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“Fuck ya life, bing bong!” *Pocket pigeon*

#dungeons and dragons #roleplay #dungeon master #rpg #d&d players #diy #homebrew #d&d #dnd 5e homebrew #dnd druid #Instagram

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I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

#dnd meta #gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #game design #dungeons and dragons #dungeon master #rpg #d&d players

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*GASP* I NEED ONE

🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓

Spring is gonna be here soon! Perfect time to adopt one of my plushie sons.

Get the plush here!

Check out Crow Time here!

(Sadly, he doesn't come with the lil cape...someone gave me that for him. I do want to make little crow capes for the store one day tho!)

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01: Demeter Chthonia

I sing of Demeter and Kore, wife of Klymenos, raising the honey-voiced hymn in the deep-sounding Aeolian harmony.

Fragment of a hymn by Lasos of Hermione, 6th century BCE.

Pausanias is our most detailed source for the famous cult of Demeter Chthonia (of the Underworld) at the remote town of Hermione in the Argolid. This cult is unusual in its emphasis on the role of Hades (who is given the euphemistic name of Klymenos, the Renowned One). “He reports that the Chthonia festival took place in the summer and began with a procession of all the priests, magistrates, and townspeople, even the children. Dressed in white and crowned with wreaths made from a local summer wildflower, they led a heifer to the sanctuary, where it was allowed to roam about until it entered the open doors of the temple. Inside, four old women rose from their ceremonial thrones and pursued the heifer until one of them cut its throat with a sickle. Three more cows were slaughtered for the goddess in the same way.”

“The indoor sacrifice is very unusual, but can be explained as the result of the strict gender segregation practiced in the cult. The cult statue of Chthonia was so sacred that only the old women were permitted to view it, and the exclusion of men seems to have extended to the sacrificial slaughter, usually a male prerogative.”

“Opposite Chthonia’s sanctuary was that of Klymenos, and the area was famed for its entrance to the underworld, an opening in the earth from which Herakles once emerged, it was said, leading Kerberos.”

Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide by Jennifer Larson

#demeter #chthonia #ancient greek cults #tw: blood

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All my animals are strays. Always have been always will be.

Stray cats 🐈

#secondlina art #webcomic #webcomics #cats of tumblr

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Alright Wuxia animation, I see you.

original character in chinese wuxia style of 旋风博文

#style points #china #video #fun #self-made anime #animation #art

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All of this is needed!

Working on new stickers and patch designs!!

#crowsdaily #secondlina art #crow time #merch #crow posting

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*Scribbles down this entire post*

I think we should make the Ultimate D&D, built on the best concepts and mechanics from the game's history, one that truly supports the Three Pillars: Dungeon, Wilderness, and Town.

#d&d 5e homebrew #homebrew mechanic #mechanics #d&d mechanics #dnd #dungeons and dragons #roleplay #dungeon master #rpg #d&d players

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This would tie in very well with a “lost age” plot where the fantasy world is built upon long buried ruins of a more advanced age. I know I know Elder Scrolls did it first but still.

Hi! I really like your other takes on Underdark races, and wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on improving grimlocks? Beyond the permanent blindness they have and the whole being humans who adapted to the underdark, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else done with them.

Monsters Reimagined: Grimlocks

Would it surprise anyone to learn that a d-list d&d monster has It's roots in 1800s ideas about eugenics and bad adaptations of genre fiction? No? Then you've been paying attention, top marks.

Asker is absolutely right in their assessment that there's not really much to grimlocks. They're one of many "hostile tribal primitives" that have filled out the monster roster ever since the original developers lifted them en mass from the pulp adventure stories they grew up reading.

A common theme among these pulp works and the early scifi that inspired it was devolution, the idea that a people could degrade from greatness back into an animistic nature. The most well known pop culture example would be HP lovecraft's deep ones, where the author's fears of race mixing manifest as monsters that literally push humanity back down the evolutionary ladder to the stage of fish.

There's plenty of different ways to explain the origin of this writing trend, but I like to chalk it up to an anxiety resulting from the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution by a society that believed wholeheartedly in scientific racism. If intelligence (read: whiteness) wasn't just a god given right but was infact inheritable, then it could also be disinherited, bred out of a population whether by on purpose or by accident. This made it so important to practice good breeding (read: eugenics), to preserve the pure stock from falling to degeneracy (read: miscegenation) and introducing undesirable traits into the genepool.

We can see fear this with grimlocks, humanoids who were inherently lessened by their "adaptation" to life underground, losing their intelligence and eyesight and descending into a state of barbarism. Given that this is one of the few d&d monsters that mention evolution at all, we can trace this feature to their likely inspiration: The morlocks in H.G. Wells' Time machine, published a scant 36 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

I'm not well read enough to know whether Wells pioneered the idea of subhuman descendants, but I can say that most of his imitators missed the point of his writing: Wells saw in his day an increasingly indolent upper class inflicting brutal and dehumanizing labour conditions on the poor to support their own carefree lifestyle. He satirized this in his book by showing that while the descendants of the rich had devolved into beautiful, useless, idiots, the descendants of the workers devolved into subterranean ape-things who maintained the machinery that allowed the eden like existence of the rich while farming them for meat. Say what you will about Wells' race politics (Neither degenerate fop or inbred ape can withstand the smarts and strength of the enlightened colonial Englishman) but his writing was specifically class continuous, and the brutality of the morlocks was a direct result of the exploitation of working people in his own day and age.

When the morlocks were adapted into the grimlocks , the d&d writers kept their canibalistic streak but specifically removed their class based origins as well as their mechanical knowhow. This is a near identical process to what happened with a creature the worlocks helped inspire: Tolkien's orcs, which were likewise turned from a commentary on the brutality of the industrial age into warlike primitives. It's a bit of a trend.

If you wanted to "fix" the grimlocks I'd go one of two ways:

If you want to engage with themes of primality, make them legit underdark dwelling primates/australopithecus type of creatures, just figuring out tool use and language. Make the rumours of them being descended from cave-exploring humanoids a common myth made up by surface dwellers.

If you want to get spicy about it though, give them back their mechanical aptitude and maybe mix in a few more dashes of pulp "lost civilization" ancient aliens nonsense. Have them dwell in great mechanical complexes beneath the earth, worker drones who've long outlived the creatures that enslaved them and scribed mechanical knowledge into their very being. Originally denied understanding of the machines they toiled to build, work, and maintain, the grimlocks jealously guard the science they've spent generations reverse engineering, giving them the reputation of being violently territorial for those underdark travelers who venture too close to the megastructures they inhabit.

Artsource

#monsters reimagined #grimlocks #the orc dissertation #underdark #dnd #dungeons and dragons #d&d #ttprg #pathfinder #roleplay #dungeons and dragons homebrew #dungeon master

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Some more work in progress.

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I’m making thins into a Kenku colony

New Crow Time - When you drink from silly fountain you get cartoon powers.

If you love Crow Time, consider supporting our comics on Patreon! You can support all our comics for $5, or just Crow Time for $2! What a steal!

#webcomic #webcomics #crow time #webtoon #webtoons #webtoon canvas #dungeons and dragons #roleplay #dungeon master #rpg

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#chaotic good

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Hell yeah

Dagger gang

#only knives left #dungeons and dragons #roleplay #rpg #d&d players #roguish archetype #how to rogue #rogue #cloak and dagger

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“I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgment and intentions are.”

-unknown to this page

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Stories matter.

Be it the news, gossip, or escapist fantasies we all need stories to get through the day, to lift us up, to know ourselves.

Different Stories Resonate with Different People

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Y’all the person who runs @dailyadventureprompts is an absolute treasure. I couldn’t come up with squat for the better part of a week and they swoop in with gold in hand. In my homebrew setting halflings will be called Ballyfolk.

I could use a favor please. I need help renaming halflings for a home-brew setting. In this world they’re closely tied to humans and their settlements, river ways and swamps. I’m loosely basing them on creole and coastal cultures. Something besides hobbits or kinder. Thanks in advance.

Sidgen- borrowed from ratqueens

Kithkin- from mtg

Harfoot- from rings of power

Half-foot-dungeon meshi

Ballyfolk-just off the top of my head but feels swampy, drawn from "ballyhoo"

#dungeons and dragons #roleplay #dungeon master #rpg #d&d players #diy #homebrew #d&d #dnd 5e homebrew

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To determine your personal stats in D&D complete the following tasks below!

#dungeons and dragons #roleplay #dungeon master #rpg #d&d players #diy #homebrew #d&d #dnd 5e homebrew