A Very Interesting And Good Article About The Finale Episode/battle Of Season 2 Of Legend Of Vox Machina.

What is the answer to that red, three-legged riddle? I'm stumped.

Oh there isn't one, I just wrote a bunch of riddle-sounding statements with no connection whatsoever.

Sadly, I admitted that after you gave up so you have failed my riddle and will now be devoured.

-Pencil

I’ve been trying to think of a setting for a nautical campaign. A vast expanse of tropical islands and waterways with the obligatory shady towns that sit on the water and temples of worship deep in both the jungle and the water. Any thoughts?

Yeknow what, fuck it, I wasn’t planning on writing a full pirate campaign anytime soon but everything’s better with pirates so lets do this!

Campaign: Scoundrels of the Sundered Isles

The Priests debate as to how our hearts may be weighted against its bearer’s sins.. but we Sailors no Better: ‘tis not sin our hearts are weighed against, ‘tis coin, as only coin could get a man to sail out to the edge o’ the bleedin world and gettim to stay ‘ere long enough to get to sinnin in the firstplace. 

-Overheard at The Last Hurrah Tavern

Setup:  The Tropical waters of the Tourmaline Sea have been a flurry of activity over the past century and a half, as natives and settlers from three different continents work together to reclaim land once lost after a half-millennia of supernatural darkness rendered a large chunk of the mainland uninhabitable. Most people deserted the Sundered Isles ( their name derived from a mistranslation that they were “Sun-Dead”) fearing the raiders and plagues that issued from that calamity, and they stayed away even after the sun returned, letting the gentle creeping of green reclaim the once barren rocks. 

Ever hungry for expansion, civilization makes its first tentative steps into these dangerous lands, with ports popping up all along the coast and archipelagos, the first wave of resettlement of a land once thought consigned to oblivion. 

All is not peaceful however, as powers both foreign and continental strive to establish dominance in this new frontier, with settlers, traders, and foolhearty sailors caught in the clash between. Discover the Mysteries long buried in darkness and sunken beneath the crashing waves, as you and your party strive to make your way in the Sundered Isles

Campaign Start

Captives of the Villainous XROC Merchant company and on their way to do hard labor in one of a number of debt-colonies, the party is miraculously saved when a tremendous wave crashes against the ship where they are imprisoned, shattering it upon the coastline and giving them the chance to escape together through the island.   There they find themselves Port Calmayne, a prosperous trade hub where the party can get their sea-legs under them while determining the best course of action and evading the Company. 

Early Game: 

A Priestess of the sea god has work for the party, neverminded that she’s a “retired” pirate, and the job involves helping a group of smugglers exterminate some monsters they accidently imported from the continent 

Investigate the haunted manor of an old Commodore, recover a treasuremap, and perhaps acquire some funds by looting through his hold treasures. Don’t get shot by a ghost while you’re at it. 

Earn the Respect of the local sailorfolk by diving for treasure into shark infested waters. Hidden among the bones of a great dragon are tokens that prove the party’s skill and sea-blessed luck, earning them passage on any ship going anywhere in the Sundered Isles

Mid Game: 

Make your way to Greenveil Lagoon, hidden home of all true pirates and the Bretherin Court. Help reunite an old salty-dog pay respects to his long departed crew, or start treasurehunting for the world’s most skilled but unlukiest mapmaker. 

Hunt ruins for a fabulous relic, then defend it in a ship-duel from a mystic privateer intent on taking it back.  When a job goes bad, it goes bad, and it’ll take all the party’s skill as sailors to evade this tenacious ( and seemingly omniscient) foe. 

Sign on With the Monster Hunting Crew of the Leviathan’s Bane, travel to the most dangerous corners of the archipelago, fight creatures that break ships between their coils, learn how to cook seamonster

Explore an ancient, eternal lighthouse, used as a lair by an eccentric pyromancer. Help a wayward celestial find their misplaced chariot of fire and learn clues as to the darkness that overtook the mainland so long ago. 

Late Game

The Merchant company that enslaved the players wants control over trade in the Sundered Isles, and is willing to unleash a madwoman in order to get it. This renegade pirate is obsessed with becoming the terror of the high seas, going so far as to overthrow the brethren court that keeps order among the Isles’ freebooters, and even unleash a vampire on the populace in hopes of becoming one herself. 

Venture into the lush jungles and overgrown ruins of the continent, and meet the fallen demigod who caused the devastation in the first place. Now little more than an eccentric old lizardfolk, this seemingly benign evil has many stories to tell, and more than a little wickedness still in him. 

The Wave that set the party free was only the herald to a true upset, as over moths an entire new archipelago of islands emerges from the seafloor after millennia in the depths.  Dotted with ruins and artifacts of a long dead civilization, these new isles draw fortunehunters into a clash with the merfolk exiled by the sudden rising of their home, all the while an ancient power wakes, looking to assert itself over the world once again. 

As always, I’m tremendously grateful for all my followers, but if you’d like to support my creative efforts, consider checking out the links below:

If you liked one of my adventure ideas and would like to leave a one time tip: https://ko-fi.com/villainforhire.

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Art 

VTM character concepts that I am compelled to share as they have completely taken over my brain: Part 2, Electric Boogaloo!

So since my last VTM character concept post BLEW UP and my brain is once again back on its bullshit, here are some more ideas! As usual, feel free to use these to your heart’s content! I’d love to hear about your characters too, so feel free to message me about them! Now, on to the main event: 1. A Malkavian researcher obsessed with statistics who hunts down “statistical outliers” in order to make sure their data is “pure and untampered with.”

2. A Ventrue who has created an up and coming adult toy empire (pun fully intended). They currently are in the midst of a fierce battle with the local Setites over who can cash in on the pleasure business the most.

3. A Brujah who was a successful athlete pre-embrace. Unable to participate in their sport and driven by extreme bitterness and jealousy, they now strive to turn the public against this particular as a whole by ghouling athletes and ordering them to discover, leak, and in some cases create, scandals. All the while, they rage against the sport they once loved under the thin disguise of false activism. 4. A dance instructor and head of a renowned academy known for producing performers who constantly seem to be breaking the limits of what the human body can do, much to the delight of audiences. What these audiences (and many newer students) don’t know is that this instructor is a Tzimisce and the performers have been carefully tweaked and trained during “private lessons” using a combination of Dominate and Vicissitude. Additionally, the Tzimisce is in search of a prospective childe worthy of being their dance partner, and has been carefully monitoring select students. 5. A Gangrel cryptozoologist who aims to be able to eventually master Protean to the point where they can turn into mythical beasts.  6. A Gangrel veterinarian who was embraced after attempting to transport what they thought was an injured dog to their hospital, only for it to have actually been their hurt and very annoyed future sire. 7. A fledgling Baali abandoned after their embrace who thinks they are just some weird Caitiff. 8. A Banu Haqim who was traumatized after they were almost diablerized by a Sabbat vamp. Thoroughly disgusted by the practice, they now hunt diablerists, all the while attempting to ignore the cravings and habits of their bloodline. 9. A Hecata “fixer” who makes their living by disposing of bodies, whether turning them to ashes through the use of Oblivion or by adding them to their collection of undead servants. I’m a little tired, so these are all I have for now, though I plan on dreaming up some more. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these!

I taught my boyfriend how to play Magic The Gathering and Ive never beaten him :(( I'm not even good at my alternative gratification activity anymore!!!!!!!!

sure, that transfem might not be very good at sex, but she can totally beat your ass at yugioh, and those two activities are practically synonymous for her at this point.

How does one... draw? I want to draw Odo and Lwaxanna Troi kissing :))

Writing Resources

My main thesaurus website which is up while I write:

My favorite Random Name Generator: There are so many ways to tweak the settings and generate names to choose from:

Behind the Name

Random Name Generator

This random name generator can suggest names for babies, characters, or anything else that needs naming.

If you have spare credits/moolah/kruge, these are awesome:

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide To Character Expression (2nd Edition) - WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Released on February 19, 2019. The bestselling Emotion Thesaurus, often hailed as “the gold standard for writers” and credited with transfor

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Emotional Wound Thesaurus - WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Below are samples of the entries in our popular emotional wound thesaurus. For the complete and enhanced collection, please visit One Stop F

Translations: Nothing beats having a native or fluent speaker's help, but DeepL tends to do better than Google Translate:

deepl.com

DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator

Translate texts & full document files instantly. Accurate translations for individuals and Teams. Millions translate with DeepL every day.

I don't heed even a third of its suggestions, but the Hemingway Editor is good for finding stupidly long run-on sentences that I otherwise skim over. It encourages me to rework some things, make them more succinct:

I would like to reiterate. High collared supermans are evil Supermans. Low collars or necklines that show some of the clavicle are good superman fashion. This is simply how it is >:) this is my 1 law of Superman design and it is universal. If u wanna make your evil Superman believable he must have a high collar otherwise it doesn't work

young kryptonian prince

The release of Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition has evoked a sense of urgent inspiration in me. I found the news inspiring because it marks the launch of a new product that rings so close to the original game in which its new premises instantly evoke a lost-world setting perfect for new players to uncover through revelation. And with it, a sense of urgency that a large chunk of the game’s horror pathos and cultural representation will be lost in lieu of chronicles centered around direct action, high entertainment, and transactional resolution.

First and foremost, I applaud the efforts of anyone wanting to excise Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and it’s fandom, of it’s toxic player base that has festered far too long. Anyone taking that on isn’t blind to something that is both wonderful and incredibly problematic, and it requires a collaborative effort to address meaningfully. It means being willing to internalize hard and profoundly uncomfortable truths. 

When I look at the prior editions, I consider its inherent value and feel that the things that made the original editions of Werewolf so special to me don’t entirely align with a large portion of it’s old player base. This is not for those players. In some ways my aim with this is small, with the understanding my target audience is also small, and this space exists for them. 

Werewolf: the Essentials is a project culminating my 25 years of entertaining and horrifying players. This is a carefully curated gaming experience tailored to Queer tabletop audiences primarily, although I am confident it will resonate with many others as well. This started as something I was working on alone but quickly has grown to include a pack of other avid Players and Storytellers who have felt left behind by the current direction of the gameline. I am laying out every little trick, twist, and ounce of Storytelling experience I have acquired over the years. In many ways, this is the quintessence of my inclusive World of Darkness, and a passion project that I hope those who read this may too come to appreciate.

In the first and second editions of the various splats published across the World of Darkness, the Storytellers Handbook gave Storytellers the raw narrative tools to convey the world to their troupe of players. As time has progressed, the sourcebooks to follow have greatly expanded to include Garou society, their relationship to Gaia, and to each other. As the editions expanded what they made available to Storytellers and Players, some of the original content of earlier editions was left out. By the time the 20th Anniversary Edition was being written, many of the edits were made to cut back a bit on the roughage and “get to the meat and potatoes” of mechanics crunch. In that way, the edits were a complete success, but something important was lost.

The earlier ST guides laid out explicitly that the World of Darkness is first and foremost a horror game. Essays within their pages provide advice on using textural descriptions and different modes of storytelling to lure in players and make the hairs on the backs of their necks stand on end. These remarkable essays are now lost to those who don’t possess the older editions. They serve as a toolset that could be applied across any RPG, and not just Werewolf alone.

W20 fell short of delivering a fully serviceable RPG to it’s Storytellers, however well-intentioned. It had all of the main bones of the setting and stats but no guidance on how to turn it into a game for one’s players. Taking it a step further, some of the writing in this new edition only managed to alienate modern audiences. 

The use of in-character narration to express setting information in prior editions seems an attempt to convey the horror and pathos of the world that would be difficult to get across in stats alone. The information contained in that first-person text is among the most important parts of the setting, but it often fails to convey the true horror of the world of Garou. In many ways the World of Darkness was intended by those who created it to be a place of genuine terror and horror, and not merely “savagery” for its own sake. Horror is a very complex basal guttural emotion that sits in the ganglia, ready to tug the emergency brakes on your body in the presence of what it believes to be a tangible threat. There are many complex higher emotions, but when it comes to the lizard brain, it takes considerable effort to trick it into getting spooked. Invoking a sense of horror in a horror chronicle is a complex enough endeavor that, by and large, these efforts fell short of delivering that experience. 

Werewolf: the Essentials is to serve as a masterclass in using those old tools to introduce new players not just to Werewolf and the World of Darkness on the whole. It gives these important storytelling tools to new and future storytellers in any game, that they might continue genuinely terrifying their players for many more years to come. The passages found in this series can add narrative value to not just Werewolf, or even Vampire and other World of Darkness tables, but also horror writing on the whole. Furthermore, this project aims to streamline the availability of that information and provide guidelines for Storytellers wishing to conduct research using the labyrinthian older editions.

Every sourcebook in this series will grow with your tables, providing increasingly more powerful stats, guidelines for making more powerful NPCs and PCs, and serve as a continuation of the legacy games’ metaplot. Some elements you’ll be reading will, for older players, be surprising at times. Some historical events are shifted further in the past, and others eliminated entirely. This project aims to make the presentation of the game a little more timeless, so it’ll hold relevance to tables now, as much as it will 20 or 40 years from now.  The World of Darkness is now something far too large for any one person to fully comprehend while providing enough tools for one to explore deep lore that holds the most relevance to their tables.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse has a long history of problematic and exclusionary elements, both in it’s fandom and, sadly, often in it’s published work. Despite this, I see more value in this game than the literature would have you believe at face value. This project is an attempt to increase the inclusivity in this game I love while also helping introduce new players and Storytellers to this world. This is a glimpse of something absolutely beautiful, horrifying, and unique, contributed to by a group of equally passionate artists and writers. Even if the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, the next best time is today. If you can listen critically, and take the lessons between these pages, then maybe you too can come to find the Glory, Honor, and Wisdom within the depths of our darkest fears.

Book 1: Cliath launches October 31st, 2024 on Storyteller's Vault

I might've added the BG3 Art Book to my dnd assets stash

It' 100% does not have things like the 5e players' handbook + 5e’s character sheet, several gm guides, critical role's explorer's guide to wildmount, baldur's gate and waterdeep city encounters, 101 potions and their effects, volo's guide to monsters, both of xanathar's guides, a bunch of other encounters, one shots, and class builds

In no way are there any pdf’s relating to any wizard who may or may not be residing on any coast

(Edit that I’ve moved the folder to the new link above! So if you catch a different version of this post that link won’t work anymore!)