I mean, what else is there to say? Dimension 20 - On A Bus was one of the greatest first episodes of D20 to date. Incredible players, stellar setting, and AMAZING DM-ing by Katie! For a first time running a game, she absolutely NAILED it. I had my doubts, but if there's anyone who can fill Brennan's American Girl Shoes, it's her. @dropoutdottv @dimension20official @gamechangershow, if you need someone to do character art for the new season, I'm your man!
The problem with playing smash or pass is that there's a lot of characters which I'm not sexually attracted to but I would fuck in a heartbeat out of sheer curiosity and ego, like I don't find Mickey Mouse attractive at all but if he approached me at a bar and went "Hey sexy, want me to show you my mouseketool?" I would say yes because then I get to tell my friends I fucked Mickey Mouse
you fool, look what you've done. you've taken a perfectly simple binary decision and turned it into an alignment chart
“The old magic persists thanks to it’s unfathomable power.”
No, the old magic persists because the new magic can’t run the legacy spells I need to do my job, and keeps trying to install spirits I don’t want or need onto my orb.
Look, if the new magic didn't have a personality construct that kept trying to tell me which spells to use, maybe I wouldn't still be using the old magic.
Yes it had a deep blood cost, but at least it was a one time sacrifice and not this monthly bloodletting nonsense new age magic has
The old magic is forbidden not because it's particularly dangerous but because Elvish copyright has an extremely long lifetime and you really do not want to be hit with that Scroll of Cease & Desist
romance of the three kingdoms FURRY EDITION! (Part 1)
I was listening to the Kung Fu Panda soundtrack and got inspired by their amazing animal designs. ok i gotta explain liu bei's design. the obvious choice is to make him a dog because of his loyalty to his sworn brothers, but i think he's much closer to a tenacious, wily hare who manages escape every encounter by whisker, and thrive in a dangerous world surrounded by much stronger opponents.
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
- A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
- The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
- The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
- A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
- A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
- Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
- Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
- Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
- "This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "It works with my tome"
- "This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "That's fixed in Xaranthius' latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility."
- "This spell causes the hair to fall of cats." "Magister Olaus of Writhington uses it to help with his allergies. WORKING AS INTENDED."
I want to see wizards snarking at each other over different magical languages/scripts, the same way programmers do it over different languages.
- Sure, "High Tower is a powerful language, but it's such a pain to write. I just use Unity* as it's simple to write and can do nearly everything I need" "cranky because you can't memorize all the conjugations and declensions, aren't you?" "LOOK MAN, I CAN MEMORIZE ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACE OF YOUR MOTHER IN ECSTASY. IN FACT, BEHOLD!" *a little time window appears between them, demonstrating exactly that. The first wizard (seen through the window) turns around and winks at the "camera".
- "you kids today with your lizardman. How can you get anything done in a language without gendered pronouns? It's like fingerpainting. Sure you can learn on it but once you've got the basics you should switch over to a REAL language"
- "the Kalic have been here already. We better get out before the rest of their army marches in." "how can you be sure?" "you see that teleport?" "no" "well, if you COULD see it, you'd see it's written in Adevic Yevi. That's the Kalic magic language." "couldn't it be someone else? We saw those Monon traders, maybe one of them..." "no. No one writes Adevic Yevi unless they're being paid to. It's a language written by committee."
- Wizards going on a quest to get the spellbooks for a lost spell, only to find out that it was written in skydove cant. No one can read that shit! The creator must have been one of those weird "functional wizards". (They're obsessed with making sure their spells have no side effects)
- There's a small library on the outskirts of Freeport which tries to collect versions of basic spells in every language. The Adevic Yevi version of "fireball" takes up 7 pages, mostly boilerplate setting up the interfaces with fire and explosions and ExplodingMagicalBallFactorySingletons. The Lizardman version is basically "AHAHAHA, YOU GO BOOM!"
- There's a bunch of wizard apprentices working on porting an old "Summon Bread and Fishes" spell from the absolutely archaic language it was written in. Once it's in Unity, it'll be easy to modify and teach to more wizards, which'll obviously be good for disaster areas. It's just too expensive to keep paying the ancient guys who can still do magic in TRAN-FOR.
- Eccentric wizards keep inventing new languages for spells. You look at them and they're neat, but it'll never catch on. And either you're right, or the next time you're applying to be a court wizard, the advisors want to know if you have at least 5 years experience in Tilted Runic and you're like "it only came out 2 years ago!" "aren't you a chronomancer?" "oh good point. Yeah I've been using it for 20-30 years."
- There's wizards who will spend incredible amounts of time doing silly things with spells in strange ways. There's this guy (Vorth) who made his own language where there's only one basic spell: fireball. Everything else is basic magic glue tying multiple fireballs together. So like, he's got a breakfast spell. Stand back (good advice for all his spells), and you'll see a fish get knocked out of the local pond, flung through the air by successive explosions, and eventually it lands on his plate, nicely cooked and deboned, if slightly charred (the glass of milk is harder to explain). His magical door locks involve a quicksilver sphere and molten lead changing shape when heated... It's tricky but it seems to work. He's working on a teleport spell, but so far it's mainly just killed test subjects (primarily sheep from a nearby farm).
* so the funny thing here is that this isn't a reference to the unity game engine. The main country in my One Hundred and One Magical Pistols setting is called "the union" and their language is called "unity".
It's wands vs staves vs bare hands.
Wanders are like "they're available everywhere and once you learn how to do it it's so powerful!"
Staffguys always talk about how you can do ANYTHING with a staff. Wanders claim it's a pain to carry around an overpowered device that can do ANYTHING when you just need to cast fireball or a simple one man teleport.
Meanwhile the bare wizards are showing off how they don't need any magical tools and can just do hand motions.
Wanders and staffguys retort that when a spell goes wrong, THEY need to go to store for a new magical tool. YOU need new hands.
The wizards who studied Conjurational Arcana are just like "well duh, of course, fireballs are Mordenkainen-complete".
You’ve been tasked with seeking out new food sources for your village. Food is scarce, but thankfully, your community isn’t picky. You can’t afford to be picky.
One day, you find it: a miracle food source hidden away in ruins no one goes in anymore. Everything about it is strange— the terrain is unfamiliar, the food is delicious and plentiful, the circumstances suspicious. Could this be divine intervention? You decide it doesn’t matter much.
Your squad feasts. You eat well. With your bellies full of food and your hearts full of joy, you carry as much of the food back with you as you can carry. You feel very confident for the first time in a long while that your community will be fed.
Your village feasts. The banquets are endless. Squads are sent to continuously replenish this wondrous food supply. Everyone is fed and happy and it is good.
And you almost don’t notice at first, but you very, very slowly fall ill.
You don’t immediately connect it at first, blaming it on this and that. You’re just more tired than usual, is all.
But all of your squad members fall ill, too. The oldest one dies.
The plague (curse?) spreads throughout the entire village. Being well-fed isn’t enough to stop it. More and more families fall sickly en masse.
The squads are hit the hardest. That’s when you finally make the connection. The food is bad.
But it’s too late.
No one can recover fast enough. Everyone has eaten the food.
When the beloved matriarch falls ill, you know this will be the end for your village. There’s no way to recover enough people, especially without any proper leadership. You know your village will silently disappear, and you know you won’t be around enough to see if any survivors will make it out ok.
If only you could be there to warn them not to eat the mysterious food in the future. If only you could warn them that it’s a trap.
honestly I think about this every time I lay one of these out
fellas, don't call yourself a "sigma male" unless you
- have an 18 inch dick
- are a stem major
- look either much older or much younger than you actually are
- live on the moon
- named your clone kyle
- created a robot that looks just like your dead gf from another timeline
- father twin children in an apocalypse bunker
- are really into termites
