#this is why we use all the save slots!! so we don’t have to play the whole game again and put siffrin through the horrors!!!!

[luminous-orb]

i’ve been doodling them…the frin…

bonus:

there he goes

#in stars and time #isat #I beat the game…but I haven’t actually beat it…secret boss….. #this is why we use all the save slots!! so we don’t have to play the whole game again and put siffrin through the horrors!!!! #anyway I think my brain is different now

[marvel-ous-m]

Eddie Munson’s Guide for How to Adopt a Jock in Four Easy Steps (4/5)

Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Five

Ao3 Link

A.N.: I can’t believe we’re already at the penultimate chapter! I know it seems crazy that it’ll all get wrapped up after this, but I promise it will. You’ll have to forgive me for the D&D game description... in addition to being a Stranger Things nerd, I have been a D&D nerd for the last ten or so years, so describing a campaign is super fun for me and I sometimes can get off-track. Speaking of which, I did some 1st edition research but I mostly play 5th, so apologies if there are any discrepancies! All that to say, hopefully you can pick up on the symbolism in the campaign scene, too! Okay, rant over, now onto the chapter. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  

“Alright, Sir Grant the Good, roll a perception check.” 

The familiar clatter of dice against the wood tabletop filled the room, and it seemed that the entire party held their breath to hear Grant’s result. 

“15 plus three- what’ll an 18 get me?”

Eddie hummed, tapping a finger on his chin. “You see a pair of eyes staring back at you from deep in the tree line. They’re slightly yellow, certainly belonging to an animal, and seemingly a large one.” Eddie pauses to roll a die, then hisses under his breath. “The animal meets your eyes and sees you’ve spotted it. It lets out a low growl- what do you do?” 

Grant groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Shit, um- I draw my sword and I wave to Mistress Emery and Sir Geoffrey.” 

“Sir Geoffrey stands beside Sir Grant and readies his bow.” Jeff speaks from his seat next to Grant, holding a D20 between his fingers, ready to roll initiative.

Gareth grinned, leaning forward in his chair to get a better view of the map on the table. “I come up to stand next to Sir Grant and ready myself to cast call lightning.”

“Um, sorry, can I-” Steve whispered from his place at the table, a chair that Eddie had moved up to have Steve sit next to him while he DM’d. Eddie turned to Steve, raising an eyebrow. 

“What’s up, Steve? You’re free to speak whenever you want, you don’t have to just watch quietly.” Eddie nudged Steve’s side, encouraging the jock to speak. 

“Yeah, um, it’s just-” Steve cleared his throat, then looked at the other three members of Hellfire. “Mistress Emery is a Druid, right? So like, isn’t her animal handling through the roof or whatever? Why don’t you try and take care of the animal before you try to kill it?” 

Gareth blinked in surprise, shot a look at Jeff and Grant, then turned to Eddie. “He knows D&D?!”

“He is sitting right here.” Steve muttered under his breath, rolling his eyes. 

“Right- sorry, what Gareth meant to say is- how do you know D&D?” Jeff gave Gareth a warning glare, then turned his attention Steve’s way. 

Steve sighed, shrugging somewhat awkwardly. “I babysit some middle schoolers. This one kid, Dustin, he’s obsessed with this stuff. Honestly all of them are, but I spend the most time with Dustin. He brought up a druid recently when we were walking around the tracks- sounded kinda interesting, so I listened.” Steve’s eyes shifted to stare down at the tabletop then, and he frowned to himself. “I used to pick up Nancy’s little brother from their campaigns, too. I’d usually have to wait around for at least thirty minutes for them to wrap things up before we could get a move on.” 

The party sat in silence for a few moments, processing the revelation about Steve’s D&D knowledge. Finally Grant hummed in thought, then turned to Gareth. “He’s got a point. Plus, if we don’t attack immediately we save some spell slots, potentially some HP too.” 

“Yeah, but the thing is growling! It’s probably going to pounce at us any minute now.” Gareth huffed, crossing his arms. 

“Maybe it’s hurt. That could be a warning growl rather than it trying to pounce at us.” Jeff reasoned. “Just give it a try, Gareth. I’ll keep an arrow loaded and I can flank while you do an animal handling check so that if it attacks I can try and shoot at it before it does any damage.” 

Gareth frowned, clearly annoyed, but nevertheless held up a D20. “Fine. I approach the forest line and hold a hand out in the direction of the animal.” 

“Roll for animal handling.” Eddie flipped through his binder of notes as he spoke, easily finding the page he was looking for. 

Gareth dropped the dice on the table, eyebrows shooting up in surprise when he read the resulting roll. “Huh- Nat 20, and I’ve got a plus five on my modifier. What’ll that do for me?” 

“The animal walks out of the forest, and you know from your studies that you’re now face to face with an Owlbear. The beast makes another growling sound, but is far less menacing. You see that Jeff was correct- the animal has a deep slash running from one of its talons up to its chest. You can tell that it originated from a sword, but the blood around the beast’s beak tells you that whatever fighter that had tried to attack the owlbear previously lost that battle. You can tell that the animal is more scared than anything. What do you do?” 

“Um… okay. I cast cure wounds and then reach into my pack and provide the Owlbear with a piece of dried meat to show it that it can trust me?” 

Eddie nodded, pulling a sticky note from his binder and handing it to Gareth, smirking as he did. “The Owlbear takes the food, trusts you, and decides to stay with your party. Here are its stats, it’ll now obey your commands and fight alongside you until its dying breath. Congratulations, Mistress Emery.” 

“Holy shit! We have an Owlbear now, that’s so fucking cool.” Grant grins, nudging Gareth’s side. “Good work, man.”

Gareth scanned the sticky note, then smiled at Steve. “Thank Steve, he’s the one who suggested it. Did you sneak a look at Eddie’s notes or something?” 

Steve chuckled, shaking his head. “Nah, it just sounded like a better alternative.” 

“I made it injured so your band of fighters would have a better chance of killing the thing, but Steve’s little stunt had me thinking on my feet.” Eddie spoke up, then winked in Steve’s direction. Steve ducked his head in response, a blush playing at his cheeks. Interesting. 

“Thanks, man.” Jeff nodded in Steve’s direction. “Maybe you should play with us next time. You seem to know your stuff.”

Steve snorted at that, shaking his head once again. “I barely know anything. Besides, all the dice and numbers would probably confuse the hell outta me. But… uh, thanks for the offer. Maybe one day.” 

The party moved on with the campaign, killing some goblins on their route as they followed a map they had received from a barkeep at the beginning of the adventure. Steve chimed in occasionally when he found something interesting, and Eddie even had him roll a few times for some of the encounters. By the end of the campaign, the party was actively strategizing with him, and Steve was grinning ear to ear and giving his opinions on what to do next. The party ended up defeating the ‘big bad’ at the end, a goblin king and four of its soldiers. They recovered some treasure and a map, which Eddie told them would be the subject of the next chapter of their campaign. 

It was about 7pm when they finally wrapped everything up, cleaned the room out, locked up, and walked together out to the parking lot. Steve, who had been pretty awake and alert for the entirety of the playthrough, was now looking much more exhausted. He waved goodbye to the boys and pulled his coat tighter around himself, then rushed from the back door of the school to his car through the biting November air. 

The four members of Hellfire watched as Steve sped off, then stood together quietly under the awning of Hawkins High. Gareth broke the silence, crossing his arms to stave off the cold. “Alright, I’ll admit it. I was hesitant to believe it, but you’re right. Harrington’s cool.” 

“You were right about the other stuff too, Eddie. He didn’t look too good. Do you know what happened? Why Billy pounded on him last weekend?” Jeff spoke up next, fidgeting with a string hanging off of his sweater. 

Eddie sighed, producing a cigarette from his coat pocket and lighting it with his zippo. “Nope.” Eddie popped the ‘p’ when he spoke, then took a long drag of the cigarette. “Barely had a chance to ask him about it, and he deflected any time I tried to get more information outta him. I think it all really messed him up, but he doesn’t want to admit it.” 

The party stood in silence for a few more minutes, all lost in thought. This time, Grant broke the silence. “My mom wants me home for dinner by 7:30, so I gotta get going. But I’m cool with letting Steve into the party if everyone else is. Looks like it’d be good for him- probably good for us, too. He’s cool.” Grant zipped up his sweatshirt as he spoke, then pulled car keys out of his pocket. “Need a ride, Gareth?”

“Yeah, thanks man. I’m cool with letting Steve hang with us, too. Just let us know what we need to do Eddie.” Gareth waved goodbye to Jeff and Eddie, then followed Grant to his car. 

“How ‘bout you, Jeff? Got anything against letting Steve into Hellfire?” Eddie questioned quietly. He took another long drag from the cigarette, watching as the smoke he breathed out disappeared into the cold night air. 

“You know it’s fine by me, man.” Jeff paused, then sighed. “I am a little concerned, though.” 

Eddie frowned. “About what?”

“About you.” Jeff moved his attention from the stray thread on his sweater to Eddie, crossing his arms. “About him, too. I’ve known you the longest out of everyone here, Eds. I can tell when you’ve got a crush. Harrington’s fragile- you said it yourself, and you saw how he was when he mentioned Nancy. It looks like everything is really fresh for him right now. All I’m asking is for you to keep that in mind as you move forward in making him feel welcome. I’m worried that things could go sideways. Either one of you, or both of you, for that matter, could be really hurt if things go wrong. Just… take it slow.” Jeff checked his watch then, wincing when he saw the time. “I gotta run. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Like Gareth said, just let us know what we can do to help Steve feel welcome.” 

Eddie nodded, watching as Jeff got into his car and drove off, leaving Eddie and his van alone in the parking lot. Eddie leaned against the brick wall of the school and dropped his cigarette onto the ground, watching as the light fizzled out in the thin layer of snow. 

Step Two: Get the Party to Come Around on Steve Harrington, complete. Time for the Step Three (which would likely be the last step in his plan): Get Steve Fully Integrated Into Hellfire. 

…with one important caveat. Do not fall harder for Steve Harrington. 

Easier said than done. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tag List:  @ellietheasexylibrarian @cuips-not-cute @melodymeddler @i-have-three-feelings @sc00ps-ahoy @singmeyoursimpsong @patchworkgargoyle @spectrum-spectre @devondespresso @thesuninyaface @obsessivlyme @angeldreamsoffanfic @carlyv @nburkhardt @inspirationorinsanity @rebelspykatie @my2amgaythoughts @lavenderagenda @just-a-tiny-void @mamafaithful @breadboi66 @beholdingloser @randomfandomcontent @oftirnanog @yellowdevilkitten @steves-strapcollection @keep-er-steddie @cinnamon-mushroomabomination @bisexualdisastersworld @jinxjinn @copingmechanizm @blackpanzy @failedstarsandgoldenclouds @evix-syne666 @crisisinverted17 @satan-is-obsessed @shrimply-a-menace @anaibis @trashcanniballecter   @thoughtfulbreadpolice @awholedamnmesstbh @chaoticvictorianspirit @jcmadgirl @satan-is-obsessed @tommyvelvet @sleepdeprivedflower @fruitmix @carvingsnowdogs @annabanannabeth @rhyswritesreadsandcries @a-little-unsteddie 

#stranger things #stranger things fic #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie #my writing #1984 steddie meeting au my beloved #steddie fic #pre s4 #pre s4 meeting #s2 rewrite #steve harrington needs a hug #hurt/comfort

[chrissieyt]

Chrissie’s Corner Save File V1.0

Welcome to version 1.0 of my new Sims 4 save file that’s been in the works for 4+ years now where I’m rebuilding/renovating every single lot & world in the game, as well as adding hundreds of new Sims & giving makeovers to all of the EA townies as well!

So why is this Version 1.0?

Basically, this save has been in the works for over 4 years, since before I even had my YouTube channel! Because of that, I’ve decided to split releases up into “versions” because I keep having to go back & update old Sims, homes & lots as we get new packs. I also tend to “hop around” a lot between worlds & as a result of that, there are a couple of lots/households done in each world already - & with each new version, I’ll update it with 1-2 new worlds that are completely done! With Version 1.0 however, I’ve decided to focus on Willow Creek & Oasis Springs!

What does Version 1.0 include exactly?

Other than a bunch of “random” builds/households done in other worlds, Version 1.0 has Willow Creek & Oasis Springs completely done! That means all new community lots, new/renovated houses for EA townies & a bunch of new Sims that I’ve created & built homes for! There are literally hundreds of NEW Sims throughout the whole save file, & you can see a more detailed breakdown of what’s included in Willow Creek & Oasis Springs down below, as well as some more pictures of each world! I’ve also done a OVERVIEW VIDEO you can watch if you’d like!

How to download & install saves:

Once you’ve downloaded the “Corner Save File” from the link below, follow these steps, or check out this great VIDEO (starting at 15:03) that OshinSims made with instructions!

Make a backup of your Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Saves folder

Download the file, unzip, and place files in Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Saves.

I’ve tried to make sure the save file slot name is pretty high, but if it says you already have a file of that name, change the slot number. You should probably choose something higher. Just make sure you don’t have that slot number already. (Example: change Slot_00000055.save to Slot_00000099.save)

Open your game and enter the save. It's named “Corner Save 1.0”. You’ll see it pop up with my SimSelf as the preview family.

Once you’ve got the save opened, make sure you “save as” and create a new file for your own gameplay. This way you can use the save again without having to redownload.

Now you can play with the Sims I’ve created, or add your own & have fun!

Disclaimers + Optional Mods:

I built this save with the intention of integrating all of the different packs we have, & since I own all of the packs, I’ve used them all. So if you don’t own all of them, you might find that you’re missing some things & I don’t know how well it would work in that case.

I’ve also used a couple of mods! Now these aren’t “necessary” but I would highly recommend them to add a bit more customization & useful gameplay. They’re really small mods too!

Mods I’ve used:

More Selectable Icons mod by @zerbu​ (To add the custom icons that I’ve used for the clubs I created as well as a couple of the holidays I added. These icons can also be used for SimTuber Avatars & Lifestyle Brand logos too!

Venue Changes mod by @zerbu​ (This mod unlocks a lot of the “specialty lots” that came with packs - like the Chalet, Myshuno Gardens, etc - but I used it to allow students to have club gatherings on the High School lot! So a couple of the teen clubs have the High School as their club hangout.)

Another mod I’d HIGHLY recommend is MC Command Center by deaderpool & I used it a lot to do the setup for my save - but it’s not necessary to have it if you want to play with the save!

Download HERE! 

SimFileShare download, no adfly!

OR

Alternate DOWNLOAD (Google Drive)

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Included in Version 1.0:

Willow Creek - 17 Brand New Lots (residential & commercial) + 4 Renovated Residential Lots

Willow Creek has 5 Community Lots: A park; Lounge; Library & Café; Gym & Spa; Museum/Wedding Venue/Art Center/Café

11 NEW households, as well as a couple of new Sims/pets added to some of the EA households.

Oasis Springs - 14 Brand New Lots (residential & commercial) + 7 Renovated Residential Lots

Oasis Springs has 5 Community Lots: A park; Retail Bakery & Café; Nightclub & Lounge; Gym & Spa; Restaurant

10 NEW households, as well as a couple of new Sims/pets added to some of the EA households.

#simssave #sims save file #sims 4 save file #sims 4 save #sims4savefile #sims4save #sims4willowcreek #sims 4 willow creek #sims 4 oasis springs #sims4oasissprings

[grailfinders]

Grailfinders #322: Caeneus (Rider)

today on Grailfinders, we’re making Caeneus (Rider), and if you’re wondering why I’m being extra polite and using his proper name it’s because I’m pretty sure if he found out I’ve made him a Beast Master Ranger he might just kill me, so I’m trying to play it safe. he’s also a Fathomless Warlock too, that way we have both ends of the sea serpent covered. no I’m not stealing this from FF14, hush.

anyway, check out his build breakdown below the cut, or his character sheet over here!

next up: stop; hammer time

Ancestry & Background

not too much is changing here, they’re still a Variant Human with our weird variant Noble background, so that’s proficiency in Athletics as well as History and Intimidation, plus the Gift of the Metallic Dragon for a bonus to Wisdom (on top of your usual Dexterity and Charisma bonuses), plus access to the spell Cure Wounds once a day for free, plus with whatever spell slots you have. it’s not quite invincibility, but if you’re still alive at the end it should be fine. the real reason we’re here though is for Protective Wings, letting you react to you (or an ally) getting hit, and adding your proficiency bonus to your AC for that attack, up to proficiency times a day. right now that’s +2 and twice a day, but it’ll grow as you do.

Ability Scores

my pc crashed the last time I did these, so now it’s a speed round. from highest to lowest: Charisma- you’re scary, we use it a lot early on. Dexterity. it’s AC. you are AC. Wisdom. you’re a security guard, keep shit secure. Constitution. you have indestructible skin, what do you think that does to a person’s HP total. Strength wish it could be higher but we don’t need it. Intelligence. you’re still a Summer servant, after all.

Class Levels

1. Warlock 1: starting off as a warlock gives you proficiency with Wisdom and Charisma saves, plus Religion and Nature.

also as a first level warlock, you get to make a pact with the god of the sea, a.k.a. the Fathomless. yaaaaay. reminder that most warlock pacts aren’t exactly willing.

anyway, you have the gift of the sea now! that gives you a swim speed, and you can breathe underwater. even better, you can summon a Tentacle of the Deep that acts as your serpent’s tail. I know it’s weird we’re getting the tail first, there’s a reason for that. still, you can summon it as a bonus action, and on that bonus action and each one after you can move it around and attack with it, slowing down whatever it hits in the process.

you also learn a little Pact Magic, spells that you can cast using your Charisma and using slots that recharge on short rests. Green-Flame Blade and Sword Burst are typical weapon-focused cantrips, and while Destroy Water isn’t technically something Caeneus uses, it feels in character. (also, pretty sure there’s a Create Or tacked on there somewhere, but I doubt he’d care.) finally, Armor of Agathys. I know we’ve been using it a lot this summer, but it’s a good spell and Caeneus is all about that toughness. even if you get hit, you’ll just lose temporary HP! it’s like you never got hit at all.

2. Warlock 2: second level warlocks get invocations, and like all weapon-based warlocks we’re saving one for level three, and just taking Armor of Shadows now for free Mage Armor, adding +3 to your AC at will. you don’t really have any ascensions with armor this time, so your unarmored AC is more important than ever.

you can also Cause Fear now, in case your usual intimidation checks aren’t good enough for someone.

3. Warlock 3: at third level you take up the Pact of the Blade plus the invocation Improved Pact Weapon, allowing you to summon just about any weapon as an action, with a +1 bonus to hits and damage, and it can be used to cast your warlock spells. normally we’d play it safe and grab a spear or trident, but neither of those are finesse- we can’t multiclass into monk or hexblade this build, so we need something that uses dexterity to attack with if we want that sweet sweet AC. thankfully the dragonlance campaigns have us covered thanks to their introduction of the Hoopak, our new favorite weapon. it even manages to be both a melee and ranged weapon, just like a harpoon!

your serpent can’t really bind people yet, but you can pretend it can with Hold Person paralyzing a humanoid who fails their wisdom save and giving you advantage to hit them, plus critical hits when you do in melee range!

4. Warlock 4: use your first ASI to grab the Resilient feat, to both add 1 to your Dexterity and make you proficient with those saves. you really don’t care about fireballs, for several reasons.

for your spells, you can splash people with Frostbite, or you can use Earthbind. it’s kind of like Hold Person, but worse! that’s why we got the other spell first.

5. Warlock 5: fifth level warlocks get third level spells like Spirit Shroud, which adds extra cold or radiant damage to your melee attacks and slows down anyone nearby. this will become that aura you’re surrounded in during your NP, but for now it’s just pretty nice.

if you’d rather spend that spell slot on burst damage instead, Eldritch Smite has your back! once a turn when you hit something, you can spend a warlock spell slot to deal an extra 4d8 force damage to whatever poor bastard you stabbed, and if it’s huge or smaller you can knock it prone for even more advantages!

6. Ranger 1: multiclassing into ranger gets you another skill proficiency, like Survival to help Gordy with the cooking. sometimes. you’re also a Deft Explorer, so you’re canny with Religion checks, adding a doubled proficiency bonus to them. against your will.

you also have a Favored Enemy, giving you advantage on checks to track and recall information about them. I’m not going to tell you what to pick for these since they’re technically supposed to be based on your own experiences in game, but in-character I’d definitely pick Celestials first, then whatever kind of humanoid Columbus is second. third is dealer’s choice.

7. Ranger 2: second level rangers get a Fighting Style, and unfortunately the Hoopak is a two-handed weapon, so not many of these options are super helpful. I’d pick Archery though, at least now your ranged and melee modes do the same amount of damage.

you also learn another set of Spells that you cast with Wisdom, plus a different set of spell slots that recharge on long rests. while they’re technically different stuff, you can use warlock slots for ranger spells and vice versa, with the exception of Eldritch Smites.

still, pick up Ensnaring Strike to actually use a harpoon like a harpoon and restrain enemies, and Longstrider for some more swimming speed. I don’t think Caeneus is actually supposed to be that fast, but both your NPs feature you zooming around in some way so now it’s stuck in my head.

8. Ranger 3: third level rangers can join any conclave they want, even if it’s the Beast Master one. this lets you summon a Primal Companion, where each time you summon it you can choose between an animal from the land, sea, or air, though obviously we’re mostly picking the sea creature. it acts as part of your turn, but it can’t do more than move, dodge, or react unless you spend your bonus action commanding it. you can summon it for free once a day, or by spending spell slots to revive them when they die. they’re proficient with all checks and saves, plus when they attack they grapple whatever they hit. very serpenty.

if you want another way to waste spell slots, you can use Primeval Awareness to sense extraplanar creatures within a mile of you. you don’t know where they are, but you know they’re there!

you also know Goodberry. I don’t think you’d be much of a healer, but your job is to keep everyone alive, so a 1 HP healing buff is pretty useful.

9. Ranger 4: use this ASI to bump up your Dexterity for a higher AC and attack bonus.

10. Ranger 5: fifth level rangers get an Extra Attack each action for twice as much stabbing and throwing. you can also use second level spells now like Find Traps, allowing you to sense traps. again, you don’t know where the trap is, but you know it’s there!

yeah, you might not be that good at being a security officer.

11. Ranger 6: sixth level rangers get another round of Favored Enemy, and you’re now Roving, adding 5’ of movement to your walking speed and giving you a climbing speed to boot! now you don’t even need Da Vinci’s help! maybe take a slow fall belt though.

12. Ranger 7: seventh level beast masters give their pets Exceptional Training, allowing you to command it to dash, disengage, or help on its turn, plus its attacks are magical to boot. the disengaging is nice since summons are usually pretty squishy.

you can also Enhance Ability for a minute, giving yourself advantage on one kind of skill check, with bonuses for physical stats- boosting strength checks increases your carrying capacity, dexterity keeps you from taking minor fall damage, and constitution gives you temporary HP.

13. Ranger 8: speaking of constitution, use this ASI to bump it up for more HP. it’s retroactive too, so you get 13 more points right now. you also gain a Land’s Stride, so difficult terrain doesn’t slow you down now, and nonmagical plants can’t hurt you? sure? I mean, your skin’s tough.

14. Ranger 9: Ninth level rangers get third level spells like Water Walk. you’re so repulsed by the ocean you don’t even swim in it!

15. Ranger 10: Tenth level rangers are Tireless, letting you give yourself some temporary HP as an action Proficiency times a day. you also lose exhaustion on short rests as well as long ones! sometimes being a security guard means working long shifts.

you can also Hide in Plain Sight, mostly because neither option here was really in-character, but HiPS is bad enough you won’t be tempted to use it. you can spend a minute making camo for yourself, giving you a +10 bonus to stealth checks as long as you stay still next to a wall. thankfully stalking the enemy is more Kama’s job, so you don’t have to use this much.

16. Ranger 11: at eleventh level your sea serpent is overtaken by a Bestial Fury, allowing it to attack twice when you command it to. that might not sound like much, but if you mix in your regular two attacks that’s four attacks per round, which is on par with a 20th level fighter.

you can also cast Protection from Energy now, giving you or an ally resistance to one kind of elemental damage for up to an hour. it’s not quite evasion, but now fireballs really won’t do much to you.

17. Ranger 12: bump up your Constitution again for even more HP! yeah that’s it this level.

18. Ranger 13: thirteenth level rangers get fourth level spells, like our pick Guardian of Nature. with just a bonus action you can turn into either a Primal Beast or a Great Tree- the former makes you faster and better in every way with melee weapons, while the latter gives you more temporary HP and better constitution saves, plus you make ranged and magical attacks with advantage, and you churn up the water nearby, turning it into difficult terrain.

19. Ranger 14: at level fourteen you get one last round of Favored Enemy, so make it count, and you can Vanish as a bonus action, as well as become untraceable to anyone not using magic. that’s actually really useful for us this time- dragging a big sea serpent around isn’t the stealthiest way to move.

20. Ranger 15: at level fifteen, you can learn Stoneskin, granting you and your serpent resistance to nonmagical physical damage. “but wait!” I hear you cry, “Stoneskin only targets one creature!” to that, I say, “yeah I was getting to that calm down.” you can target two creatures at once thanks to your final beastmaster ability which gives you the chance to Share Spells with your serpent! as long as you’re casting a spell targeting yourself, you can also make it affect your beast companion if they’re within 30’ of you. that’s pretty good, but we’ll talk about how good it can be in the pros & cons section.

Pros & Cons

Pros:

doubling up on certain spells can be really good if you’re creative with it. your free mage armor casts don’t really matter for your beasts given their natural armor does the same thing (but protip to DMs: they just went through 15 levels of beast master ranger, let them have a lil somethin' somethin'), but when you look at spells like Armor of Agathys doubling the temporary HP and damage dealt with each hit, or Spirit Shroud to pump a ridiculous amount of damage while also eviscerating your enemy’s movement speed where you and your serpent’s auras align. also you could use one version of Guardian of Nature on each of you at the same time, which probably isn’t super useful but it is cool as hell.

warlocks and rangers both have spell slot issues, and they both kind of fix one another? rangers don’t have a lot of spell slots in total for what they try to do, and warlock’s weird “always one kind of slot” thing makes casting low-level spells feel bad, but together they kind of mesh well.

you still have some pretty thick skin, and while we don’t get to the insane heights of your past self, your baseline comes with more health and more ways to shield or heal yourself to make up for it.

Cons:

your bonus action is split between your serpent tail, your serpent, and a bunch of ranger spells, so it can be hard to fight effectively. seriously we mostly went with the Fathomless warlock for the swimming, you could go hexblade again and not miss out on much for most of the build.

speaking of bad decisions, the doubled spells are cool, but are they 15 levels of beastmaster ranger cool? Honestly, not really. like, not only are you playing the weakest ranger subclass, but we also deliberately picked worse options for your features to stay in character. speaking of…

your spell list also suffers from this design choice- Caeneus isn’t big on magic, and their repertoire reflects that. like 100% serious right now, even if you feel the need to play this character 100% as we made it, for the love of god pick something other than Find Traps. that spell is the trap, don’t use it.

#fgo #fate grand order #D&D 5e #DND #Caeneus #Caenis #warlock #ranger

[deadboyfriendd]

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕚𝕣𝕝𝕤 𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔹𝕒𝕟𝕕 | E.M. 

Summary: Your band finally scores the Friday-night spot at The Hideout. But who the fuck is Corroded Coffin? And who the fuck is Glitterfoot?

Warnings: Eddie Munson X Fem!Reader, unprotected p in v sex, fingering, language, light angst, Eddie goes a little Vince Neil, language. As always, if I missed anything reach out and I'd be happy to change it!

My content is 18+ Minors DNI

Word Count: 4.0k

Author’s Note: I've had this piece in the works for literal weeks. I'm literally gonna burst into tears if it doesn't get read.

“Fucking pardon?” 

“I don’t know why you’re so upset. That spot wasn’t yours anyways.” 

Eddie’s thought came to a needle-scratch halt when those god-awful words spilled from the old man’s mouth. Eddie towered over Ott, the gruff man who owned The Hideout, however, the man nearly doubled him in width, and he wasn’t budging. 

“You said we could have it!” Eddie screeched at him. 

He was a republic of voices tonight, and unfortunately, that republic was Italy. Ott raised a brow as the young man before him swung his wrists so hard he thought they were going to fly off in a liability claim. He knew his words were going in one ear and out the other, but at least it was entertaining. 

“No… I said I’d think about it.” He corrected, stance unwavering despite the tantrum happening before him. 

“That almost always means yes!” Eddie hitting the highest tenor he had probably ever hit in his life. 

“Except for when it means no.” Ott gruffed back. 

“Who else is gonna play? There’s no other band in town?” Eddie said, finally, resulting to mirroring a much lankier, much more dramatic version of Ott’s stance. 

“Glitterfoot. They’re a couple of really nice girls. And it looks like you’ve got competition.” He said back to Eddie, turning around and walking back out of the greenroom door. Eddie furrowed his brow, his face twisting in anguish. He looked back at the rest of his band members, who looked back at him in unsurprised questioning. 

“Who the fuck is Glitterfoot?” 

+

The bar was old, to say the least. The wood covering the ancient bartop had been covered with resin in order to preserve it, yet the constant spilling and wiping had left a waxy residue that pulled at your skin whenever you leaned against it. When you looked around, you realized nothing was new here. Not even the patrons- save for four men leaning idly against the bartop. Not even the bartender. Not even the shock that came to you at the sheer age of this building. 

You were used to bars like this. You played them every chance you got. 

The static basso of Lori’s guitar being plugged into the amp finally drowned out that god-awful hum that reverberated off the walls from the neon surrounding you. 

The bar was considerably more full than the Tuesday-night slot. Eddie wore a near-comedic deep-set frown. He moped, leaning his back angrily against the bar and he kept his arms crossed across his chest, glass bottle handing deftly from his fingers off to the side. 

“Why exactly are we here again?” Jeff asked, leaning over towards Eddie’s shoulder so he could hear them over the opening riffs of your first song. 

“To scope out the competition.” Eddie explained, shortly, eyes fixated on the stage before him. 

“What competition?” Jeff asked him, confusedly. 

“Whoever these bitches are.” Eddie said back at him, trying desperately to end the conversation. 

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re bitches bu-”

“Dude, just shut up and look mean.” Eddie finally snapped, other boys in the band turning their heads back towards the stage. All of them took on the same stance, backs leaned against the bar top, arms folded over chests, bottles hanging from the necks in their hands beneath their folded arms. However, while the other boys watched, and quite enjoyed it, Eddie’s face stayed mean. 

He used those mean feelings to ignore the way your hair flew around your face in slow motion. He shook the dastardly thought right out of his head, but he couldn't ignore the way the light refracted around your face in a shower of sweat like glitter. He couldn’t help that he could see your stupid eyelashes kiss where the apples of your cheeks pushed them together from the bar. It’s not like he controlled the way your ring-clad hand brushed ever-so-softly against your face or the way you smelled like a girl and he could catch a whiff of it across the building. 

What he could help, however, was that he was mad. He was mad that you were up there instead of him, and he was mad that there was actually a respectable crowd here tonight, and he was mad that they were actually enjoying the set- and so-help-him-God that was your fault.  

He sat stone-faced through the entire setlist, through the crowd clapping and Jeff telling him that his face was going to stick like that if he didn’t cut it out. Frankly, he was hoping that his face would stick like that. This was the most lively the bar had been in years and he was mad that it wasn’t him that drew it. Before he knew it, the gaggle of girls were strutting towards the bar. 

“Hey.” He piped up, loud enough for you to hear, as your band all took their places beside them at the bar. Your bandmates and yourself turned your heads to look at him, a parliament of wide-eyed owl women hungry to tear apart mean mice-men. They stood behind you, read for a fight, or to say really mean things until he cried. Most likely the latter. 

“Uh, who are you?” You asked, sitting back on the barstool and crossing your arms in defense. 

“We’re Corroded Coffin.” He explained, like he expected you to know the name. You raised an eyebrow, hoping- daring him to elaborate

“The Friday night band?” He continued, gesturing his arms around his head like he owned the bar. 

“Uh… we’re the Friday night band?” You asked, your friends looking at each other like they needed to brace themselves;

“What the fuck is a Glitterfoot?” He started immediately. It blindsided you, and you stared at him, dumbstruck. 

“Us-” Ada started in, in your silence, but this was your fight now. 

“What twelve year old came up with Corroded Coffin?” You spit back with a vigor, splaying your hand out to gesture at all of them- even the boys behind him that were burying their face in their hands in sheer embarrassment. . 

“Me.” Eddie piped up, perhaps a little too quickly. 

“Figures.” 

“You guys aren’t even that good.” He started, just looking for an out at this point. 

“Then why are we playing tonight and you’re not?” If your purple nail polish were poison, it would drip from your fingers and dissolve the flesh in front of you like acid

“Because we suck, too.” His friend piped up, trying desperately to dig his friend out of the hole he dug himself into. 

“Shut up dude, they didn’t know that.” He turned around to look at the man, his arms waving around like an aggravated toddler. 

“Everyone knows that.” His friend said back. 

“Hey! Girls! You did great! Look at the crow- oh Christ on a cracker.” Ott said, arms outstretched excitedly as he emerged from the office behind the bar- only to see the drama in front of him unfold. 

“Oh, hi, Ott, we were just leaving, actually.” You said, anger and annoyance dripping out of your voice in the same poison purple tone as your nails. 

“Wait. Where are you going?” He asked, watching you with broken eyes as you slid off the barstool. 

“Giving the Friday-night band their spot back.”

+

“What do you mean we’re fired?” Eddie screeched, loud enough to reverberate out of the green room and rattle the glasses behind the bar. 

“Y’heard me. Whatever you said to those girls made them not want to come back.” Ott said to him, firmly. 

“So that means I’m fired from Tuesday night?” 

“Call it showbusiness, son.”

“But what about our fans?” Eddie screeched again, making Ott want to shove Gareth’s drumsticks in his ears just to block out the noise that was coming from the Vince-Neil-level tantrum before him. 

“Drunks, Edward, not fans.” Ott humbled him, remaining stagnant as Eddie buzzed around him like electrons to an atomic nucleus. 

“They come for us.” Eddie reasoned, loudly enough to still be unreasonable. 

“No, they came for alcohol… and they came for those girls.” Ott said back, gesturing his hand outward towards the bar. 

They sat in silence for a long while, Ott relishing in the silence and Eddie staring through him in thought. 

“Ugh… shit Ott.” Eddie started, running his hands over his face, through his hair, and back again, “What if I can get them back?”

The silence stretched on- this time with Ott deep in thought and Eddie buzzing with nerves. It was finally broken when Ott released a defeated sigh, pulling the hat off his head to rub at his balding hairline. 

“I’ll tell you what, son, if you can get them back, your Tuesday spot is safe…for now.”

“Deal.”

+

He saw your signup on the open-mic night sheet for the record shop downtown. He was well-known here, well-liked even- considering whatever spare money he had was usually spent here. With a little bit of prying, he got the manager to fess up to what time you were playing, and he even got your names. 

He hung around in the back through your set, watching your deft, ring-clad fingers curl around the mic again. This time you looked softer, less on the defensive. He listened to your voice this time- less drowned out by the angry music your friends backed you with. He let it fill his brain like ink spreading through water. 

He knew why you were called Glitterfoot now, the sunlight coming through the shop windows like a beacon. He swore he could see the glitter falling from the sky and pooling at your feet in a pool, he knew it would follow you and coat the bottoms of your shoes and leave beautiful metallic footprints when you walked away. He immediately felt bad for what he said just a few nights prior, he knew you weren’t bad. You had to crowd to back it then and you had the crowd to back it now. 

This wasn’t just about saving his Tuesday-night spot anymore. Hell, he would trade all of the Tuesdays in the world just to hear your voice for just a little longer, even when it dripped in anger at him.

“You’re here to boot us out of open mic, too?” You asked, this time, letting your friends pack up after you insisted you could handle him one-on-one. 

“No, actually, I’m here to listen.” He said, hands up and palms facing you in surrender. 

“Thought you said we sucked?” You asked, not dropping your own defensive stance. 

“No- ugh, jesus. I came to apologize, okay?” He said, finally, rubbing his temples with his middle fingers. 

“Go on.” You said again, coldly, still not dropping the stance. 

“I’m sorry. For Everything. You guys don’t suck, and I am a gigantic, gaping asshole.” He started, taking a step closer to you with his hands out towards you- offering his apology like it was tangible and sat in his hands. 

“Keep talking.”

“You guys belong at The Hideout and I was just mad that you got picked to play instead of us.” He continued. 

“Okay.” 

“Okay what?”

“Okay.” You reiterated, turning on your heel and starting to walk away

“That’s it?” He asked, stepping forward and gripping your elbow softly, “You’re just gonna say okay and walk away?” He asked you, spinning your frame around and placing his hands on your shoulders. 

You tried to ignore the way your stomach turned. 

“Yep.”

“Look, come down to The Hideout on Tuesday, we’ll buy you guys a round of drinks. Like friends.”

“Okay.”

+

The bar was old, the same way it was old the last time you checked. The wood covering the ancient bartop had still been covered with resin, and it still pulled at your skin when you leaned your elbows against it. When you looked around, you realized nothing was new here, not even the band, and especially not the patrons.

What was new in this place was the way you looked at Eddie, the stage lights casting a halo around his head shrouded in soft curls. You watched the way his lashes kissed at the corners of his eyes, attached to the corners of his pillowy mouth by invisible threads. The stage lights dripped molden gold on to his personage, rolling down his face like sweat. It dripped out of his voice and coated the strings on his guitar. 

The setlist looked much different now that you weren’t playing, fifteen full-length songs felt so much longer when you sat at the bar. You realized now that this was the one place you had never been- in the crowd. You reveled in it for a while. It was atmospheric, really, something you couldn’t seem to describe- maybe it was just him. 

“Hey” You started, your best smile plastered across your face. 

“Hi.” he said back, more genuinely. He was still covered in a sheen of sweat from the set he’d just played. 

“So you’re Corroded Coffin?” You asked sarcastically, a sort of starting over phrase. 

“The Tuesday-night band.” He clarified, looking through kissed lashes at you, “We kinda suck.”

“Hey, we kinda suck too.” You giggled back. 

“Only slightly less, though.” He clarified, once more, “-enough to be the Friday-night band.”

“So… we were actually wondering…” Ada started from behind you, pulling you out of the daze of the back-and-forth banter.

“...If you guys maybe wanted to play with the Friday night band?” You finished, getting her hint and getting to the point. 

“What, like, amp versus amp?” Jeff asked, shoving his hands in his pockets. 

“No… like… together.” Gwen said, finally. All of the boys turned to look at each other, then back to you, and then back at each other once more. 

“I call huddle.”

You, Ada, Gwen, and Lori reconvened into your owlet-woman parliament, staring with wide eyes at the congregation of grown men in a t-ball-esque huddle in front of you. From the eye of that storm, a rain shower of whispers resonated Dungeons-and-Dragons-style from it. 

“What’s their motive here, boss?” Gareth asked. 

“That’s the thing… I don’t think there is a motive.” Eddie replied. 

“Maybe they’re just being nice.” Grant groaned, rolling his eyes. 

“Maybe they’re gonna make us look like a bunch of assholes.” Eddie started, with a raised brow. 

“Make you look like an asshole.”  Jeff corrected, remembering his qualms with the word bitches from a mere few days ago. 

“Well maybe you deserve it a little bit.” Gareth added in, with a soft nod from the rest of them. 

“Shut up, Gareth.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well we already look like assholes, what else do we have to lose?”

“We’ve been begging for that Friday night spot for months.”

“Fuck it.”

From two barstools away, your own congregation chipped and screeched in a patriarchal basso of mirrored words. 

“So… what are we looking at here, boss?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you.”

“Maybe they’re scheming? Trying to find another way to humiliate us?”

“No, I think he really meant that apology. Maybe we’re just a bunch of bitches?”

“Maybe you’re just a bitch.”

“Well then maybe I deserve it a little bit.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“Shut up, Gwen.”

“Ugh, fuck it.”

In a choreographed dance, you and Eddie met face to face, eyes piercing into each other like leucotomes. You feel like a lobotomized housewife, words coming to the forefront of your mashed-potato frontal lobe but unable to make its way through your ground beef cortex. 

“So do we have a deal or not?” He asked, and it felt like it was barely above a whisper. 

“It’s a date.”

+

The stage lights in the Indiana-local dive bar were miserable- always had been. After performing a few times, you started to realize that they were comforting- almost in the same way as the beginnings of a sunburn. They blocked the prying eyes of the crowd and settled the nerves, which were extraordinarily tense on this night. They didn’t, however, block the piercing, ambergris gaze of the man casting a shadow over you on the stage, deft fingers traveling back and forth over frets and metal strings. 

The music isn’t what you’re used to performing, but you can’t help the way the sound that poured from his system dripped off of the frets like gold. 

Your voice wasn’t a sound that he was used to working with. It was far less abrasive and sounded like bells. The sound resonated from you like glitter. 

The stage was packed, with the eight young adults performing on stage, some people opting to sit out for certain songs- some originals from Glitterfoot, some originals from Corroded Coffin. It was a new entity- entirely different in nature. It had the boys’ abrasiveness, with your tentative, feminine flare. The small crowd, though confused, loved it. 

Eddie didn’t sing much, but tonight, he couldn’t help but to let the small resonation slip past his lips into the microphone. You felt it in your chest. Though he sang much more quietly, it filled your ears and overtook the sound of your own voice. 

He couldn’t help but to peer up at you, hair flying over your shoulder in the most beautiful sequence of flight-like movement he had ever seen. He saw every detail about you through a macro-lens, the way your lashes kissed at the corners, the broken ends of hair at your crown catching the light and casting a celestial halo around your head, the delicacy- yet firmness- of the way your hand gripped the microphone in front of you. 

As the final note catches in your throat, the applause from the crowd fades from your ears like they’ve been stuffed with cotton. The only thing you can hear is the clicking of fingers on strings on frets, the only thing you can see is ambergris eyes.

+

There was a wire that cut through ice tonight. The group had filed out, quickly and all at once- as they usually did, leaving you and Eddie alone to pack things away into the green room for the next Tuesday-night show. 

You plopped yourself down in between the open back doors of the van, the suspension groaning and flexing slightly under the combined weight of yourself and Eddie. You sighed softly, bringing your knees up into your chest and staring at the brick in front of you, breath escaping your lips in a cloud of vapor in front of you. 

You could feel his eyes on you, not boring, like they were the first night. Scanning. Scanning your personage. If there were a light behind his eyes it would illuminate your body in a soft glow. 

“You're like… really pretty, you know that?” He asked, craning his neck to look down at you, his neck wrinkling under his chin. 

“What am I supposed to say to that?” You asked, and his brows knit together in confusion. 

“What?” He asked you 

“I mean… if I say no you’re gonna elaborate and it sounds like I’m fishing for compliments and if I say yes I sound conceited.” You explained further, drawing a chuckle from his lips. 

“I guess, when you put it that way, I’ve put you in quite the predicament, huh?” He asked, looking at you with soft eyes. The softest you had ever seen. 

That’s not the only predicament. You thought quietly to yourself, his liquid-gold laden image still filling the crevices of your brain matter like ink dropped in water. 

“I guess you have.”

“Pretty and funny.” He continued, your cheeks aflame. You tried to ignore it. 

“Okay, I will claim funny.” 

“But you really are very pretty.”

“Thank you, Eddie.”

Your eyes flicked upwards towards him, pupils locking into his. The warmth of his breath cut through the ice of the night like a hot wire, melting the condensation into pools of steam and soft puddles- one of which pooled between your legs. 

His lips touched yours as his hands came to grip your waist. It felt like it was in slow motion, yet moved so quickly you couldn’t process it. He was down soft- yet steel-wool abrasive. Otherworldly yet so tangible. 

Your back pressed against the woolen carpeting of the van beneath you, head resting sloppy against his folded jacket, still warm with smoke from the bar. Your hand gripped the nape of his neck abrasively, holding on to him as he lay your body down against the hard back floor of the van- back doors clicking shut as he dragged them with the top of his foot. 

“Pretty.” He whispered, breath tickling the soft spot beneath your ear. You drew in a breath, offering only a soft whine in response. 

He was delicate with you, hands drawing up and down your legs with a tenderness he had never displayed before. He gripped on the meat of your outer thighs, running them down to meet your knees and so delicately spreading your legs to make a home for his body to settle. 

His fingertips pressed valleys into the flesh of your thighs like linen, coming up to cup your heat. It drew a sigh from your lips at the contact. 

“So, so fucking pretty.” He whispered, breathlessly, yourself just as breathless as the pad of his thumb slid beneath the band of your underwear to rub endearing circles across your clit. You released a soft whine. 

“And you make the prettiest fucking noises for me.” He said again, his spare hand running across the valley of your breasts and over the bump of your tummy. Slowly, he slid his middle and ring finger into you, drawing another whine from you. 

“Good girl.” 

The name sparked a fire in your abdomen, heating quickly- tightening a coil within you. It burned bright orange, teetering on the edge of molten, just as you teetered on the edge of orgasm. His soft whine sent you into a spiral, the coil snapping and your orgasm cresting like a dam. 

“There we go. You did so good for me.” Eddie praised, working you down from that floaty place. 

He unclasped his belt, unbuttoned his pants and slid them down his thighs, lean with a light smattering of hair. His cock sprung up from the waistband of his boxers, pink at the tip with a pearlescent bead of precum dripping from the head. 

“Are you ready, baby?” He asked you, with tentative eyes. It turned your stomach over, a slight, 

“Mm-hm.” all you could muster. 

“Okay.” He whispered, pressing a soft kiss to the flesh of your lips, following it with a sparse trail of them that led back down your body. 

He  used his two fingers to guide the tip back on, and you relinquished the sting- followed by the delicious ache that filled your stomach. Slowly he pushed in, pausing once he was buried to the hilt. 

“We doing okay?” He asked, barely above a whisper, running his hand back and forth across your hip, endearingly. 

“Move, Eddie.” You whined back, just wishing he would move already. He chuckled at this, gripping both of your hips firmly between his hands. 

“Slow down, tiger, I’m going.” He said, between laughs.

You swore you could have seen stars as he began to thrust, each one more rhythmic and deeper in nature. It was delicious and celestial. His whines were like songs, high-pitched and out of character for him, but still just as beautiful. 

His hips met yours with a near-pornographic slap with each thrust and, as far as you knew, the suspension from the van was creaking just as loudly, though masked by the sounds being drawn from your throats. He was all hands, attaching himself to you like a garment. He ran hot. A furnace of a man. 

You swore you went blind when you came. In the few minutes he took on the comedown, you caught yourself staring. He wasn’t as rough around the edges here. More oblong. More organic. You looked at the soft smattering of freckles that dusted the outsides of his cheeks, indicators of childhood days spent in the sun. His ambergris eyes a much cooler color in the darkness of the night that surrounded you. 

He offered you a soft smile, pink lips pulling upwards where they met. 

It was then that you realized that not all that glitters is gold, but it’s still so goddamn beautiful.

#eddie munson #eddie x reader #eddie stranger things #eddie x fem!reader #eddie munson smut #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson oneshot #eddie x y/n #stranger things season 4 #flea writes

[eternally--mortal]

One of my many time travel headcanons slots into the irondad—spiderson corner of the Marvel fanverse. I love Spider-Man and his stories, but I also suffer from visceral second-hand embarrassment and second-hand pain of seeing someone neglected or abandoned or alone, so most of my voluntary interactions with the Spider-Man/Marvel fan sphere come from the warm and fuzzy and emotionally rewarding sections with Tony and Peter becoming family. I know there are some arguments about how realistic that may or may not be to the movies, but I don’t really care. I love that those fan fictions and fan arts exist and I embrace them because they’re my favorite way of intaking that particular corner of media. So if you’re on that same page with me, enjoy my little private time travel headcanon:

In a Universe where Tony survives, Beck would have to curb his plans. They wouldn’t have formed the same way. For one thing, the drones and the glasses wouldn’t have been accessible through Peter / Tony’s will. For another, Peter would have been immediately more obviously tied to Tony, because Tony wouldn’t want to let him out of his sight after saving the world for Peter. In this version Tony and Pepper essentially adopt Peter and share informal joint custody with May. Peter gets to be Morgan’s older brother and he eventually sees Tony as his dad. They take their time to adjust: Peter has time to settle after the snap and find a new equilibrium, and the group of them develops a normal family routine. There’s definitely an optional version of this where Harley’s there as well because I have a soft spot for that, but this is mostly about Peter and Morgan (sorry Harley. You’re awesome, I just didn’t imagine you in the bulk of this story).

Beck’s team takes longer to get their shit together—partially as a plot device to allow Peter to adjust enough to call Tony “dad” and partially because Tony isn’t dead in this version, so their plans have to be different.

When the public figures out that Tony has a ‘son’—one that’s just as smart as he is—Beck and his crew decide not to go directly after the drones. They go for the kids instead. They figure ‘hey, if the rumors are true and the brat is just as smart as Tony, he can build whatever we want him to. If not, we can use the kids as leverage to get what we want.’ They go after Peter and Morgan and steal some of Tony’s super-secret-recently-invented time travel technology and hop around the space time continuum for a little bit. They don’t realize that Peter is Spider-Man because they’re convinced he’s Tony’s son and have fixated on that rather than on the fact that Peter might be a superhero (since Tony so obviously considers him a son they didn’t do as much digging into ‘why on earth would Tony Stark take interest in this random kid?’). But Peter doesn’t know whether he should play his hand as Spider-Man. They keep him separated from Morgan most of the time and he has to keep her safe because they’re threatening him with her. Peter doesn’t want to take the risk that he’ll escape and they’ll portal away with Morgan somewhere/when where he can��t find them.

Beck and his crew haven’t tried to reach out to Tony yet. They’re pretty confident that they can use Morgan to get whatever they want out of Peter instead. And besides that, Beck really just wants to make Tony suffer, so he figures taking his kids somewhere unreachable is the best way to do that. But he also wants to be able to watch Some version of Tony, just to remind himself of whom he’s torturing. So after hop-skip-jumping their way through the time stream, Beck takes them back in time to just after the Avengers saved the world from Loki—or some other convenient time within the span of movies. There’s some flexibility there. (The watches work for all of these trips. It’s possible that Peter and Tony revisited the tech to eliminate Pym Particles as an energy source. Maybe Beck’s team of engineers found another power source. Or maybe they just have a huge stash of particles. I don’t know. I didn’t really think about that part of the story. This is really mostly just background.)

Peter wants to lessen the risk of being more permanently separated from Morgan, he wants to make it easier for Tony to find them, AND he likes that they’re in a time period where he can reach some version of the Avengers. So he sneaks out while they’re trying to make him build something and he sabotages all of the time bracelets so they can’t be used again.

The real meat of the story comes with the back-in-time Avengers. Tony gets an odd transmission that he can’t open (because Peter sent it to JARVIS in the hopes that His version of Tony would find it and see it in the future and would know when and how to come back and get them). Then the Avengers run into the future version of Tony who shows up in the past. Younger Tony gets super suspicious, and he and the other Avengers assume that this is some super villain using a copy of the Ironman suit.

Beck’s crew may also have done something to get them on Team Cap’s radar, and Cap may be investigating some of their movements as potential remnants of Hydra or something else equally suspicious. Especially since Beck’s crew may have been too bold entering into this part of the timeline when they assumed they’d have access to an escape (before Peter broke the bracelets).

Finally the Avengers have a run-in where they see Tony’s face. Maybe they even catch him and drag him back to Avengers Tower (which of course he would know how to control / escape). He won’t tell them what’s going on because he takes one look at his younger self and sees a traumatized man with narcissistic tendencies who is Not ready to be a father. So he just tells them that Beck “stole something from me” and to “not get involved.” He plays up some of his familiar bravado and ego so they won’t dig too far into what exactly Beck might have stolen.

Meanwhile Beck is getting fed up with Peter, for obvious reasons. They’re trying to get him to fix the bracelets on Top of everything else they wanted him to do, but he keeps stalling for time. Beck keeps almost catching him recording covert videos, and before Peter has the chance to upload and send any more of them, the crew packs up and ditches the base where they were originally holding the kids. Peter and Morgan are now stuck in the past together, but Peter’s finding fewer and fewer opportunities to escape with her without revealing himself, and now that they’re in the past he’s afraid that Beck might discover his identity and go after Peter’s younger self as well before he even has the spider bite. Besides that, none of Beck’s team realizes how much food Peter needs to eat to stay functional. And when he’s difficult they do things like withhold food (which is a problem for his metabolism), withhold heat (when he can’t thermoregulate, so it’s basically like drugging him because it makes his body think it has to hibernate), actually drug him, etc. He’s hedging between causing problems to make life difficult for Beck, playing at good behavior in order to get more time with Morgan, actually practicing semi-good behavior to buy some time for Tony to come get them, and trying to formulate a better escape plan. And when Beck relocates them to an old Hydra base, Peter decides not to take any risks about showing off his spider powers.

The Avengers team breaks into Beck’s old base after the relocation. Cap is convinced that Tony made some stupid world-ending tech that’s going to get them all killed and that That is what Beck stole. That, or it’s just the time travel tech. To be fair, Tony is also pretty convinced that it’s some sort of tech, and he’s fairly invested in finding out what future-y stuff his older self is being so cagey about. They find evidence of a lab with mechanical parts (tools and pieces that they gave Peter to try and get him to build things, etc.). But Nat comes across a room with a blanket in the corner and a couple crayon drawings and does the whole “Guys, maybe we’re on the wrong trail here” bit about how maybe they don’t really know what’s been stollen. Tony gets what he can out of the computer and takes it back to the tower to decode.

A week later he’s de-encrypted the files enough to access some of the videos that Peter made and saved behind some walls of coding.

There are little snippets that show Peter stalling for time, ones that show some of the repercussions of his sabotaging the watches, etc. There are videos that show how much Beck’s team is treating him as a stupid normal kid and trying to manipulate him in a variety of ways—sometimes with Morgan, sometimes with violence or bribery.

A video where Peter wonders if he should be building something to appease them because they’re not feeding him and he needs to see Morgan, and how he wants to hold out, but Dad he’s not sure he’s going to be able to if it means Morgan might get hurt. How he promises to take care of her.

There are videos of Peter being a little shit and pulling tricks behind Beck’s back to mess with the tech.

A video of Peter looking a little better and Morgan sitting there assisting him and handing him the right tools before he can finish asking for them. They sing a little Italian at each other (in this version May taught Peter some Italian and Tony taught Morgan and Peter some as well). Morgan tells Peter “that’s not the way Daddy builds it.” And Peter has to tell her that they don’t have dad’s stuff at their disposal. (They’re sneakily building an E.M.P. instead of whatever Beck wants. That’s why Peter had to stash the thumb drive so it wasn’t hooked up to the computer system. Unfortunately Beck gets wind of it and figures out what they’re doing before they can use it. He’s noticed the Avengers sniffing around which is why they ditch their original base.) There’s definitely a moment in a video somewhere where they’re talking about Pepper (calling her ‘mom’) and how she would be able to stop Beck maybe even more easily than Tony—Peter says it as a Half-joke to make Morgan feel hopeful—and Peter says “can you do your mom impression?” And Morgan’s face transforms into this little deadpan look and she goes “No, Tony.” And they both laugh and joke about how Pepper would just tell Beck “No” and take them home. And then we see Beck storm in and discover the E.M.P. and throw it into the corner where it smashes (which is how the Avengers find it when they investigate), and we watch Morgan get dragged off screaming and Peter screaming back for her and trying to talk down Beck while Beck is pulling the whole ‘I thought letting you work with your sister would make you behave, but obviously I can’t trust the two of you together’ bit. He says shit like ‘you’re a worse brat than your dad’ and insults their whole family and says some nasty things about Tony and then about Peter and Morgan all while he’s ordering his people to shut the place down and clear out. Beck figures out that Peter’s been recording all of this after his team drags the kids out and he leaves a nasty message for Tony about how he’s going to pay, blah blah blah, how he’s never going to get his kids back. Something dramatic.

Obviously there’s some backlash in the team to Tony finding out that he’s a dad or that he’s going to be. They try to do some calculating to figure out when he’s going to have Peter (since they assume he’s a bio kid), but some of that is messed up by the fact that they don’t know about the snap or the five years that Peter lost. It’s generally chaos. They’re also a little more rushed to figure this out now that they know that there are kids involved. (They also don’t realize that Peter has powers, but it shouldn’t really matter because he’s a kid anyway.)

(At some point there would also be a conversation later when they meet up with Older Tony where someone suggests that Younger Tony just deal with Beck in the present time to avoid all of this so that Older Tony can explain how time travel doesn’t work like that and that This future version of Beck is already set the way he is, likely on a deviant path from their own Beck.)

Beck super mad that the time watches are broken and that the Avengers are on their tail. He rigs up the Hydra base and uses some of his hologram tech to manipulate the kids into thinking they’re being rescued when they’re not (either just to be an asshole or to try and get Peter to fix the watches through manipulation), or to show Peter a hologram of Morgan when she’s not in the room and vice versa to mess with them. At one point he possibly makes Peter think he’s shooting Morgan or something as a form of punishment for Peter not cooperating. There’s a large variety of evil that Beck is frankly willing to dip into to psychologically mess with these kids (and Tony by extension).

Older Tony and the Avengers end up working together to go save Peter and Morgan, which could honestly go a variety of ways. But I like the idea that Peter and Morgan are integral to the escape somehow, by building something or by Morgan remembering something important or by Peter using his smarts or his powers just a little. Younger-Tony gets handed Morgan (by another hero, against his will) at one point while Older Tony is in another room on the other side of the base trying to negotiate with Beck who’s threatening to kill Peter (something like that), and Morgan calls him Mr. Stark or Tony instead of Dad or Daddy because “You’re not my Dad yet” and makes a comment about how there isn’t enough gray in his hair. And he’s not really sure how to respond to her so they’re kind of strangers to each other.

Morgan possibly mentions something about ‘why didn’t you bring Uncle Bucky?’ and Steve just about has a heart attack, and Peter has to defuse it like ‘I don’t think they know about Uncle Bucky yet.’

Beck and his crew are taken into custody. Peter and Morgan get some time in the med bay for recovery. We get to see them interact with JARVIS (which is a little odd because they usually just have FRIDAY). The Avengers get to see Tony being a dad—even if he’s a little cagey about it around the super hero team. There are allusions to him being married to Pepper (without them directly saying it). Peter and Tony fix the time watches (without letting JARVIS see the schematics, because we can’t have an earth-conquering robot knowing how to traverse space-time), and they go home. (Either that or we involve Harley, who’s possibly been home with Pepper this whole time and did not get kidnapped because having all three kids would have driven Beck over the edge. And Harley took care of the technology from his end and ended up altering the tech to open a doorway instead of just using the watches. Not canon compliant, but I don’t know that I mind it as an option. Because, again, The Feels are more important to me for this particular story.) There’s definitely a little moment somewhere in their stay at the tower in the past with the Avengers where Peter wants to drink coffee or something and Tony tells him ‘thanks, no, I’ll take that’ and then asks Morgan to do a Mom (Pepper) impression, so Morgan turns to Peter and goes “No,” and Peter responds with “traitor” or something. I don’t know I think it would be cute.

And then there’s just the aftermath. Peter has Aunt May and MJ and Ned waiting for him when he gets back home. There’s family time with Pepper (and maybe Harley???). All those good vibes. Back in time there’s an acknowledgement of the fact that Tony is a whole-ass person who will grow and develop. Cap wants to go look for Bucky. And the seed has been planted that something is going to go wrong with JARVIS. Tony wonders if Peter’s out there somewhere and was possibly a child of one of his one night stands. Things like that.

#tony stark #peter parker #irondad #spiderson #marvel Spider-Man #mcu spiderman headcanon #mcu headcanon #marvel headcanon #marvel fanfiction #Tom holland’s Spider-Man #I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while because then No Way Home came out #and I was depressed all over again and reminded that the way I like to view Peter’s story is not how it’s portrayed in film #and how it’s also super tragic in the comic books and in ever iteration of his story #that doesn’t mean I don’t like the films #but I’m really glad that the fandom has this corner to it #it’s been a valuable fan experience for me and has been personally healing in a lot of ways #it’s rewarding to see Tony as a parent for Peter #I’ve had this one in my head for a while #I’m sure there are scenes I’ve thought of that I’m forgetting now #or that I’ve smushed together or altered #and I know I had some alternate storyline scenes and moments when I was first considering it #I just don’t remember them now #stories I don’t have the energy to write but that live rent free in my head #let Peter and Morgan be siblings #Let Tony be Peter’s dad #I love them #they’re a lil family #time travel au #I have too many of these I know #it’s my trope weakness

[macgyvertape]

Is anyone really enjoying the difficulty changes? It feels like the casual enjoyment has been stripped out of a lot of mid-range PvE activities where it feels sweaty and the rewards aren’t worth the grind time.

Battleground Mars Nightfall exemplifies this, it takes 3 runs in Hero mode and it punishes you if you aren’t using a meta loadout. So that’s between 40-60+ minutes for one pinnacle, assuming your team doesn’t wipe in the last room to the infinite ads and 1 hit kill boss. I think its going to become the new worst GM, even not counting the 1 hit KO lasers, because the design is so that you fundamentally cannot play it slow. 

The first playlist defiant battleground (in regular difficulty!) I loaded into 10 minutes in and they hadn’t cleared the EDZ beach-head. I left and loaded into a fresh one in the cosmodrome map and it took 34 minutes including a section where it would revive us in the middle of a mob of enemies, champions, and turrets so we kept dying after a few seconds. I’ve since done a few more and I’ve never had a seasonal activity that took so long and felt so different playing with random players vs clan mates. 

Legend Solo Lost Sectors were already infamous for low exotic drop rate, with the sort of rumors of “if you haven’t gotten anything but glimmer after a few runs try leaving to orbit and coming back to reset it”. I enjoyed doing all but the moon ones as a way to try out new loadouts or do something challenging while chatting with friends. They fucking suck now since there’s no increase in exotic drops; the difficulty is 20 over the pinnacle cap so you’re at a disadvantage unless you bounty grind instead of the old system where Legendaries were at powerful cap

Fun fact, 20 difference in power mode is the same difficulty difference for Raid Contest mode. I don’t understand the reasoning behind locking additional loadout slots behind a flawless solo completion; new and casual players will struggle to achieve that much more than hardcore players, and hardcore players are more likely to not need this and already are saving tons of loadouts in DiM. With the difficulty so high, I don’t understand why Bungie doesn’t encourage teamwork or helping out clanmates and let it be a personal flawless completion with a fireteam. 

I regret not finishing all the triumphs for Master Wellspring, because what’s the point of doing it with increased difficulty with no increased rewards. Same thing with Legend Dares of Eternity, the difficulty has been increased but none of the bounties or rewards have been adjusted, and the Legend difficulty bounties were already a pain to do because you had to get it completed in one run and fight all your teammates for the kills. I have no comments on Vex Incursion zone because I haven’t gotten one to spawn. 

Legend Vexcalibur is a pain in the ass where with 3 people it feels tougher than a GM, but there’s no solo operator mod so the long fights where the ads are infinite are frustrating since if you wipe you’re repeating very long fights. Even regular Vexcalinur feels more frustrating than fun when doing it solo. 

In past seasons I played a lot of endgame activities, and I’ve talked about how I enjoyed the legendary Lightfall campaign difficulty a lot. However I don’t enjoy hard difficulty all the time, especially not in activities I’m going to have to run 30-40 times for the seasonal challenges. I’ve heard similar complaints about PvE difficulty changes from clanmates who don’t enjoy endgame activities at all, but they aren’t in fan spaces like tumblr. I know it's about 6 months of development time between feedback and ingame changes, so in the meantime I think I’m best served skipping all the seasonal stuff till week 10 and just doing raids and dungeons until then. 

TLDR: not sure if others feel like the new harder difficulty is the monkey paw’s result of Bungie transitioning away from power level grind, and if others are finding it frustrating

#destiny 2 #season of defiance #destiny 2 critical #putting that last tag just to be safe

[anonym-potato]

Empires SMP D&D - Gem

In celebration of Season 2 of Empires dropping, and the many comparisons to D&D games by both cast and fans, I’ve decided to start building Season One’s characters using Dungeons and Dragons 5e chargen. A few housekeeping notes.

I’m going to be describing these characters starting at Level 1, and then all the way up to Level 10.

I’m gonna be a bit of a canon stickler for these, but I’ll also include other ideas at the end of each section.

I’m writing these with people who haven’t played D&D before and/or don’t know a lot about it in mind. To experienced D&D players, a lot of this will include explaining obvious things.

Now, without further ado…

Gem

I’m starting with Gem because she is the easiest. There are two important elements to building a D&D character - Race (species) and Class (what your character can do). We’ll also need to pick her Background (what she did before she started adventuring).

Gem is canonically a Human, so we’ll go with that. For Class, Gem is a Wizard, and functions more or less like Wizards in D&D do, which is why she’s the easiest.

Now that we know what we’re doing, we have to pick our stats. Stats in D&D run from 1 (the worst) to 20 (the best). The standard run of stats if you don’t want to roll is 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, and 8. We’ll assign the 15 to Intelligence, since that’s the most important stat for Wizards, and determines the effectiveness of their magic. The 14 will go in Constitution, the 13 in Charisma, the 12 in Dexterity, the 10 in Strength, and the 8 in Wisdom. Being a human lets Gem add +1 to two of her stats, we’ll add them to the odd ones so she gets a higher bonus to them. In the end, Gem’s stats look like this: STR 10, DEX 12, CON 14, INT 16, WIS 8, CHA 14

Being Human also gives Gem Proficiency (an extra bonus that rises each level) to one skill of her choice, and a free Feat (extra features that let you further customize your character). For her skill, we’ll pick Persuasion, and for her Feat, we’ll choose War Caster (which lets her cast spells on someone when they run away from her, and makes it easier for her to concentrate on spells with sustained effects). We also get two skill proficiencies from her background. We’ll pick the Sage background for the Arcana and History skills.

Now that all that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Wizards.

Wizard Level 1

At Level One, Wizards get two features: the Wizard version of Spellcasting, and Arcane Recovery. They also get more Proficiencies!

Wizards get to pick Proficiency in 2 skills from a short list. We’ll give Gem proficiency in Insight and Investigation. Wizards also get proficiency in Intelligence and Wisdom Saving Throws, rolls to overcome harmful and/or magical effects.

Spellcasting lets you…cast spells. Spells include Cantrips, which you can cast whenever you want, and leveled spells, which you can cast a limited number of times. Level One spells are the weakest, and Level Nine spells are the most powerful.

Arcane Recovery lets you regain a few Spell Slots (the things you use to cast spells) once a day when you take a short rest.

At first level, Gem gets to pick 3 Cantrips and 6 First Level spells to put in her spellbook, and can prepare (be able to cast) a number of those equal to her Intelligence modifier (which with a 16, is +3) plus her Wizard level. Wizards add 2 more spells to their spellbook every time they level up, and can learn more by finding spell scrolls during the game.

Wizards to Level 10

These are the abilities all wizards get by the time they reach Level 10

Spellcasting: By the time they reach Level 10, a Wizard will know 5 Cantrips and at least 24 spells of up to 5th Level. I’ll put Gem’s full Level 10 spell list at the end of this post.

Aaaaand that’s it. Most Wizard features come from their Subclass, called an Arcane Tradition, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Ability Score Improvements

At 4th and 8th Level, all classes (including Wizards) can choose to boost 1 ability score by 2, or 2 ability scores by 1. They can also choose to take a Feat instead. We’ll spend Gem’s 4th Level ASI to boost her intelligence to 18, and her 8th Level to get it all the way to the maximum of 20. Gem’s a dedicated scholar, after all!

Arcane Tradition

Wizards get to pick their subclass at 2nd Level. Each Arcane Tradition is focused on using a different kind of magic. I struggled to decide on one for Gem, before eventually deciding on the School of Abjuration. Abjuration magic is focused on protection and dispelling magical effects. Most of Gem’s big magical acts, like sealing Xornoth and protecting Violet, would fall under Abjuration magic. Here’s what Abjuration mages get up to Level 10

Abjuration Savant: A passive benefit you get when you join the subclass at 2nd Level. Whenever Gem adds an Abjuration spell to her spellbook from a scroll, it takes less time and costs less money.

Arcane Ward: The other ability you get at 2nd Level, Arcane Ward is the bread and butter of Abjuration Wizards. Whenever Gem spends a spell slot to cast an Abjuration spell, she can create a magical ward that has hit points equal to her Wizard level x2 + her Intelligence modifier. This would be 7 when she takes the subclass, and 25 at level 10. Whenever Gem would take damage, her Arcane Ward takes the damage first, and it’s destroyed once it hits 0. She can’t make the ward again for the rest of the day, but every time she casts an Abjuration spell, the Ward heals a number of hit points equal to twice the spell’s level.

Projected Ward: At 6th Level, Gem can also use her ward to protect anyone she wants within a short distance of her, as long as it’s already been conjured.

Wizards are very squishy - at 10th level, Gem will only have around 60 hit points, which is fairly low, but her Arcane Ward will help her tank some of that damage, and protect fWhip the next time his experiments blow up in his face.

Gem’s Spells - Level 10

(All Abjuration spells are in italics)

Cantrips: Friends, Fire Bolt, Light, Minor Illusion, Prestidigitation

1st Level: Absorb Elements, Detect Magic, Feather Fall, Find Familiar, Identify, Mage Armor, Shield, Witch Bolt.

2nd Level: Arcane Lock, Dragon’s Breath, Misty Step, Shatter

3rd Level: Counterspell, Dispel Magic, Fireball, Intellect Fortress, Lightning Bolt, Nondetection

4th Level: Banishment, Blight, Summon Elemental.

5th Level: Bigby’s Hand, Planar Binding, Wall of Force

#Empires smp #empires dnd #gemini tay

[devilinlittlehope]

I am here to request a little Jerin fic…it doesn’t have to be NSFW, but I don’t really have a preference…thank you for providing for the fandom :)

Hi, thanks for the support🫶🏻 here’s a little Jerin ficlet as requested!

It’s mostly sfw but gets a little nsfw at the end so 18+ warning!!

Jerin is one of my favorite couples and what I love is that if you keep both alive the two talk about how their relationship will progress in the outside world. It was great to see that representation and it meant a lot to me! I wanted to continue to explore that in this fic. I love Jamie and Erin so much and am so happy that supermassive games gave us this wonderful couple❤️❤️ let’s go lesbians!!

This mini fic takes place after Jamie chooses to save Erin over Kate. Kate and mark have are off having some alone time and Jamie and Erin are together and recovering:

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jamie asks. She takes Erin’s hand in hers, squeezing it gently.

Erin has already used her inhaler and has been quiet since. Jamie can’t imagine what she’s feeling right now. The thought of her air being cut off sends an imagined burning feeling in her throat that tears. That’s probably not half as bad as what it actually felt like.

“I am now,” Erin says. “Thank you for saving me.”

“It felt terrible to choose, but I’m glad you’re both safe,” Jamie says. Briefly, she thinks about what might’ve happened if Kate's window hadn't been faulty. For all her jokes, she never really hated Kate at all. If things had been different, would she have blood on her hands? She shivers, ridding herself of the thought. A flash of anger seizes her. Fuck Du’Met and his stupid games.

For now, they’re all alive. Jamie will do anything to make sure Erin stays that way.

“If it’s not too personal, why did you choose me?” Erin asks. Her big brown eyes shyly meet Jamie’s. She looks so goddamn adorable.

“You’re a good kisser,” Jamie jokes. Then, she sighs. It’s been so hard to open up to other people in the past. Anytime it got serious, her mind wanted to push them away before they got to know the real her. But with Erin, it’s different. She wants to share herself with Erin, all her strengths, all her flaws. She’s tired of being alone, but it’s more than that. Erin is not some hookup, and adrenaline isn’t dictating the way she feels. When Jamie thinks about Erin, all she feels is extreme happiness. Jamie has a desire to impress her, to charm her, to take care of her, to do everything in her power to make Erin hers. It’s funny how it’s taken a life or death experience to give her the courage to admit these feelings.

“I chose to save you because I want there to be a future where we’re together. I don’t want to live in a world without you in it. I’m kind of falling in love with you, and if you feel the same, I’d love to be with you if we make it out alive,” Jamie says. There are tears in her eyes, and her heart is beating out of her chest.

Erin surprises Jamie with her boldness. She cups the other girl's face in her hand, looking into her eyes. Her gaze is lovely and intense, and Jamie melts under it. “When we make it out alive, not if,” she says. “We’re making it out of this, no matter how scary it might seem. We’re going to have a future together.”

A surge of love overtakes Jamie as she leans over and kisses Erin passionately. As their mouths collide, Jamie realizes she’s backed Erin against the wall, and she’s sitting on a ledge where she can slot perfectly between her legs.

It gives her an idea.

She decides that she wants to take Erin’s breath away, in a way of her own choosing.

As Jamie emerges from the kissing, both women are breathless and excited.

Jamie grins a bit mischievously, full lips in a smirk, as she drops to her knees and settles between Erin’s legs. Her skirt is easy to lift up, thankfully. Jamie plays with the hem of it, considering her options.

“I want to help you relax in the way I know best,” she offers.

“Oh Jamie-“ Erin says, breath hitching as the other girl plays with the hem of her underwear. “I’m new to this,” Erin admits.

Jamie beams up at her. “You’re doing great. Just follow my lead. I want to make you feel good.”

“I trust you,” Erin says, nodding her assent.

She gasps as Jamie’s fingers circle her entrance, plunging the warm depths of her. As Jamie’s fingers pump in and out of Erin in a slow, sensual rhythm, her legs open wider and she whispers her praise.

Jamie dips her head so she can taste Erin, and she savors the feel of her clit beneath her tongue and the other girl’s moans of pleasure. She’ll look forward to doing this as often as she can once they’re far away from the island. She can’t wait until they’re safe. Jamie wants to wake up beside Erin every morning and fall asleep beside her every night.

“I’m falling in love with you too,” Erin whispers once they’ve finished, and are cuddling together, in the warmth of each other’s arms. Jamie has never felt so alive.

**********

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! This was fun to write and the first Jerin piece I’ve done, but not the last I’ll write. I hope you’ve enjoyed your request, anon :)

If y’all liked this, feel free to comment or reblog! I’m definitely writing more supermassive games/dark pictures content 🥰💕

#jamie tiergan x erin keenan #the devil in me #jerin #jerin fic #jamie x erin #dark pictures the devil in me #anon request #dark pictures anthology #the devil in me game #jamie tiergan #erin keenan #lgbt fic #lets go lesbians #my writing #dark pictures fandom #supermassive games fandom #supermassive games community #supermassive games

[christmas-shenanigans]

Session 4: Fri 22 Dec 2023

Last session before Christmas! I was out last week so let’s see if I can catch up. Halbrecht is late; we get a WhatsApp message: “I am late.” We are joined this week by Bosley, and his pseudodragon Guts!

(Apologies if I have misheard some of the following...)

We need to speak to the Kayak to get access to the fey world, in order to locate a potion of flying from that place. (I know it's Cailleach. I can't be bothered typing that every time.) This is the final ingredient needed by Cuthwulf Toggleswock, who is trying to make a cure for the Bleaching, a condition that afflicts gnomes who have been away from the fey realm for too long.

We have a key, which we can try to offer the Kayak as payment:

Who is most diplomatic? Valeros has a plus 8, so we shove him forward. He tosses his hair and looks nonchalant as he holds up the key. The Kayak raises an eyebrow. “Careful with that, boy.”

Wee Jock bangs his hammer on the ground and demands that she “show us the way to Christmas Land, hag!” He gets kicked from Roll20 before he can roll Diplomacy. He rejoins and rolls a 5. Valeros slaps a hand over his mouth, and they roll contested Dex checks; Valeros wins, so Wee Jock drops his hammer on Valeros’ foot.

The Kayak looks at Skabb and says that she bears the mark of her sisters. She says that if the goblins wanted to know something from her, they would have sent their wisdom. We call the ugly goblin forward - she’s a Wisdom! Skabb produces the little pet things as well and exhibits them. Mini Wise One!

You haven’t come here on behalf of Pinereek, the Kayak says. No, but we’re here because of Tallywhacker! Wangledong! We’re here to help save the gnomes! Skabb makes a Diplomacy check. 20!

The Kayak points at the Key. “Bring it here.” Skabb brings Valeros forward. He is holding the key between his tensed pecs; he jiggles them. She snatches the Key. How many of us have been to the Fey world? The Kayak points at Half-Brick. “Your Gods have no sway in the First World.” His magic will be patchy over there... She gives him a token to make his magic work when we get there.

Nothing we kill will stay dead, and no damage we do will be fatal, we are warned.

She gives Skabb a scroll to help her open the gateway. We will need to perform a ritual. She has given Klipp Klopp the knowledge of the location. Perform the ritual there and the gate will open.

There is a guard that will attempt to prevent entry to Christmas Land; the only way in is to defeat him.

We head back to Pinereek for a rest. (Before we go, Valeros just wants to check - she doesn’t find him at all attractive, does she? He receives a flat ‘no’ for an answer.)

The goblins are still working their way through the gert squiggler. (Skabb stuffs some in Zorya’s mouth; she spits it out. Skabb waits until no-one is looking to scoop up the discarded squiggler and put it back in her pocket.)

We rest, and get back all hit points, spell slots, and focus points. (Not normally allowed in Pathfinder, but it’s Christmas. Yay!)

Valeros drinks heavily when we get back, staring into a mirror and wondering why the hag doesn’t think he’s the sexiest thing she’s ever laid eyes on. He begins crying uncontrollably. Skabb offers him a paper bag “so you don’t have to worry about how hideous you are!” Mialee pats him half-heartedly on the shoulder, and Halbrecht offers him some cheese.

While we are drinking the door opens and Rokmoxa appears looking angry. “Where is she?” Skabb tries to scrabble away, but she grabs her by the ankle. She’s looking for Zorya. “Where are my herbs?” Zorya plays innocent and starts turning out her pockets. Skabb wants to know what she has and starts sniffing her. There is a faint smell of herbs about her, but we’ve just been in the Kayak’s cave. Rokmoxa warns Zorya to watch her back if she ever comes back to this village. Zorya, laughing: “Okay!”

We must follow Klipp Klopp the following morning, to the place where we are to perform the ritual to open the gate to Christmas Land. Skabb spends the journey trying to convince Klipp Klopp to come with her after this adventure, to no avail. We traipse through the forest for quite some time before we see this:

In the woods near the portal is a half orc and a pseudodragon, eating cheese. It’s Bosley and Guts!

He knows some of us, so he puts his cheese down and joins us.

We take out the scroll. Skabb will need help casting the ritual - we have an arcane trickster and a cleric who might be able to do the job. Cheese Boy 1 and the Tricksome Elf step forward.

Arcana check from Mialee - nat 1 for a 14 total but that’s enough. Zorya notices low-grade magic appear as Mialee sprinkles powders, but nothing has changed yet. Halbrecht nat 20’s his Religion check! Some of the snowflakes on the portal start to glimmer and shine. Skabb is next with her Primal magic. 14 Nature check, and that’s enough after Halbrecht’s crit.

The portal opens and we go through…

Bosley mentions that he saw someone else come along and try to open the portal earlier, but they apparently failed.

Skabb looks down at her pocket full of squiggler to see Guts trying to get a bite; she feeds him some.

Zorya finds some bugs for Skabb; they are shiny and not gross at all. She waits until the others are occupied to give them to her and quietly apologise for spiting out the squiggler. Skabb is very pleased and squishes them to make them gross enough to be palatable. They tinkle as she crushes them. (And scream, I think?)

We remember about the Guardian; Wee Jock readies his hammer and farts in preparation. Skabb scuttles up a tree and readies a fireball. Mialee and Zorya also scale trees. Bosley readies his crossbow. Valeros scouts ahead, with Wee Jock following.

The snow gets heavier, almost blizzard-ish. (Valeros is still depressed. Wee Jock: "Would a prostitute help?" Valeros: “I shouldn’t have to pay.” WJ: "Don’t worry, I’ll pay." V, cheering up instantly: "Goddammit, I’m in!")

We hear an awful noise and coming up the path is this:

We make Will saves, some of us re-rolling with Hero Points. Even so, most of us are Frightened…

The Goose attacks Valeros, as he has found himself face to face with it. He makes a Reflex save against its Goose Chill, but fails and takes the damage. It makes a multi-attack against him as well.

Zorya shoots, but even a 22 doesn’t hit. She hides again.

Skabb had a fireball readied, so she is allowed to use it before she takes her turn.

(This Goose is a re-skinned regular D&D creature; Mialee guesses an adult white dragon and she’s right.)

Bosley uses his readied action to mark the Goose as his prey:

Skabb casts Elemental Betrayal, choosing to amplify Fire damage. She then casts Fireball. The Goose steps neatly out of the way. DM, smug: “He will take none of the damage, thank you.”

The Goose moves and does a Goose Chill, hitting Wee Jock:

It then does its Breath Weapon attack, hitting everyone but Valeros and Zorya:

Mialee is hidden, so can sneak attack - if she hits. 25 will do it! It takes 15 damage, which is more than she rolled… Cold iron weapon, likely. 12 is a miss, and she uses her last action to hide.

Wee Jock can rage as a reaction so he is already there. He has Titan Wrestler, so he has a go at tripping it. Athletics check against the Goose’s Reflex DC - he rolls a 24. That’s a fail… He swings at it with his hammer instead, and does an extra 6 Rage damage on top of the 10 he rolls for the weapon. It takes 21! Those are good numbers. He will grapple it! “I’ll grab it by the neck. That’s how you grapple a goose,” he says, knowledgeably. 28 Athletics this time. Can he scream at it as a free action?

Halbrecht heals Skabb for 27 HP. He casts Guidance on Wee Jock as well, by using an obscene gesture.

Valeros and Wee Jock make Perception checks; 12 and 17 respectively. Wounds start to heal over on the Goose… (Skabb asks Zorya how she would feel about stealing a heart out of a chest…)

Skabb and Mialee make Perception checks, as does Halbrecht - Mialee sees that some sort of magic has been cast on the Goose. Halbrecht can see it was healing magic, and Skabb sees that it came from behind the Goose.

Valeros scales the Goose - 26 Athletics. “Time to get slashy.” He stabs the Goose with a 32, which hits for 18 damage, and it takes 23. The Goose sprays some freezing blood on him, doing him 7 cold damage and slowing him for 1 round.

Bosley has never played Pathfinder before, he’s a D&D kind of half-orc, so there is a lot of sorting out that happens while he grapples with the mechanics of the game. He shoots the Goose first of all, 25 hits for 9 piercing! He moves over to a tree, and uses his last action to give Guts two actions. Guts flies up into the Goose’s face. He dazzles the Goose, meaning we are all Concealed!

Zorya crits her next attack doing 33 damage total! She hits twice more, earning herself two Hero Points and a new epithet - Goosebane. (She doesn’t bother hiding…)

Skabb tracks the source of the healing of the Goose. She uses an action to give Grabby Cat two actions and has her fly 25 feet straight up to look around for whatever is working against us. 21 Perception, but she doesn’t see anything. (Wee Jock, OOC: “Do you remember when 21 was a good roll…”) Skabb shouts “There’s a magic bastard healing this Goose!” She wants to vomit bugs at the Goose, but it will hurt her friends so she runs up and starts gnashing its legs with her cold iron teeth!

The Goose does a Ground Slam attack, forcing a Reflex save from everyone on the ground within 10 feet. It then does a multi attack at Valeros, Skabb and Wee Jock. It is dazzled, so it must roll a d20 before it can attack.

Mialee attacks for 13 piercing plus cold iron damage, then misses twice. Wee Jock swings his hammer and misses, all three actions.

Halbrecht wants to know who’s looking poorly. He could heal us all, but that would heal the Goose as well. He Heals Valeros instead, and casts Guidance on him.

The Goose’s wounds heal up again…

Skabb makes a Perception check - behind the Goose and to the north.

Valeros’ turn, and he would like to swing around the goose with a rope and tie its legs like an AT-AT. DM, dubiously: “… That’s going to be a hell of an Athletics check.” Valeros rolls; “… let me Hero Point that.” He rolls a second 11. “You are dangling there like a limp scrotum.”

He wants to get into its mouth and try to use his own body to choke it to death. He decides to swing to the ground and slash at its knees. 35 crit! 27 damage plus cold iron! He’s just undone most of the healing that our mysterious adversary has bestowed on it. He takes some Freezing Blood damage and is slowed.

Bosley slams a healing potion, regaining 15 hp. (There is a plus 1; he can add that to various saving throws.) His crossbow isn’t loaded. Can he throw it at the Goose? He uses an action to give Guts two, and has him do some damage. 27 hits! Guts does 1 piercing damage. 23 hits as well, as it’s flanked! Another 1 piercing damage.

Zorya shoots three more arrows; only 1 hits but she gets Sneak Attack because it’s flanked.

Skabb has a spell that sends out helpful wood spirits; can she have them search using her Perception modifier? She could, but Grabby Cat rolled really well and couldn’t see the source of the mysterious healing. The DM generously hints that she could use Detect Magic instead. She does that and rolls a Perception check. She gets a ping! She shouts to Mialee and Zorya to tell them where it is.

The Goose has spotted Zorya and flies over to attack her. 27 damage total… Ouch.

Mialee’s turn. She drops out of her tree, and hides in a bush behind the Goose-healer and starts stabbing it. “Stab!” She selects a square to attack as the healer is hidden - and gets the right one. It appears. It may count as a munchkin, and might be roastable:

(Bosley is very excited at the prospect of roast munchkin.)

Wee Jock runs up to the Goose and takes a couple of swings at it - his first attack hits but the second misses.

Everyone is tired, so we call it there…

#christmas special #dnd #pathfinder

[shinygoku]

Johto is kind of Quaint

...while symbiotic with the other regions.

Yeah, after my analysis and conclusion of Kanto being an unfortunately grimy and less-than ideal place to live (but that does make it a cool setting in its own way!), I remarked that the other 3 Japan-Regions are little slices of Ghibli vibes. But out of those, Johto feels the most tricky to actually define. The closest I can come up with is Remote, while heavily leaning on Kanto and later, Sinnoh, for more actual substance. Paradoxical, ain’t it? Let’s have a deeper look...

Imagine (or possibly, remember!) you’ve just slotted your brand new Gold or Silver into your Game Boy, after having played Gen 1 faithfully for years. How this brand new region both looks so much like what you’re used to, but there’s more colour, and an exciting new Day and Night difference. As you play, you realise the routes in between Towns are more winding and natural feeling, and even once you hit the most developed location, it’s an odd one out and a considerable distance off from the others. It ain’t just more of the same!

It’s rural and lacks the hustle and bustle of Kanto, which is a deliberate design choice. Kanto, after all, shares its very name with the real-world region that contains Tokyo, so while Johto got a new name for itself, it’s basically the Kansai region. Home of historic areas and temples, and a reputation for being laid-back and easygoing. Johto has mostly small towns that seem to pride themselves on being small and humble, and is all bordered with either dense forests, vast cordoned off ocean or a jagged mountain range. There’s even an early route to the 2nd biggest and the single most developed city, except that it’s so tree lined that even one fake-tree blocks the entire path!

Yet... Johto doesn’t feel entirely like its own thing. In a way, the contrast with Kanto is the defining feature it has, but what else is there? Is it truly a region we can consider a separate entity, or the balancing half to the urban sprawl of Gen 1? It gets weirder when you factor in the native mons, generally being unassuming and underwhelming, except for some of the best and coolest concepts, which are very strangely limited to being found only in Kanto once you gain access. The Psychic Killer type being mostly confined to the postgame is pretty crummy! That’s a pretty bad choice that ain’t even fixed in the remake, unless you know how to rig the Safari Zone... but still, you can’t walk around Johto at night to find Houndour or Sneasel? Why not?! My best guess is that it’s incentive to keep combing through the slightly shortened version of Kanto for goodies, but who’d think to look for the unseen new mons in the stomping grounds of the past? And yes, both real life and even in-game past, it’s explicitly set 3 years after the events of RGB.

What’s the deal with the level scaling and extremely sparse spread of Trainers in the later parts of the game? A poor attempt to allow for choosing your own route after Ecruteak means the 3 possible Gyms are all low levelled. You trek through an abandoned Victory Road, where the implication is that Silver scared the NPCs off with Major Character Powers, and Mt Silver (...no relation lol) is also deserted save for the surprize reveal of Red at the peak. Is Johto really that low energy that they don’t feel the urge to battle?

It may be this, honestly. Johto seems way more friendly and personable than Kanto. A whole game mechanic has you getting phone numbers for swarm info, rare items or pointless chitchat. Other than Team Rocket’s weedy attempts to re-assert their dominance, the only somewhat antagonistic characters are 2 sore loser Gym Leaders and Silver the Human. There’s even the brand new Friendship mechanic for your team, and breeding!

Overall, Johto makes me think of summer evenings. It’s exciting but in a small, cosy way. You can imagine running up a hill to reach a small house at the top with the windows glowing with yellow light and the door invitingly open. It’s also like a crisp autumn morning where the sky is clear and blue and you can leisurely sip at a hot drink. The Ruins of Alph are weird and spooky, but not in a ghostly way, but one that makes you want to unearth the mysteries. There’s tall wooden towers to climb and whirlpools to swim around. It feels like a great place to have an adventure, but also one where you can get back home in time for supper.

A very early build of GS had the region take place over a theme park version of the WHOLE of Japan, I think it’s very good that they re-planned it to be the Kansai region instead and give Kyushu and Hokkaido their own focuses later too, all these areas get a lot of loving attention to detail as a result.

As for the symbiotic traits with the fellow regions, I’ve got a lightweight summary here:

Kanto - Literal next door neighbours who are also yin and yang. A lot of Pokémon overlap and Prof Oak has much more presence in Johto than Elm, plus the whole shared Indigo League. For some reason Mt Silver is regarded as Kanto but I’d argue for it being a Johto thing lmao.

Hoenn - Less so, though the playable character (Brendan or May) is from Johto as their dad, Norman, went up enough in the ranks to be given a gym position in Hoenn instead. Hoenn thus feels bigger both figuratively and literally, having its own branch of the Pokémon League that Johto doesn’t quite manage.

Sinnoh - Similar themes of reverence for history and old myths. Again there’s a lot of Pokémon species overlapping with new Evos and Prevos. The two halves of Sinnoh being divided by a vast mountain range echoes how Kanto and Johto are geographically, plus Mt Silver is the only other place to Sinnoh with fallen snow.

Oh yeah, and there was the whole Embedded Tower (where you find Groudon/Kyogre/Rayquaza) and the Sinjoh Ruins that you only access with an event or hacked Arceus from the remakes! Well, I’d say they borrow more the Vibe from their respective regions, which I’ll soon cover!

#Johto #Johto Region #Johto (Pokemon) #Johto Pokemon #This is a somewhat different format to the Kanto one and thus I somehow mirror the games lmao #I have really fond memories of this one even though in the Game Boy Color days I barely made a dent... I was Young then y'know!

[yaldev]

Meeting with His Judgment

Every animal instinct tells Acolyte Decadin to throw his body at the bars. To ram them with his shoulder, bend them with the force of his indignant rage and rip them from their slots. An ancient strength he’s never felt courses through his body, a power bestowed by the desperate will to survive, a dormant force from the days when wild humans lifted boulders thrice their size if that’s what it took to break free. Decadin reaches forward with trembling hands. His fingers try to grasp the cold metal, but his body is still curled against the opposite wall and his legs will not move.

The Oracle, she’s here in the cell with him. But she can’t be. Even in a world where Decadin’s own Empire would imprison him, some trace of rationality remains, and it is too important to abandon.

“You won’t even try?” she asks.

She’s a dream. A hallucination.

“You could scream. Maybe they don’t realize who you are.”

She’s an illusion. A magic trick from the captors.

“I know you remember the stories. The strength that blesses us in the most dire times.”

“No!” Decadin yells. He finally feels the emptiness in his lungs, and he sobs.

“After everything else, this is what stops you?”

“Everything else…” Decadin shakes his head with eyes tightly shut. “Everything else was possible.” They open. “But those bars are steel. Probably manganese steel, maybe enchanted. It’s too stiff to bend even with hysteria in play, and the tensile strength is definitely too—”

“Possibility never stopped you. Would you just be too embarrassed if you failed?”

“I’m saying there’s no ‘if’ about it. There’s doing the impossible, and then there’s ‘my body cannot exert the force to bend these bars under known physics.’”

Decadin had sought out the Oracle when he was a boy. She looked no different now, even as he had grown up, changed the world, flourished, wrinkled, regretted. Now this ghost-hallucination-trick was standing over him to gloat.

“I think you’re scared.”

“How astute.”

“In your academy days, you learned how real panic felt. Then you forgot, and now you imagine that you’re still in control because you’ve kept your composure, you’ve tried nothing desperate, and you know the mechanics of your cage.”

“The only thing I’m imagining is you.”

She grins. “You’re an even greater fool than you think.”

“And what about your part in my foolishness? You did this too.”

Her smile closes, but persists. Decadin pulls himself to his feet and takes a closer look at that immortal face—at the eyes that stare past his flesh—than he had ever dared.

“Don’t act like you didn’t set my course. Yes, I did this, but you’re the one who set my imagination running. I don’t think your predictions would have come true if I never came to hear them.”

“A self-fulfilling prophecy? Your science has no data to prove it, so you must rely on your religion.”

“What?”

“You embraced reason since we first spoke, but you were always too smart to let go of your superstition.”

“Is that why you did this to me?!”

Decadin shoves the Oracle. His hands pass through the image. He growls.

“Revenge for the Old Faiths? Your Deftists, your Eej-Landians? I never thought I’d have to let that poison into my mind again.”

Her smile opens again. Liquid chaos pours from between her teeth to the cell floor.

Decadin scrambles into a far corner, staring in horror. “What in Pelbee’s name?!”

“THAT IS STILL THE GOD YOU CHOOSE?” she hisses, slowly approaching. The colorful mana carves runes into the floor, writing in tongues that died before the Ascended Nation was born. “YOU PRAY TO THE CITY THAT UNMAKES YOU?”

“Guards! Come, please!” “ONE MORE PROPHECY FOR THE HERO WHO SAVED US ALL. THIS IS REVENGE—”

“Sweet Aster, protect me!”

“—FOR NOTHING. ONLY TRUTH!”

She gasps, savors the stale air of the prison, and breathes a torrent of gaseous mana into Decadin’s screaming face.

---

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

#beeple #fantasy #scifi #worldbuilding #writing #everyday #short story #surreal #dystopia #dystopian #dystopian fiction #science fiction #science fantasy #sci fantasy #sci-fantasy #scifantasy #sf #sff #worldbuild #worldbuilder #worldbuilders #magic #d&d #dnd #canadian writers #escapism #lore #amwriting

[grailfinders]

Fate and Phantasms #308: Mysterious Idol X (Alter)

today on Fate and Phantasms we’re putting together the hottest idol act this side of the apocalypse, Mysterious Idol X (Alter)! let’s see, she’s got to be good enough with an instrument to wow a crowd, have supereffective attacks against robots, and pull a giant glowing sword out of nowhere to end fights. yeah, that’s a Glamour Bard alright. but just to spice things up, we’ll still give her some Psi Warrior Fighter levels to keep things star-warsy.

check out her build breakdown below the cut, or her character sheet over here!

next up: who’s a good girl? who’s a good girl? who’s a good beast of calamity? it’s you! yes, it’s you! aboojiboojiboo!

Race and Background

it’s been a while since MHX Alter, and I’m pretty sure we went with custom lineage for servantverse servants once or twice, but it’s easier to just stick with Variant Human and call it a day. that gives you +1 Dexterity and Charisma, proficiency in Acrobatics for more involved dance routines, and the Mobile feat for ten feet of movement each turn plus the ability to ignore triggering reaction attacks after you attack someone first. long before any idol goes on stage, you have to put in time for your footwork.

you’re still a Far Traveler though, so you get Insight and Perception proficiency.

Ability Scores

now that you’re hopped up on idolium, your Charisma is through the roof! you’re still from a science fiction-based universe, so your Intelligence is still a lot higher than most people’s. your Dexterity too, since you need to be acrobatic for some of your dance routines. all this does mean your Constitution has taken a serious hit since last time, though you’re still with a positive modifier. the same can’t be said for your Strength though, since this time you mostly deal damage through rocking out. and of course, we’re dumping Wisdom. you were a berserker, and you’re now a foreigner. neither of those classes are great when it comes to sanity.

Class Levels

1. Fighter 1: yes, most of your levels are in bard, but we need to get some physical training in before we start performing, which is why your Fighting Style is the Superior Technique, Evasive Footwork. with this, you can add a d6 to your AC once per short rest when you start to move, ending when you stop. dance fucker dance, they never had a chance. to hit you.

you also learn how to catch a Second Wind as a bonus action for some quick self-healing.

finally, you’re proficient in Strength and Constitution saves, as well as Athletics and Intimidation checks. have you seen how nervous those nerds get at meet n greets? this is why.

2. Fighter 2: sometimes you need to play an encore, and for those times you need an Action Surge to keep your turn going for an extra action. you can do this once per short rest as well.

3. Bard 1: okay, that’s enough training, it’s time for the big leagues! just being a bard gives you proficiency with Performance, because… duh. you can also use Bardic Inspiration Charisma Modifier times per short rest, giving an ally a d6 they can use on any attack roll, save, or ability check in the next minute.

on top of that, you can cast spells! using your charisma! and your spell slots! spells like, dancing lights to dance with lights, and friends to enrapture the crowd for a couple seconds. you can also disguise self for some quick costume changes, faerie fire to light up the stage and make other attacks more accurate, and of course thunderwave to blast enemies with the power… of MUSIC!

4. bard 2: second level bards are jacks of all trades, giving you at least half proficiency on all ability checks. you can also sing a song of rest as part of your short rest, adding another d6 to your party’s healing if they use hit dice! and we finally don’t have to reflavor this one.

you also get Magical Inspiration, so your bandmates can add your inspiration dice to their magical damage or healing as well! now that’s some king singing!

speaking of healing, we might as well have some for ourselves, right? grab Healing Word so we can heal and still leave our action open.

5. Bard 3: honestly MIX(A) is so plain vanilla bard you could probably make her without a subclass at all. but we still need one, and if you’re going to be an idol the college of Glamour is just a no-brainer. with her Mantle of Inspiration, you can spend a bonus action and one inspiration use to suit up for a show. you can pick up to Charisma Modifier creatures, giving them temporary HP and they can use their reaction to move without provoking opportunity attacks. idols have to be good at weaving through crowds, and it’s just not a show without the whole crew!

once you’re on stage, you can put on an Enthralling Performance. if you sing for a minute, you can choose Charisma Modifier creatures that have to make a wisdom save or they become charmed for 1 hour. while charmed, they idolize you, but they won’t commit violence on your behalf if they weren’t already inclined to do so. they won’t notice anything if they succeed on the save, and you can do this once per short rest.

you’ll get a lot more chances to perform when people find out about your Expertise in performance and acrobatics, doubling your proficiency bonus with those checks.

you can also Shatter robots now. we’re still like, a month and a half out from your event so I don’t know why that’s important, but boy howdy you don’t like robots, and this spell gives them disadvantage on their save against getting blown up by your speakers.

6. Bard 4: use your first Ability Score Improvement to bump up your Charisma for stronger spells and more inspiration. speaking of spells, Minor Illusion will add some flair to your show, and Kinetic Jaunt helps you get through larger crowds without having to worry about any grapples.

7. Bard 5: fifth level bards not only get stronger inspiration dice, but they also become a Font of Inspiration, letting them regain inspiration on short rests as well as long ones. you can also use third level spells like Mass Healing Word now for a full-party heal.

8. Fighter 3: With most of our basic stuff out of the way, it’s time for some force powers. as a Psi Warrior you have Psionic Power, represented by psionic dice. you get to use these dice 2x your proficiency bonus each day, and you can also spend a bonus action to regain a die once per short rest. If that wasn’t needlessly complicated enough, you can use them in three different ways. Your Protective Field can shield yourself or another creature as a reaction. You spend the die, roll it, and reduce the damage by the roll and your intelligence modifier. Your Psionic Strike adds extra damage to your attack once per turn, again by spending a die and rolling it. Finally, your Telekinetic Movement lets you move objects with your mind, either moving it to an unoccupied space 30’ away, or straight to your hand if it would fit. You can do this one for free once a short rest, or by spending a die.

9. Fighter 4: Because we’re working with actual weapons again, it’s a good idea to get your Dexterity higher so you can actually use them.

10. Fighter 5: Fifth level fighters can attack twice each action. Your spells are still stronger, but it’s good to have something to fall back on.

11. Bard 6: back in bard, you can spend your action to Countercharm, giving nearby allies advantage on their checks against being charmed or frightened. or you can do something better and put on your Mantle of Majesty. now for the next minute, you can use the Command spell as a bonus action, including the one you use to transform. these don’t use spell slots, and charmed creatures automatically fail their save against these spells. it’s powerful, but it only works once a day. now that’s star power!

of course your targets have to understand you to follow you, so that’s why we’re grabbing Tongues this level. all the good idols come with subtitles, right?

12. Bard 7: seventh level bards get fourth level spells, like Freedom of Movement. we’ve already gotten pretty much everything we need, now it’s just about getting bigger spell slots. and your NP, of course, but that comes later.

13. Bard 8: at level 8 you get another ASI, and this time instead of raw stats we’re grabbing some more force powers. with the Gift of the Gem Dragon, you get one more point of Charisma, and you can toss people around with your brain after they attack you. you force a strength save on them, and if they fail they take force damage and get pushed. you can do this proficiency times per day.

you can also make a Hypnotic Pattern for a sick lightshow on stage.

14. Bard 9: ninth level bards get a stronger song of rest, as well as fifth level spells like Legend Lore. If it’s important enough to count as a “legend”, you can learn more about it, getting more info the more you already know. if we’re going back to the servantverse, you’re probably going to be the one doing the exposition dumps.

15. Bard 10: tenth level bards get a d10 inspiration die, as well as Expertise with two more skills like perception and athletics. even without being a berserker, you’ve still got that madness enhancement to pahmp *clap* you ahp!

you also get some Magical Secrets, two spells you can pick without worrying about class restrictions, alongside your cantrip Thunderclap. if you want a song with more punch, Destructive Wave has just what you’re looking for, dealing damage all around you that is both thunder and either radiant or necrotic, while also knocking creatures prone if they fail a constitution save. Steel Wind Strike is more to give you actual sword skills, dealing damage to a couple creatures and teleporting behind them like the chuuni you are. don’t worry though, it’s nothing personnel.

16. Bard 11: eleventh level bards get sixth level spells like Otto’s Irresistible Dance. it’s technically in character, since your NP starts with making the enemy party dance a lil. still, what other spell could I give an idol bard?

17. Bard 12: you’re still a jedi though, so we also gotta get you a little Telekinetic. that rounds up your Charisma, and you learn the mage hand cantrip, which you can cast silently and invisibly. you can even use the hand to shove people around as a bonus action. with this, you’re now fully stocked up on charisma, giving you the most inspiration and spell power possible.

18. Bard 13: thirteenth level bards get a bigger song of rest as well as your NP, Mordenkainen’s Sword. summon a sword as an action, then you can spend up to a minute using your bonus action to swing it around. it’s not coming out of your guitar, but we allow for upgrades here.

19. Bard 14: a fourteenth level idol has some unbreakable majesty, making you prettier overall as well as giving you another minute-long transformation. with this one, the first time a creature attacks you each turn they need to make a charisma save or be forced to pick on someone else. even if they pass that one, they get disadvantage on all saves against your spells next turn. and you can even use this one every short rest, sweet!

if that’s not enough you also get two more Magical Secrets! pick up Project Image so you can give concerts throughout the galaxy and Heroes’ Feast. you’re still the same berserker we know and love under all that fame, after all.

20. Bard 15: your final level comes with a bigger inspiration die, as well as an eighth level spell. Prismatic Spray feels like a good way to end the build. it’s flashy, it’s powerful, and it’s flashy!

Pros and Cons

Pros:

with MIX’s mobility and unbreakable majesty, she’s great at avoiding combat altogether, or at least avoiding getting hit. waltz through the crowd and get out of the concert before anyone even realizes your set is over!

speaking of parties, you’ve got maxed out charisma and half proficiency on everything, so of course you’re a good party face. the costume changes aren’t mandatory, but they certainly don’t hurt, either.

let’s be honest, intelligence is usually most people’s dump stat, so the fact that you have a positive modifier and half proficiency puts you well above most characters when it comes to finding stuff out, which means your Legend Lore info dumps will be all the more useful.

Cons:

a lot of your subclass is still heavily charm based, so higher level creatures will be a pain. at least you can keep their flunkies away.

you also don’t have great physical stats, so while you can fall back on your swordplay to save spell slots, it’s not ideal.

you’ve still got low wisdom and no boost to your wisdom saves, so ironically you could easily get charmed yourself, leading to a charm-chain that takes out half your party.

#fgo #fate grand order #D&D 5e #DND #Mysterious Idol X Alter #Bard #Fighter

[mushi-miko-unya-no-happypy]

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@cerastes

@festive-jungkook

@captainjobvious

@mysterious-heroine-x-alter

I tagged 1,941 of my posts in 2022

#azoor layne - 235 posts

#literally - 84 posts

#save for later - 84 posts

#crumbsader kings - 62 posts

#this is badass - 35 posts

#quite literally - 20 posts

#literally me - 19 posts

#umusume - 15 posts

#okay but literally - 11 posts

#umusume :) - 11 posts

Longest Tag: 136 characters

#‘just invest in vit’ fuck you coward if you aren’t playing soc as a glass cannon you’re less then garbage and your opinion means nothing

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

21 notes - Posted November 21, 2022

#4

Shoutout to @sillynightmarearbiter for the idea for this

So you’ve picked (back possibly) up Azur Lane, I get it, pngs are cute, it’s a generous gacha and the gameplay is refreshing for the usual turnbased gachas, it’s a home run in every way shape and form- You’re in deep (or at least you wanna try and be) but there’s one small issue, everyone is telling you BiS (best in slot) gear that takes OpSi or Research to get, research takes months and you need BiS gear to farm OpSi in any way that doesn’t take decades so what gives? Must you slog and suffer in the mines? Oomfie im here to tell you that 90% of people in this game who give decent advice have also been playing this game forever, the low level scene is alien to them- but fear not! Your beloved oomfie Smugg will pass you the deets on how to gear up your pngs like a pro without having to spend a decade looking up cheap strats, gimme a couple paragraphs of your time and you’ll be c6ing and meta 15ing in no time at all

Let’s start with a bit of a preface, this will take grinding- a lot of grinding, 10s of thousands of oil of grinding, the road to heaven is paved with violence but- rejoice, unlike old AL you no longer have to do it yourself! If you’re doing something that you can leave your phone on and press a button every once in a while by all means do it! I grind during viddy gaems, while I’m cleaning, anytime I’m not actively using my phone (which isn’t all that often ngl but) I’m always on the grind- you don’t need to go crazy and stupid like me but you get the idea. Enough cock rating, time for a taste test

Chapter one- baldi’s basics

I’m sure you’ve noticed certain ships share certain slots, every ship has Auxiliaries (shortened to auxs), Most ships have Main guns (shortened to mg), most Vanguard (vg) have torpedos (torps), and a whoooole lot have Anti Air guns (AA), Carriers (and light carriers) have Dive Bomber (DB), Torp Bombers (TB) and Fighters (don’t shorten this one idk why), a few of these share a BiS (remember best in slot, this one will be said a lot) so we’re gonna go over shared first

Torpedos :) -

Torps are classified in two different ways, either you’re willing to manual (control your funny little kansen) or you’re not (auto)- I will tell you now, top level play of this game is auto mostly, with a bit of manual for the hardest stuff you can find, don’t get caught up on the silly stuff, both are challenging in their own right if you know what you’re doing- For auto torps you’re going to want mags (magnetic), and I’m sure you’ve all heard the name Quintmags

the crème de la crem, but tragically they’re locked behind gear lab, which takes OpSi, which takes good gear. I’m sure I know what you’re all thinking “oomfie if quintmags are the best don’t we just rarity down, the gold mags are easy to get” I like where your going with this but hold your horses, rainbow quintmags have much better tracking then their gold cousins, what you’re gonna want are gold quadmags

See the full post

31 notes - Posted March 23, 2022

#3

Lately I’ve been absolutely OBSESSED with this image of Essex as sundowner (Sexdowner)

36 notes - Posted August 10, 2022

#2

59 notes - Posted July 25, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Oomfie do you have the. The "cum about it" Formidable gif?

Here you go king use it wisely

79 notes - Posted December 16, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#Only sharing this because I think it’s insanely tucked up that my top post is from litcherally less then a week ago

[pidge-poetry]

Foals’ Yannis Philippakis: ‘The internet should’ve killed us’

The wildmen of rock are back with a new album, Life Is Yours. Their frontman talks resilience and the strangest house party ever

Dan Cairns | Sunday June 12 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times

You sense quickly that Yannis Philippakis is a stranger to moderation. Never mind the hair-raising legends of havoc at the house parties the 36-year-old lead singer of Foals and his band played in their early days. The giveaway is how Philippakis is staring at my pack of rolling tobacco.

The man who mainlines adrenaline and thinks nothing of diving into the crowd or scaling lighting rigs during live shows is regretting his decision to stop smoking. “It was ridiculous, I was hitting 60 a day,” he frets. “I went to Greece after we finished recording the album with a 30-a-day habit and it just skyrocketed — I was chain smoking. But I can’t just do, say, five a day.”

Heroically resisting the urge to lapse, Philippakis muses on Foals’s longevity. Over the course of six platinum-selling albums and festival headline slots that have the atmosphere of revivalist meetings, he and the alt-rock/pop band he co-founded in Oxford 17 years ago have blazed their own particular trail.

Foals have built — and maintained — a fanatical following that was seeded when the internet was only flickering. They are, the singer suggests, “an anomaly”, a sort of highbrow Coldplay. On their new album, Life Is Yours, you’ll find references to a “Duchenne smile” and ambergris (a perfume ingredient from the digestive system of sperm whales), which are not the sorts of things you tend to encounter in Chris Martin’s lyrics.

Artists two decades into their careers aren’t supposed to be making music as vibrant, fresh and inventive as Foals’ — the more common story is one of steady decline. “We haven’t sold our skin,” the singer says. “That’s kind of rare now. We don’t talk about it, but there is sometimes this feeling of surprise, like, ‘Wow, we’ve got this massive tour coming up.’ It’s been an unusual trajectory. The internet should have killed us off but it hasn’t. Who knows, though, the digital reaper may be just round the corner.”

The band have lost two of their five founding members in the past four years, both apparently amicable partings. The bassist Walter Gervers, who, like the guitarist Jimmy Smith, attended Abingdon, the same private school as Radiohead, left in 2018. Three years later the keyboardist Edwin Congreave quit to do a postgraduate degree in economics. (Which is somehow very Foals; Philippakis abandoned an English degree at St John’s, Oxford, and bought an old Royal Mail van to cart the band around in.)

So Life Is Yours is the work of a three-piece — and sounds, appropriately, leaner and more taut than the two-part, overblown Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost of 2019.

“To me, what was important about the band was the feeling of family, of solidarity,” Philippakis says. “When people leave, it obviously wounds that image in some ways. I’m still figuring out Walter’s departure . . . he was our glue, our Jimmy Whispers.”

Yannis Philippakis of Foals on stage during Rock am Ring in Nuerburg, Germany | GINA WETZLER/REDFERNS

Life Is Yours combines the crisp beats, bright staccato guitar and dance grooves that are Foals trademarks with lyrics that are at once elegiac and escapist. The song Looking High is key, a track Philippakis describes as “clubby and nostalgic . . . But then, within the lyrics, there’s that twist: all the clubs have closed down — you have nightlife, club culture, one of the greatest things about life in Britain, being ravaged by government, Covid, property developers. We’re not there, our friends aren’t there, the place itself is now a ghost.”

You can draw a straight line between the young tyros who used to pack out sweat-soaked Oxford venues such as the Wheatsheaf and the band who will headline Latitude festival next month. The energy Philippakis bristles with helps to explain why Foals are one of the great live acts in this country. They bring the spirit of those riotous early house parties to their national tours, no matter how vast the arenas.

But there is one legendary and decidedly less raucous event from their very early days that they don’t emulate, when a house-party booking went pear-shaped. “There was just one guy with his two mates,” Philippakis says, “and for some reason his mum’s pasta salad was on the table, though she wasn’t in the room. I’ll always remember that plate. I mean, we played a few songs, but when we left we were like, ‘F***ing hell, that’s got to be the strangest house party ever.’”

Yet Foals do occasionally try to play the modern music game, even if you sense that, rather sweetly, their hearts aren’t in it. The band recently launched a hot honey sauce to a recipe devised by the drummer Jack Bevan and named after one of their albums, Holy Fire. Foals as entrepreneurs? No, probably not.

Life Is Yours is out on Friday; Foals play Latitude on Jul 23

Watch the video with Yannis and Jimmy talking about 2am and read the article on thetimes.co.uk.

#foals #interviews #the sunday times #yannis philippakis #jimmy smith #liy era

[omega-tech]

my opinion about emulation

Emulation:

I could go many ways of my dislikes or likes but I will say a couple of things. 

I feel that emulation would help archive old video games that have been forgotten or lost from documentation. How else are we supposed to know the history of video games if we don’t save them? Many old games from the cartridge era are dying from chip rott or chip failures. Some cartridges are just beyond repair or saving. And as for disc base from pc to playstation. Those are getting hit harder than cartridges due to the disc rot and scratching on the data on the disc. Once it's gone, it's gone for good. That is why I feel that emulations should be a thing to save these games before being lost. 

What I don't like about emulation is the use of it. Over in China, you could buy loaded retro box or handhelds that have thousands of games from the eight bit to sixteen bit, even twenty four/sixty four bit games roms for over twenty to eighty dollars. Some come in the form of an arcade fight stick. And another thing i am seeing is software or hardware devices that you can mod your current console and play rip games. Nintendo went after a company that makes the switch emulation that you can run on your pc or steam deck. And the ps4 just got a linux based emulation and runs pretty well if you got a beefy pc to run it, only if it linux os then windows os. Those of the emulation I don't like but that is my opinion. 

But I do see why people do it, and the reasons that come with it. I mean, I would love to have a red cab neo geo mvs arcade system but those are going for $900 to $3000 a pop from a one slot to four slot. I would rather emulate the cab on my pc than buying the cab. Also the mvs carts are getting so pricey. And there are some games on the snes I wish I could afford but can’t. I would love to have most of the jrpg games on snes like secret of mana, chrono trigger, and super mario rpg. But those games are running around $80 to $400. Same thing on ps2 the king of jrpg. I wanna get my hands on the .hack series and also tales of the abyss, star ocean, fantasy star universe, and tales of rebirth. Again, those games are getting so pricey and scary due to disc rot. And if I have to use an emulation to play them. So be it. 

The world of retro game collection in 2024 is pretty bad now since everyone is getting into it. I got into it with my little brother back in 2009. I am lucky to have most of my childhood games but the games I was curious about that I mentioned before will be outta react unless I get lucky online from facebook market space or ebay. Emulation is my way to play games i haven’t had a chance to play when i was a kid. Even through it all sources of wrong or good. I feel that emulation will be the only way to preserve video game history and its contents that come with it. So I am 50/50 on the emulation. It is good for preservation and it is wrong for piracy from the current gaming consoles we have now. Again, that is my opinion about emulation. 

#retrogaming #emulation #preserving #media preservation #pirating