The Plot Doctor

ThePlotDoctor on TikTok. ADHD, Bisexual, Gender Queer, Leftist, Probably Fucked your Dad. Focus on emotionally compelling stories and plot writing, and shitposting, plenty of that. https://linktr.ee/theplotdoctor

[i-write-sins-not-poems]

Mum:hey -

Me, returning from a walk in the woods after still being unsuccesfull in getting abducted by the fair folk: I don’t wanna talk right now

[probably-a-velociraptor]

Ye olden days: “ we must never go in there, the fair folk may take us away from this world”

Millennials: *banging pots and pans together in the middle of a mushroom circle during a full moon on an equinox * “IT WOULD BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING ABUCTED ME RIGHT ABOUT NOW!”

[theplotdoctor]

This is just cruising right?

[jerseyclown]

you guys have got to try living . its ugly but theres no other option

[ifafimb]

don't wanna

[jerseyclown]

didnt ask dont care surrender to the tide of life and allow it to wash over you in all its imperfect and profound beauty

[theplotdoctor]

Fuck Die Hard. The greatest Christmas movie of all time is Scorsese's 1973 classic Goncharov.

[theplotdoctor]

Layline press stall from Dragonmeet. Great humans, great games.

[theplotdoctor]

Tw kinky electricity based times:

Every month in Brum there's this fetish market called the Birmingham Bizzare Bazaar. They have an after party. I haven't been in about 10 years but went along tonight. They had a violet wand demonstration thing where you sat in a chair and they used it on you for 20 minutes... HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS. It was one of the best 20 minutes of my life. The feeling was indescribably good, like part scratches, part pain, part deep tissue muscle massage. They had all these different things you could use and when they started on the impact ones (floggers and the like) with the current running through them it sent me straight into fucking subspace. I could barely stand afterwards or process rational thought until I had some chocolate.

[theplotdoctor]

Very nice here on tumblr. All my followers are conventionally attractive women in bikinis with no posts. Didn't know I had that kind of rizz.

[titanrpg]

in my experience, trans people make the best soup. it just so happens i’m trans and I make the best soup out of anyone I know. so

[theplotdoctor]

I also make fucking amazing soup so this tracks.

[theplotdoctor]

Did you know Jonathan Sims and Sasha Sienna from the Magnus Archives make TTRPGs? Well you do now and they're bloody brilliant. Go check them out!

MacGuffin & Co.

Indie tabletop role-playing games from Sasha Sienna and Jonathan Sims.

[theplotdoctor]

Building Queer Worlds

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how queerness is not only an identity but an act of political rebellion. How by taking a well worn cishet “thing” we can subvert it and turn it back on society as a mirror, showing the hollowness of cisheteronormativity and how it excludes the full range of humanity by insisting on narrowly defined boxes.

Thinking about this led me onto the idea of building truly 100% queer worlds. Worlds where absolutely nothing is straight, where the mythology, culture and even natural laws of a place all lead to queerness. 

What if rather than a sky father and an earth mother you had a lesbian couple? Rather than some bearded dude planting his seed, the two came together and force of their sex raised the mountains and carved the valleys. What if their spit became the oceans and their sighs became the breeze? What if the generation of life came from their love, their queer love, rather than something as mechanical as sex? What if everyone in the world is a child of love and choice?

What if the gods of war and peace are a gay man and their enby lover? Chasing one another down the centuries, never managing to be present where the other is. What if war is seen as the sharp piercing pain of penetration? And peace is the gentle relaxation of loving aftercare. What if through the lens of queer love war is viewed as a sad but necessary price of creating a more gentle world? What if the only time they meet is at the beginning and end of war?And their anger and sorrow incites people to war and leads them to peace?

What if the gods of rivers take their long and winding sensuous course until they gather power and penetrate the ocean, but every stream feeding them is another god? a million trains being run to create the most potent top imaginable. 

Mythology and sex have always been intertwined. Why not make it gay as fuck?

What if everyone in the world can change their body’s sex at will? either, or, both or neither? What if everyone could just make what was on the outside perfectly reflect their inner world? 

What if they could go beyond the humanoid template? What if somehow they could make their bodies express more abstract concepts, mythological creatures, rainbows? 

Perhaps people wouldn’t even need to adjust their bodies if they don’t want to? Maybe in this world everyone just has the power to project their gender so strongly that there is never any mistaking it? Or everyone has the power to instinctively grasp and understand every gender presentation.

What if all the great romances of the past never discussed the gender of their subjects? What if any love song could be about anyone? What if the entire culture of the world was built around queerness? Gendered anything exists only insofar as the people who want it to be gendered claim it for their own. 

Gender in our world is heavily entwined with systems of power, why not divorce it from oppression?

What if the hero of the world's greatest epic romance was explicitly ace? What if the gold standard of romance in this world is divorced from sex? What if the connection between two people was held in more high regard than the mechanical aspect of it all? 

What if the world's legal systems explicitly recognised polyamory? What if having more than two parents was common? What do familial kinship dynamics look like in a world where extensive interconnected families are common? How does inheritance play out?

What if the world recognised that some people have a very fluid experience of sexuality? What if that society was more open to polyamory as a result? What if the idea that you might go through periods of not being attracted to your partner was accepted? How would relationships look? More open and understanding? 

How does all of this affect material culture? What do houses look like to house very large extended families? Do people still give expensive tokens of affection or are they cheaper and more symbolic? Are there communal platonic living arrangements for those that are aro ace? How does food preparation and consumption look? What do children’s things look like to handle multiple children of roughly the same age?

My point with all of these question is to highlight just how far you can go in making world’s queer. How much a society can change and adapt to be more inclusive. How you can take common things that most worlds have and subvert them by making them queer as hell. How you can make people question why they’ve always done it the one way.

Hope this was useful. I’ll likely start building a super queer world and post my progess here. 

Thank you all for your continued support. It’s appreciated so much!

All my Love - TPD

[theplotdoctor]

You may be the end product of 10 million years of evolutionary success. I am the end product of 10 million years of poor life choices and drunken decision-making. We are not the same.

[andhumanslovedstories]

Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection 

[andhumanslovedstories]

Hey there guys. It’s me, in 2022, commenting on this post from 2016. There’s been a lot of people on this site lately being like “oooh no don’t make viral uwu I’m so pathetic, little, and defenseless and my poor notifications can’t handle 10k reblogs” well first of all ALL of us are pathetic, little, and defenseless and secondly none of our notifications can handle 10k reblogs and thirdly I’m not a coward and I think this should have a million notes. Not because of its own merit as a post, I just think it’d be funny if when I turn 30 this year and I reflect on the greatest accomplishments of my life thus far, I have to at least consider putting “famous tumblr popcorn post” on the list

[andhumanslovedstories]

Hi there guys. It’s me, again. It is December 8, and my birthday is December 16 (and fyi I didn’t even get my birthday off from work which I’m being so brave about, just saying) and I want you all to gather round and listen to my pitch. I could tell you that I really want this, which I do but I also think it’d be really funny to NOT reach my goal and to start my thirties on the note of failure but like a really stupid kind that doesn’t matter and is very funny. I could tell you that getting this post to a million notes will benefit you in some way, but it absolutely won’t, except in the general tumblr sense of getting to participate in committing to the crowdsourced bit, which is actually the truest joy this webbed site can offer. I could even be very earnest and say something how for better or worse tumblr had a hand in defining my twenties, and even when I’ve been infuriated with parts of it, it is genuinely the only social media that doesn’t make me feel like shit and isn’t impossible for me to use, and at very hard times in my life the weird community has been a comfort, but that’s TOO EARNEST. Knock that shit off.

Instead, I offer you this: if you reblog this post with tags, like anything at all in the tags, multiple reblogs won’t be collated together meaning that you can make my notifications truly unusable. Think about that you fuckin jackals. Can you resist the urge to be both helpful and annoying as shit

[dailyadventureprompts]

Why I don’t Use the Great Wheel Cosmology

For those of you who might not know, “The Great Wheel” is a name given to the arrangement and relations of planes that’s provided for the “default” d&d setting, and is assumed to be going on in the background of 99% of all published d&d material. It arranges the planes in a looping sequence vaguely based off the alignment chart, with wordily embodiments of the most extreme forces of good, evil, law, and chaos existing at the cardinal points. Souls depart from the material plane and are drawn directly to whatever plane most aligned with their alignment, to either live on in an eternal state or to become outsiders of their particular domain.

Over the years that I’ve run this blog I’ve stated time and again my distaste for the great wheel cosmology, meting out my critiques in bits and pieces as they were relevant to whatever I happened to be writing about at the time. This has happened so much that I wanted to collect all my gripes in one place so I could link back on it instead of reexplaining myself each time. So without further ado, brace yourself for an opinionated nerd telling you his in depth opinions about something that absolutely does not matter: 

The whole point of a cosmology is to describe the natural order/structure of the universe, and the great wheel describes a universe that’s effectively just the christian dichotomy of heaven and hell with a few extra steps. It’s a fundamentally moral view of how the multiverse works, and makes “right” and “wrong” not only into objective facts, but a geography you can walk across, travelling from the most morally correct place to the most incorrect place with just a couple of protals. 

This system is painfully rigid, not only removing any nuance over whether a course of action is correct, but preventing any competing worldviews from even existing: you can’t have differing belief systems/schisms of faith when you can go out and see proof of the rightness of the great wheel. Much like with how d&d handles gods, this paradoxically removes the idea of “faith” from matters of worship, which to me removes the whole point of having gods in the first place, reducing the big questions around death into a moral assembly line with one of a select number of pre-determined outputs.

It’s no stretch to say that the great wheel is just the alignment chart canonized as a fundamental part of the game world, and while we’ve all grown past the fundimentally black and white morality of the alignment chat It still mystifies me that d&d uses the great wheel as a piece of worldbuilding upon which most campaigns are supposed to be set. 

This boggles my mind because d&d has a much better and simplier cosmology upon which campaigns can be set, one that makes no moral judgments and instead allows for the infinite creativity that the game is supposed to be all about. The astral sea is an infinite expanse of possibility, where worlds are spun together from thoughts and dreams paralleling the process of creation that goes into the act of storytelling itself. What better way to explain a multiverse that functions on narrative tropes more than it does physics? Where hope really can prevail against wickedness and rule of cool supersedes the dictates of fate.

To end with a couple of personal gripes, the great wheel is really kind of boring? As a selection of afterlives about half of them are idyllic natural landscapes with nothing really going on and the other half are unplesant caves/wastelands suffering some kind of fucked up weather event. Most of it is painfully eurocentric when it comes to visions of the afterlife, and those planes that DO stand out ( The crashing metal cubes of Acheron) are more weird for the sake of weird. 

I can’t help but focus in on how much the great wheel doubles down on the game’s weird hodgepodge of colonialist belief structures. While WOTC has hastily amended out “always chaotic evil” over the past couple years, they still set their material in a cosmology where creatures like orcs/goblins/gnolls are born evil, drawn to evil all their life, and are doomed to suffer eternally in various hells because “evil” is in their very nature. This isn’t good worldbuilding, it’s the authors seeking some kind of weird vindication for their own beliefs by creating a group of people they can feel morally justified in punishing, and we all know where that gets us.

[theplotdoctor]

Putting my Dragonmeet videos here too. Hope you enjoy. I am actually weirdly proud of figuring out the tracking call-out for the hat. Always learning! Go check out ArtemisgamesUK.

[fairydrowning]

"Alone, like a verse from a lyric with no beginning and no end. Alone, like the cry of a heart in the wilderness."

– Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)

[theplotdoctor]

I am COMPLETELY fucking outraged about the "Ardlings". Someone at WotC fucked up big. "Bottoms" was right fucking there!

[penflowerink-deactivated2024010]

All current concept art for work-in-progress solarpunk / cyberpunk GM-less TTRPG (featuring a new robot friend!) These represent the different playable character types that will be available in the game: cosmetically altered human, regular human and robot.

Experimenting with this art style as well as a different layout style has been really refreshing, and so far writing up my ideas for the game has been an exciting challenge.

[theplotdoctor]

This is amazing 🥰🥰

[theplotdoctor]

My brother in Christ.....