fhylie

[fhylie]

[fhylie]

Lake Superior , Canada 🇨🇦 / USA 🇺🇸

[fhylie]

Who is the best Rogue in fiction published since 1980 and why is it Lyra "Silvertongue" Belacqua?

Maybe? I haven't actually read His Dark Materials.

But here's a hot take: your Rogue card is immediately revoked if you're an Oh So Special Chosen One. (Even if you're Locke Lamora? Yes, even then.) You can still be roguish, just not a Rogue. Rogues don't have prophecies about them, don't pull swords off stones, and don't inherit thrones (though they might steal a few). Rogues are nobodies, the salt of the earth, and they aren't destined to do anything. They make their own luck. Like this guy.

[fhylie]

Now that I've posted a little bit about the campaign world, at least as much as the PCs knew at level one, I think I'll post a bit about the player characters in my game. I'm a stream of thought guy, so that'll open me up to what I want to post about next.

First character up is Morgan Ioztor - I don't think I really want to list who the players are as I haven't really checked with them about that. So, here we go.

This first image is what we used as a base for Morgan's character art. I've never been able to find a source for it, and I suspect it's part of a bigger image. If anyone who sees this knows where it's from, I'd love to know!

Morgan is a half-elf hexblade warlock multiclassed with swashbuckler rogue. He grew up poor in Sanctuary, in a favela (slum, ghetto, poor working class neighbourhood) called Hautsez-Tatu, where his father Konon is a labourer who has desperately tried to instill a sense of hard work and responsibility in his son, and his mother Morwenna works as a waitress and cares for Morgan's siblings and cousins, all younger than him, named Danel, Agurne, Alazne, Pau, and Josep.

As far as being half-elven goes, Morgan is basically the same as the humans in Sanctuary. His elven part comes from a nation of elves called the Fanno, who are very strongly tree-worshipping and have particular ideas about magic and who is legally allowed to raise a child. However, Morgan and his family don't have much connection with that; they've lived in Sanctuary since the time of an ancestor dynasty of the current Fanno that were more focused on exploration and sailing, over a thousand years ago. In other words, he's just half-elven because both of his parents are, and doesn't have much connection with nature or songs or the joy of crafstmanship.

The Ioztors themselves have had a crowded, stressful life living in a dangerous part of town. Gang activity is overlooked by the city guard, since no one in Hautsez-Tatu is wealthy enough to command their attention or influence city officials, and most parents are split between worry that their children will get pulled into a life of crime or that said life of crime might be the only opportunity they have.

Things worked a little differently for Morgan, though. At the age of 12, Morgan was kidnapped and taken to an altar beneath the city to be used by a bunch of grey-robed figures in a sacrificial ritual. As in, he definitely died. That didn't stop him from being found injured a few days later, to the relief of his parents and the confusion of the young boy.

While recovering from his injuries, Morgan found over time that he was able to bring into his hand an odd knife, made from mottled grey stone with red flecks, with a dull chunk of ruby in the hilt, and taking a slightly different appearance every time. When he showed his parents they were confused by it, but since there wasn't any other adverse effect, it didn't seem like he was cursed.

His friends, however, simply thought it was cool, and spread the idea to him that getting his hands on something magic meant he was supposed to do something with it. Since he didn't have the connections or funds to get the knife looked at by a magister or even a hedge-wizard, it just became a part of his life, with his friends occasionally being wowed if the knife saw fit to give him some new trick. As he grew up, Morgan's distaste for the criminal element in Hautsez-Tatu led him to "patrol" the area, ideally helping friendly citizens where the city guard would not.

At 19 years old, Morgan is dissatisfied and listless with trying to deal with the problems of his home district. His father berates him for not seeking out real work, his mother continually needs him to take care of his younger siblings, his friends and hangers-on are lost to the novelty of his very limited magic powers, and he's had absolutely no luck at all trying to figure out even the most basic properties of the knife other than it's sharp, he can summon it from somewhere, and it lets him cast spells sometimes.

Just before game start, though, one thing of note has occurred: by complete chance while ranging outside of his normal haunts in a nearby wealthier area of town called Magialdean, Morgan ran into a very familiar-feeling man in a grey robe. At the same time, the knife pulled him towards the man, an odd internal call and direction which drew him into an alleyway the man was using as a shortcut as he skulked around, attempting to remain out of sight. Following the grey-robed man in half a trance, Morgan was almost along for the ride in a way as the grey-robed man noticed him approaching, recognized both Morgan and the knife in his hand, and collapsed instantly in death from what should have been a non-lethal slice.

Regaining control of himself in an alleyway with a corpse, in a nicer part of town where the city guard actually cares, still with no explanation of his situation, Morgan starts our game in a rising level of panic.

Behind the scenes a little here, I asked each player to have something else about their character that wasn't "in the rules", as it were, to better define their character. Morgan's player wanted there to be a lot he didn't know, a mystery to solve about the origins of the knife (a fun little device called the Shard of Ruin, which he learns later), he wanted to have some missing memories to track down, and he wanted it to tie into what I had said would be a main adversary of the campaign, which is aberrations, body-snatchers, and mind control. I, of course, was only too happy to oblige.

Unknown to the players at the start, though I shared this with them later, I also decided on themes to throw at them. Morgan's was "choices", both the possibility of choice and the pressure of being made to make hard choices.

I also drew a number of major arcana tarot cards (hello, Rider-Waite deck) for each player and picked themes based on what fit best. Morgan's drawn cards were the Devil, the Chariot, Strength, and the Wheel of Fortune. I picked out the Devil as what I would focus on for themes, both because it's great thematically for a warlock even if he doesn't deal directly with fiends (yet, ho ho), but we've also got the base card meanings of "Ravage, violence, vehemence, extraordinary efforts, force, fatality; that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil" and "Reversed: Evil fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness." These paired pretty nicely with some stuff I had planned down the road as well as the whole thing with choices.

I think this is a pretty good picture of the character at the start of the game - he doesn't have those rogue levels or specialization yet, and he hasn't run into the other party members yet, who are certainly not going to get him into any less trouble.

Let's close out the post with some extra pictures of Morgan, as well as some others, drawn or created by @aaeds. I swear I'm not going to tag you in every post. She does a ton of extra art for the game and it's sick as hell. You don't have to ask about the furby one.

#what lies beneath #dungeons & dragons

[fhylie]

Abandoned Tori Gate found in Japanese Tunnel

Such gates are used to mark the entrance to sacred grounds or gods' territories. "The tori gate symbolizes the division between the sacred and the profane, and is considered a spiritual gateway between the physical world and the spiritual realm."

[fhylie]

hilarious drama going on on reddit, the least respectable social media site i use. someone goes to r/legaladvice with a question about a shitty interaction with a cop. pretty normal post.

some users replied with regular advice, but one r/legaladvice moderator came in saying it was OP's fault, defending the cop. when OP requested they "please read the post", they equipped their next reply with their little mod hat and told them that showing attitude would result in a ban.

after receiving hundreds of downvotes (and many replies, all of which were removed and banned), the r/legaladvice mod nuked the thread in a fit of anger.

so you'd think it'd stop there, right? well, that's where you're wrong.

there's another subreddit called r/bestoflegaladvice, where the more interesting r/legaladvice threads are reposted for audiences to take the piss out of. and of course, a mod throwing a tantrum and nuking a thread because they were asked to read would make that cut. so it was reposted! and of course, everyone started rightfully calling the mod a bootlicker.

people then started pointing out that the r/legaladvice mod team has cops on it, at which point, part two of the drama starts: some people are mods of both r/legaladvice AND r/bestoflegaladvice, and they get really mad when you call them cops (derogatory).

so of course, they take the best course of action, which is to angrily reply to comments calling them cops and then use mod powers to delete the comments they don't like, insisting that only ONE r/legaladvice mod is a cop, so it's totally fine!

the r/bestoflegaladvice thread was then deleted and locked by mods, presumably for "republicizing deleted comments".

the same thread was then reposted to r/bestoflegaladvice. again, the thread fills with people calling the r/legaladvice mods cops.

this thread was also deleted and locked by r/bestoflegaladvice mods.

but it doesn't end there! because there's ANOTHER subreddit called r/subredditdrama, where the juiciest drama from all manner of subreddits gets reposted. and you'll never believe what's gone on long enough to count as drama.

here, free from the shackles of reddit's legaladvice world, users were free to dunk on the mods as much as they want.

the r/subredditdrama thread was eventually deleted as well (but not locked) just because they don't accept links to nuked threads since the original can't be read, but thankfully, everything had been archived by that point.

and just because the streisand effect should never go unrealized, i'm reposting it here, to tumblr. who knows, maybe someone will bother to screencap this and put it on r/curatedtumblr, and it will eventually live on in reddit again.

as for OP, they reposted their situation to r/nostupidquestions and later posted this update:

moral of the story: never go to reddit for legal advice, because the legal advice subreddit is run by ONE cop.

#yeah I'll repost that

[fhylie]

if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.

[fhylie]

all things said abt les misérables "cop who experiences one (1) moral conundrum and then promptly kills himself" is like objectively one of the funniest characters you can have

[fhylie]

Knights attempting a Leap of Faith to reach the Holy Grail

— Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

[fhylie]

👀 Mediterranean solidarity ✊

[fhylie]

In the Middle Ages, it was very common to wear a book case on the belt. Book of Hours, Bible, Breviary etc and they were thus at your fingertips.

This one is Italian, made between 1465 and 1485, in nicely worked leather.

[fhylie]

gallons of the stuff <3

[fhylie]

oscar woodiwis

[fhylie]

[fhylie]

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, on account that a bunch of monsters can turn you into a monster by biting you. Vampires, werewolves, zombies. those are the big ones, there are others

[fhylie]

solcomma

[fhylie]

Justin O'Neal