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cononeillbreastingboobily · 1 year

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A, K, Y and Z for the fandom asks!!! <3 :)

A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)

Oh honey.

I mentioned them before but Lanjuls from @tinfcomic . They're SO cute!!!!!!

From OFMD: steddyhands, and any side of the triangle that is not Ed x Stede. Blackhands? Delicious. Gentlehands? Hell yeah!!!!!!!!!

As for two people that have been making me insane consistently for the longest time out of all of these, it's

Adam (left) and Rahim (right) from Sex Education aka Adahim aka i did my waiting!!!!! 30 years of it!!!!!!! When are they coming back to me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you're feeling a bit too mentally stable and haven't exposed yourself to either one of these, I absolutely recommend it.

K -Say something nice about someone in any of your fandoms

😃...

SUNNY!!!! (yes I needed to start off with you, did you think I'd forget about you? 3:)) you are a wonderful, funny, sweet and talented person, and without you my experience of the OFMD fandom would be so much worse!!!! Ilu!!!!!!! 🩷🩷🩷

@whiteasy you are such a talented writer, I am obsessed with you!!! Here's hoping we're getting the air date of the 4th season of Sex Education very soon 🤞🏻

@sluttymickey Drish!!!! You're in a bunch of fandoms so I'm not going to refer to just one, but please know that I adore you and I love seeing you on my dash and in my notifications, always 💕💕💕

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)

So many!!!!!

Doctor Who (I've seen <10 episodes)

Shameless

Succession (I'm working on watching it okay!!!!!! Still it might not count since I post something here and there about it even without watching it. I'm invested 😭)

Countless Thai BL dramas courtesy of @dreamedofyou 😁

Interview with the vampire (was it raining Louis???? That's about as much as I know. And that it's gay)

Severance (I should get around to watching it tho, it seems freaky)

Blacksails

And many more I probably will remember the moment I post this and look at my dash again 😅

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go (prompts optional but encouraged)

Well you didn't give me a prompt so!!!!

The most universal fandom truth I can bestow upon ye is that fandom is an exercise in customizing and adjusting your experience online. Stick to the people you like, don't be afraid of the block button, learn to enjoy things even if others might not like them. It's your life after all.

#hehe #thank you for the ask <3 #sunnibits #adahim #steddyhands #blackhands #gentlehands #ask #ask game

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jamesclarkross · 1 year

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1, 17, 27 for the writer asks!

1. What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting?

I frequently write on my phone so whatever is the default. Arial size 11.

If I want to get fancy though it always ends up Times New Roman size 12 because turns out you can take the man out of the academia but you can’t take the academia out of the man.

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

This is such a fantastic question and I wish I had a current WIP to talk about. I’m sort of standing in a field during a thunderstorm with a kite, waiting for inspiration to strike, or for a friend to make a convincing point to drag me into their current fandom.

(No, I will not talk about pirate wips I have on ao3. I hope to finish those one day, but shit happened, work’s busy, and I got distracted and couldn’t really get back into the vibe and fandom again. :/ )

I have a couple small Rossier things I’m procrastinating right now but they’re mostly historical so not much fun lore going on.

This is a “current WIP” in the sense that I have the doc open right now because I started thinking about fitzier again the other day and found the 7k intro from 2-3 years ago and thought it was still a worthy concept. It’s a fic dubbed the “Modern Fitzier Canadian Road Trip AU” and this was 2020/21 so I wasn’t going anywhere so I wanted to live vicariously. After I wrote a fun fitzier fake dating for a wedding fic, I wanted to write the Worst version of that where they have to drive to Franklin’s funeral together after a series of Planes, Trains and Automobiles-esque incidents. They hate each other. They’re stuck in a car for days. The fight, they hook up, they fight some more, hook up some more, make up briefly only for one of them to say something in just the wrong tone and end up at eachothers throats again. Set to be at least 20k and include as many Stan Rogers references as possible. (And yes, I did spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that a modern AU would mean they never died so Stan Rogers would have never written Northwest Passage, so oh boy did I make up a whole cold boy alternate history there). I had a whole separate doc for backstory. I have pages and pages of just awful arguments between them about everything from speed limits, to correct ways to make poutine to Sophia to shit Francis said 10 years ago and has not forgotten. Ultimately they sort of run out of things to say and finally discover there’s a lot more common ground than they realize. So yeah, that’ll be a fun fic I will maybe write in the next one-three business years…

27. Who is the most stressful character you’ve ever written? Why?

I think it would definitely have to be James Flint BlackSails. I definitely don’t write fanfic to try to improve my writing skills, but I think I levelled up in writing quality after writing that guy. There’s just so many layers of things going through that guy's head, and he’s such a talker, and a lying liar who lies. And there’s so much grief and anger in there. You have to get several layers deep into his motivations and how he wants to be perceived before writing about what he does. Also slightly historical language there. I spent so much time thinking and overthinking and asking “would he say this? Would he do this? Why. Why though?”

Oh man, it was rough. I miss him so much though.

#thank you!#asks #jouissants

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dmsden · 7 years

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Go With the Flow – The Art of Improvised DMing

I had all my notes prepared. I knew that the PCs were going to be rewarded by the Sea Baron, Honnak Wavecutter, with gold and treasure. I suspected they were going to give some advice to their dwarven friend, Darberik Fivebraids about whether or not to accept the Sea Baron’s offer of help. Then they would hit level 10, and I would help them level their characters. I thought they might make it to Estwald, the city they’ve been heading for, and I had copious notes of where things would go from here.

And some of that happened…

In speaking with Darberik, it seemed they wanted to help him. They discussed buying a ship for him themselves and offering him better terms than Honnak had. After all, they are supposed to be in Estwald in about a month, and they have a couple of weeks of travel ahead… But then they hit on a new plan. They’d recently driven off the reaver Gar Shatterkeel, and he had ships. They didn’t like leaving him behind, knowing he could hurt innocents, especially if he began tracking them down for revenge. Suddenly, Commune and Scrying spells were coming into play. Could they get to him, defeat him, and get back in enough time to meet the King in Estwald as they’d been commanded?

I delayed as long as I could, making them discuss the questions for the Commune spell. As they did, I began to fill in details. Since he kept attacking from underwater, he likely had a base underwater. I knew he was likely amassing allies to seek revenge against the heroes. Then the questions came…

With our current resources, do we have the ability to find and defeat Gar Shatterkeel and return to town in ten days or less?

That was pretty specific, but I wanted them to keep going, so I replied, “Possibly.” After all, I already knew he was underwater. They could cast Water Breathing, but how would they get down to his undersea lair?

The next question was is Gar Shatterkeel’s base underwater?

“Yes.” That was easy.

Final question – does the Sea Baron know more about Gar Shatterkeel’s location than he’s told us?

Interesting! I decided I would figure it out later and said, “Yes.”

Based on this answer, I began to think about what the Sea Baron knew. I hit on the name Blacksail Harbor. Sounded like a reasonable pirate base name. I also thought of the name The Mere of Dead Men, but I wasn’t sure how to tie it in, since a Mere is a lake.

They had one of Gar’s captured ships, so they had a decent bonus on their chance to Scry him. I made his Saving Throw…natural 1. Hoo boy. So I began to improvise. I described Gar walking through a harbor town that was built in an undersea cave, lit by lanterns and eerie algae formations. In my campaign, orcs are a seafaring threat, so I described him speaking with orcs. The PCs have fought sahuagin long ago, so I thought they’d be a nice addition. I described him speaking to sahuagin. I had one of his known lieutenants come over and talk with him. Through their dialogue, I let it be clear that he was preparing to come after them. They know he’s a disciple of Olhydra, the Princess of Evil Elemental Water, so I described water elementals of various sorts. I’d recently heard a folk song about the Flying Dutchman that had the line, “It’s hate that fills her sails.” That had made me think of an undead ship. So I described a ship of Undead surfacing on the harbor from below. I described the dead men on the ship, lurching, and their captain, an undead, grinning thing advancing to the bow of the ship to greet Gar.

And the Scrying ended.

I jotted down a couple of names – Captain Hellstrom seemed like a good name for my undead pirate, and Dagon’s Wrath worked well for a ship name. Looking at them all, I saw two things on their faces. They knew they were outmatched, massively, and they knew they had to take the fight to him nonetheless. If this force came after them, many innocents would die. That’s not the kind of thing my PCs will stand for. I knew they were going to need allies.

When they spoke to the Sea Baron, he made it clear he was no friend of Shatterkeel’s. They explained what they’d seen, and he revealed the existence of the “legendary” Blacksails Harbor. Many menaces had used it as a base over the years. He had a theory that it might be somewhere near the Mere of Dead Men, a stretch of water between three close islands that’s very deep. There we go – worked both of those names in. They talked more. It was increasingly clear to me how badly my players wanted to do this. I had to try and make this happen.

“You know,” the Sea Baron told them. “I have an ally that might be able to help.” I described him taking them out to his ship, dressed in black leather armor and a cloak, looking very much the warrior rather than a diplomat. He took out a curiously fashioned horn from under his cloak.

One of players, who plays Tilly the Halfling, murmured something like, “If he introduces us to a dragon, I’m going to plotz.”

I imitated the horn sound. I described the silence. “Maybe he’s too far away,” Honnak said. And then something huge launched out of the water. Something with wings…

I’d had an encounter with a bronze dragon coming, thinking that I’d had yet to have any good dragons appear in my campaign. Maybe he could help them? But how to bring him in? Well, here was a good way. When Tilly introduced himself, he said, “I am the luckiest halfling in the world right now!” Lazarantios the Bronze would join with them, glad for a chance to annihilate the scourge of Gar Shatterkeel. And he would bring allies.

Satisfied that they were on their way to having a chance, we leveled up. As we did so, our cleric, Eustace the Minotaur, found that he now had the Divine Intervention ability. So of course, he exercised it. And of course, he rolled sufficiently to get a success. So there will be some kind of aid from that forum as well. What aid and allies will come? Well, we’ll find out next week.

If I’d read the room wrong, this session could’ve been a total block on my end. I could’ve made it impossible. I could’ve discouraged them. But that’s not how I play. Instead, I now have a group of intensely excited players who can’t wait to see what happens next. I usually ask my players if they had fun. This week, one of them grinned and said, “You probably don’t need to ask this week, do you?”

No, I didn’t.

I happen to be pretty good with coming up with names on the fly, but you don’t have to rely on that. You can jot down names that you think of between sessions and use them when you need them, or you can find lists of names online. You can use a fantasy name generator. Being ready with a few names when the PCs go in a direction you don’t expect is a valuable thing.

If you have material, and the PCs go in another direction, don’t despair. Only you know what you had planned. Maybe the beautiful dungeon map you’d created won’t get used as the goblin lair. Maybe it’ll be a troll lair when they’re a few levels higher by altering the scale. Did the PCs go the wrong way down the path? Well, only you know that. You can have the goblin lair be east instead of west. As long as you’re consistent, all will be well. I intended the encounter with Lazaranthios to be an RP encounter on their journey to Estwald, but I like using him in this manner as well.

I encourage all DMs to learn to think on your feet. Don’t let the players rattle you and absolutely run with what they give you. Rewrite your plot for them, and let the story take you where it goes. What comes may be absolutely epic. Next week, I suspect I’ll have to tell you how I like to run large scale battles! I hope you’ll come back to hear more.

#dnd #dnd 5e #d&d #d&d 5e #dungeons & dragons #dungeons and dragons #dungeon master

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