#the objective is to get the immortal to a. summoning circle i guess?

[gabessquishytum]

One of the ideas I’m obsessed with is Hob getting summoned instead of Dream because he has been touched by Death. The Corinthian would be unmade. So no glass sphere. But Burgess would find out very soon that Hob is immortal—but is not Death. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his uses.

Burgess forms a collar that hides Hob and keeps him bound to his will, but is easier to maintain than the circle. Either way, hob is trapped but not protected by glass. That means Burgess has a lot more options. He does experiments on him and sells his organs and blood, whatever he can do to make a buck.

Hob however isn’t like Dream. He begs and shouts and tries to befriend the guards and nothing works.

But he also tries to befriend Alex Burgess. Ironically as Alex grows up, Hob is a rare positive presence in his life.

One day, when Alex is a young man, Burgess catches him talking to Hob. Alex fights him and he dies the same way. For a moment, Hob is full of hope. But Alex doesn’t let Hob go. He takes Hob’s face in his hands and professes his love.

This was not the outcome Hob wanted at all. Hob tells Alex he can’t return his feelings. He has grown to be fond of him, but it’s too weird for him since he watched Alex grow up. But also, Hob reminds him, he is a prisoner, so even if he did feel the same, he can’t truly consent. Again he pleads with Alex if he really loves him, he would let him be free.

But Alex says he can’t let him go. He begs Hob to give him a chance; Hob begs for freedom. They’re at a total impasse.

The years pass. Alex tries to treat Hob better. He doesn’t sell parts of him or torture him. He lets him out of the basement to roam the house, walk the grounds, feeds him the best food money can buy. But no matter how much Hob asks, Alex refuses to let him go free. If enough time passes he is sure Hob will grow to love him back.

Hob is walking on eggshells. He knows Alex has all the power, only he can remove the collar, and Hob is very aware that if Alex snaps, all bets might be off. Every day that passes, neither of man getting what they want, Alex and Hob each get a little more desperate.

No one is looking for Hob. Even his stranger won’t know to look until 1989 at least—and that’s assuming he even shows up after Hob offended him so badly…

Wowee, I love this!!! I also love a good "Hob gets captured instead" fic and I really like the idea of Hob and Alex having this super complicated thing going on. I feel like Alex is a great narrative foil for Hob in many ways, I guess they have certain similarities. The differences all come in the ways that they view and perceive Dream as a friend/person/object.

Anyway I'm adding the second part that you sent which is also super interesting. I'm quite fascinated by the idea of Destruction being Hob’s rescuer, that has the bones of an AWESOME Hobstruction whump fic right there. I'm also very keen on the idea of the Corinthian somehow coming to have ownership of Hob...

Other possible candidates for who might free Hob that come to mind...

Calliope - once she escapes her own captivity, perhaps she seeks out other beings in trouble in order to give herself some closure. She "inspires" the captors to free Hob, not knowing anything about the friendship between him and Dream.

Death - she's kind of noticed that Hob hasn't died for a while (he does it periodically and it's a way for her to check in with him) and she goes to see what's up. OR Hob mentally breaks down and asks for Death to come to him. Whether she takes him to the sunless lands or not, I'm not sure!

#the sandman #hob gadling #nsft #cw kidnapping

[littleblackqrow]

((I think the most frustrating part of watching people analyze the actions of characters in vol8 is that the biggest complaint is that logic is thrown out the window and I would argue that’s the point. Especially because of the perspective of the show. I really hate to keep picking on Ironwood, Qrow, and RWBY, but those characters are the ones driving the plot, so I guess we gotta.

Lets start with RWBY. They’re kids first off. WBY are all about 19-20 years old and Ruby is 17. Lets start off by saying those are ages not exactly known for smart, long term decision making. Most people that age are trying to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives, struggling with college, dates, drinking, sex for the first time. They’re stumbling around in adult bodies while still having more or less the mind of a teenager because society has suddenly stopped treating them like a kid and expects them to be an adult. Except instead of having to struggle with decisions about their near future, RWBY is being asked to save the world. If you think you could handle that pressure well at 17-19, you’re lying. 

Does it make their decisions right though? No. The way they treated Ozpin for hiding the worst of his abuse and the fact that his ex-wife was an insane bitch who is functionally immortal is wrong. But again, I ask you, could you handle having all that dumped into your lap in an already stressful situation? The person who should be (and rightly is) condemned for his reaction is Qrow for throwing a punch. No matter how upset you are no hitting. Once you throw a punch in that situation, you’re the bad guy. And until he makes an effort of an apology he’s the bad guy in that situation. 

The biggest problem that team RWBY has is that all of their terrible decisions throughout the show have either been rewarded, or the got bailed out from having to see the real consequences. 

Ozpin allowed Blake to hide her White Fang past and therefore missed the least subtle component of the Fall of Beacon. Things could have been significantly less bad if he’d known about their involvement and was able to send Qrow in to spy on their operations. Maybe he could have figured out what Roman or Adam was up to, realized they were working for Cinder and by extension Salem.

Ozpin allowed team RWBY to do a mission that was a couple grades too advanced for them because he knew they’d break the rules otherwise. That was a tacit acknowledgement that he thought whatever they were up to was alright, and that they had his blessings on whatever it was that they wanted to do.

The best example of terrible decision after terrible decision that RWBYJNR makes is Argus. They have no idea how they’re getting the Relic to Atlas, and they seem road blocked. Jaune suggests stealing an airship, and Qrow, the adult in the room tells them that this is a bad idea, and if it goes bad it has the potential to screw up their entire life. He’s right. The problem is that he’d run off on his bender, and therefore the kids, and we in the audience, are supposed to see this as an unreasonable suggestion. 

However, it plays out as him being right. The incredibly complicated plan did go wrong. Now, they had no reason to suspect at the time that Adam was stalking Blake at the time (and I could go into why thats perfectly ic for him at another date), but there were a lot of moving parts in this plan and literally any of them could have broken. Everything that happened after they put this plan into motion was reactionary. Cordovan, obsessed with showing the Might of Atlas (TM), jumped into the mech suit. At that point, Ruby didnt really have a choice of not breaking it. But the ensuing fight created enough general unease that it summoned a Grimm hoard.

By rights, Argus should have fallen because of their bad decisions and in spire of their best efforts. Instead, Cordovan had a change of heart at the last moment and bailed them out.

This just reinforced the flawed idea that RWBY is always in the right and directly lead to s7′s climax. They are the unstoppable force.

Now you have Ironwood, quite literally the unmovable object, which I now realize is sort of his name. Ha.

Ironwood’s behavior does not come out of nowhere. Since his appearance, he’s had problem stamped all over him. He showed up with an entire goddamn army to a supposedly peaceful event that is to promote unity and the excellence of each kingdom. His rationale is that the people are going to be impressed with his big guns and feel safe. Ozpin gently points out that those big guns also signal to people that there is something out there that those big guns are designed to shoot. 

If its not a Grimm, could it mean that Atlas intends to shoot people?

Remember we’re not even 100 years out from the last World War, one that was basically started by Atlas. People are nervous. There are still grandparents and great grandparents alive today that were kids when the Great War was happening. Not only that but we’re also made aware that Atlas has rolled in the apolitical protectors of the people, the Huntsmen, into its military. This elite fighting force that is basically above the law and can go to any country in the world whenever they want, is now part of the military. The ONLY standing military that Remnant seems to have.

All of this has obviously caused friction in the Inner Circle. Qrow is not quite and never has been quiet about his disdain for James’ heavy handed techniques. Glynda calls James’ actions a dick measuring competition, and Ozpin was trying to be gentle about it, but he was clearly telling Ironwood to get his army off his fucking front lawn. And what did Ironwood do? He’d gone around Ozpin and talked to the Vale council.  They were threatening to remove Oz fro his position because they agreed with Ironwood: he was being too passive. Ironwood even tells Glynda that he cant believe that a man he trusted for so long would just sit by and stand to the side instead of meeting the problem head on. He didnt seem to understand why Qrow would want to go gather intelligence on an operation before sending in the big guns. 

Ironwood has never been a man to put a well thought out plan with all his ducks in a row into motion. This is a man who plows through opposition at every opportunity.

And when we see him again, we can see him steamrolling through opposition again. Somehow he got himself two seats on the council. That gives him an enormous amount of power. And his position as general means that at any point he can declare an emergency and become the de facto dictator of Atlas if he deems it fit. The problem is that he’s having these arguments against Jacques Schnee a man that the audience rightly hates, so he seems reasonable. Who gives a fuck about Jacques loosing business, he’s a dickhead. We’re not noticing the fact that James is consolidating power, or that he’s using that power to make unilateral decisions with no one telling him no.

There’s no one left in the room who is able or willing to tell him that these are bad ideas, that there will be consequences that he cant foresee. His  bullish behavior lead to both Robyn Hill and Jacques Schnee running for an empty council seat, and that created the environment that we walked into in s7.

Now, not all James’ ideas are bad. The Amity Project is actually a really good one, and James is right in wanting to keep it from the general public until its near completion. But you know who should have known? The other fucking council members. Probably the candidates. Playing your cards too close to the chest when you clearly need help and allies is a bad thing. But again, James didnt even trust Ozpin to be able to run his own kingdom, so durr hurr of course he’s the only one who can take care of Amity. And run a kingdom. And run an academy. And protect an ageing, ailing Maiden. And of course he doesnt have time to treat his horrific PTSD from the Fall of Beacon.

So when things go tits up because again, of course they will with a plan that complex James Ironwood doubles the fuck down on his terrible solo decision making. Clearly, non of this is his fault. No one is listening to him. He cannot trust others to make decisions so he’s going to make all of them. There’s no one around him to tell him no, especially because the first person that tried was publicly executed. 

James is scared. He’s had a mental break because of that fear. His paranoia, his PTSD, and the fact that there’s nothing there to help him back to stability means that he’s just going to be bouncing from one terrible choice to the next. He’s Hamlet in the throes of paranoia, heading down a road that is going to get everyone, including himself killed. He is King Lear as the world crumbles around him, acting cruel and making unreasonable, horrible demands of those around him. 

Working with Watts seems like an absolutely terrible idea, but to someone who thinks that he is in control of the situation because he has to be in order to keep functioning, there’s no way that this can bite him in the ass. For James, if no one is willing to follow his orders, he’s going to make them. This attitude is probably exactly why Watts did what he did and joined Salem in the first place. 

So when you combine the unstoppable force of Team RWBY, who’s been told they’re the child saviors of the world, and who’ve been either rewarded or bailed out of their bad decisions against the immovable object of Ironwood and his absolute conviction in himself, you have the mess Atlas is in now.

Honestly I find it kind of brilliant. 

#headcanon #rwby meta #ok to reblog

[verdantsymmetry]

Zsigs

So, MIT has this IM system called Zephyr that I still unaccountably find useful.  Clients generally let you display a signature with your message that might be some static bit of text or might be the result of a script if you’re more into that.  I have a script that selects from a bunch of sayings, jokes, etc that I’ve collected over the years.  And which I now want to inflict on you, Tumblr.

Please forgive the puns and don’t take these too seriously.

Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me.  We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over. *Reality is what you can get away with.

The truth is whatever you can't escape.

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.  Then I remembered who was telling me this.

I feel more like I do now than I did a while ago.

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

Don't ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

You can't know that this sentence is true.

Imagine there were no hypothetical situations.

The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the unanimous views of all parts of my mind.

Don't immanentize the eschaton!

Because anti-induction has never worked in the past I can be sure it will now.

Knowledge is power.  Power corrupts.  Study hard, be evil.

Put the romance back in necromancery.

Everyone generalizes from one example. Or at least I do.

You don't understand society until you can build one out of nothing but signals and incentives.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, is probably an artifact of an incomplete hypothesis space.

I, for one, like roman numerals.

Debugging is like being a detective in a crime novel where you're also the murderer.

I don't have pet peeves. But I do feed a number of feral peeves that live in the neighborhood.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a master strategist who achieved immortality by living on in the form of delusional people all over the future

"Roses" is how / you start poems of this meter / but poems about poems / are more meta and neater.

I know not with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with adorable cockroach-sized swords.

When did the Japanese start eating eggs?  A long たまご!

Usually the explanation for why a thing exists is not the reason it started existing, but rather the reason it continues existing.

The adjective "indescribable" is, by definition, never correct.

Failure isn't an option.  It's mandatory.

Start every day like you woke up surrounded by a circle of wizards who perform a summoning spell once a century

Omniscience makes reasoning about counterfactuals harder.

Any machine is a smoke machine when you use it wrong enough.

I believe that inside every tool is a hammer

I said raise the barn, not raze it!

Remember with increasing sample size, your averages become more reliable - The Ns justify the means.

New EA cause area: Banning everything else Thomas Midgley invented, just to be safe.

Your eyes don't see, you do.

My favorite three bean soup is vanilla soy latte.

You will forget that you ever read this zsig.

Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing.

Made in China? Silly plate, you are made of China.

Give a man a fire and hell be warm for a day. teach a man to fire and youll get your liver pecked out by an eagle every day for the rest of eternity

When trying to understand entropy, remember that sitting still with your eyes closed will make you ever more lost - not within the universe, but between universes.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.

Blessed are those who can gaze into a drop of water and see all the worlds and be like who cares that's still zero information content. 

The First Rule of Robot Fight Club is you DO NOT TALK about Robot Fight Club, or, through inaction, allow Robot Fight Club to be talked about.

Correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlations.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.

Computer science is like omnipotence without omniscience.

Your existence is not impossible.  But it's also not very likely.

Finally, a study that backs up everything I've always said about confirmation bias!

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

Everything happens for a reason. The reason is a chaotic intersection of chance and the laws of physics.

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

We think much less than we think we think.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

Because ten billion years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral, it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness.

Language will evolve irregardless of barriers.

A library of all possible books contains less information than a single volume.

Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?

Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.

Though through rough boughs

I'm just sayin', everyone that confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, until we've landed on the moon, of preventing this decade from ending.

If you die in a documentary, you die in real life.

My intuition pump won't turn off and now my basement is full of scary ideas.

One Weird Trick to hijack the inner voice of hundreds of minds by posting this message

Most supposed conspiracy "theorists" don't come up with their own theories; they are conspiracy *enthusiasts* at best.

Have you tried throwing money at the problem? Yes? Well have you tried throwing it harder, using deadlier forms of currency?

Have you tried reducing the problem to a harder one which no one will expect you to solve?

Have you tried raising the temperature until you have enough thermal energy to overcome the problem’s energy barrier?

Keep your identities small, so you can fit more of them in your head.

You are a useful abstraction.

I Went To The Platonic Realm And All I Got Was THE Lousy T-Shirt.

A society where ubiquitous 3D printing makes the delivery of physical objects obsolete. A post-post society.

Appeals to Purity Intuitions Considered Toxic

Yog Sothoth is the golden key, the accursed result of the NSA's demands. Do not call up what you can't put down, cried the opsec researchers.

Known thy enemy and know theyself.  You can combine these tasks and so double efficiency using the obvious method.

Consciousness is the weakest form of telepathy, where you're limited to reading your own mind.

A good pun is its own reword.

A new drug prevents the brain from speculating. You'll never guess what happens when you take it.

Philosophy is mainly useful in inoculating you against other philosophy. Else you'll be vulnerable to the first coherent philosophy you hear.

#humor #puns

[radramblog]

A recap of a D&D One-shot: The B-Team

This is a little bit late, frankly, since the one-shot in question took place quite some time ago. But it’s pseudo-sequel is upcoming, and I’ve been building a character for that, so.

The B-Team was a very cool and good one-shot that turned into a two-shot because things kinda just kept going on for a bit, and that’s okay because we were having fun. It was the first D&D (or tabletop in general, excluding TCGs) I’d played in quite a while, since nobody’s campaigns had spare space and it’s not like I feel experienced enough to DM my own one.

It was also heavily inspired (I believe) by a movie I haven’t seen, so until it was literally spelled out for me I had no idea about that. Oops. Anyway.

I’m not sure this is going to be the most interesting content, but this is also going to nudge my memory about the setting and such, which is relevant for one shot two, so. At the very least, my mates who read this and weren’t there can get a rundown, even if it’s a little late.

We did so much crime.

The B-Team opens with our titular party returning to Huckston (a city I had assumed was spelled differently) from a job for local mob boss Seamus Greenleaf, a halfling sorcerer whose accent was as silly as his name implied. Dude was basically an extremely dangerous leprechaun. Said job involved the retrieval of a ring whose name I forgot but basically just gives regenerative immortality.

Our party was comprised of 4 members, each with a very particular set of skills that probably would have worked a little better if we’d communicated better beforehand. We had Prissy, a Half-Elf Courtesan and Wizard who was theoretically the party face but more importantly a nigh-untouchable Bladesinger, Vael, a Human Circle of the Shepherd druid who is likely single-handedly responsible for getting that subclass softbanned from our tables for just spamming rats and bears everywhere and making keeping track of things a pain, and Stitches, a Half-Orc Rogue who had to take up the tank/melee role even though their class was not suited to it, because the rest of the party was casters.

And then there was my character, Parri. A Kobold Artificer/Alchemist, who I’d essentially flavoured as someone who digs through dumpsters to find usable components to do the grossest possible magi/science possible. I’d deliberately taken spells that were less useful than they were flavourful- this snappy mans is very likely to have Grease handy since he’s probably rooted around in a nasty restaurant bin, he’ll have Heat Metal (a spell I didn’t realise was as good as it is) since that would be a useful tool for making things to hold dangerous ingredients, and y’all know he’s taking Acid Arrow. Actually, you get that one for free as an Alchemist anyway, so.

Parri was…interesting to play, to say the least. I’m sure people complain a lot about this sort of thing, but his accuracy with spells was frustrating at best. Alchemical Savant, on the other hand, was an excellent little boon that made sure said spells were dealing some sexy damage. I probably goofed up when I took Cantrips- Poison Spray was solid enough, but Mending was something I’m pretty sure I never used- while it makes sense for someone going through garbage to want to fix up the things they find, we did a lot more breaking than we did fixing. Parri was also a major Critical magnet, including on the opening turn of the final battle, so he spent a lot of time healing himself with various abilities.

Artificer is also a class I will probably wait a while before going back to, because it has a lot of little tinkering going on, appropriately enough. By level 9, where we ended the campaign, he had a sizable pile of spells with 3 levels, the Magical Tinkering ability to basically have a bunch of little things that do semi-useful stuff, 6 infusions- basically self-made magic items, with a huge list to pick from and 3 active at a time, the ability to make tools at will, two randomised Experimental Elixirs every long rest, that also give temporary HP, the ability to cure statuses and diseases pretty much at will, and the extremely useful Flash of Genius feature for yourself and allies. Added onto the Kobold stuff of Grovel, Cower and Beg (an ability that, despite being nutso bonkers, I literally Never Used), there was a lot to keep track of, and I’m much more keen to go back to something a little simpler.

These 4…adventurers? Would show up to Greenleaf and hand over the ring, only to discover that it was not the ring they had assumed it was, or at least, it didn’t seem to work. Assuming we, his loyal hench-group, were trying to screw him, he sicced his boys on us, forcing us to flee to safe haven, and attempt to make a next move.

Each of our characters had a person or group we knew in the city who could help (I deadass don’t remember Vael’s one, though), and as a team now being hunted by the largest gang around, we were hunting for options. Stitches had family working in the docks, who fortunately knew a guy who could promise us safe passage the hell out of dodge- and considering the circumstances, that seemed like the best idea if we wanted to keep our lives. His fee, however, was well beyond our price point, so our goal was, in fact, to get rich quick. For our lives.

And that’s just what we did, using the only thing we knew best: Crimes. Using Prissy’s contact- a hole-in-the-wall bar she used to work at (or at least, she knows the owner), we had ourselves a relatively safe base to work from for a few days, from which we could sneak off to the city’s underbelly- literal in this case, since it was in the sewerage- and find jobs of Questionable Repute to do. Lucrative, but dangerous. We took a couple contracts, bought some shit from Parri’s contact (Black Market Magic Items!), and got to work.

It is worth noting that, of course, our travel was not particularly free, as the price Greenleaf put on our heads was astronomical. So just about everywhere we went, we were met with someone or another trying to kill us for a reward. This was a great excuse to have Lots of Fights, but it meant that our resources were somewhat limited. Everything from goblins to fully trained Dragonborn warriors and tamed Drakes was on our ass, and fortunately, we survived each encounter.

The first job we took was pretty much the reason the game was extended to a second session- the assassination of a major noble pretty much turned into a murderous heist movie scene. With the noble in question being a sleazeball, it’s not like we really minded (Parri was evil-aligned anyway). It ended up a surprisingly involved plan, with Vael shapeshifting into a rat and Stitches doing Rogue Shit in the background to keep things moving, Prissy doing what courtesans do best and stab people to death in bed, and Parri disguising as a waiter, doing not a great job of it, but eventually enabling the escape by causing a distraction in the form of setting loose the noble’s pet Lion (via melting the chains, because subtlety is dead) and fleeing in the ensuing chaos. It was kind of a blast to put together, though particularly nerve-wracking- especially because if anything went wrong, or the set-lion-loose plan failed, Parri was in the middle of a room with many, many guards.

But it did go right, and the Lion even got to survive, after shrugging off a spell or two from the wizards guarding the place, so we got paid, called it a night, and called it a day in game because it was like 6 or something at this point I think.

After a week (or two?), we reconvened for the second part of what was now the B-Team two-shot. Our objective of Get Gold was not fully completed, but we’d gotten the majority of our funding sorted, so our next job would be something a bit easier and safer. As it turns out, that job would be Bullying Shopkeepers for Protection Money, something that made me vaguely uncomfortable IRL but hey, it’s only game.

Over the course of this job, we threatened a local blacksmith, a potion-seller (Parri made off with a brew or two), and a small local Goblin gang named the Green Mongrels. While this particular altercation turned violent, Prissy had just picked up Fireball, so you can guess how that one went. Two of the gang’s three leaders ended up so much dust on the ground, let alone the grunts, and the final one surrendered, which was appreciated. Especially since it meant we had a couple extra spell slots for the fight on the way back, being the one with the aforementioned tamed drakes.

Cash in hand, it was now time to get ourselves smuggled out of dodge, levelling up in the process. We actually levelled a few times over the course of the campaign, an accelerated pace mostly because it’s a short thing so it doesn’t really matter, and because levelling is both fun and lets the GM throw harder things at us.

Our attempt at escape was somewhat thwarted, as upon reaching the shore and farewelling our now quite rich trafficker, we were ambushed by our final foes. Because of course, if there was a B-Team, there would of course be an A-Team. This was a pretty interesting idea for a fight, a squad of four deliberately mirroring our own- A Goblin Artificer on the Artillerist stream, a Rogue preferring bows to swords and spending most of their time peppering us with arrows while stuck to the side of a cliff, a Druid that turned themselves into a monster rather than summoning like ours did, and a Wizard who’s class I don’t really know but boy did he like Counterspells.

This was a long, and protracted, and kind of brutal fight that took a lot out of the group, and I’m pretty sure more than one person (and by that I mean more than Parri, because he got shot right in the face for a crit immediately) was downed over the course of it. But eventually, the Rogue was knocked off the cliff enough times, the Wizard was downed and drowned, the Druid ran out of things to transform into, and the Artificer got taken apart with extreme prejudice.

But it didn’t seem to be over. As we were scrounging the bodies, someone attacked Stitches, and it was unclear whom or from where. We assumed it was the Wizard having somehow survived, as he’d been walking on water and thus his body ended up in the depths- couldn’t find it. Parri casts detect magic, and one very dead Wizard was found.

And a very suspicious Necromantic signature coming from Vael.

Turns out he’d had the reviving ring the whole time, and it was driving him completely mad. A final fight ensued, arguably our biggest damage dealer, currently unable to die, against the remainder of the party. And it was similarly brutal.

The tech ended up being for our not particularly strong characters to have to get close enough to pry the ring off his fingers so that they could actually become cold and dead. This was somewhat complicated by Parri getting very quickly downed by bats and bears, and Stitches being actually killed by such. After some healing and teleportation thanks to Prissy, however, we were just able to not only get the ring and finally put Vael down, but Parri, having recently learned Revifify and acquiring a jewel to burn on it, managed to un-kill Stitches.

Betrayal is a great way to make the closing moments of an adventure particularly memorable, I think.

Put mostly together, the ring and bodies disposed of (no-one holding on to this fucker anymore, ideally), 3/4ths of the B-Team wandered off into the sunrise, to restart their lives anew somewhere else. I like to imagine Parri opened a potion shop somewhere, but who knows if any town would actually suffer a Kobold long enough for him to do so.

And that was the campaign. It was a lot of fun, though it had been so long since a previous tabletop adventure that I don’t really have a lot to compare it to. The table seemed to get along well enough (I mean we were all friends beforehand, so der), aside from some somewhat awkward pauses.

And considering the sequel to this campaign is coming, with different characters and the same people (now significantly less stressed out since the Uni break is here), I’m extremely excited to get back into it. I have a new extremely small man to play as, and I couldn’t be happier to bring him to the table. Just…not as many nonsense abilities this time.

#ramble #tabletop #dungeons and dragons #very long! oops

[wyrdsistersofthedas]

Globes and Circles: More from the Brecilian Forest

Thanks for the great ask, Nony!  This was so much fun to investigate!  

Is it any wonder that the Brecilian Forest is one of our favorite areas to theorize about?  So many interesting details to dissect!  Is there something going on with the globe and the circles?  Almost certainly!  Are they related to the Veil artifacts?  Possibly!  And the Forest Ruins are just the beginning.

Let’s get the easy, but important, details out of the way first.  The circles on the floor of the chamber in question are summoning circles used to make it easier for spirits and demons to cross the Veil.  We see a simpler version of them at Soldier’s Peak.  Avernus used them to summon the demons that later possessed Sophia Dryden and sundered the Veil (5:10).  

The presence of the circles in the Brecilian Forest suggests that it too was a site where experiments involving spirits, demons, and the Veil were taking place, but on a larger scale than Avernus’ work.  And that makes it far more likely that globe and the nearby weird ass whirlygig (pictured below) in the Brecilian Forest ruin is also tied to the Veil, and thereby creating a potential connection with the veil artifacts.  

So what is it all about?

There are some curious similarities between Soldier’s Peak and the Brecilian Forest.  Both locations have summoning circles, it is highly likely that both had eluvians, and the Veil was messed up in both places.  Anyone else seeing some parallels?

Now, you might say, “Morta, there’re no globes or weird ass whirligigs at Soldier’s Peak...is there?”  

Behold!!

Avernus (or the Wardens before him) embedded the same type of globes and a whirligig in the damn roof!  There is something going on here...

If these connections are in fact connections, we should find more locations with similar features: summoning circles, globes and whirligigs, eluvians, and Veil weirdness.  And, sure enough, there are.

At Kinloch Hold:  

Globes, both in the tower and the basement.

A whirligig and Veil weirdness in the basement.

And note the eluvians and floor pattern, which is most likely given this is the Harrowing chamber a large scale summoning circle.  

At Vigil’s Keep there are some of the same features:

There is a whirligig in the Vigil’s basement, although I haven’t found a globe, summoning circle, or eluvian.  

There is lots of Veil weirdness, however.  Walking corpses, the wraith in the crypt, and the Dark Theurge being prime examples.

The Architect got in on this shit too.

(What the hell was the Architect trying to do in this chamber?!?  If these whirligigs are really used to mess with the Veil, what was the Architect trying to do to that involved piles of dead people?  Experimenting with sending them through the Veil ala the Anchor??)

But I digress.

It sure looks like these artifacts have connections to places where the Veil has been messed with, and these globes and whirligigs could very well be what allows the Veil to be manipulated.  So is there a connection to Solas’ Veil artifacts?  Very possible.  Especially when you start connecting some dots.  

Now you might be asking, “Well, why do they look so different from the the real Veil artifacts?”  My (Watsonian) guess is that someone was trying to reverse engineer the magical tech in order to create objects that could do the opposite.  These globes are meant to make the Veil vulnerable to thinning or tears.  Next question, who would want to tear the Veil?  

The most obvious answer would be Tevinter given that Corypheus and Magisters Sidereal given what happened with the Black City.  Tevinter certainly had a presence in Ferelden, albeit for a relatively short time, around the time that the Cory and Co. breach originally the Veil.  

But there is another explanation that is interesting to contemplate as well.  Were these magical artifacts created, not by Tevinter, but by the elves and humans (Alamarri/Avvar) living side by side in Ferelden during the thousand years after the creation of the Veil?  Not impossible.  I’ve written other posts about what appear to attempts and collaborations between these two groups to recapture some of Arlathan’s magic. (Links! Wells of Sorrow, In Search of Eluvians, Eluvians in the Temple)  

It looks to me like Tevinter was riding on the coattails of earlier efforts to undo the Veil.  I don’t believe all of these artifacts being found in Brecilian Forest ruins is a coincidence.  The ancient elves, and the humans who appear to have been their allies to some degree, had every reason to want to undo the magic that created the Veil.  They could free the elven gods and regain the magic and immortality that the elves lost to the Veil.  They had a thousand plus years in Ferelden to figure out how to do it, and it is very likely that the artifacts found in the Brecilian Forest are the result of their efforts.  

Why weren’t they successful?  Lots of reasons.  1) shortened lifespans 2) magic limited by the Veil 3) Fen’Harel’s people, or other elven groups, making war on them and/or 4) something targeted the Brecilian Forest ruins for destruction (see the video at 2 minutes).  Bonus) Pressure from the growing Tevinter Imperium probably didn’t help.

So...yeah!  I think the globe thingy is totally related to the Solas’ Veil artifacts, but they do the opposite.  

Thanks so much for the ask!

- Morta Mahariel

PS - If the globe is Solas’ orb reverse engineered to weaken the Veil, I’m thinking the weird ass whirligigs are possibly an attempt to recreate these thingies from the glory days of the Elvhen Empire, which are typically found in places where the Fade once touched the mortal world. (Where is the rest of the Dead Hand in the Exalted Plains?  In the Fade, of course!)

PPS - One last weird idea that is somewhat related to this post and has been bouncing around in my head for a while...  If Fade magic and Titan anti-magic is basically competing music, and the Veil is sound waves; are Solas’ artifacts basically mini speaker playing a Titan song that basically says:

Fade, Fade, go away Come again some other day

???

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