phantomtheraccoon

[phantomtheraccoon]

Today is Blacksmith Days, the local blacksmith guild's annual event. Jacob is an active member of the guild, and I don't think we've ever missed a year. These people remember when the kids were babies sleeping in a basket.

Every year there are forging competitions, and this year Jacob entered the "hammer under a pound" competition, and honestly I thought he'd have the prize, because

Repousse hammer with chased roping. Cute as fuck.

But my guys, they brought their A game.

This one is apparently a bookbinder's hammer.

This one is just a stunning beauty with mosaic Damascus steel:

Even the handle was beautiful and so smooth it felt like silk satin.

This raising hammer by Rob Deker took first prize. It's actually also Damascus, but he says it was just a scrap he had on hand--because Damascus steel knives are just what Deker does.

Bonus hammers, the etching hammers of Matt Stagmer, of Baltimore Knife and Sword, who demonstrated decorative etching and grinding.

Exquisite.

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[phantomtheraccoon]

:O

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

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Yeah two, dozen maybe.

I finally put all my rocks in a thing. Here's all of my choicest rocks and minerals and bones and shells and teeth. In one thing.

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Turtle!!!

Surprisingly fast little buddy.

Become pebble.

#turtle #painted turtle #maybe? don't quote me #phantoms vague wildlife

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Scratch is great and all but how I long to let Us live in my camp with me.

Yes I gave them toe beans.

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TOAD

He sing!

Handsome little big man

#toad #phantoms vague wildlife

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Loud Friend!

Loud Friend do a dancey dance

Be free!

#cicada #phantoms vague wildlife

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Frog

#frog #phantoms vague wildlife

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I was born ungovernable, so I went double or nothing and became unemployable.

#lmao

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Spooder friend.

Pretty spooder friend

They're bigger than my thumb nail!

#arachnophobia tw #spider #i only noticed them because they popped one of the bubbles #so they're having fun #phantoms vague wildlife

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THIS IS A CURSE, A CURSE. NO! WHAT.

start scooping

What

#horse friend

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start scooping

What

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She's spotted them.

Friend!

Friend make mess.

And a sharp friend!

Sharp friends don't belong in the house.

And another vague brown bird, though it's less vague than the last one.

#cat #rat

[phantomtheraccoon]

Friend!

Friend make mess.

And a sharp friend!

Sharp friends don't belong in the house.

And another vague brown bird, though it's less vague than the last one.

#blue mud wasp #rat #vague brown bird #rat and his wife enjoy tearing apart our compost #phantoms vague wildlife