Hi there! Big fan of the stuff ya do here! I don't wanna take up ya time and certainly not making a request or nothing, but I've been working on a D&D adventure based on my Krenko commander deck and I wanted to ask some advice on how you convert the abilities of cards to statblocks. Namely, I'm not really sure how to keep the vibe of Krenko's doubling goblins effect without just making like a bag of rats situation. Any advice I could pick from ya brain? o3o
Hey there, thanks for saying so! I'm happy to help out. I understand the difficulty too-- token generators are always tricky to convert, especially if there doesn't seem to be a good in-lore explanation for the way the abilities of the card mesh together. Since you mention doubling, I'm going to assume we're talking Krenko, Mob Boss (although I think any advice I give here could work for Tin Street Kingpin too).
My first thought is to connect the ability to Krenko's position as a gang leader, and perhaps to the idea of inciting a riot. For that, I would actually set the ability as a lair action, or just a function of the environment. For the former, give Krenko a lair action that calls up one goblin for every goblin who's already shown up. Maybe they all call for friends. Count Krenko too-- so he summons one pal, then next round they both summon another, then next round you get four more. Each goblin knocked out is one that can't call an ally, and they can all flee if Krenko is beaten. If it's a function of the environment instead, perhaps with a battle set during a goblin riot, use a clock. Each round on initiative count 20, for each goblin on the map, another one shows up. Be explicit about that, and let your PCs know that as long as Krenko and the other goblins run wild, things will keep getting out of hand. In both cases, you could allow Krenko to use a legendary action to direct the actions of these goblins, but otherwise they might loot, trash buildings, and generally cause havoc (including sometimes attacking PCs without being ordered to).
Straight up giving Krenko an ability that summons additional goblins also isn't a bad idea, but you could describe them as appearing out of alleyways, climbing up through storm drains, popping out of crates and barrels, dropping in from higher levels of the city, etc. Really go all-in on the traditional "goblin warren" type of situation, maybe make a d10 list of places they show up and roll it whenever you need to describe them appearing. Also, give a reaaaaaaally big range of where a "summoned" goblin could appear relative to Krenko. Maybe just anywhere on the map, setting them up for sudden attacks against PCs who thought they had good positioning. If you do with this option, I'd set it as a recharge ability, with the number of goblins depending on Krenko's CR (somewhere between 1d4 and 2d4). If you do, to get a semi-accurate read of Krenko's CR just add each goblin's flat HP and average damage to Krenko's own. So for example, if he summons 1d4 goblins (an average of ~2) with each use of the recharge ability just add 14 extra hit points and 10 damage/round to Krenko's stats when calculating his CR (using the normal assumption of three rounds of combat as listed in the DMG).
Hopefully that helps a bit! None of these are too off-the-wall, but it sounded like you wanted something more grounded anyway. Good luck!
Extremely helpful actually, danke mate! Yeah honestly the biggest hurdle of it weirdly is just that at least in lore Krenko don't really got a logical reason for mass goblin reproduction like he does in the cards XD the funny "overcomplicated" way I've thought for it, since I'm basically using my whole deck for inspo, is he's got the Door of Destinies amongst his hoard of treasures and turned out to be a door put there by Duskmourn's Valgavoth (which I called a "Door of Delirium" jus for the fun) and basically made a pact with Krenko that juiced the mobster gobster to near Planeswalker power! Xp
And funny enough, I also have Tin Street Kingpin Krenko in the deck with the idea he's a timewarped copy of himself since I already got other legendary gobs that after looking at the lore would DEFINITELY be dead in the current day >w<
At last, it is time. So this post is going to be different from my Hollow Knight one as I drew way more stuff this time around.
I was ecstatic when I found out that Silksong had food related worldbuilding in it. I was really grasping at straws with the Hollow Knight one, so I’m glad I have much more to work with here! >:)
In the past year I’ve learned way more about agriculture and food production. Previously, I was very reliant on Greenpath (I also regret not making proper use of Fungal Wastes)—however, Silksong also has way more varied and “nature-rich” regions which allowed me to spread out crops and resources over different areas. I’ll likely be making another post at some point that’ll go more into depth about my field research since I took over 200 in-game screenshots of plants and such…and then learned how to rip game files so I could get the raw spites.
Also bc I got questions about this with my last hk food concepts piece, if you want to use any of the ideas here for personal projects, fanwork, etc—go ahead. You don’t need my permission, the world is your oyster
But anyway, my commentary regarding the art will be under the cut since this is already getting pretty long.
Spices, Herbs, and Seasoning
Man I didn’t even come up with unique names for like 90% of this. Okay so this section probably takes the most inspiration from in-game environment sprites out of any of the agricultural sections. Thyme, tarragon, rosemary, sage, chamomile, white plum blossoms, the red pea flower, sumac, and of course clovers all are based on my silksong field journal. I added a new blossom to the nectar flower section, the purple ones are more rare but you can harvest saffron from them. The white ones come with plums and nectar. Vanilla blossoms are rare but chamomile is plentiful, it blends in with the white rose-like flowers that are all over Shellwood. The red flowers are called “pea plants” in the game files so i kept that part of the name. But the seeds are a stand-in for allspice. I haven’t decided on what to do with the leaves/main body. Coral stars are based on star anise—peppercorns, cloves, chives, and coriander are just that. I finished this section ages ago, I’ve just been procrastinating on every other section.
Fruit
A lot of these are inspired by either in-game environmental sprites and/or real life fruits. Mossberries and silk fruit are obviously in game, but everything else is made up. So quick rundown:
ice apple → ice fruit, cloudberry → puffberry (I had also called it “powderberry” in my notes), jackfruit → mega-mossfruit, durian → spikefruit, Yang Mei → coral plum, miracle berries → rosary berries, mangosteen → crustfruit, rattan fruit → oocula, sugar apple → plated sugar apple. I didn’t change the name for the Kaffir Lime because I got lazy. My, uh, design for the rattan fruit may have been inspired by the Ooca, tit fruit.
The coral plums were still called yangmei up until like the last second, I truly had no creativity left. The lotus fruit probably should’ve been in this section but reorganizing these pages is a nightmare.
Vegetables, Roots, Yams
The spiral sprouts, moss artichoke, abyss root, lotus fruit, and cotton puffs were influenced by environmental spirits I screenshotted while doing field research. I would’ve just combined this section with the fruits but these pieces are so crowded and convoluted, it would’ve been a mess.
I don’t know where the Silk Squash or Lufta’s names came from, squashes all look so similar that it’s impossible for me to figure out what I based them on. Those may very well have been their actual name but google is not helping me here. Celtuse is the original name but the coloration is different. Lotus root, lotus fruit, oca, mashua, and the bamboo shoots didn’t get special names. As for the others: black radish → void radish, black carrot → void carrot, scorzonera → abyss root, winged bean → verdania bean, cardoon → cotton puff, fiddlehead → spiral sprout, samphire → asparagus, crosne/chinese artichoke → artichoke root
Mushrooms (Bilelands)
There wasn’t enough here to fill a full page so I vertical-ized it. Get condensed fool. Anyway, I got lazy here after the Paper Mushrooms. These are all based on real mushrooms (minus the aforementioned paper mushrooms which are based on environmental sprites), I didn’t really do any research on their habitats or anything (morels probably shouldn’t be here). So this section isn’t super high effort compared to the others. Also I combined Sinner’s Road, Bilewater, and Putrified Ducts together for the Bilelands, since that’s how Vog refers to them.
Extras (+ baking soda)
I’m now going to subject you to my algae farming agenda.
Algae is a super underrated resource, in real life where we have sunlight and large swaths of land for agriculture, its usefulness is less so, but for limited settings (like space faring or underground bug civilizations) algae is a good resource for farming. Algae/spira flour and glucose can be produced through it, as well as oil (which I believe can be used for plastic production). Other sources for flour like rice and sorghum have to be farmed in specific conditions, but for the citadel, spira flour is probably more accessible. Sucrose requires sugarcane which likely became less accessible when the burning bugs took over wisp thicket. Spira flour has a natural green coloration but the capital uses bone char to bleach it white (bone char comes from deep docks). Fructose and glucose sugar have a whiter tint so they don’t need as much processing. Some of this is based off of real life processes, some of it is me talking out my ass.
And yes, I did come up with a method for how they’re acquiring soda bicarbonate, unfortunately it’s very convoluted. In my HK food chart I just listed soda bicarbonate as coming from mineral springs, but Pharloom doesn’t have hot springs everywhere so I had to get more technical.
Salt Spikes (from Sands of Karak) combined w/Ground Limestone to create “Soda Ash” which is then dissolved in water and combined w/Carbon Dioxide (found in groundwater & lakes) to create Baking Soda.
Alternative method: Salt Spikes combined w/Ammonia (found in Deep Docks) and Carbon Dioxide to create Baking Soda and Ammonium Chloride (used in fertilizer).
Can be found (albeit rarely) naturally occurring in basins & hot springs. Sometimes found in mudrock (Deep Docks), co-product of shale oil extraction from solution mining. This is all based on real life, I’ve just simplified it heavily. Method two is literally just the Solvay Process. A lot of this is paraphrased from Wikipedia and I understand the basic gist of it but I’m not a chemist.
This project had me googling insane shit again, but this time it was more to the tune of “do bugs have collagen” rather than “do bugs make milk” so we’ve improved slightly. I’m ignoring the fact that they don’t have collagen, there’s probably some beasts around somewhere that are vertebrate.
Oh yeah also I’m into vinegar now. I had some pomegranate vinegar and it was delicious. Pour some of that into a nice cold glass of club soda and it would be perfect unfortunately my mother has hidden the vinegar. Uh, so anyway, there’s more vinegar options. Fruit, sugarcane, and grains. Oh yeah and the Cheong method of syrup making returns, this one uses a lot of sugarcane so its more old fashioned (in this setting not in real life).
Animal Products
I previously had roach milk as this decadent dairy product and then Silksong introduced roaches and put them in the biohazard area, so, surprise! It’s gone sour now.
Weaver milk is infinitely more rare here, but I should clarify that when I’m saying weaver milk I don’t just mean The Weavers, I meant spiders in general. The weavers aren’t having kids, but the Phallids may produce more offspring that will require some nutrients.
Ant and craw milk are more normal. I realize the craws are bugs, but I’m treating them like birds. So they get eggs and milk. Ant milk is thicker and richer in flavor while craw milk is more watery and nutritious. The cheeses present are all based off of real cheeses—Lebanese white cheese, camembert cheese, and blue cheese. Weaver silk cheese is inspired by the Centaur’s silk cheese in JayEaton’s “Runaway to the Stars” series.
As for eggs, the craw eggs are more like typical bird eggs, while the maggot eggs are gelatinous and usually laid in gooey bunches underwater. I had to google ant eggs for this drawing so you all owe me money for that. The moss egg is me capitulating to the game design, they look like artichokes to me so I used the design simultaneously for the vegetable and the egg. I imagine some foragers have had the traumatic experience of dropping what they thought was a plant and it then cracking like an egg upon impact. Or biting into it and it making a gooey crunch. These are all good ideas.
Oh yeah, meat. Standard meat here. Added some more organ cuts and included some creatures that are referred to as edible prey either in the compendium or by NPCs.
I’m glad my pickling inclinations the last time were fulfilled here, more pickling. Vinegar is great and we should be using it more. Get pickling now! The sauerkraut is here because I was so focused on pickling that I forgot that the page was for animal products.
Also ignore the crust organ, I put it in the animal products section, but in my head its a 50/50 between “stone from the guts of a [previously] living macro-organism” and “big walnut”.
Miscellaneous Musings
I know that in-game the Memorium is meant as a sort of zoo/archive for the fauna and flora of different regions. But I think it would also serve as a useful area for farming, since the citadel likely doesn’t want to have to rely on other regions for food production. Deep Docks serves a strong role in mining/harvesting the materials needed for filtration, purification, etc. for various baking ingredients. But Shellwood and Sands of Karak likely also were and are very important for food production. Salt is a necessary resource, which may still be harvestable post-collapse. If Pharloom Bay somehow gets added in a future DLC/update (Edit: right after I fucking posted this) then I can probably use that for salt production.
I need to learn how to mod Silksong so I can add new regions/areas in. That’ll likely take me forever though, I have a microscopic level of modding experience. The HK modding community is more combat/platforming focused, which makes sense considering the game genre. I just wish modders did region expansions in Hollow Knight like the Rain World modders do. I love the Rain World region expansions, The Mast, Fog Gulch, and Preservatory are my favorites.
But in terms of achievable Silksong mods—the organ harvesting quest is my favorite quest in the game and if someone could make a mod that extends it to like 100-150 per category I’d appreciate it.
Team Cherry should hire me to design/draw stuff for a DLC, I definitely won’t spend the entire time creating 30 food-related fetch quests. I have depths beyond this!
This post got me thinking, we’re probably going to get a Q card. What creature type is he going to be?
I don’t think Alien God works. Alien Avatar might but that’s stretching it a little. They might make him just a Q, which would be the shortest creature type in all of magic. But then again there’s only like… half a dozen Q that we’ve ever seen, and only one of THOSE is even remotely likely to get a card.
Q seems like the only card type that could work for him is a planeswalker which is tricky cause new planeswalker cards aren't exactly popular but everything else just seems beneath what Q would want for a card Xp
OK but I do genuinely believe we need to push for something like this before it's too late - and not just in digital spaces. We should have the right to peace and quiet from advertising. There should be more limits on how much and where we get advertising because otherwise it'll just become a creep of more and more until every fucking public space is lit with several billboards blasting us with ads, and the walls between spaces lined with ads, and our commutes filled with ads, and local parks sponsored by corporations to offset the cost of local councils, and so on and on and on and on. No. I need quiet. I need spaces where ads cannot touch me.
Grenoble, France, in 2014 banned any new billboards and took down the city owned ones in a step towards de-advertizing public spaces. They swapped out the billboards with trees btw!
The city of Nantes in western France has recently banned most electronic billboards, dismantling 110 in one night. The municipality is also cutting digital advertising in shop windows and on the public transport system. It’s also banned all advertising near schools. Which is apart of Frances over all goal to reduce visual noise and light.
In 2009, Chennai, India prohibiting billboards, digital banners and placards in public spaces.
São Paulo Brazil created a law "Lei Cidade Limpa" (Portuguese for clean city law) in 2006
Several states, namely Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska have banned Billboards and have been working on other electronic ad bans.
This article goes over what some other locations might look like without such advertising
So just know these kinda policies are possible! Whether your in Europe where the UN is working on anti-Ad legislation, in the US, or South America!
I know that trading the Crown of Karsus to Raphael is considered one of the "bad" endings, but as I read through the Descent Into Avernus D&D module (which immediately precedes the events of BG3), I keep finding myself thinking "holy shit but does Avernus need some regime change."
Like yeah Raphael is bad but Zariel is SO COMPLETELY TERRIBLE that replacing her with pretty much anybody would most likely be an improvement.
Not to be like that guy and dunk on creativity but… it IS the 9 Hells, and like Avernus being the frontlines in the Blood War makes it especially brutal so like…… frankly I dun trust Raph to make it any better XD
They're squeans I'm pretty sure! If they pop like that anyway. But the term for this kind of "symbol to refer to the general vibe of something in art" is called "Emanata" because it emanates from a person or object.
i just think that since the death of the block system and the discontinuation of tie-in novels, magic: the gathering sets are simply not well equipped to tell a story about a setting experiencing a big shift in status quo 'on-screen', so to speak, because the vast majority of everyone engaging with the story is just going to do so through the cards (and even the vorthos loreheads are only getting like a single digit number of short stories). case in point: tell anybody who isn't already super invested in magic story that the big dramatic ending to new capenna was angels returnign to the plane and 99% they will say "wait, there weren't meant to be angels on the plane?", because there's a whole bunch of angel cards in the dang set.
what they are very well equipped to do is show a world and situation that's changed since we last saw it--magic sets, as a format, give you a staggering amount of breadth to work with when it comes to showcasing the different corners of a world and how they could potentially interact with each other. like any good toy storyline -- take, for all its.Many, mny, many flaws, the warhammer lore, which is very good at this -- magic stories are best equipped to be about giving you a big powderkeg world in which you can imagine exciting stories about why your guys would be hitting each other.
so "this is the new status quo" is simply yhe story a modern day mtg set is best equipped to tell, and i'd rather it do a good job of that than a bad one of trying to tell the story of the Big Battle That Changes Lots of Stuff, check in ten years from now to find out what the consequences of it were! (also, like, there was already a set about the khans fighting the dragons, it was called 'fate reforged' innit and you can go online and order a booster box of it right now if you really want it)
dinosaurs are like the coolest thing possible for a child to learn about. it’s like hey i know you were just borned but giant monsters are real and they fought each other in wars for 100000000000 years and then blew up when the sky exploded.
occasionally an anticommunist will say something to you to the effect of "wow believing all this must make you miserable" which is funny bc 1. that doesn't make it not true and 2. i think the exact same shit happening but being unable to understand it and believing this is the best possible world and there's no alternative is a lot more miserable, as evidenced by how 3. liberals don't seem very happy right now, a lot of them seem to be always miserable in fact
(One of) My favorite things about Sorin is the circumstances surrounding his planeswalker spark igniting.
We know from the Innistrad art book that Sorin was the first vampire to be sired after Edgar.
And we know from the MTG Visual Guide that Sorin sparked during - if not right after - his transformation into a vampire (thanks @bace-jeleren, I owe you my life)
And we also know from the C17 art of Blood Tribute that this was a public ceremony with numerous onlookers and Olivia Voldaren next in line.
WHICH MEANS
Olivia watched Sorin drink demon-cursed angel blood, explode out of existence, and still decided “yeah, I’ll have a cup of that”.
tumblr user parasect doesnt even know former WOTC writer alison luhrs confirmed on twitter that the demonic contracts reversed liliana’s menopause and caused her to start having periods again
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