After Starting Fem HRT I Am Much More Aware Of Smell And It Has An Effect On Me. Before, All I Knew Was

Urskan

Image by Steve Ellis, © Wizards of the Coast. Accessed at the Frostburn Art Gallery here

[Despite being a well-read kid, I somehow never even heard of His Dark Materials until I was a senior in high school, and didn’t know about the panserbjorn until publicity for The Golden Compass movie geared up a few years later. So when I first read Frostburn, I thought, “armored polar bears? What a weird and novel idea!” I’m onto your game, WotC.

The original urskan was a strongly overpowered CR 5–I bumped them to CR 7 and still had to tone down their offensive capabilities. No more powerful charge, no more rend. I also got rid of their cold subtype, because not every arctic monster needs it.]

Urskan CR 7 Magical Beast This white bear has a gleam of intelligence in its eyes, and a suit of armor on its body.

The urskan are a species of sapient, semi-aquatic bears. Due to their love of heavy armor, they are sometimes referred to as “armored bears” or even “tank bears” by outsiders. Although they resemble polar bears closely, they also have a notable feature of pandas. All urskans possess a mobile sesamoid bone in their wrist, acting like a thumb to help them grip objects. Although their grip is not as fine as a human’s—urskan writing implements more closely resemble fitted bracers than a pen—it is good enough for them to hold tools and weapons.

Urskans typically hunt in the water for seals, whales and large fish, and do so unarmored. Their armor is donned for territorial battles, displays and clashes with other polar powers such as frost giants. Their claws are exceedingly sharp, but many urskans wield hammers, picks or other dual-purpose weapons as well.

An urskan stands ten feet tall when it rears on its hind legs, but they typically walk on all fours. They get along well with dwarves, and are somewhat distrusting of humans. An urskan’s lifespan is short by humanoid standards—one that survives into its fifties is seen as ancient.

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Artwork by Gina Iacob

I'm stuck in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I've been a little kinda sorta completely fucking gutted by the election results. I feel so utterly saddened for 2SLGBTQIA+ people, BIPOC, women, people with disabilities who now have to live beneath that man's shadow.

Among the sadness is an ache.

An ache to do something. An ache to take action of some kind. I have no idea what kind yet, but I can't stop thinking about it. I am brewing. Do I mean to create something? I don't know yet. I'll figure it out. But I mean to do something.

Community.

I've been reading lately. A book called "How To Think Like A Woman," by Regan Penaluna. The book tells the author's personal memoir, as well as the stories of 4 Early-Modern philosophers (who were women). I'm not a particularly smart person, sometimes I needed to read a paragraph or even a passage multiple times to really 'get it,' but some things stuck with me.

These philosophers were steadfast in their beliefs that women were deserving of education, asylum from abusive husbands, that they shouldn't need to hide their sexuality, that they should be allowed to pursue their intellectual desires just as a man could. But in these demands they each were specific. These freedoms were not meant to enable selfishness in women, as they often did in men. They believed that these freedoms, for all people, also came with the duty to better one's community - to give back. That embracing the people, valuing the people, fostering each individual, would further the community.

This point of community is where I've been stuck all day long. We all need community right now. We need shoulders to cry on, we need friends to laugh with, we need wise folk to tell us what the fuck to do now.

I don't know what I'm going to do - or make - but community needs to be a central theme.

Queerness & Transness.

I also feel like I've created nothing inherently queer. I've abandoned writing for some years now, my projects are old. Older than my realizations about identity. Older than my epiphanies about transness. I want to do something fuckin' gay as hell. I want to pour energy into something that may in some small way counterbalance the hate being screamed into the universe, infecting the pretty space-dust that I wanted to use to highlight my blush. I want to create something that whispers with a forked tongue: "Fuck. You."

Fact or Fiction.

Will it be fact or fiction? Do I want to search for beautiful, real stories to tell and help spread them? Or do I want to create something entirely new? I'm not a documentary producer, but should I be? My heart is in crafting stories, but maybe it's time to set that aside for a while in order to spread true stories that inspire good and justice. Maybe I'd better stick to what I know and make something up.

Abilities // Restrictions.

I am one person. Alone I can write, but that is difficult without an idea. I have the tinder and plenty of firewood, but I need a fucking spark. Once I have the spark I can do more.

I'm a filmmaker, I produce and edit. That's what I enjoy doing best. Not shit I can do without the idea. So for now those sit on the backburner.

I also have a(n admittedly small) rolodex of lovely queer individuals who may also feel a little distraught at the moment. Might be time to meet with them to discuss working on... something?

Budget is zero. Don't know what the project is so right now necessary funds are also zero, which is great. But nobody's getting paid for whatever the fuck comes of this, unless I can be smart.

Ending For Now.

This is all I can bear to write and word-vomit for now. I have been so full of energy and stress thinking about this all day long. I needed to get my thoughts out. If you feel the same ache I do, if there's any way I can help you make your "Fuck. You." project, or if you want to contribute to mine, please DM me and I'll be so happy to discuss and talk.

Please be safe, please be there for your fellow human beings, please be good to each other.

A Queer Native Feminist Reading List

Readings

Decolonization is not a metaphor (Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang)

Everyday decolonization: Living a decolonizing queer politics (Sarah Hunt & Cindy Holmes)

Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage (Rachel Flowers) 

A Glossary of Haunting: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (Eve Tuck, C. Ree, Angie Morrill, Kathryn Recollet, and the Super Futures Haunt Collective)

The end of (the capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchal hate-full order of) the world, a survival guide (Zoe Todd)

Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson)  

Can the Other of Native Studies speak? (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

These are stories of resilience. Or, emblems of resistance. (Naomi Sayers)  

Not Nowhere: Collaborating on Selfsame Land (Eve Tuck, Allison Guess, Hannah Sultan)

Of Dogma and Ceremony (Tara Williamson)

Ahkii: A Woman is a Sovereign Land (Gwen Benaway)

Video & audio

Embodying Self-Determination: resisting violence beyond the gender binary (Sarah Hunt)

Indigenous Feminist Resurgence, Love and Resistance in Indigenous Women’s Contemporary Storytelling (Dory Nason)

Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sexuality (Kim Tallbear)

Coming In: Indigenous Resurgence, Body Sovereignty and Gender Self-Determination (Alex Wilson)

Our Bodies and Lands are Not Your Property (Erica Violet Lee)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2016 NWSA keynote address

His pits after a 8 hour shift working a warehouse gig where he's the only competent worker. You agree. Reblog

her pits after she's been wearing the same hoodie for three days straight without a shower. you agree. reblog

While exploring some different shapes and styles for laser defense bastions, I was left with the conundrum of where to put garrisoning infantry stands when the roof is mostly laser. After noodling on it, I struck upon the notion of building plinth to provide conveniently infantry-sized platforms to represent troops occupying the structure.

The layout is taken almost entirely from the official Grimdark Terrain Dominator Prison Complex Xhi build, but I wanted to try and replicate the look of the now discontinued Imperial Bastion.

We also wound up using it as a proof of concept for pre-arranging the components in Blender and exporting to a flat .STL for printing, which worked reasonably well. Some minor artifacts due do to inadequate precision arranging the parts and I'm not sure it's actually that much of a time savings over hand assembly, but the finished product is rock solid and looks great on the tabletop.

Dantioch and Polux, a love, not of Eros, but of brotherhood

My Complete Homebrew Catalogue

In the past I have made master list posts whenever I added a large brew to my portfolio… but that got to be a huge hassle. People would reblog it, and then things wouldn’t get updated evenly.

So, after some work, I’ve made a spreadsheet. This sheet will have a static link that I can update on the sheet side so that when something new gets added the link will be the same and people can find it relatively easily. I’ll still post things here when I complete them, but it’s nice to have a little treasure trove of just my things.

HERE IS THE LINK TO ALL MY BREWS

And I’m talkin’ classes, sub-classes, spells, items, creatures, books, and everything else too. Just click the link above.

An added bonus is that I (and I guess you, if you trust me flat out to balance things well for your games) can just pin this link to a discord channel and my players can reference it super easy if they are using any of my homebrew content.

by the way i fell in love with the little map marker drawings when I saw them at their biggest size because look at them they're adorable, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone share them before so here they all are in their original size. The first two images are from the base game, the last one from SotE.