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Haunted by a fantasy world where "adventurer" is handled in the same way as "assassin" in John Wick. An ifykyk secondary economy running on gold coins where everyone knows each other but no one acknowledges the elephant in the room because we have manners about our weird-ass line of deadly desperate dangerous work.

Rolling into town, looking immaculate. Checking into the Inn. Not an inn, or the coaching house, or the traveler's hostel. The Inn. The one that takes my ridiculous oversized coin and says that my room is ready, and will I need to visit the Smith today? Perhaps a meeting with the Vintner? Shall I send up the Gourmand?

"Good afternoon, Master Whicke," the Smith says, putting aside the barrel scraper he's been working on to flip a switch beside the forge. Racks of tenpenny nails and trowels and hammers fold back to reveal the glittering points and edges of a score of swords and axes and spearpoints lit with the flicker of finely-tuned enchantments. "Shall we tour what's new?"

"What sort of occasion are we hosting, Master Whicke?" The Vintner asks, pocketing the coin with a sigh. "A funeral," you say.

"Ah, well perhaps something light to start, then," she says selecting a straight-walled flask that glitters with contained starlight, proof against the touch of the undead. " And something for remembrance," she plucks a small crock of something evil-smelling and phosphorescent. "And then something to really bring down the house." She gingerly selects a double ampoule of energetic looking jellies.

The Gourmand carefully runs his knife through the salted flank of a cockatrice with a pursing of the lips. "So many neglect trail rations, Master Whicke, and it is their shame. Paired with goldenwheat pancakes and carrion honey, a mouthful of cockatrice--properly seasoned of course--will keep the mummy rot at bay, even post-exposure. I have been given to indicate by the Management that your current escapade may make such information useful to you. I will of course wrap your purchases exceedingly carefully. Rot will be your constant companion in the Black Pyramid."

There's something here.

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More random tropes that I fucking love: Becoming the mask you wore.

Like oh shit, this character who was sent to spy somewhere under a false identity suddenly realises they've started to genuinely become the person they claimed to be? Someone who's been telling the same lies about who they are for so long that they're actually forgetting that the story isn't true? Finding themselves genuinely doing the things they pretend to do in front of people, when they're alone and nobody's watching? Answering to a name that wasn't supposed to be theirs without thinking?

Ooohh-hoh-hoh, you lost track of yourself in pretending to be someone else? You were only supposed to impersonate somebody, a plausible background and a name you came up with on the spot, and now that the people you were supposed to infiltrate have become your true companions? You lost yourself in the game you played, and no you no longer know who you truly are, and where your true loyalties lie? And both sides would mark you a traitor if you came out with the truth. On a scale of one to ten, how bad did you fuck up.

Fuck that is a good trope. Never seen it done badly. Pour that shit on a table and I'll chop it into lines and snort it.

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It's pretty easy to come up with a single course of action you could (theoretically) take that would piss off a lot of people. It's a lot harder to come up with a single course of action you could take that would appease them all again.

If you've pissed off a lot of people, and you're asking them what you should do next, and all their answers contradict each other - that's not because they're chaotic and unreasonable, it's because you've pissed off a large number of individual people.

#context free shitposting

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Recent sketchbook pages! All freehand ink

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Weekly Worldbuilding Prompt #29

Who is the boogeyman of your setting? Who is it that features in stories to get children to behave; whose name is invoked to keep people afraid to leave their homes at night? Is their reputation well-earned, or are the stories scarier than reality?

#weekly wednesday worldbuilding #worldbuilder's almanac

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DEATH OF THE AUTHOR is a solo tarot TTRPG of character autonomy.

Play as a Character attempting to gain agency by wresting narrative control from their Author.

Gameplay involves drawing tarot cards for Scene Prompts, events written by the Author. The Character then edits these prompts to shape the story to their will.

Use caution - tampering with the narrative draws the attention of the Author, who might retaliate by using the Character’s own words against them.

Death of the Author will be crowdfunding on Backerkit starting May 14th. Follow the page to be notified when it launches!

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One thing most people don't realize about Gazebos is how bloodthirsty they used to be until the 1930s or so. It used to be that in order to appease your average small town gazebo you had to feed it 4-5 marching bands a year, or roughly 2 dozen barbershop groups. Noaways? Throw it a steely dan cover act every 6 months, maybe a bridal party every few years if you're actively trying to court its favor, and you're pretty much in the clear. And the crazy thing is nobody knows why they calmed down, or that their appetite for flesh won't return to its 19th century heights one day. It's actually an increasingly popular theory among modern Gazebo researchers that we're at the tail end of a period of dormancy and it's only a matter of time until they start howling for blood again. And if/when that does happen there's the question of whether our modern zeeb-keepers are really ready for the task of booking enough sacrificial acts to meet that increased demand. Guild policy has gotten lax in the century since the heyday of Dark Pavillionism and a lot of local keepers refuse to even look at newer research that threatened to upsettheir status quo. Kind of scary to think about

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Help me choose my party.

I am—and by extension, you are— heading to Chiron’s Doom. I cannot go alone. The game will not let me. Despite my misgivings about all of these strange rakehells, forlorn souls, mad-eyed seekers, and horrible blorbos of sundry makes and models, I cannot make the journey alone.

For slot 1 of 3, do I take:

Sparra Simms, a Grad Student from the Alienist’s Guild: She learned eye contact from a book, and is terrified that she’s doing it wrong, so she’s substituting enthusiasm for accuracy. Her robes are grounded with chokewire sigils in patterns that make my eyes water. She needs this job, because her thesis (already written) requires citations and the word of her otherworldly sponsors don’t count apparently. There is no language she cannot speak.

Bottom-Groat Gollivar, an Adventure-Capitalist (and Crux, the Alleged-Mule): Gollivar’s got an easy-going charm that shouldn’t ever exude from someone who presented a list of graves previously robbed as a resume. He’s got stuff, though, and that’s for sure. Most of it, he claims, is actually from Chiron’s Doom, and it wants badly to go back. He’ll sell some to me if I’d like. Crux, however, the not-quite-mule, crunches apples and spits out intact skins. Crux has clearly been to Chiron’s Doom before. Both of them are clearly skilled to have survived this long in their professions.

Marquis d’ Sercasso, Ovin Weems, Old Money and plenty of it: Freakishly well-equipped and startlingly intense for a person bred and raised in the lap of luxury, Ovin has already mapped the quickest route to the entrance to Chiron’s Doom and the Wellspringg beyond. They try to take my hand, tears dripping black from the corners of their kohled eyes. The dreams, apparently, started when they were named heir to Sercasso. They will find the heart of the Wellspring and Old Sercasso will rise again from the mires of the South. Magic will return to the world, and I could be a part of that. Don’t I want to be a part of that? They have more money than God.

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I had an interview with a local paper this week about this rock snake I started on the longest street of a nearby city (where I work) because it's bringing people so much joy:

I said something during the interview that the interviewer seemed really shocked by, so in case it's important for anyone else to hear: When asked about the rock snake and some scavenger hunts that I've hosted for adults, I said -

"We don't stop enjoying the things we liked as kids; they just stop being offered to us. And when you're a kid, fun things like art projects and scavenger hunts are always brought to you, so you're not taught to make a habit of seeking them out as and adult."

She said "Wow yeah... life is so stressful... and you don't think to... wow."

So if anyone else needs direct permission to be a whimsical adult child today, I hereby grant it to everyone. ❤️

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Glass Moth Wings

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okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

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sorry for acting batshit crazy I was feeling a little unwanted

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I'm gonna reblog with some videos of people speaking various American Indian/indigenous American languages, because I think most people don't even know what they sound like. Not to be judgement of that—just, you know, I think people who want to be informed should know what they sound like!

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The bit excerpted in the screenshot is delightful, but the full article itself is sobering and chilling: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/how-chinese-students-experience-america (12ft ladder to get past the paywall).

There, but for the grace of post-Tiananmen immigration reform, go I...

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Weekly Worldbuilding Prompt #28

How thoroughly do people in your setting record their ancestry and/or family trees? What is their preferred method for recording this information? Local registries? Centralized database? House tapestries? Oral tradition?

#weekly wednesday worldbuilding #worldbuilder's almanac

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Sunset and Moonrise

I had started this with the intention of more cloud petticoats but somehow it evolved into ocean waves, so I just went with the flow~

HD files, art videos, and PSD files on my Patreon.com/Yuumei

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Cover photo from my Ides of April 2024 newsletter. (Sign up here.)

My favorite part of writing my monthly state-of-Mirror-lock-Atelier newsletter is taking just the right photos (and applying just the right filters) to capture the specific aesthetic I seek.

I feel like you can probably look at these and get a reasonable idea of the kinds of TTRPGs I write.

#mirror-lock atelier #cover photos