wewererogue

[wewererogue]

Indeed.

#once upon a time #robin hood #will scarlet #rogues in fiction #open lock #thieves' tools

[wewererogue]

"In all the ornamentation on display, however, there is not one single abacus to be seen. There's no way to know anyone's balance, no way to tell if someone is Valorous, Caenumous, or anything in between. It's shocking. It's subversive. It's… hot. Phineas is aghast, but maybe also just a LITTLE turned on?"

— MIDST s03e10: "Bedrock"

#midst #rogues in fiction #heroes and villains #no tears for the creatures of the night #midst spoilers

[wewererogue]

“Birds born in cages think freedom is a crime.”

#the writing on the wall #the phantom of liberty

[wewererogue]

““Why does everyone run toward a blood-curdling scream?“ mumbled the Senior Wrangler. "It’s contrary to all sense.””

— Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

#Terry Pratchett #Reaper Man #fearlessly fleeing #rogues in fiction

[wewererogue]

The last dance - Arya Stark, by Andrés Bazán

Personal work - Like quite a lot Game of Thrones, and Arya is one of the most   complex characters for me.  Really wanted to make a killer stare, as in a duel for life… and the last dance the prey was going to watch.

#arya stark #asoiaf #rogues in fiction #assassin

[wewererogue]

Are rogues required to be competent? I've made an OD&D Thief who seems to have no redeeming qualities, and his personality is even worse

Heh, I can picture that. GO FOR IT.

Competence is wildly overrated in D&D, in my humble opinion, and anyone can do without it. What leads to woe and possibly strife on the table is when the character is incompetent and the player doesn’t realise it until it’s too late.

Like, you expect to be this totally cool and badass motherfucker who never looks back at explosions, and end up running for your life like Rincewind with no dignity whatsoever, or just failing at everything you try. And I get it, that’s a bummer. Usually it’s preventable, though, it’s due to a miscommunication of some sort, or because you don’t know the game system well and nobody explained it to you.

But if you’ve already accepted incompetence, then you can EMBRACE it and proceed to have ENORMOUS amounts of fun. :D

…Also, I have a very soft spot for inept criminals.

#correspondence #tabletop tales #how to rogue #fluff #deception #trs #d&d

[wewererogue]

Our Creed does not command us to be free. It commands us to be wise. | #AssassinsCreedMovie art by Joel Gomez.

#scene #assassin's creed #rogues in fiction #the city speaks

[wewererogue]

D&D Update:

My mother literally stabbed our table to make her Intimidation check against the Arl.

#tabletop tales #intimidation #only knives left

[wewererogue]

From my class’ RPG Challenge

Day 2 - @josephine-meis José : Thief Dog Handler / Voleuse Maître-Chien

#rogues gallery #thief #rogue #animal kingdom #doggy! #handle animal

[wewererogue]

Today a good friend of mine told me, half in admiration and half in annoyance, that I’m “the cynical voice of reason”, and I felt so honoured.

#and smug #I also felt smug :p 22/10/2017 - 66

#friendship #trs #probably tmi #dishonour on your cow

[wewererogue]

Italian postcard. In English it says "Bologna, Civic museum of the first and second Risorgimento - Six daggers with damask decorations which reproduce some masonic symbols among those ones used by the dekka death society of noble family of Castelbolognese."

A kinda weird translation (what the heck's a dekka?) of the original "Museo Civico del I e II Risorgimento - Sei pugnali con fregi damaschinati che riproducono alcuni simboli massonici frammisti a quelli usati dalla Società della Morte esistita in Romagna, appartenuti ad un membro di nobile famiglia di Castelbolognese."

Pretty daggers though! I think most are German, definitely the one with the wavy / flaming blade, and the second one may be French.

#tools of the trade #dagger #knife #italy #germany #france #bologna #trs

[wewererogue]

"Daggers and poniards", from Guide des amateurs d'armes et armures anciennes by Auguste Demmin (1869), translated as Weapons of War by C.C. Black (1870)

pages with captions after the cut

#typology #tools of the trade #how to stab #dagger #stiletto #main gauche #bollock dagger #cinquedea #trident dagger #swordbreaker #bagh nakh #khanjar #katar #qama

[wewererogue]

Campaign where the only permissible alignment is True Neutral. Any player who deviates from this alignment gets penalties on their rolls until they atone for their unneutral behavior.

#d&d #ad&d 2e #ad&d #how to rogue #XP #alignment #crunch #fluff #roleplaying #trs #tabletop tales

[wewererogue]

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before

I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

#probably tmi #iliad #homer #trs

[wewererogue]

[From a 2014 article by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. He's talking about how a random spam email ended up inspiring a part of his book Wolf in White Van. Later, in 2020, the album Getting Into Knives came out, and I think it inspired its artwork too.]

"It took years for me to be able to just reflexively delete spam, or filter it so that I never see it at all. I blame the spammers for this; the quality of their work took a sharp nosedive at some point. But during whatever period of the internet’s growth you’d call the early 2000s, it seemed like you’d still get some winners: things that had been typed up by a person, sent out to a bunch of email addresses they’d bought or rented for 5 or 10 bucks from the only guy who was ever going to make any money in this particular exchange. Most of them went directly, if manually, into the trash; but once in a while, there’d be one that seemed to earn, at the very least, the minute it’d take me to read it.

The one I’m remembering here was subject-lined SUPPLY OF KNIVES. [...] The subject line opened on an all-caps email that boasted, in ornate, antiquated English appealing to the reader’s more refined sensibilities, about the high quality of the knives on offer at an external website. You shouldn’t click on links in spam email. I live my life on the razor’s edge! I clicked the link.

I want to tell you about these knives: They were beautiful. They were weird. They had elaborate designs in the handles, moons or stars of wolf heads, and special grips, and a variety of points. They were made from metals whose pedigrees were described lovingly, and had been struck — smithed? wrought? — via processes I knew absolutely nothing about, but that sounded fantastic, difficult, arcane. It’s the joy of specialized language: When you’re an outsider to it, it can’t help but sound cool.

Of course this is the whole idea of any operation like this. SUPPLY OF KNIVES could well have been, and probably was, a company in Ohio who’d stumbled across an old warehouse full of knives, and knew enough about sales to describe these things in the most exotic terms they could find. I’m pretty immune to pitches: Who likes to feel like he’s being pitched? But somebody involved with SUPPLY OF KNIVES had had just enough authorial flair — that, or true faith — to caption each knife’s mysterious, blurry accompanying JPEG with a description whose constant recourse to specialized vocabularies seemed to say, “You’re not even reading this unless you already know about this sort of thing. Let us therefore speak like the fellow travelers we are.”

It was like a trade catalog for roadside bandits in need of knives.

I can’t speak for everybody, but I know that when I was a child the life of the roadside bandit seemed like a pretty romantic way to go. I looked at all these knives and read the descriptions and was just generally delighted about the whole thing, so I saved the email in a “memorable spam” folder I used to keep that had maybe two other emails in it. A few years later, Apple came out with this robotic-arm-screen iMac you never see any more, and we were long overdue for a new computer so we got that; and then, after a while, I got myself a laptop, because I was traveling all the time, and eventually both the old iMacs ended up in the basement, and they were both asleep but alive until fairly recently, as far as I knew.

But when I went to check for the email, it was gone. The old blue iMac is dead, bricked, lifeless. Searches on the term “supply of knives” on this laptop and on good old robot-arm-screen find nothing. The backup CD for the blue iMac drive is probably in a drawer around here somewhere, but that’s like saying, “The coin I had in my swim trunks’ pocket is probably somewhere in the ocean.” There is no SUPPLY OF KNIVES. There’s only the memory."

[source]

And this is the wonderful cover art of Getting Into Knives. Back cover and promo material below. Note that "Knives International" and "Knives Wordwide" are not real companies, they appear to be a callback to that elusive spam email.

#trs #The Mountain Goats #John Darnielle #Getting Into Knives #Wolf in White Van #only knives left #tools of the trade #bandit #prison ballads

[wewererogue]

Is there a pithy one-word term for the chauvinism of literate/urban/agrarian elites toward nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers? Like as far as bigotries go it's pretty much literally as old as civilization (that is, since those elites have existed to record/feel their chauvinism), but I can't think of a specific term for it.

#bandit #theory #the city speaks #trs #prison ballads #folk #Transidelia #Ta za #Ξεκουδουνώσανε τα ζα #the Rogue school of translation gives exactly zero fucks

[wewererogue]

#tools of the trade #only knives left #trs #trp #trc #douk douk #kiridashi #higonokami #pantographic knife #switchblade #laguiole #folding knife #japan #france #italy #Czechia