© (c ) copyright 1990-2011 Rebecca Sinclair
See the original HERE
HEY DUDES I MADE THIS FILLABLE go check it out!! i also tweaked the pronouns to make it more inclusive! enjoy~
@thewritershandbook
Peter Solarz

No title available
RMH
hello vonnie
Cosmic Funnies

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

shark vs the universe
DEAR READER

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Claire Keane

JVL

★
NASA
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
dirt enthusiast
styofa doing anything
KIROKAZE
todays bird

#extradirty

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@writerstetris
© (c ) copyright 1990-2011 Rebecca Sinclair
See the original HERE
HEY DUDES I MADE THIS FILLABLE go check it out!! i also tweaked the pronouns to make it more inclusive! enjoy~
@thewritershandbook
The Void
The Void, one of the many planes of existence in The Shattered God setting, was created to prevent and correct a slight miscalculation in the designs of the planes. When the Wellspring and the Terminus were created and connected to the Prime Material to give it the cycle of life and death, the purely metaphysical nature of the Wellspring and Terminus reacted with the raw physicality of the Prime Material plane and spawned two unexpected offshoots: The Charade and The Mockery. To prevent this accident from happening again, the Architect drafted a plan: A barrier, physically and spiritually insulating the planes from one another, while still permitting the expected and necessary transfer of energy, concepts, matter, and essence to support the entire system and allow it to thrive. As a happy accident, the plane also serves as an effective barrier between the multiverse and the Nothing outside of it.
The plane is a misty grey expanse that touches every point of every other plane in existence, connecting and separating all of the other planes from each other. To preserve their integrity, the other planes avoid Nothing and as such, the Void the only plane in existence in which contains non-negligible amounts of raw Nothing. This has the primary effect of enhancing its barrier effect, while incidentally making the deeper parts of the plane extremely dangerous for the unprepared. Raw Nothing is beyond corrosive; things dissolved by it cease to exist.
The plane is the demesne of the Engineer, the goddess of protection, defensive warfare, travel, and new souls. She has devised and built safe pathways through the Void, bulwarks to keep the Nothing at bay, and a special well from which she draws Nothing forth to turn it into real things, most notably new souls. It is also the point of origin of the Changelings, a race of people who, inexplicably, have a refined form of Nothing in their physiology, and who can reform their bodies into any shape they desire at will.
While changelings will get their own write-up eventually, it may be a while, and for the time being, players in the setting who wish to play Changeling characters can use the following alternative stats to what was posted in the Eberron Unearthed Arcana article.
Changeling Traits
Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 2, and your Dexterity increases by 1.
Size. Changelings are built much like humans, but a little leaner. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
Darkvision. Having arisen in the dark and misty plane known as the Void, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions, no matter what form you inhabit. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of grey.
Duplicity. You gain proficiency in the Deception skill
Mercurial. You gain proficiency in one skill or tool of your choice, and the ability to speak, read, and write a language of your choice. After each long rest, you may change the proficiency and language granted by this trait.
Shapechanger. As an action, you can polymorph into any humanoid of your size that you have seen, or back into your true form. However, your equipment does not change with you. If you die, you revert to your natural appearance.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write common and two other languages of your choice.
It's hard for me to make fanfics. I always have so many ideas and really complex storylines that I wanna make. Do you have any tips? Honestly I've tried everything
Haha oh boy do I feel that, nonny. It’s a little something I like to call Skyrim Syndrome, where you just have too many options to choose from and get super overwhelmed on where to go next.
It’s hard to concentrate on any one story when the rest of the plot bunnies are yelling in your head, right? The good news is, having too much creativity is a much better problem than having too little!
Personally, I can never work on just one thing at once, because I’ll immediately get distracted by something else and/or feel like I need more time to let the thoughts sit and mature a bit. Sometimes an idea I thought was brilliant last week turns out to be even better when I just take the time to think on it a little more. Sometimes the idea I hated yesterday turns into something good. Sometimes I need to rethink the ideas I thought were good but were actually not. (It probably doesn’t help that I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, so my focus is a little scattered.)
As far as my writing process goes, I can only tell you what works for me personally. I can’t promise it will work for you and your creative process because every writer is different, but I hope it at least gives you some help to hear from another writer (albeit an amateur one).
Generally, I tend to just write whatever I feel inspired to write at the time. Sometimes that means fanfic, sometimes that means drafting random scenes from my original works. Sometimes that means writing an idea down to save for later, or talking it out with someone I trust to give me honest and constructive feedback. It means I have a million WIPs, headcanons, and notes for future ideas at any given time and it takes me forever to finish long things, but I’m starting to think that’s ok.
The best thing about creativity is that it’s recyclable. It never goes to waste.
If you have an idea that isn’t working for your current story, don’t delete it! Save it for later! It might fit a different story down the line. If you are stuck on something, work on another project and come back to it instead of forcing yourself to churn out an uninspired result. This might sound cliche but you’re writing for you, and that means the most important thing is focusing on what makes you happy to write! Also if you’re happy/excited to be writing said story, you’re more likely to stick to it. In my experience, there’s no faster way to kill my will to work on something than to turn it into a Chore I must force myself through.
Every time you write you are practicing your craft– it doesn’t matter if that’s longfic or a oneshot. Lately, my fanfic has all been little ficlets based on ask prompts, or oneshots requested by friends. While my main goal and biggest project at the moment is of course my own novel, I use these smaller, short-term projects to set challenges for myself: working on improving my dialogue, practicing an action scene, that sort of thing. (Also fluff. I can’t write fluff to save my life u_u)
Even if I’m not making progress on my main goal, none of that time is wasted. I’m still improving my writing by streamlining my style. It’s also given me the freedom to try different styles that I can then later incorporate into my original works. Fanfiction is a great sandbox that way.
And if you’re worried about the complexity of your storyline, a rough outline or some notes might help keep you on track. Remember though, an outline is just there to help you remember your plot ideas. If you find a better plot down the road or change your mind, you don’t have to stick to it!
I hope this helps a little <3
-Vir
Short Hiatus
Hey y’all. You may have noticed that there was not an article last week, and by this likely not this week either. I’m in the middle of a large writing project for work, I’m in the middle of a larger project that I’m keeping under wraps For Reasons, and to be perfectly honest a game I love was just rereleased (FFXII) so I’ve been preoccupied.
The Astral Canvas
The Astral Canvas, one of the many planes of existence in The Shattered God setting, has the distinction of being the first plane to exist. It is commonly believed that the Astral Canvas served the Architect as a sort of sketchbook or workspace, where the concepts of the rest of the planes were drafted and iterated before they were created out of the Nothing from outside of creation. After the plans for the planes were complete, the Architect reworked the plane into the source of magic and the home for dreams; some philosophers argue that these two functions are completely indistinguishable. All spellcasters draw energy from the Astral Canvas to cast spells and reshape their world, even if their precise spellcasting methods vary.
Now, untold eons after the Architect shattered, the Astral Canvas is home to the Pleroma, the dualistic god of creation and annihilation, his servitors, known as the Gith, dreamers, and the occasional traveler who entered the plane either through the Astral Projection spell or a portal. The Gith, like their master, are divided sharply into two functions, creation and annihilation. The githyanki represent the forces of annihilation, and they venture into the other planes to destroy or unmake according to their patron’s whim. The githzerai represent the forces of creation, and they venture into the planes to preserve reality or to deposit new creations, such as artifacts, creatures, plants, or structures. Though the githzerai seem more benign, they are insatiable in completing their objectives, and care little for what was already existing where they are to place new pieces of creation.
The plane itself is an infinite, scintillating sea of shifting pearlescent colors and lights. The plane does not experience time as the rest of the cosmos does; there is apparently some manner of causality, or planar travel there could not function and no being there could exist, but whatever time in the Astral Canvas is, it is not a strict progression of cause to effect. Pieces of the past collide with fragments of the future, rippling forth as inspiration to mortal dreamers. In many ways, spatial travel and travel through time in the Astral Canvas are entangled. As such, direct astral travel can be quite hazardous; without precise and careful navigation, it is possible to leave the Astral Canvas at a different time than one left it, sometimes even by centuries. Entrances to other planes appear as colored motes of light, with the color roughly coinciding with the plane one will wind up in. There is little solid matter in the Astral Canvas, and what there is is transient, disappearing when the being that conjured it leaves the plane.
Project #1: The Shattered God
The Shattered God is a D&D 5E campaign setting that I created for a one-shot for @thepioden’s and @sadgaywerewolf’s mother’s birthday. I’d had the individual pieces rolling around in my head for a while now, and the one-shot gave me the impetus to put everything together into a single concrete Thing.
In addition to the setting and a short dungeon crawl (ending in, of course, a fight with a dragon, because I was feeling particularly literal with the request of “Could we play Dungeons and Dragons?”), I put together quick overviews of 9 different characters that the party (of 5) could choose to play.
For this project, I will be posting these short character descriptions, descriptions of the world, and I hope to flesh it out into something I or some other DM could use.
About The Setting
The Planar System
Divinities:
Characters:
Crash
Halie Onyxblood
Holly Argenti
Pascifica
Rúsëa
Sunny-Disposition Johnson
Surprise Bear
Trixy
Willow
Races:
Dragonborn
Dwarves
Duergar
Planetouched: Aasamir, Tiefling, Genasi
Homebrew Rules
Maelstrom Genasi
Shardtech
The Planar System
The Shattered God setting’s universe consists of 15 distinct Planes: the Prime Material plane, the Astral Canvas, the Void, the Court of the Dead, the Maelstrom, the four elemental demiplanes, the Heavens, the Hells, the Charade, the Mockery, the Positive Energy plane, and the Negative Energy plane. Each plane has a function (and an equivalent to more familiar planes), and they will be developed in a series of articles. In brief:
The Prime Material: The home of mortal beings, and most of the action in the setting.
The Astral Canvas: The plane of magic and dreams, equivalent to the Astral Plane.
The Void: A transitory plane that walls the other planes off from each other, and contains not insignificant amounts of raw Nothing. Equivalent to the Ethereal Plane
The Court of the Dead: The plane of law, where souls are judged after their death, supernatural contracts interpreted and enforced, and disputes settled.
The Heavens: The place of rest for souls deemed worthy, home to the angels, and a force of benevolence and good in the universe. Equivalent to all good aligned Outer Planes.
The Hells: The destination for souls judged corrupt, home to demons and devils, and a source of strife and evil in the universe. Equivalent to all evil aligned Outer Planes.
The Charade: A mirror of the Prime Material Plane, the Charade is bountiful, vibrant, and alien. Home to the fey and many animals and plants that have gone extinct in the Prime Material. Equivalent to the Feywild.
The Mockery: A mirror of the Prime Material Plane, the Charade is barren, grayscale, and alien. Home to a variety of undead creatures. Equivalent to the Shadowfell.
The Wellspring and the Terminus: The sources of the energies of life and death; more metaphysical than any of the other planes, nothing can actually visit them. Equivalent to the Positive and Negative Energy planes.
Future articles will describe these planes in greater detail.
Shardtech
Throughout the history of The Shattered God setting, one feature has been fairly ubiquitous: Shards. These magical crystals have been present in the universe since its creation. Through the ages, the peoples of the universe have found uses for the incredible power housed inside Shards: consuming them with spells to gain incredible power for a short time, using them to fuel magical rituals, to recharge the Barriers that protect their cities, and to create and power simple, if effective magical items. At various points in history, it was discovered that Shards could be inscribed with instructions to cause them to reliably produce a consistent effect. This is the basis of Shardtech. It has taken various forms and reached different heights at different times and locales, but Shardtech is almost always present in the world to some degree; even if only as mysterious artifacts found in ancient ruins.
At the point of the setting where I am typically working, Shardtech was relatively recently rediscovered; after the Great Goblinoid Invasion five centuries ago, much knowledge was lost and had to be regained. It was only within the past 70 years that Shardtech began to rise to prominence again. Common uses for Shardtech include urban development projects, including water purification and transportation and enhancing crop yield, powering and programming advanced constructs, advanced Barrier techniques, enhancing personal abilities, and long distance communication.
By far the most important Shardtech item for adventurers is called simply a Bracer, or sometimes a Shardtech Bracer to distinguish it from the piece of armor; innumerable makes and models exist, each with their own name, but each maker will produce Adventurer’s Grade Bracers with a set of common core features:
Adventurer's Grade Shardtech Bracer
The Adventurer's Grade Shardtech Bracer consists of a rectangular, flat shard and some manner of clasp designed to keep it securely fastened to the forearm of the user. The shard has been specially enchanted to be resilient and essentially immune to damage and wear and tear. Basic Bracers have several useful features:
You may communicate with any other Bracer user who is within the same Barrier as you or that has a communication link established with your Barrier. This functionality can be used while relatively close to a Barrier, though the coverage varies based on location and topography.
You may exchange currency from secure accounts at connected financial institutions, similar to the communication feature above.
Documents, including maps, can be created, stored, and referenced; many wizards will at least partially store their spellbooks in their bracers.
Many have a camera feature, creating still or moving images that can be holographically projected; these images are obviously holographic in nature and are unlikely to be able to fool someone as a real object.
Bracers can be enchanted to grant the effects of any magical bracer item; it is not intended that Bracers conflict with magical items.
Finally, a Bracer can be used to interface with other Shardtech items and creatures (in the case of constructs) to use, program, maintain, alter, or create them.
Adventurer’s Grade Bracers have a few important advanced functions
The Bracer ambiently absorbs magical energy, empowering and refreshing the wearer. While you have this bracer equipped, you use the regular 5th Edition Resting Rules; otherwise, you are restricted to the “Gritty Realism” resting variant found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide on page 267.
The Bracer absorbs leftover magical energy from defeated foes, using this energy to further enhance the wearer. While you have this bracer equipped, you gain XP at the normal 5th Edition rate; if you do not have a bracer, you gain XP at half the normal rate.
It is expected that an Adventurer will have an Adventurer Grade Shardtech Bracer before beginning their career, and almost certainly by the time they reach third level, but this is not strictly necessary. It is strongly advised that all characters or none have a Shardtech Bracer; differentiating the XP totals and resting rules could create unnecessary friction.
Dwarves: Duergar
Writer’s note: Originally I was not planning on including Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (SCAG) races in The Shattered God; I don’t own the book and it was designed specifically for another setting. This latter reason is also why I do not plan on converting any of the races from Wizard of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering-Dungeons and Dragons crossover material, “Plane Shift”. However, when I realized that I had essentially included all of the SCAG races but one, and that last one is available on a free demo PDF, I had no real reason not to.
The last cultural subgroup of dwarves on Soril, the primary world of The Shattered God setting, called alternatively Grey Dwarves and Duergar, chose a very different path from their cousins during a long forgotten cataclysm. While the Hill and Mountain Dwarves fought and endured this disaster, the Duergar opted for what they deemed to be a more likely chance for survival. They already had an extensive network of mining tunnels running deep underground, and so at the deepest point of these tunnels, they began to clear space for large Vaults, sealed and secured fortresses, capable of preserving the dwarves inside indefinitely. Once their population had finished migrating to the Vaults, a few brave souls sacrificed themselves (or so it is believed), to bring down the mining tunnels, sealing and protecting the vaults. Safe in their Vaults, the Duergar did indeed weather the cataclysm and survive to the modern day. However, due to the extent of their measures and secrecy with which they operated, the Duergar as a whole never learned of the end of the cataclysm. Isolated Vaults are discovered now and again, but the Dwarves inside have grown insular and suspicious of the outside world. Indeed, their safety and security protocols often seem excessive, but all caution is justified when the survival of the dwarven people is on the line. Vaults have been discovered on all continents save the strange, perfectly circular continent from which the halflings, gnomes, and beastfolk hail.
ROLL YOUR CLASS
Roll 1d100, adventurers. (It’s entirely possible to end up with “adventurer”).
click here to roll online
My reaction when I got 42: :D :D :D :D
My reaction when I saw 42 gave me ‘Bard’: FUCK
57?! REALLY!! REALLY!!!!
Oh wait that’s enchanter. NVM Im ok.
How astute.
Ok I don’t have anyone to talk to right now, I just had to be socially trans in person for an hour while signing legal forms, and I’m strung out and tired. SO I’M GOING TO RANT ABOUT CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGES AND MAGICAL SCRIPTS.
Look, I get it. You want your conlang/magic script to look mystical, cryptic, special. You want it to look different than any other language while still looking like a language people write in. If you’re a spiritual person or magic-user this may even be a language you’re channeling and that you believe to be ancient in nature or otherwise pre-existing. But 95% of conlangs and magical scripts look totally fake and made-up, and this is not a judgment I’m casting on their actual grammatical structure or language theory or the languages they were based on. The thing that makes a language look like one people ever actually wrote in for hundreds of years, that makes it look like the letters/characters are all from the same language, is that it looks like a language that’s been written in whatever tools you are claiming or feel like it was traditionally written in.
Let’s take cuneiform:
Looks super-neat, right? Man, who’d ever think of having those wedges in an alphabet! It’s totally different than most modern languages out there and very distinctive, and the wedges are consistent across the letters, so it makes them all look like they’re from the same alphabet. This wasn’t just arbitrarily designed as a font style. There is a reason for this!
Cuneiform writing was pressed into wet clay with these shaped bits and that’s why it looks like that. It got stamped with wedges. That’s how (this type of) writing was done at the time. It’s a technological solution and that’s what makes the lettering get that peculiar stylization. You’ll get variants based on craftsmanship and tools, but basically the method is the same across various implementations. Once someone tried to write that in pencil, you could imagine it’d look different, and you’d see evidence of people’s hand-motion between strokes, becoming more of a tilt between letters.
For instance, English looks like it does, even in tumblr’s sans-serif fonts, because it can be constructed with a pen. When it gets fancy with a variable-width pressure-sensitive pen nib, you can get more complex and flowy, but notice the flow and arc still go with the movements natural for a hand to make:
Those little trails between letters exist today because nib pens were drippy and left ink trails. The written language adapted to the tools to incorporate the trails and still make it look legible, and that’s why we have cursive writing at all. This is a simplified history but it’s basically there to make you think about the letter shapes in various traditional ways of writing in English and why it looks like it does instead of like cuneiform.
Which brings me to conlangs. If you want your brand new ancient-looking language to truly look like people have used it for eons, write it out with the tools you think those people would have used, and keep adapting the letters if you find that, say, a brush or nib pen can’t construct the weird arcs and whirls you’ve designed the language to have. Languages by and large are made to be convenient to write. If you don’t know how to write kanji, Chinese words probably look complex and arbitrary to you. But their shapes are logical when you see them written with a brush:
So if you have some arcane-looking swooshy script but it still looks kind of fake, think about where the weight should really be. It should be where the brush presses down heavier and the trailing marks are where the brush lifts up (and usually leaves the paper and ends the stroke). Where the stroke is wide on one end is where the brush initially met the paper. Above, you can see how one swish immediately flows into another, the strokes are like arrows leading across the page when you understand how they’re created. Pick up a brush and figure out an actual stroke order for your symbol. If logically the stroke seems like it’d leave someone’s hand smearing it trying to follow its arc, then logically that symbol would eventually get redesigned if it were in an actual language. Someone would figure out a better way to write it and everyone would adopt that way over time.
So practice writing your language with different tools. Consider a calligraphy course or even just a kit with a guidebook (or youtube training videos!). Written language is a tool that people use, magical as it can be. And if you’re using it for magical purposes such as woodburning it into tools or painting it onto things or writing it onto paper, consider that your symbols will change a bit according to the tools, just like with mundane languages. A wedge-shaped wood burner will get you something a bit closer to cuneiform. A brush will get you something flowy and not super-precise. Pencil will not leave ink trails and will get you something more technical and practical. Your written language logically should shift for that and adapt like a proper tool. And if you do that right, if you really use it, then it will look much more genuine because it will have experienced an actual evolution of form adapting to the physical tools it’s been worked with via.
And if you’re not using it for magic but are just using it for a fantasy setting where people use it for magic in the story, all the above would still apply to them.
Even with just one symbol not meant to be in a greater language, think about the tool you’re creating it with. It’s hard to make a realistic brush-style symbol in pencil. Use the tool that fits the symbol and you’ll produce something much more genuine-looking.
That’s it! I’m not a language expert, this is not meant to be A Real Factual History Of All Language, it’s just a rough primer in How To Make It Look Like A Language Is Actually Written With. It’s not meant to be a critique in whether your magical language is “real” enough or “magical” enough either. It’s simply some pointers in how to make a magical/constructed language that’s actually reasonable to write with and suits the tools you’re writing it with and the purposes you mean it for. Hundreds of years of written language evolution is hard to replace, but I believe in you.
Conscripting 101: the basics.
Oh thank you this is lovely. And one of my big issues with a lot of conlang scripts. Drives me fucking bonkers.
They did this sort of thing with the dragon-script in Skyrim; they tried to make it symbols the dragons could make with their claws easily.
Planetouched: Tiefling, Aasamir, and Genasi
Sources:
Tiefling: PHB
Aasamir: DMG and Volo’s Guide to Monsters
Genasi: Elemental Evil Player’s Companion, Maelstrom Genasi
While it is fair to say that no two people are exactly alike, this adage holds even more true among the planetouched of Soril, the main world of The Shattered God setting. Even among one of the three broad classifications, making generalizations beyond “usually between five and seven feet tall” and “humanoid body plan” is difficult. A planetouched child can spring from the lineage of any mortal people, and most typically when an ancestor is a planar entity, such as an angel, a fiend, or a genie, resulting in an aasamir, tiefling, and genasi, respectively. There have been isolated reports of planetouched arising from in-utero contact with powerful sources of planar energy.
A planetouched’s parent species determines little more than their general size and shape. However, the influence of their planar heritage means that even planetouched born to halflings, goblins, kobolds, and gnomes are tall enough to be considered Medium sized creatures. Planetouched, much like their extraplanar ancestors, are capable of having children with any mortal race, with the child being another planetouched, the race of the other parent, or the race (or races) of the planetouched parent’s parents, and so on, if necessary. This has lead to some fairly complicated family trees, and on one notable occasion, a dwarf family ruling, by birthright, a small elven kingdom. Among themselves, planetouched will breed true with other planetouched, resulting in planetouched of either of the parents’ type.
Angels are messengers from the forces of good, and Aasamir, as their descendants, often view themselves as the message, devoting themselves to some mission they, and hopefully by extension, their ancestor view to be important. Without access to a communion spell or a summoning spell, however, an aasamir will not know with absolute certainty what their ancestor desired. Angels tarry with mortals less than any other planar being, and usually focus on their mission; as such, aasamir are the rarest of the planetouched. Aasamir vary in form as greatly as their angelic ancestors, and though some have traits that seem alien, they also seem beatifically perfect in form. Some possess extra eyes or sets of arms (or luminous wings, when they manifest), though this grants them no statistical advantage, and imposes interesting challenges to tailors. Some seem to glow with a corona of holy flame. Others are gaunt and pale, with speech deep as the grave, descend from angels of death. Yet others have heads that resemble animals instead of their humanoid parents. All inspire some amount of awe in those that meet them.
Tieflings, the descendants of fiends, are the most common variety of planetouched for two main reasons. First, the forces of hell discovered very early that lust is a very powerful tool to drag mortals into sin, and second, in the ancient past, a city-state, in desperation and facing annihilation by a powerful foe, made pacts with several powerful fiends. As part of this bargain, the entire population of the city-state was marked by one of the archfiends, becoming tieflings. Through this profane ritual, this ancient land handily defeated the foe that threatened to overwhelm them, but not even a decade later, the city fell to infighting and collapsed; many of its citizens were dispersed across the globe. Most tiefling have a supernatural beauty to them, as they are the descendants of incubi or succubi, though any fiend can give rise to a tiefling, and the child will bear traits of their hellish ancestor. Tiefling are not evil, though they feel temptation far more keenly than other mortals.
Genasi are the descendants of powerful elemental spirits collectively called genies; they exhibit even greater diversity than the other varieties of planetouched and tend to group into five major types, based upon their elemental affinity: Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and Maelstrom. This is reflective of the Maelstrom, the chaotic elemental plane, within which the four other elemental planes planes live, move, expand, contract, and clash. Genasi tend to have physical forms that are indicative of their element; for example Fire genasi tend to have skin tones in the red, orange, and yellow range, and typically lack hair, instead possessing harmless flame in its place. By contrast, an earth genasi may appear to be a marble statue when standing still. Maelstrom Genasi, the descendants of either the janni, the most powerful of the genies, or mixed elemental genasi heritage, do not have a single elemental nature, instead shifting chaotically between all elements. Genasi of all types are typically individualistic and tend towards chaotic alignments.
Maelstrom Genasi
(Genasi Subrace)
The following traits are common to all genasi and are reproduced below.
Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 2.
Age. Genasi mature at about the same rate as humans and reach adulthood in their late teens. They live somewhat longer than humans do, up to 120 years.
Alignment. Independent and self-reliant, genasi tend toward a neutral alignment.
Size. Genasi are as varied as their mortal parents but are generally built like humans, standing anywhere from 5 feet to over 6 feet tall. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Primordial. Primordial is a guttural language, filled with harsh syllables and hard consonants.
Subrace
Maelstrom Genasi
As a Maelstrom Genasi, you are descended from the mighty Janni, those powerful genies that have mastered all four elements, or perhaps from genasi parents of different elements. You inherited the chaotic power of the Maelstrom and some measure of control of it and the elements.
The nature of a Maelstrom genasi’s elemental manifestation is inconstant and ever shifting; some days a maelstrom genasi may appear indistinguishable from an earth genasi, while on others, they may have skin that is a mottled patchwork of vibrant colors.
Ability Score Increase. Increase one ability score of your choice, except for Constitution, by 1.
Chaotic Resistance. At the end of any short or long rest, roll 1d4, and gain resistance to one damage type based upon the number that you rolled; 1 for fire, 2 for cold, 3 for lightning, and 4 for acid.
Chaos Control. You know the prestidigitation cantrip. Once you reach 3rd level, you can cast the Chaos Bolt spell once with this trait as a 1st-level spell, and you regain the ability to cast it this way when you finish a long rest. Constitution is your spellcasting ability for these spells. (If material from Unearthed Arcana is not permitted, substitute it for the spell Chromatic Orb; casting in this way does not require the material component)
No article this week. ....Not that I stick to a weekly schedule that well, but regardless, I wanted to let y’all know. My household just got a cat and getting ready and making sure he settles in well has taken a lot of my time and energy.
@dearly, here you go. :)
@aph-belarusia
@imperfectkreis
I HATE THIS. @missmungoe @sansbanshees @vir-ghilani
There is a reason I called this blog what I did.
Project #1: The Shattered God
The Shattered God is a D&D 5E campaign setting that I created for a one-shot for @thepioden’s and @sadgaywerewolf’s mother’s birthday. I’d had the individual pieces rolling around in my head for a while now, and the one-shot gave me the impetus to put everything together into a single concrete Thing.
In addition to the setting and a short dungeon crawl (ending in, of course, a fight with a dragon, because I was feeling particularly literal with the request of “Could we play Dungeons and Dragons?”), I put together quick overviews of 9 different characters that the party (of 5) could choose to play.
For this project, I will be posting these short character descriptions, descriptions of the world, and I hope to flesh it out into something I or some other DM could use.
About The Setting
Divinities:
Characters:
Crash
Halie Onyxblood
Holly Argenti
Pascifica
Rúsëa
Sunny-Disposition Johnson
Surprise Bear
Trixy
Willow
Races:
Dragonborn
Dwarves
Dragonborn
Dragonborn are, despite their name, made rather than born. Dragonborn are created by a God when some need arises; it should be noted that Spirits cannot create Dragonborn. Dragonborn representing the interests of Spirits exist, but they uniformly have a God acting as the intermediary. This may cause… complications. The God contacts a mortal, typically in a moment of crisis or at the instant of their death, and offers them a deal: Become an agent of my will, and you will be saved and reborn. If the mortal accepts the offer, the god reshapes the mortal’s body into a new semi-draconic form. Dragonborn on Soril deviate from the dragonborn of the Players' Handbook in that they have a muscular tail; this tail grants no mechanical benefits or detriments and is not prehensile. During this process, which can take as little as a few hours and in some cases has taken centuries, the putative dragonborn is encased in impenetrable, immovable crystalline egg. While the mortal is incubating, the God imparts some task or destiny to the incubating dragonborn, usually in the form of cryptic visions. Upon hatching, the newly formed dragonborn emerge fully grown, ready to handle whatever task they have been given. However, this power and transformation comes at a steep cost: dragonborn remember very little of their life before their transformation, typically only hazily remembering the moments before they were chosen. A dragonborn may begin to remember bits and pieces of their previous life as they adventure, typically because of some sort of eidetic trigger or other sense memory.
Because dragonborn typically do not remember their original names, they will often name themselves after some aspect of their mission, their deity, or a virtue or ideal they hold. This is the case with Crash, the dragonborn cleric of the Storm Queen that was created for a one-shot, played by my lovely wife, @tsukidoesthething; Crash named herself for the crash of thunder that is so connected to her deity and to herself as a blue dragonborn. Furthermore, dragonborn may differ wildly from their original selves; a female elf commoner, for example, may become a male dragonborn druid. Dragonborn tend towards the alignment of their deity, and so do not have any racial predisposition to an alignment. Dragonborn almost invariably become adventurers or similar in the drive to see their mission accomplished. Given their connection to the gods, they often take up a divine spellcasting class. The color of a dragonborn’s scales, and the element and shape of their breath weapon is linked to what god created them, with the most clear connection coming from the elemental deities.
What reward dragonborn receive for completing their mission is a closely guarded secret, and some dragonborn may not actually know what reward awaits them. (Note to DMs: They become true dragons; this does not need to be immediate if the dragonborn has unfinished business to complete as a mortal/you have more campaign left. That said, because of their origins as mortals, dragons on Soril are not Color Coded For Your Convenience.) It is known, however, what happens to dragonborn who fail their mission: they become twisted monsters, such as wyverns, hydra, chimera, or behir. It is unclear how long dragonborn live, given that they usually succeed or fail at their mission before old age could claim them.
Dragonborn are not true-breeding. While it is rare enough that two compatible dragonborn would meet, any children they would have would not be dragonborn. Instead, the eggs hatch into Kobolds, who are true-breeding and present in most places of the world.