Theres a wandering immortal who has been planting flowers and trees after the fall of Humanity..700 years later the remaining survivors wake up from cryosleep to a foreign, yet breath taking earth.
-Harriet Mannings, from 'A Not So Holly Jolly Christmas'.
Some obvious facts:
The Black Death reduced the population of Europe by between one third and one half.
Vampires are immune to mortal ailments.
Late 14th-century Europe suffers from a massive vampire surplus.
As chair of the wizard- [PARRIES A SPELL] As chair of the wizard counc- [PARRIES A DIFFERENT SPELL] As chair of the wizard council, I- [PARRIES A DIFFERENT SPELL] As chair of the wizard council I think staffs should be illegal during these meetings.
OP made the post unrebloggable but said it's fine to screenshot and I'm in love with this
“So mermaids and sirens are two different species?” “Just so. My people, what you call mermaids or merfolk, share a common ancestor to you humans, making us distant cousins. What you call sirens, however, are fish that evolved to look and sound like humans to attract their favorite prey.”
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.
Stuck on your WIP? Unsure of how a scene should go? Feel as though your story is lacking substance? Enduring with the frustrations of writer’s block?
Why not try throwing in a plot twist?
A messenger brings bad news
Something important is stolen
Someone vanishes without a trace
An important item is damaged
Protagonist recognizes a face in the crowd
Someone seems to intentionally fail
Protagonist finds an item thought lost
A charitable act has a harmful result
A cruel act has a beneficial outcome
Someone unexpectedly returns the favour
A raging storm moves across town
A gift makes a character the target of a murderer
A fallen enemy makes one last attack
Only one character in danger can be saved
An enemy saves the life of Protagonist’s friend
A will from a long-lost relative appears
A secret rival seeks to replace Protagonist
A thief makes Protagonist their next target
An obscure law suddenly becomes important
Strangers mistake Protagonist for a fugitive
A tool breaks when needed most
You couldn’t live this lie any longer. You finally confess to your blind spouse the truth of your cursed Gorgon nature, only for them to finish sipping their tea before calmly responding. “Of course you are, I’ve always known.”
Just an inspiring author posting summaries, concepts, and plot galore!
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