renaissancewoodsman

[renaissancewoodsman]

Actually, the more I think about it, almost everything Toshiro does is totally sensible and also wrong.

Falls in love with a woman who is gentle and reverent of the living and the dead, after plunging repeatedly into life or death peril with her, likely saving each other's lives over and over again. BUT, she doesn't share those feelings, and just like you she can't be direct about it.

Tries to politely deter Laios in a way normal to his brain. BUT, his cultural background and personality leave him totally unable to communicate effectively to Laios, causing resentment to fester and damaging their friendship. (And I do think they're actually friends. In my opinion, Toshiro's flashbacks are tainted by his current foul mood and starvation, and are just as innacurate as Laios' rose tinted ones)

Falin dies. Laios is broke and has no good plan, and you were probably the strongest fighter in the group. So you gather your wealth and badass ninja retainers to go save her yourself. BUT, you get stalled on your way down by the dungeon rearranging, likely because an actual demon was trying to prevent Laios/Marcille from ascending. You run out of food and also she's a monster now. Well, okay, he could have taken better care of himself here.

After a friendship repairing fistfight and Real Talk, decides to be Laios' getaway driver from the elf cops and gives him the magic bell. BUT, he forgot to tell god's most tunnel visioned soldier to secure it tightly, thereby annoying himself for weeks.

Anyways, this isn't what we usually mean when we say "doomed by the narrative", but the poor bastard...

People give Toshiro a lot of flack for proposing out of nowhere (and they should, because it's funny and she's gay). But both he and Falin are landed gentry. She was almost certainly in an arranged marrage, and that's probably normal for him too. I mean, she left home really young, so I doubt this engagement was her choice:

So in his mind proposing himself was probably the dashingly romantic alternative to asking one of his retainers to go ask her dad about it.

#dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi spoilers #shuro dungeon meshi #toshiro nakamoto #laios touden #falin touden

[renaissancewoodsman]

People give Toshiro a lot of flack for proposing out of nowhere (and they should, because it's funny and she's gay). But both he and Falin are landed gentry. She was almost certainly in an arranged marrage, and that's probably normal for him too. I mean, she left home really young, so I doubt this engagement was her choice:

So in his mind proposing himself was probably the dashingly romantic alternative to asking one of his retainers to go ask her dad about it.

#dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi spoilers #shuro dungeon meshi #toshiro nakamoto

[renaissancewoodsman]

#dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi spoilers #i debated that top text a lot #“you can eat your way out of any problem” #“handsome men with big tiddies”

[renaissancewoodsman]

Tangentially related, I wrote a ttrpg ages ago where your character can get recast, or the show can get rewritten due to low ratings. Also if your character gets cast as Jennifer Aniston you can summon The Friends to do your bidding.

https://renaissancewoodsman.wordpress.com/blockbuster/

There should be a fanfic writing game called the showrunners challenge where someone writes a story and partway through someone else can play things like "actor leaves after 4000 more words" or "topic now too politically sensitive due to unforeseen world events" or "lost rights to that reference"

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg

[renaissancewoodsman]

[renaissancewoodsman]

Knowledge Revenge.

#this is canon to me

[renaissancewoodsman]

Extra funny to me because this construction (place -> person from place) is extremely simple in Japanese. I imagine this adds to the frustration.

Of course, every language has its quirks. Looking at you Japanese counting numbers...

#I am not fluent in japanese I just took it in high school #But I remember the counting numbers with dread #You gotta use a different suffix on numbers for different types of thing

[renaissancewoodsman]

I'm about 50 chapters into dungeon meshi, on an obsessive binge. This really is a story born out of someone asking, "But why though?", and follow up, "Also how?"

In the obvious worldbuilding way, "But why would there be monsters? Where do they come from? What do they eat? And of course, what eats them?"

But also in the plot and characters, "Why would anyone be a dungeon delver? Why would someone live in a place like that? Why would someone go to such lengths of cruelty or self sacrifice for another person?"

It's such an intimately curious and... almost philosophically scientific story? You know how people talk about Tolkien being so good in part because his story is so rooted in his obsession with linguistics and mythical literature? How even the parts that arent directly about those things are still About them somehow anyways? This feels like that but for ecology.

Anyways it's good. I'm being very normal about it.

#dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #manga #anime

[renaissancewoodsman]

[renaissancewoodsman]

I love the cover art, and also this is the greatest one shot conceit:

Out now: NEONDERTHALS - the free prehistoric cyberpunk one-page RPG

Neonderthals is my first attempt at a one-page TTRPG - players take on the role of Neanderthal cyberpunks, fighting against megacorporations in a prehistoric techno-metropolis.

Pick it up for free (or pay what you want) on my itch.io page here!

[Itch.io] - [DMs Guild] -[Twitter] - [Website]

#ttrpg #rpgs #indie ttrpgs

[renaissancewoodsman]

I want a story where the taxonomy is done less like scientific disciplines, and more like religious or philosophical schisms.

You see two people doing identical magic, but one says

"No, I'm a wizard. She thinks you can channel the ineffable cosmic power using wooden instruments, so she's a warlock"

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!

[renaissancewoodsman]

#Oh man this is so cool #Are there a lot of secrets in this comic??? #I've just been reading it casually as it crosses my dash

[renaissancewoodsman]

They made Charisma implant from New Vegas into real thing

[renaissancewoodsman]

Agreed, Worcester is slept on here. There's a dive bar there with a train car, a moose head, bikers, a punk rock venue, and a bathroom coated in defaced 80s porno mags. It hosts a weekly slam poetry night. If they made Friends but for dirtbag gays, it would be set there.

[renaissancewoodsman]

Perfect, Flawless, Beautiful Solution to the martial-caster divide in 5e: Dunk

At 5th level, all Fighters, Barbarians, and Rogues can Dunk a ball and also can do a backflip. No roll required. At 10th level? Rogues can half court shot, fighters can three-point Dunk, and Barbarians can Dunk other players they have grappled (Only while raging, of course).

At 15th level? 20th level? They learn the Forbidden Dunks

#d&d #ttrpg #bad rpg ideas #dungeons and dragons #d&d 5e #basketball #sorry to any fans of actual basketball who see this because I tagged it basketball #i tried to find a gif from charles barkley shut up and jam gaiden but i've never played it and tumblr gif search kinda sucks anyways

[renaissancewoodsman]

I'm a multiple WIP kinda lad, but I've come back around to my random character generation obsession.

The big one is inspired by Shonen Battle Anime. You know how in most post Hunter x Hunter shows, each person has a very specific power? And in a lot of those shows, it's assigned randomly at birth. So this (very large) set of random table spits out a power that you then have to work with. I've checked, it can spit out 100% of the Jujutsu Kaisen powers, 80% of the H x H ones, and most impressively, about 60% of the JoJos ones.

I've built the rest of the actual game too, but this is the funniest part

Y'all working on any games out there?

I wanna hear about them!

#rpg #anime #ttrpg #roleplaying game

[renaissancewoodsman]

You'd have to stretch a bit on your definition, but you might be able to build esper faerie control?

Bitterblossom is only anime-esque, and swords and arrest are more "aggresive" than "smug". But people who want to be stepped on by rude anime girls can probably stomach that deviation.

There's less smug anime support for it, but for my money, the best individual card is:

Magic: The Gathering deck whose theme is maximising the number of smug anime girls present in the illustrations while still having something resembling a coherent game plan.

#magic: the gathering #mtg #anime