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wehavekookies · 5 months
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Painted a bunch of little skulls for the Planescape: Adventures in Multiverse book, including my beloved childhood friend Morte and this funky guy all covered in stickers :)
Please notice little Mahadi, the Cassalanters' crest and Barovia postcards I allowed myself to slap on him :)
Plus the rest of the mimirs.
AD: Emi Tanji
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wingbuffet · 6 months
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The 'Smoldering Corpse', a bar in the planar city of Sigil from D&D's upcoming 'Sigil and the Outlands' book (and originally from Planescape Torment)
Never have I painted so many NPCs in such a big scene, with so many little stories going on :D
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dailyadventureprompts · 3 months
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Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.
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Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness
Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.
As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.
We can do better
TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.
While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:
It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.
Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.
Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.
Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.
Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.
The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.
There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.
Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.
Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.
THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".
What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now
Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time
THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.
Adventure Hooks:
The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)
Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.
The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.
Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.
Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.
Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.
Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.
Art
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shuunnico · 3 months
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You like rpgs. Do you recommend any games like baldurs gate 3?
Absolutely. I'll assume you mean CRPGs and not RPGs in general.
Computer Roleplaying Games (CRPGs) refers to a style and genre of game that BG3 follows. Some have started calling CRPGs "Classic RPGs" instead. CRPGs are typically identified by an isometric, top down view style, a heavy focus on story and exploration.
I'm going to split my list it three main categories based on accessibility factors. These factors include the amount of reading involved, the depth of mechanics and the level of abstraction/math required.
Easy Entry Level
Baldur's Gate 3 - 2023 - Larian Studios. The current gold star for easy entry CRPGs. Exceptional graphics, every character voice acted, very little reading and fairly straightforward mechanics and concepts.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 DE- 2017 - Larian Studios. This is basically a less polished, more complex version of BG3 and made by the same studio.
Disco Elysium, Final Cut - 2019 - ZA/UM. Disco Elysium is a detective/social focus game that dives into heavy narrative concepts. Failing rolls is just as viable for the story as succeeding them, making the game's mechanics take a backseat to story. However, there is a lot of reading and that may be a barrier to entry.
Tyranny - 2016 - Obsidian Entertainment. A game about being evil, it's mechanically pretty simple, but there's a fair bit of jank due to it's low budget, and the game ends on a cliffhanger, but it's story is very solid.
Mid Entry Level
Wasteland 3 - 2020 - inExile Entertainment. The long awaited third installment of the Wasteland franchise and significantly less complex than its predecessors. Post apocalyptic, frozen Colorado, grim reality and goofy ideas. This is the franchise that originally inspired Fallout.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall DC/ Shadowrun: Hong Kong EE - 2014/2015 - Harebrained Schemes. Set in the Fantasy/Cyberpunk hybrid setting of Shadowrun. Fair bit of reading, but the game's mechanics are relatively easy to grasp and don't require a lot of math. Always play Dragonfall before Hong Kong.
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire - 2018 - Obsidian Entertainment. A unique setting, exploring a fictional parallel to the age of piracy. Very wordy (but a lot is voice acted), with a lot of world building, but well worth engaging with. The first game, Pillars of Eternity, is less accessible, but still good.
Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous/Rogue Trader - 2020/2022/2023 - Owlcat Games. Owlcat adapts existing systems into CRPGs, like how BG3 is an adaption of DnD 5e. Do not be fooled, these games are where you start hitting a lot of complexity, a lot of math and a lot potential to damage your playthroughs by accident. This is where things start to get difficult.
Difficult Entry Level
Baldur's Gate 1/2 - Bioware - 1998/2000. The prequels to BG3, these games use an older, much more complex version of DnD's rules. Be prepared for a lot of reading and complex mechanics, but you'll be rewarded with some amazing storytelling.
Planescape Torment - Interplay - 1999. Another game using DnD's older mechanics, Planescape is a completely different beast from BG3. Many consider this series mechanically inferior to the Baldur's Gate franchise, but with better storytelling and world building to compensate.
Fallout 1/2 - 1997/1998 - Interplay/Black Isle. One of the most widely known game franchises started as an isometric CRPG. Universally considered more complex, rewarding and deeper than the Bethesda portion of the franchise, you'll need some experience to get into them, but you'll be happy you did.
Games I haven't played but I've heard good things of:
Wasteland 2, DC - 2015 - inExile
Torment: Tides Of Numenera - 2017 - inExile
Neverwinter Nights - 2002 - Bioware
Arcanum - 2001 - Troika Games
Ultima 7 Part 1/Part 2 - 1992/1993 - Origin Systems
Icewind Dale - 2000 - Black Isle Studio
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oldschoolfrp · 6 months
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The Mortuary of Sigil is a sinister jumble of vaults surrounding a menacing dome with spinelike buttresses (Ned Dameron interior art from Planescape adventure The Eternal Boundary, TSR, 1994)
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taritoons · 6 months
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A little tribute to the tiefling companions from the past 20+ years of D&D CRPGs.
Left to right:
Haer'Dalis (Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn; BioWare; 2000)
Valen Shadowbreath (Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark; BioWare; 2003)
Neeshka (Neverwinter Nights 2; Obsidian; 2006)
Karlach (Baldur's Gate 3; Larian; 2023)
Annah of the Shadows (Planescape: Torment; Black Isle; 1999)
Gannayev-of-Dreams (Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer; Obsidian; 2007)
4k 16:9 wallpaper under the cut.
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probablybadrpgideas · 5 months
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Oops!
All planescape!
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josh-lanceero · 4 months
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yeah finished those two sad old men
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impact-frame · 1 month
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VR-LA's feeling just a bit targeted. He's just a lil guy.
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owlbear33 · 1 year
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saintrabouin · 1 month
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The Chant of Sigil : a normal day at the Smoldering Corpse Bar
PS : as you can guess, full of PC and NPC
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The art for 5e Planescape is just incredible.
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I have been waiting literally my entire career of playing D&D for this to be released.
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mechaniaa · 6 months
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women from the planescape: torment sketches (official) tony diterlizzi
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dailyadventureprompts · 9 months
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Planescape: The Inclementus Convolution
It is simple as hells go, there is the snow, the walls, and the shape of things that will haunt you for the rest of your days
It appears first as a troubling dream, endless anxious wanderings through a frigid and featureless maze. While most shrug off these visions others sink into a deep and restless malady, possessed by recurring feelings of being cold and lost. For some the dreams deepen, overtaking their waking life until they sink into an unwakung torpor, others are compelled to walk: seeking out winding alleys or wintry landscapes in the hope of finding a way OUT of the maze, only to find themselves transported to it bodily.
Occult scholars of dream and dimension have named this phenomenon the Inclementus Convolution, and conjectures on its purpose and original architects feature in many a forbidden tome. What these dabblers have failed to understand is that the convolution is not a thing of artifice but part of a great unknowable entity, which uses the maze to filter-feed from the multiverse the way a great whale uses baleen to trawl the sea. While the exact nature of this entity will be discussed below the cut, whats far more interesting is how the appearance of this dream labyrinth affects the lives of others.
A series of disappearances has the party tracing the city’s backstreets tracking rumours of a slaver gang or some kind of monstrous presence. Imagine their surprise when they not only find one of the lost individuals wandering in fevered confusion, standing before an alley from which unseasonable snow billows. 
Nearly swept up in the convolution as a child, a minor noble has bent the wealth of her station towards determining the meaning of that traumatic vision, becoming a notable patron for adventurers as she sends them off to explore various ruins or gather scraps of potentially relevant lore. The party are hired by her for a mission, but weeks later when they return from their delve they find that her estate has fallen prey to an otherworldly influence. They’ll need to brave the twisting halls of her manorhome and the hedgemazes that sprawl across the grounds if they want to get paid, and maybe rescue their hapless benefactor in the process. 
A fairly simple bounty mission to track down an occultist hiding in the mountains and bring him back alive quickly goes out of control after he opens a portal to the convolution inside his cell, transforming the surrounding guard barracks and its prisons into an eacheresque tangle backing onto an eldritch landscape. With other prisoners looking desperately to escape and panicking guards looking to arrest everyone they don’t recognize, will the party be able to escape before the whole structure is subsumed into nightmare?
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The entity at the centre of the maze is seldom seen by those lost with the expanse as the upper reaches of the towering walls are obscured by an omnipresent cloud cover. As such no earthly name has been given to it, as the miles long tendrils it sends skulking through the corners are often confused for individual lifeforms which some call. It is not malicious, nor is it strictly sentient, it is simply a lifeform doing what it has always done to survive, nevermind that it involves pinching beings from across the cosmos. Creatures that die within the convolution desiccate, their bodies becoming dried out husks as the moisture within them is absorbed by the surrounding stone to feed the entity above and later join with the ever present snow, the built up condensation from innumerable victims across time.
Future Adventures:
Lost souls from many worlds have left marks on the walls of the convolution, pleas for help, attempts to map a way out, epitaphs and memorials from those that knew their end was near. One of these happened to be a sage with secret knowledge most relevant to the party's ongoing struggles, meaning if that they want to find it for themselves they're not only going to have to find their way into and through the labyrinth, but also Ariadne their way back out after finding and deciphering the message he left.
Though very little can survive long in the endless halls, there are some interdimensional oddities that have managed to persist around the fringes, carried from one world to the next as the Inclementus seeks out new victims.
The most fearful of these passengers are a remnants of an alien empire known as the Tssol who were led into the convolution when their god-prince decided to lead his people into the otherworld following a "holy vision" (and the encouragement by his less theisticly inclined siblings looking to clear a path to the throne). The survivors of this royal expedition have endured for centuries by by carving their city into the oldest walls of the labrynth, where the entity's fleshy stalks merge with the endless walls. They worship it, subsisting from the meat sloughed off as it grows and using the remains to feed fungal farms, counting themselves blessed for following the god-prince's vision. Those that stumble into the maze are of particular interest to them, as individuals affected by Inclementus influence are capable of wandering in and out of the aberrant realm allowing the Tssol warriors to ride out and launch raids on other worlds.
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arathir-starsong · 8 months
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Shai'ara Crescent
Void Genasi - Hexblade Warlock/Warrior Spirit Summoner - Chaotic Good
Art by the eternally excellent n8dl3!
Shai is my character (and tribute to the game Planescape: Torment) in a Planescape campaign I've been in for a few years, which has finally picked up again! She is the factol of the reborn Mercykillers faction, and her soul is bound to the spirit of an old and tireless Mercykiller, Vhailor. She utilizes a homebrew summoner class by one of my fellow players, which allows her to summon her patron Vhailor in battle.
Set after the Mercykillers faction in Sigil was obliterated, Shai was saved from near death when she chanced upon a portal to an abandoned crypt containing a rusted suit of armor, inhabited by the soul of a relentless force of justice. The two saved each other from oblivion, and set their sights on bringing justice to the planes.
Shai is a void genasi, with astral elf heritage. She glimmers like a nebula, her hair glows a doft blue, and her white freckles sparkle in the dark.
Partially possessed by her patron, she fights with a summoned blade materialized by Vhailor's fanatical force of will, and defends herself with a crescent shaped shield made of Carcerian stained glass.
Her ideals on justice - that of a vigilante seeking reparation and vindication beyond the scope of the law - differ greatly from those of her patron Vhailor, who stands true with the lawful ideas of justice. However, the two agree that justice is the most powerful force of the multiverse, and this shared belief sustains both of their souls despite their near brushes with death.
Also: a version of her art with her hood and veil up!
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cassettefuturism87 · 2 years
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Watching Sigil from the Outlands
"From the Outlands, it was possible to see Sigil hovering atop the Spire as the mountaintop vanished into nothingness"
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