have a fun surprise planned for when we make it!

[dorindameddler]

if you live in california please vote no on prop 22 to waste the 186 million dollars uber lyft and doordash spent to keep exploiting their workers

[thefaceless96]

Another new Kingdom in the wake of the war, the Electric Kingdom was torn out of the Zephyrous Kingdom by the Storm Artisan’s rebellious daughter.  The new Stormsinger consolidated the electrical magic in the Zephyrous Kingdom and broke away as an anarchist state.  The gangs and militias that joined the Stormsinger supplied energy to the Iron Queen’s war machines and harried the Council’s forces whenever they could.

[thefaceless96]

In the Iron Queen’s fight against the Sorcerer’s Council, she sought to destabilize the states that made up the Council.  She began with the Vital Kingdom, with the help of an allied Sorceress, she corrupted the vibrant life magic of the Kingdom and converted half of the sprawling forests into the Necrotic Kingdom, a land of rot, decay, and undeath.  The new High Lich supported the Iron Queen’s armies with an army of skeletons.  Since then the two kingdoms have made tenuous amends but struggle to be friendly in the peace that followed the war.

[thefaceless96]

Formerly the militant arm of the Sorcerer’s Council, the former High Judge’s son defeated him in single combat and the Solar Kingdom seceded from the Council.  Now seeking to atone for the crimes of his father, the current High Judge has made sweeping reforms to the Solar Kingdom’s class system and has been offering labor across all of Ur-Eden to repair in the wake of the war against the Council.

[thefaceless96]

Formerly the capital of the Sorcerer’s Council, the Lunar Kingdom has become an independent state after the dissolution of the Council.  It’s monolithic spires and gaols torn down.  It’s philosophy of order has been rewritten by it’s new Archsorceress, denouncing the old tyrannical rule and exemplifying a more meditative approach to order.  Those who would disrupt this peace still find the Kingdom’s Hunters enforcing law, but now they are a welcome sight to those who are in danger.

[thefaceless96]

The Metallic Kingdom is the rising star in Ur-Eden, using magics declared taboo by the old Sorcerer’s council, the Metallic Kingdom created a land of living metal, machinery, and plastic.  After securing her Kingdom’s freedom and autonomy, The Iron Queen set out to repair the damages caused by her war with the Council.

[thefaceless96]

Hello Tumblr, finally decided to make a blog for myself, likely going to post large dumps infrequently but I’m going to be posting art and small snippets of my setting here.  I want to eventually publish my setting stuff so all the names I’m going to be giving things will be vague because I’m terrified of plagiarism.  Hope whoever finds my stuff ends up enjoying it.