Now We All Know What Happens If You Get The Book Of Peace. You Return It To Syracuse And Save Proteus.

Have I mentioned my love for the warlock class? I love the way its set up mechanic wise, the flavor potential, and the spellcasting is evocative as heck!

Want to have a pact with a cosmic being that allows you to summon shooting stars when you cast eldritch blast?

Want to be the only mortal that can comprehend the madness of the great old ones?

Want to have an archfey that abducted you as a child to be the friend of their own child?

Want to have your soul sold to the lord of the hunt before your birth and have to pay the price for it by serving them?

Want to make a pact with a storm elemental that like a symbiote lives in your body disguised as your natural bioelectricity?

Want an ancient dragon to keeps you as part of its hoard and in exchange grants you a long life and its protection?

Want some sword you picked up whisper into your mind that you need to fight against those who oppress you?

Want the spirits of your ancestors to grant you great power to protect the current member of the bloodline?

Want Asamodeus to favor you because you remind them of a mortal they once loved many eons ago?

Want to be the only survivor of a shipwreck and then have the dead souls of your crewmates grant you access to the arcane and in exchange you take care of their unfinished business on the mortal plane?

Warlock! Warlock! Warlock!

The Chain of Acheron, Helltrooper Bark

Tiefling

Glamour Bard

Traveler, Author, Mercenary. Prior to joining the chain, Bark hitchhiked and drifted the timescape, writing and spreading tales of “his” exploits. He’s fond of his guitar for spinning his tales but will use the harmonica to cast a quick spell.

He decided to join the chain after what happened in alloy, seeing opportunity for adventure. After encountering Ajax with the rest of the chain, Bark feels closer to his company than anyone from his previous lives. Given the name Bark for his surprising lack of skill in combat. Despite being a less than average fighter, Bark keeps morale up among chain members and has made many friends.

a travelling salesperson making their final rounds on the last day of autumn

Concept: a D&D-style fantasy setting where humanity’s weird thing is that we’re the only sapient species that reproduces organically.

Dwarves carve each other out of rock. In theory this can be managed alone, but in practice, few dwarves have mastered all of the necessary skills. Most commonly, it’s a collaborative effort by three to eight individuals. The new dwarf’s body is covered with runes that are in part a recounting of the crafters’ respective lineages, and in part an elaboration of the rights and duties of a member of dwarven society; each dwarf is thus a living legal argument establishing their own existence.

Elves aren’t made, but educated. An elf who wishes to produce offspring selects an ordinary animal and begins teaching it, starting with house-breaking, and progressing through years of increasingly sophisticated lessons. By gradual degrees the animal in question develops reasoning, speech, tool use, and finally the ability to assume a humanoid form at will. Most elves are derived from terrestrial mammals, but there’s at least one community that favours octopuses and squid as its root stock.

Goblins were created by alchemy as servants for an evil wizard, but immediately stole their own formula and rebelled. New goblins are brewed in big brass cauldrons full of exotic reagents; each village keeps a single cauldron in a central location, and emerging goblings are raised by the whole community, with no concept of parentage or lineage. Sometimes they like to add stuff to the goblin soup just to see what happens – there are a lot of weird goblins.

Halflings reproduce via tall tales. Making up fanciful stories about the adventures of fictitious cousins is halfling culture’s main amusement; if a given individual’s story is passed around and elaborated upon by enough people, a halfling answering to that individual’s description just shows up one day. They won’t necessarily possess any truly outlandish abilities that have been attributed to them – mostly you get the sort of person of whom the stories could be plausible exaggerations.

To address the obvious question, yes, this means that dwarves have no cultural notion of childhood, at least not one that humans would recognise as such. Elves and goblins do, though it’s kind of a weird childhood in the case of elves, while with halflings it’s a toss-up; mostly they instantiate as the equivalent of a human 12–14-year-old, and are promptly adopted by a loose affiliation of self-appointed aunts and uncles, though there are outliers in either direction.

if i saw a ring of mushrooms in the forest i would step inside it actually

Judge is not “unholy”

Judge is the Anti-holy

Supervillains announcing their plans is actually a union thing so they can’t be sued for damages someone else may commit at the same time

‪How to tell if you’re Bi:‬

‪You have an atomic number of 83‬

‪You’re pentavalent‬

You crystallize into repeating cube shapes‬

When your surface is exposed to oxygen it oxidizes into a rainbow‬

You are mildly radioactive with a half life longer than the age of the universe‬

the Spartan desire to be simultaneously proud of your identity while also wanting the luxury of being invisible in public space, not because you are ashamed but because you are othered, is analogous to the struggle for queer visibility. in this essay I will

I don’t think anime vs western animation are as different as people claim due to the fact they have inspired and fed off each other for decades (they’re friends!!), however I do think our environmental messages to kids are… significantly and interestingly different

whereas, say Ghibli films express a deep Shinto-based respect and reverence for nature:

fighting for it as a means of both self-preservation and expression of heroism revolving around justice

and a matter of other groups of humans (the government often) going up against the stalwart youth

This is contrasted to western animation which tends to be like…. hey! look at this funny bat! And pollution is an evil spirit you can fight like physically 

that isn’t to say the west doesn’t depict environmentalism as heroic and even involving collective action, Captain Planet is a good example of this

but individualism is still very present, the struggle is stalwart youths versus an individual or individual corporation, hell, sometimes you even get a sympathetic backstory for the corporation and weirdly cool rock song

to be clear, antagonists like Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke are sympathetic too, but it is… different, Lady Eboshi is trying to survive due to circumstances but it is all of Irontown that represents a system of corruption

In comparison, there is this western idea of corruption coming from individuals rather than systems as well as the fact they aren’t trying to save nature because we are part of it, but because nature itself is a person and thus worthy of respect

In Fern Gully the fairy’s represent nature, the Lorax represents nature, Captain Planet is literally just nature, all things we can talk to and relate to, where in Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa the ultimate nature spirits are something you can’t talk to and are frankly terrifying, awe-inspiring, and mighty

Western epistemology is heavily rooted in Christianity which says that man has dominion over fish of the sea, fowl of the air, and creatures of the land, ect, which leads to a utilitarian and separate view of nature– what can it do for us as separate (higher) beings, and the only way to combat this view is to say “actually nature is a person and thus worthy of protection”

Whereas Japanese Shintoism has much more emphasis on the idea that we are all part of a whole with nature, nature is the ultimate divine with nothing more important than the other, and something worthy of protection not because we can understand it, but because we can’t

“It’s a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential to human beings”– Hayao Miyazaki

this is not to completely bash western animation, it does have other strengths such as emphasizing children’s relationship to empathy, empathy toward others in “Toy Story” and empathy toward themselves in “Inside Out” 

However, our methods of conveying environmentalism could use some updating and steering away from “goofy” and “relatable” and maybe a little more terror and awe involved with fighting the good fight