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shadow-djinni · 4 months
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alright. I've been hiatising long enough, so I feel like I owe y'all an explanation.
I haven't been engaging in the kind of fandom stuff I started this blog on in a really, really long fucking time, and I don't think I'll be returning to it at any point in the near future. I've been running d&d campaigns as a dm, and it eats up a lot of your time and energy (not that I'm complaining about that, I'm having a lot of fun) to plan things, especially because I run homebrew campaigns rather than published modules. the VLD and Zelda hyperfixations have long since worn off.
that said, at this point I'm considering treating this blog as a dm blog/campaign tracker—post updates on the campaign(s) I'm running, dungeon master thoughts, occasionally dungeons or scenarios I've run and designed for other peoples' reference once they're no longer spoilers for my party, occasionally art.
thoughts?
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shadow-djinni · 11 months
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so, just keeping y'all posted:
hitting the end of the dnd campaign I'm currently running
just about finished with the base prep for the homebrew campaign I'm firing up next
caught the vld bug again, fortunately or unfortunately as that may be
so.....expect a new chapter of Under the Smoke sometime in the next couple months, I guess??
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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dragonfire
this one's got a bit of a story behind it, under the cut for length
about a month or two into the campaign, we got word of—and saw—a red dragon and rider scouting the area around our party's home base. dragons in this setting work for the Dragon Empire, a nation-state to the south, and are ridden only by the Highlords, a coterie of warriors led by the Dragon Emperor...and a bit of investigation turned up another shocking piece of information.
the red dragon rider, Highlord Renato, was a former member of the Kai, who purportedly betrayed the order and helped hunt them into extinction...and was now hunting Cedar.
we had a couple close encounters with him, including one in a dream where Cedar faced off with him (and actually took damage from his attack!), but managed to escape his grasp every time...so he got clever, and laid a trap.
see, the thing is, two of our other party members—Asmodai, our cleric, and our paladin, Berethor—are acolytes of a persecuted religion, and Cedar was known to rarely be seen without them. a ruined temple to their goddess was located just west of Renato's domain, and when we went to investigate it, he'd laid a trap that went off when we entered the crypt, and he cornered us in it before we could flee, with the dragon covering the entrance to the crypt while he descended the steps to fight us in person.
we rolled initiative, and Asmodai and Cedar got the same initiative count and were first in the order. we went to the end of the crypt, right around the corner of the stairs, with Cedar insisting that they were going to fight Renato to buy everyone else a chance to escape—and Asmodai stepped out first and snapped his staff, a holy artifact of his goddess, causing a backlash that destroyed Renato on the spot.
at which point the dragon blew fire at us.
we were on the same initiative count, though, and I turned to the dm and asked "hey, can I accelerate and try to pull Asmodai out of the way?"
"make me a strength check", he says.
I beat the DC by one.
which saved both of our lives—Cedar managed to drag Asmodai, in full plate, twenty feet back down the hallway to Berethor, who jumped in and shielded us from the flames with his magic cloak
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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handful of sketches, featuring Asmodai, our party's cleric (and Cedar's dearest friend)
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plus a meme redraw featuring my out-of-character attempt to figure out what the fuck the dm is doing plotwise
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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two of the more polished drawings of my character, Cedar, from an OSE west marches style campaign I'm playing in irl! they're a kineticist (effectively a fantasy jedi), and a member of a destroyed order of monks known as the Kai, who were all but wiped out forty years before the beginning of the story...
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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also, if y'all want to know literally anything about that OSE campaign, don't hesitate to ask me! my ask box is always open and I want to talk about that campaign so badly it's unreal
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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dragonfire
this one's got a bit of a story behind it, under the cut for length
about a month or two into the campaign, we got word of—and saw—a red dragon and rider scouting the area around our party's home base. dragons in this setting work for the Dragon Empire, a nation-state to the south, and are ridden only by the Highlords, a coterie of warriors led by the Dragon Emperor...and a bit of investigation turned up another shocking piece of information.
the red dragon rider, Highlord Renato, was a former member of the Kai, who purportedly betrayed the order and helped hunt them into extinction...and was now hunting Cedar.
we had a couple close encounters with him, including one in a dream where Cedar faced off with him (and actually took damage from his attack!), but managed to escape his grasp every time...so he got clever, and laid a trap.
see, the thing is, two of our other party members—Asmodai, our cleric, and our paladin, Berethor—are acolytes of a persecuted religion, and Cedar was known to rarely be seen without them. a ruined temple to their goddess was located just west of Renato's domain, and when we went to investigate it, he'd laid a trap that went off when we entered the crypt, and he cornered us in it before we could flee, with the dragon covering the entrance to the crypt while he descended the steps to fight us in person.
we rolled initiative, and Asmodai and Cedar got the same initiative count and were first in the order. we went to the end of the crypt, right around the corner of the stairs, with Cedar insisting that they were going to fight Renato to buy everyone else a chance to escape—and Asmodai stepped out first and snapped his staff, a holy artifact of his goddess, causing a backlash that destroyed Renato on the spot.
at which point the dragon blew fire at us.
we were on the same initiative count, though, and I turned to the dm and asked "hey, can I accelerate and try to pull Asmodai out of the way?"
"make me a strength check", he says.
I beat the DC by one.
which saved both of our lives—Cedar managed to drag Asmodai, in full plate, twenty feet back down the hallway to Berethor, who jumped in and shielded us from the flames with his magic cloak
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
handful of sketches, featuring Asmodai, our party's cleric (and Cedar's dearest friend)
Tumblr media
plus a meme redraw featuring my out-of-character attempt to figure out what the fuck the dm is doing plotwise
6 notes · View notes
shadow-djinni · 1 year
Text
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two of the more polished drawings of my character, Cedar, from an OSE west marches style campaign I'm playing in irl! they're a kineticist (effectively a fantasy jedi), and a member of a destroyed order of monks known as the Kai, who were all but wiped out forty years before the beginning of the story...
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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sorry I've been AWOL for eight million years! lotta stuff going on irl (very good but busy full-time job, irl dnd game) and hard to post about hyperfixation (2 different dnd games, one I dm and one I play in, plus a setting I'm building that I can't post about bc my players follow me) mean I've written absolutely zero fic since like....June, and none of it's publishable lmao
putting together an art dump though, for stuff I've done since July for the irl game, so you'll see some of that in a bit
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shadow-djinni · 1 year
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Hey, I'm just here to check and see if you're doing okay! Are you doing okay? You haven't posted anything in a while and I'm just a little worried.
-A concerned anon
oh!!! yeah, I'm doing just fine, I didn't mean to scare anyone!!
it's been a hot minute since I posted anything for a couple reasons:
I'm in the middle of another longform fic project, not any of my current posted WIPs and not in any of my current fandoms, and since that one has a (set) ending that's (theoretically) pretty close, I wanna knock it out before I start posting anything
I've been busy with dm'ing an ongoing dnd campaign for a couple of friends (y'all know who you are lol, all of them follow me here) and playing a different game with a group irl
I work a job that's super busy during the summer months, because that's tourist season in my area, and when you're working nine- and ten-hour days for three months at a shot it doesn't leave much juice for writing
so yeah! that's where I've been. I'll be picking back up on the writing again shortly here, though, and I do have a fair handful of doodles from dnd floating around that I could drop in the meantime...
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shadow-djinni · 2 years
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Under the Smoke Chapter 3 is up!
Rating: T Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Relationships: slow-burn Sendak/Shiro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sendak Redemption Arc
Fair warning for, uh, lots of things. It's rough. It's a rough chapter.
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shadow-djinni · 2 years
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Under the Smoke Chapter 3 is up!
Rating: T Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Relationships: slow-burn Sendak/Shiro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sendak Redemption Arc
Fair warning for, uh, lots of things. It's rough. It's a rough chapter.
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shadow-djinni · 2 years
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Under the Smoke Chapter 3 is up!
Rating: T Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Relationships: slow-burn Sendak/Shiro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sendak Redemption Arc
Fair warning for, uh, lots of things. It's rough. It's a rough chapter.
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shadow-djinni · 2 years
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Under the Smoke Chapter 3 is up!
Rating: T Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Relationships: slow-burn Sendak/Shiro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sendak Redemption Arc
Fair warning for, uh, lots of things. It's rough. It's a rough chapter.
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shadow-djinni · 2 years
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Under the Smoke Chapter 3 is up!
Rating: T Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Relationships: slow-burn Sendak/Shiro Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sendak Redemption Arc
Fair warning for, uh, lots of things. It's rough. It's a rough chapter.
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shadow-djinni · 2 years
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The St. Erasmus' Fire rewrite is officially live!
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