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if Ivy pointing at Fig disguised as Lucy wasn’t casting Hunter’s Mark, then Brennan’s slipping

#dimension 20 #fantasy high junior year #fantasy high ​junior year spoilers

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on quangles

people who are betting on the Time Quangle playing a significant role in the plot of this season: how are you squaring that with the fact that not a single one of the intrepid heroes has brought it up, either in an episode or an adventuring party?

if you go back and watch the bit where brennan brings up the quangle, he’s not on screen, and the camera cuts between intrepid heroes looking vaguely amused, but (very uncharacteristically) not reacting at all to the introduction of a silly word. and if you use headphones you can detect brennan’s voice during that bit sounding slightly different from the surrounding aguefort speech (covered up by a bit of “this is a recording” post-processing). it has all the hallmarks of a “hey, we know the timelines between the seven and boy’s night and this don’t really line up, don’t worry about it” line recorded after the fact rather than a plot point introduced mid-session.

according to the internet, everyone who was watching and heard the word quangle has been unable to stop saying it since; do you really believe that emily axford and ally beardsley heard the word quangle and were immediately stoic enough to prevent themselves from repeating it aloud?

brennan has also not reminded them of the Time Quangle in his little recaps, something that he would definitely do if it was meant to be significant and they were supposed to be on the lookout for discrepancies. but of course they’re not, because they don’t — they can’t — pay nearly as much attention to how the momentary improv at the table coincides with or contradicts established lore (most of which was also improvised literal years ago) as the collective consciousness of the viewers does.

by all means have fun with finding quangles, there are going to be plenty, improvised narrative can always only hang together loosely. but if you’re expecting a big quangle-based plot resolution and feeling the need to keep on top of it for that reason, maybe focus more on the plots that are actually being laid out.

#dimension 20 #fantasy high junior year #time quangle

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i've seen so many people saying that they found the last hour of fhjy ep 2 horrifying and depressing and cried their eyes out, and i guess i just fundamentally interact with fiction differently. why would i want my protagonists to live an untroubled life? slowly uncovering the shape of the challenges before them is so much more fun and absorbing than the "everything is great for everyone, now go do this quest" that started out sophomore year.

#dimension 20 #fantasy high junior year #fhjy spoilers #but i can also measure the distance from my own junior year in terms of decades so maybe that has something to do with it

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There is an actual answer!

According to Dropout staff on the Discord, they made two more Foundry episodes in the summer of quarantine, but ended up shelving them because they didn't feel they were up to the standard of quality they wanted to put out, and they didn't pursue making any more because it was decided that Brennan's time and energy were best spent elsewhere.

There was talk at one point about releasing them eventually, but that's gone away. The Chungle-Down Bim episode only initially got released as a donation reward for a GOTV campaign in 2020 after fans had already seen him in action in Boys' Night, and then once some people had seen it they released it to everyone on Dropout a few months later. So there's a possibility that any other builds that got done in 2020 might get released once the characters or items that they made there show up in a campaign episode, but it's equally possible that they'll never see the light of day.

if you haven't seen it, i cannot recommend enough that you do

(if there's an actual answer, please lmk!)

#dimension 20 #one of the perks of being a fandom elder is knowing things from the dim forgotten past of 2020

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okay new tag game. do you actually recommend people play/watch/read/listen to your favorite media?

#absolutely not #i don't listen to anyone else's recommendations and i don't expect anyone to vibe with my particular weirdness either #holy shit you can edit tags after writing them now?! #anyway #there are so many things i love that i have never once named in places where anyone can see them #or at least i only talk about them in closed circles #so my music friends don't hear about my actual play fixations #and the actual play friends don't know anything about the rare book collections #etc.

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“Where do you think you will sit in the history books? You are a footnote, hastily memorized by a child and forgotten the instant you are written down on a pop quiz.”

I sincerely believe that I’ve listened to Rude Tales of Magic: Come at the King more times than anyone on earth. I’m always coming back to it. A vastly underrated miniseries from a vastly underrated podcast. A show that will make you feel almost every emotion. A wild ride from start to finish.

EDIT: made a mistake but I fixed it look at this version of the post instead

#come at the king is the best actual play anything released in 2020 #and i was there watching and listening to everything and no really it was #rude tales of magic

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it was just technical difficulties, their internet connection went down while they were streaming.

this has driven me crazy for ages

in FHSY, episode 4, Adaine sees a strange figure in her tent and calls out for help. Sandra Lynn doesn't see anything and Brennan tries to convince Adaine that she was just hallucinating. Siobhan kind of throws her hands in the air and seems frustrated.

There is a brief cut to darkness, and then the scene continues with Brennan saying "I don't know if Adaine is sure she saw something or not"

is anyone who was watching live able to explain what happened during that cut? was there a fight or something? technical difficulties? or is there no explanation, and did that cut to black exist during the live broadcast, too?

it's the only cut in the whole season so it really sticks out to me.

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I am sorry to report that this is the official merch from Dropout that was available for a little while in early 2020, pulled from the Internet Archive:

Fantasy High fans: is there an official spelling of Fig and the Cig/Sig Figs? I’m working on some Halloween costume stuff and I need to know. Note: I do not not consider the dimension 20 wiki an official source! The subtitles are also iffy as a source because I know they’ve spelled things wrong, but if it’s that or nothing I may take their word.

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@dimension20official @quiddie As often as the Chipmunks have been mentioned in episodes, I've been waiting for the right time to make this sort of art. Jaysohn as Alvin made the most sense to me.

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Can y’all please spell Aabria’s name correctly?

This feels like a weird thing to focus on, but I feel like her name is consistently misspelled even in the most glowing posts about her being an absolute badass, and it feels weirdly disrespectful.

Obviously everyone makes mistakes and folks may have impairments that make spelling difficult, which is not the issue. BIPOC consistently have to deal with lack of attention/care, and outright bias based on their names, so pretty please take a moment to double check how you’re spelling.

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i’ll say this every time: the first time a bad kid met another bad kid there were attack rolls. he’s had his pvp the whole time, he just never appreciated it

I literally said right after Aabria had Siobhan and Izzy rolled for their pvp,

"Ha! Brennan hasn't been able to get a pvp in any of his seasons!"

I Loled 😆🤣 so hard when he said this seconds later:

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oof, time to change some tags on some old posts because i do not want my years-old speculation getting caught up in fhjy fever

#dimension 20

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Of Stoats and Systems

Things are getting heated on various platforms but rather than @ anyone and contribute to the engagement spiral I thought I'd just lay out the various pieces of information that have caught my attention about Dimension 20's upcoming season, and the inferences and assumptions that I'm bringing to them, and see whether any of it resonates.

Evidence

Exhibit A: In the first Fireside Chat, the talkback show for actual-play podcast Worlds Beyond Number, Erika Ishii references a "cyberpunk Watership Down" concept, and is hushed by Aabria Iyengar, who says that it may be coming up sooner than Erika thinks.

Exhibit B: In the SAG-AFTRA production signatory database, a season of Dimension 20 is listed with the working title of Stoatal Recall.

Exhibit B.5: The 1990 film Total Recall (as well as the 2012 remake), based on a 1966 short story by Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," concerns a man who undergoes a memory-alteration procedure which may or may not turn him into a superspy, depending on whether the events of the movie are all in his head or not. The important part here is the theme of ability enhancement.

Exhibit C: Once the Burrow's End trailer was released, the two pieces of media that were officially referenced by Dropout as inspirations for the season were very obviously Watership Down (1972 book, 1978 animated adaptation) but equally consequentially, The Secret of NIMH (1982 animated adaptation of the 1971 book Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH).

Exhibit C.5: The central premise of the NIMH stories is that experiments done on rats by the National Institute of Mental Health gave them human-like intelligence, organizational capabilities, and (in the movie) access to magic and the use of weapons.

Exhibit D: Aabria, in both a Bluesky post and a Tumblr tag essay which have been widely shared, has explained that she chose 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons as the system for Burrow's End not due to comfort with a familiar system or to commercial pressure to not deviate from what fans are used to, but because particular elements of the system design lent themselves to the specific story she wanted to tell in ways that no other TTRPG she knew could.

Cross Examination

Now, many people have taken this to mean that intense and recurring violence is a central aspect of the season, since one of the most obviously robust elements of D&D is its battle simulation mechanics. (There are, of course, many TTRPGs which incorporate mechanics for drawn-out, granular combat, several of which position small woodland creatures in a big dangerous forest instead of traditional fantasy races in a fantasy realm as the protagonists.)

Others have suggested that D&D's elaborate magic system is the key element, since bits of the trailer suggest that the Stupendous Stoats are granted some kind of magical abilities by the Blue. (Games where woodland creatures specifically use magic are rather thinner on the ground, but there are again many TTRPGs that support a wide variety of magical abilities with a high degree of customization.)

I've even seen people proposing that D&D's fundamental origins as a killing-and-looting game rooted in 20th century imperialist narratives in which powerful people go into uncivilized lands, plunder their treasures and are considered heroes for it, is the point, especially since stoats are predators that take over the burrows of animals they kill, and are an invasive species in some parts of the world. (Other games about imperialist conquest and the ramifications of power achived by violence do exist, although it would be untrue to say that D&D is not the market leader there.)

Closing Argument

But if I'm looking at the themes of the works that appear to have been the most direct inspiration for Burrow's End, there's something else that D&D does more completely, if not actually better, than just about every other system.

A fundamental theme of the cyberpunk genre is the use of technology to exceed current human limitations, whether through biohacking, neuromancy, or even merely robotics so advanced as to be indistinguishable from humanity. Even if the technological element does not seem to be overtly present in Burrow's End, exceeding limitations does.

As a film, Total Recall was deeply influenced by cyberpunk, which was itself deeply influenced by Philip K. Dick's work, but the concept of a procedure which could endow a normal man with the capacity for action-movie violence and a deeper awareness of the reality behind the façade of the everyday is, obviously, older than cyberpunk.

In Watership Down, rabbits whose mental abilities exceed those of other rabbits often attribute them to a kind of mystical communion with deific figures in rabbit mythology; in the NIMH stories, the rats' enhanced abilities are more straightforwardly attributed to human experimentation.

In every case, the concept of abilities that increase over time and exceed the natural physiology of the protagonist species is an essential part of the worldbuilding of the source material. And what D&D does more of than almost every other system, perhaps what it does to excess, even to the exclusion of design elements that would better contribute to a satisfying narrative, is power leveling.

Speculation

As you might expect from the foregoing, I take the position that power leveling is, in itself, not particularly compelling as a central narrative (unless your horizon for compelling narratives is limited to video-game RPGs and shonen anime, I suppose), even though it's endemic as a narrative device. As I sarcastically noted elsewhere: "it's impossible to have adventure without also having power fantasy, I've been told by every media property aimed at boys since the Carter administration."

But the tone of the trailer for Burrow's End is hardly that of a shonen anime or Schwarzenegger film. And as a listener of Worlds Beyond Number I can't really believe that Aabria just wants to level up her stoats to a point where the dangers of the forest are trivial and even the dangers of whatever human institution (there are camo-covered trucks tucked away in the DM screen) may be responsible for their ability score increases are managable. What I can't stop thinking about, what tantalizes me, is the possibility of power leveling as a narrative device that can go both ways. What if deleveling is also on the table?

And the work I haven't seen anyone else reference but has always been paired in my head with Mrs Frisby & the Rats of NIMH since I read them both as a tween, one of the supreme works of sci-fi psychological horror (even though it isn't usually discussed in those terms), is Flowers for Algernon.

#dimension 20 #burrow's end #long post #maybe spoilers for burrow's end? #i don't know #am i getting my hopes up and it's just going to be another scrappy band of heroes against cosmic evil at the end? #maybe #but that's brennan's m.o. not aabria's #okay that's enough fussing over an overlong tumblr post

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Hello one and all and welcome to Dimension Changer, the only ttrpg show where the ttrpg changes every show! I am your humble hostmaster Samnan Lee Reichigan and I'm joined today by these six lovely players, say hi lovely players! Now you all understand how the ttrpg works,

#dimension 20 #game changer #dropout #sam reich #brennan lee mulligan

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#i think they will *start* at level 0 #but not stay there for long #dimension 20 #burrow's end

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following up on my previous posts about d20 seating: 1 & 2

seat archetypes (all seasons)

as you can imagine, finding a throughline that exactly fits every d20 character that sits in a seat is never fully going to work. i'm not jamming them into an archetype that doesn't fit. these are big general thoughts, just like they were for the intrepid heroes seasons. anyway:

L1: pretty even mix of martial and magic--lots of partial casters. 3/4 d20 paladins. i checked. in game, there's a penchant for big swings and wild decisions. sometimes the payoff of that is insane: ricky's sacrifice in the final battle, fig making arianwen lose her magic, liam's wish, sunny & the bell, maggie giving birth, rick diggins' everything, antiope killing charity in one round, gunnie going ftl with gnosis, conrad's appeal to madam loathing, i could go on. many who sit in this chair have a penchant for party guidance/leadership. they may or may not be an official leader, but many of them are the heart of the party morally and just generally.

Characters:

Fig Faeth, Maggie, Ricky Matsui, Rick Diggins, Liam Wilhelmina, Sunny Biscotto, Gangie Green, Whitney Jammer, Antiope Jones, Terry Talbo, Gunnie Miggles-Rashbax, Dr. Aleksandr Astrovsky, Andhera, Rosamund du Prix, Thane Delissandro Katzon, Troyánn (Karkyn?), Conrad Schintz/Conscience

L2: Martial lean--only a couple of full casters. in game, these characters kick ass in high stakes scenarios (sometimes), or hit rock bottom. there is no in between. sometimes their entire arc is getting knocked down and the getting up from rock bottom in order to kick ass: leiland's whole deal, sofia's chapter 2 arc, timothy . a bunch of tanks. also, a tendency towards older men.

Characters:

Gorgug Thistlespring, Leiland, Sofia Lee, Boomer, Theobald Gumbar, Barbarella Sarsaparilla Gainglynn, Buckster $ Boyd, Katja Cleaver, Riva, Captain K.P Hob, Mother Timothy Goose, A. Tension/Attention

L3: the magic chair. lots of full casters. 2/3 d20 wizards sit here. the lowkey chosen one energy persists. think about it. strong narrative investment. several characters who make the hit that takes down the BBEG. either some kind of chaotic gremlin or a parent. oftentimes both simultaneously. actually the split more reflects parent or parent issues. isolated characters who feel ignored in some way taking control of their narratives.

Characters:

Adaine Abernant, Efink Murderdeath, Kingston Brown, Agnes, Jet Rocks, Saccharina Frostwhip, Cheese, Daisy D'umpstaire, K | Dream, Penny Luckstone, Megan Mirror, Norman "Skip" Takamori, Squing, Lady Chirp Featherfowl, Pinocchio, Bishop Raphaniel Charlock, Princess Foehammer, Hunch Curio/Curiosity

R3: slight magic lean. it's the bard chair. 5 of them, to be exact. a lot of charismatic characters sit in this seat. if they're not charm-based, they go the complete opposite direction. not friendly, surprisingly violent, quite abrasive at times. learning to really understand other people and move past your perception of your own needs by contrast. this can go either direction: you can have a fully self-interested character like margaret or you can have danielle barkstock's insane selflessness.

Characters:

Fabian Seacaster, Sokhbarr, Misty Moore, TI-83, Ruby Rocks, Myrtle (the Bitch), Iga Lisowski, Rowan Berry, Vicar Ian Prescott, Sam Black, Danielle Barkstock, Tuti IV, Margaret Encino, Wetzel, Lord Squak Airavis, Puss in Boots | PIB, Karna Solara, Gertrude, Imelda Pulse/Impulse

R2: Split of martial & magic. it's high WIS or no WIS, people. trying to do better than you did before in various ways: kristen's religious crisis, kugrash's atonement, cody's whole deal, gerard's whole deal, dan fucks' revolution, rue coming out, jack's whole deal. there's a very funny split that i've found here; the ladies who sit here have a lot of power and use it to devastating effect. examples: kristen making a god and naming an old god, ostentatia's commune & divine intervention, lilith's everything, sidney taking a vercadian out in one shot. the men? they either hit rock bottom during the season or start there and work upward. the only exception i can think of is bean. and the nbs, rue and lars, are just fabulous.

Characters:

Kristen Applebees, Lilith, Kugrash, Bean, Amethar Rocks, Jack Brakkow, Cody Walsh, Lars Vandenchomp, Ostentatia Wallace, Sundry Sidney, Delloso de la Rue, Gerard of Greenleigh, Colin Provolone, Dan Fucks/Desire

R1: the rogue chair. it's more than R3's bards, with six rogues. no multiclasses. it's the rogue chair. otherwise, a bunch of rangers and sorcerers. this chair is for the plothounds. they're searching it out and making connections, or they're making big magic swings and connecting themselves to gods. they tend to put the detectives here. everyone here is going to make the dm's job easier by idk, communing with a death god (2 nickels for this seat), or going off on their own to find clues to a greater mystery.

Characters:

Riz Gukgak, Markus St. Vincent, Pete Conlan, Car-Go Jones, Lapin Cadbury, Cumulous Rocks, Marcid the Typhoon, Sylvester Cross, Evan Kelmp, Sam Nightingale, Seven, Big Barry Syx, May Wong, BINX Choppley, Ylfa Snorgelsson, Lady Amangeaux Epiceé du Peche, Twyla, The Fix/Hyperfixation

and that's all for this installment of thisisnotthenerd's d20 stats. feel free to tell me what you think, whether you agree or disagree. as always, the spreadsheet can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g7skmX8WuPRsjvU1K0lAjVf4rNVnuuarW3Zb87A5hx0/edit?usp=sharing

@perksofbeingalittletwat you inspired this with your comment on the last seating chart, so thank you for that.

#i genuinely love this kind of analysis #big data interpretable only through an act of creative writing #dimension 20

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prism grimpoppy a.k.a. pri$m (critical role: campaign 3)

babson "babs" wisplin (critical role: lookout, here we come!)

favorite emily axford characters, in order of appearance:

emily ashford (hot date)

murph’s ex, bridget (hot date)

moonshine cybin (bahumia)

figueroth “fig” faeth (fantasy high)

onyx lumière (trinyvale)

sofia lee bicicleta lee (the unsleeping city)

princess bastard jet rocks (a crown of candy)

queen saccharina frostwhip, first of her name, sovereign ruler of candia and the sugarlands, witch-queen of the dairy sea, high priestess of the sweetening path, archmage of lost sucrosia, enemy of the faith, the sundae sorceress, storm-captain of the frosted fleet (a crown of candy)

whoever and wherever she plays next, ad infinitum