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tenderesthands · 2 years

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just finished watching liam's quest for the first time and i feel so normal insane about it like OH WOW. he really did sit down and created a mini time traveling gothic horror dnd story as a love letter to his friends.

he broke all of time and space because he missed his friends and all his sorrow and his grief and his love spilled onto the world and destroyed everything. he put his best friends through the most horrifying and nightmarish timelines in an attempt to bring them closer to him. he wanted to see them one last time and tell them how much he loves all of them. he haunted them throughout time and space because there is not a single version of liam that does not long for his friends. what is a haunting if not a ghost full of love with no place to go?

he maimed and murdered his best friends in a sequence that literally came out of his deepest darkest nightmares because what is more terrifying than watching the people that you love die? he turned back time and he made them kids again so that they could have friends. he dug their lonely childhoods out of the ground with his bare hands like a gardener. like a reaper. and he said "no more lonely walks. now we are together." there is nothing more tender and devastating than looking at your friends and thinking i wish that i could have been with you every day since you were a kid.

he broke all of time and space to see them again. and he was ready and willing to die by their hand so that they could be free and go home. but instead they all decided to stay in a never ending loop of torment for the small chance of maybe being able to save him. he was ready to die for them but he forgot that they have already died for him hundreds of times. and they will do so again and again until they are all together. family? family.

#it truly is the one shot of all times like #we have time travelling. we have baby rabid liam clones. we have eldritch horrors and creepy wet forests.#we have 15 years old ashley johnson wearing dead marisha ray's ribcage like a hat. we have warlock goth 9 year old taliesin. matt is a bard #we have 15 years old ashley johnson taking a bite out of a dead cat because 15 years old girls are just like that for real #the sky is bleeding yellow goo. the walls are intestines. theres a beach filled with biblical horrors. also sam has a useless pet #conan obrien is even a horseman of the apocalypse #liam's quest #critical role #liam's quest: full circle #liam o'brien #my text

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captainsparklefingers · 1 year

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Okay you know a place is really bad when you cast Decompose and uh. That. That happens.

You know it's really bad when FUCKING COGNOUZA took a Decompose spell more normally than this fucking haunted blighted place.

Caduceus. Cad, where are you, I need an adult. D:

#cr spoilers #critical role #I wonder if any of the clay family ever went into Molaesmyr #and tried to decompose the bodies left behind and uh #THAT. happened.#explains why none of them ever tried again #why they're so desperate to protect what they still can #and why caduceus was so unsettled by the similar forest in aeor #this REEKS of Ludinus I swear to God #the evidence of him being from Aeor is just mounting #also I DON'T LIKE THIS PLACE #D: why is Matt so good with eldritch horrors and body nightmares

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matt-eldritch · 8 months

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Here's my drawing of Ahsoka Tano for my Colour wheel challenge! I based her on the work of @morvalii a wonderful artist who allowed me to model my Ahsoka on their own fanart. It's kind of funny that I have a character I headcanon as bisexual on the last day of Bisexual Visibility Month when I had posted fanart of Sasha Waybright, a canonical bisexual Amphibia character, on the first day of Bisexual Visibility Month.

#artofmatteldritch #matt eldritch #ahsoka #star wars ahsoka #ahsoka tano #star wars #star wars clone wars #clone wars fanart #color wheel challenge #colorwheelchallenge2023 #morvaliii #morvalii #bisexuality awareness week #bisexual character #headcanon #queer headcanons

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chaosgenasi · 2 years

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tonight’s cr lore rabbit hole brought to you by the concept of being a paladin or cleric “of people” is kind-of its own worship of the divine by virtue of drawing your power from something the gods created/shaped

#basil.ramblings #thinkin fcg & zerxus thoughts. zerxus totally had some luxon/universe shit going on but nothing was ever cemented #and This branch of thoughts comes from the whole 'gods created/shaped mortals using the magic of exandria which is in & of itself connected #to the luxon -- not to mention the fact that both the gods & the luxon were celestials of light' idea #also the connection between magical potential/spell slots + ether & the flavor text matt gave laudna regarding casting eldritch blast #esp when you think about sorcerers being naturally connected to leylines & having that raw understanding of magic #also aabria's whole 'the elements & the divine aren't entirely separate' speech #one day my leyline essay will be comprehensible enough to share SDFKJG

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keycomicbooks · 3 months

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The Flash #6 (2024) Matt Taylor Card Stock Variant / Simon Spurrier Writer / Mike Deodato Jr. Artist / 1st Appearance of Eldritch Beings

#TheFlash #6 (2024) #MattTaylor Card Stock Variant / #SimonSpurrier Writer / #MikeDeodatoJr. Artist / 1st Appearance of #EldritchBeings "The Gift" THE FIRST ARC OF THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED SERIES CONCLUDES! SAVE ON SHIPPING COST - NOW AVAILABLE FOR LOCAL PICK UP IN DELTONA, FLORIDA https://www.rarecomicbooks.fashionablewebs.com/The%20Flash%202023.html#6 #VertigoComics #Vertigo #KeyComicBooks #DCComics #DCU #DCUniverse #KeyIssue #NerdyGifts

#The Flash #6 (2024) Matt Taylor Card Stock Variant / Simon Spurrier Writer / Mike Deodato Jr. Artist / 1st Appearance of Eldritch Beings #rare comic books #key comic books #dc comics #key comics #dc universe #Flash

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ruinandrue · 14 days

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Introducing Inkwarren: A dark fantasy TTRPG of woodland adventures!

Hi all! I'm Matt, and I am an Atlanta-based indie ttrpg designer currently developing Inkwarren, a dark woodland fantasy TTRPG of swashbuckling tactics and storybook intrigue. Today, I'm going to talk to you about what Inkwarren is, what inspired it, and the design goals I have for the game. Inkwarren is already in preliminary playtests, and I hope to have public playtests sometime in the near future.

What is Inkwarren?

In Inkwarren, players take on the role of woodlanders- animal wanderers of the massive Woodland, who use magick, wits, and weapons to take down foes supernatural and mundane. Your woodlanders' wandering band may be a band of mercenary adventurers, a band of high-spirited rebels, or even a band of scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells just looking for their next score.

One player takes on the role of the Voice in the Dark, a guiding force behind the story that presents challenges, describes consequences, and narrates the actions of the woodlander's foes.

Inkwarren aims to merge modern-style deep narrative rules with exciting, flashy, swashbuckling battles that emphasizes teamwork, movement, and positioning. Character creation is a deep and choice-driven process, that fully contextualizes a woodlander within the world and sets them on a path to a truly memorable story.

Inspirations

Mechanically, Inkwarren borrows from and is inspired by games like Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Modiphius's Dishonored, ICON, Blades in the Dark, and City of Mist, mixing design trends of modern tactical fantasy games with deep narrative based trends found in other systems. Inkwarren's combat also shares inspiration with the Hades series of games, aiming to emulate the fast-paced action where movement and positioning are just as important as the attacks you use.

Narratively, Inkwarren is inspired by The Secret of NIMH, Dishonored, Redwall, Root, and Hollow Knight. When designing Inkwarren's eponymous setting, I want to evoke the gravitas and melancholy somberness of Hallownest from Hollow Knight, with magic as eldritch and strange as the Outsider's gifts in Dishonored. With this, Inkwarren is still a game about hope, and aims to capture the optimism-despite-adversity and little-heroes-against-great-foes vibes of stories like Redwall or The Secret of NIMH. I have to credit Root for originally giving me the idea to shift my game concept to one where the PCs are little woodland creatures.

Choice, Sacrifice, and Hope

Inkwarren's core mechanic emphasizes choice, intent, and narrative weight. The base 2d10 roll is modified by the woodlander's own Virtues (core strengths like Brawn, Nimbleness, or Insight), combined with a Style to define how they're using that Virtue (such as performing an action Cunningly, Quickly, or Sneakily). Difficulty is measured by Risk and Effect, that assign narrative weight to the severity of consequences a woodlander faces, and how effective they will be if they Prevail.

When woodlanders just don't roll high enough, they don't simply fail- they Falter. Faltering grants Hope, a resource that can be used to Persevere and succeed despite consequences on future challenges. With Hope, failure is never the end- it simply closes one door, and opens another.

Swashbuckling Battles

Inkwarren's Battle system emphasizes movement, positioning, and teamwork. Woodlanders interact with the battlefield through exploits, combat disciplines that have a variety of different effects to use on the field. Exploits have an at-will root effect that can be used as a woodlander's bread and butter, but more powerful effects are always within reach. By using root effects, meeting battle objectives (such as defeating enemies or reaching escape points), and continuing the fight (by ending rounds), woodlanders build Momentum, a shared resource pool by the entire band that can be used to power a woodlander's most powerful abilities. Woodlanders can spend Momentum to use an exploit's powerful bloom effect, or power a duo effect that they can use to combine their abilities with those of another ally. Momentum doesn't deplete until the Battle is over-- use it for quick bursts, or build up to unleash more powerful attacks against your foes!

Other rulesets like charging attacks, staggering mechanics for bosses, climbing on top of larger foes, environments, high ground, and ally turns (that don't clog up combat) also add gravitas, pace, and exciting tactical decisions to make Inkwarren's Battles so engaging.

Sweeping Narrative

Inkwarren's narrative mechanics work to ensure that solving problems outside of Battle carry just as much weight as Battle itself. Inkwarren's narrative ruleset includes:

The Doubt system allows woodlanders to call upon the Voice in the Dark for aid, but at a cost: as the woodlanders build Doubt, the Voice can spend it to increase the danger of the surroundings, unlock new abilities for foes, or act as a mastermind behind the antagonistic forces of the narrative.

Narrative abilities called flourishes that woodlanders can use to interact with the world.

A special character-based tour de force that a woodlander may use to do something truly legendary, although infrequently.

Rest Activities woodlanders may use to Cook Meals, Spar, Entertain, or Pray to give themselves bonuses and restorations for use later.

Wounds to carry over how trials in-combat affect a woodlander after the Battle ends.

Rules for Tongues that establish a woodlander's knowledge of a language with several levels of fluency.

Ties, which are narrative bonds with NPCs woodlanders may use to increase their effect against them, or burn them to ask for a favor.

And So Much More!

Deep character customization for woodlanders, including a Coat mechanic that allows you to play as any little animal your heart desires, unique and evocative traditions like the ghostly historian Folklorist or the passionate Warrior-Poet, rules for mysterious and magical artifacts called esoterica, an in-depth crafting system, and more!

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! I'm so excited about this game, and I hope to share more with everyone soon!

Tìoraidh!

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg design #woodland fantasy #inkwarren #ttrpg community #tabletop

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dailyadventureprompts · 5 months

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Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness

Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.

As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.

We can do better

TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.

While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:

It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.

Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.

Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.

Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.

Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.

The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.

There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.

Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.

Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.

THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now

Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time

THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.

Adventure Hooks:

The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)

Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.

The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.

Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.

Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.

Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.

Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.

Art

#monsters reimagined #outergod #tharizdun #lovecraftian #outer spheres #astral #kaorti #quori #far realm #planescape #spelljammer

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