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senlinyu · 3 months

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I'm excited to announce that I have signed a book deal with Del Rey at Penguin Random House in the US and Michael Joseph in the UK for my debut novel, Alchemised, a standalone dark fantasy set in a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy, in which a healer with amnesia is taken as a prisoner of war and must fight to protect her lost memories and the secrets hidden among them. It will grapple with themes of trauma and survival, legacy, and the way that love can drive one to extreme darkness, and it is, as you may be able to tell, a reimagined version of Manacled.

I know I’ve been rather quiet about my publishing journey, and a lot of that has been because I didn’t want to spark any concerns or worry that I might be abruptly taking away a story that is such a deep part of myself and that I know has meant so much to so many people. This process has unfolded very slowly and quietly because I have tried to be mindful as I could be in every step of the way.

As most of you know, I have been a reader in fandom long before I ever began to write. Fanfiction is incredibly special to me, and I have tried to do my best not to undermine its legal protection or allow my works to do so either. During the last several years, there has been a growing issue with illegal sales of Manacled, putting both me and the incredible community that shares fanfiction freely in legal jeopardy.

After consulting with the OTW as well as other lawyers, it has grown clear that as a transformative writer I have limited options in protecting my stories from this kind of exploitation, but I wasn’t sure what to do; I didn’t want to just take the story down, in part because I worried that might only exacerbate the issue, but I didn’t know what other options I had. Then I suddenly had this idea of alchemy, which was peculiarly appropriate; an academic world filled with unique transmutational abilities, and a necromantic war against people who had discovered the secrets of immortality, and I could see a path to reimagining the story while still holding on to as much of the original spirit of Manacled as possible.

I began redrafting the concept privately around Christmas 2022, and then as if the universe had aligned, just as I was finishing, Caitlin Mahony and Rivka Bergman of WME reached out to me and were delightfully enthusiastic about concepts and ideas for my new alchemical world and the ways I had reimagined the story.

I'm thrilled to be working with Emily Archbold, my visionary editor at Del Rey, along with Rebecca Hilsdon at Michael Joseph in the UK, to polish this novel for publication in Fall 2025. I feel uniquely privileged that both my publishing teams are familiar with Manacled and understand how special it is to so many people, and how important it is that this reimagining captures the same spirit while also having its own wings.

Manacled is not going anywhere at present. It will remain online throughout 2024, at which point it will, if you’ll pardon the pun, alchemise for 2025 and be removed from AO3.

I'm so thankful to all of you who've enjoyed my works, and I hope that I can continue to rely on your support as I take my next steps as an author.

#manacled story #alchemised

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icy-watch · 2 months

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Cole Jr!

#liveblogging #ninjago #mini series #legacy reimagined #episode 5 #golden hour

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dailyadventureprompts · 4 months

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Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness

Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.

As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.

We can do better

TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.

While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:

It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.

Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.

Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.

Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.

Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.

The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.

There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.

Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.

Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.

THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now

Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time

THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.

Adventure Hooks:

The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)

Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.

The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.

Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.

Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.

Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.

Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.

Art

#monsters reimagined #outergod #tharizdun #lovecraftian #outer spheres #astral #kaorti #quori #far realm #planescape #spelljammer

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sirtotallynotatimetraveler · 3 months

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Welcome To Confection Castle! (AU)

What in the World is Confection Castle? :

Confection Castle (formerly known as Candy/Candied Castle) is a role-swap AU of Pizza Tower, akin to the more well-known PT swap AU, Sugary Spire. Unlike Sugary Spire, Confection Castle only swaps the roles of the characters and not their personalities, with a few alterations. With the unchanged personalities of each character, this instead changes the mechanics, environment, and even story of Pizza Tower, with each character handling their swapped roles more differently than Sugary Spire's interpretation.

(This AU's concept was largely inspired by TS!Underswap. A reimagining and fangame of the Undertale AU, Underswap, which uses the same concept)

The Story:

Teddy is faced with the consequences of his own actions after pulling one too many pranks against a castle that was bought out by a huge confection company, Candyboy Corporations. A company that steals the competition against smaller sweets business owners. Teddy's given a warning by the corporation CEO's assistant, Granny Candydimples, that the CEO will destroy his and many other confectionary's shops, forcing them to all work for his company. Thanks to the warning, Teddy and his confectionary allies team up to take down the Confection Castle and its evil schemes.

The Characters (may or not feature some slightly outdated art):

Teddy Taffy (Theodore Taffy) - Noise in the Role of Peppino: A smug, witty, mostly down to earth, prankster who formerly premiered on the big screen before leaving it all to continue his family's legacy: making mouthwatering candy and sweets. He owns a quaint candy shop in a vaguely European town near a looming Confection Castle. He's obsessed with sugar and when he consumes a good amount of it, can become hyperactive and manic.

Suzy (Suzette) - Noisette in the Role of Gustavo: A kind-hearted, rule-following, and dorky dessert baker who owns a bakery/patisserie next to Teddy's candy shop. She's close friends with Teddy and secretly has a crush on him, which may or may not be obvious to everyone except Ted. Like Ted, her business was challenged by Candyboy Corporations, forcing her to rally against the castle with Teddy,

The Ingredipets - Role of the Toppins: Little creatures resembling confectionary ingredients that were kidnapped and enslaved by Candyboy Corp. to make the companies candy. Teddy and his allies will save each of them to defeat their competitor. Ingredipets may be different depending on the character being played.

Captain Crackle (Peppino Ravioli) - Peppino in the Role of The Noise: Captain Crackle is a well-known cereal brand pirate captain mascot for the cereal of the same name. He's played by a worn-out has-been TV and opera celebrity Peppino Ravoli who does the bidding of Candyboy Corporations to make a living. He takes on three jobs: Captain Crackle, a Candyboy Corp. gift shop worker, and the Castle's TV News Anchor. He just wants to quit everything and live a peaceful life making pizza, his real dream.

Mr. Gus (Gustavo) - Gustavo in the Role of Noisette: Mr. Gus is Captain Crackle's pirate sidekick who serves as the comic relief character, always getting the short end of the stick and being kicked/thrown around the place for comedic effect. His actor, Gustavo, has a similar story to Peppino's, working for the castle, trying to sustain a living. He owns a secret soda tavern hidden from where his boss can find it.

Mr. Lollygagger - Pizzahead in the Role of Mr. Stick: Teddy's accountant who both does and doesn't take his job seriously. He pulls many gags toward his patrons to get them to comply with his offers and tries to pose as a nice, patient, and understanding accountant who needs money in exchange for a good offer. Ted's annoyed by him, A LOT.

Sapphire - Snick in the Role of Brick: An adventurous, rule-breaking, and cocky rock candy Porcupine who loves to skate on his hoverboard at the speed of sound. He becomes friends with Suzy after pestering her rule-following morals and later helps her and Teddy's journey.

Murray Muffinman - Pepperman in the Role of Gerome: An experimental artistic genius restrained to the role of maintaining the paint job of the castle. When he's on break he goes to his supply room to unleash his creativity through all sorts of mediums. He can be found all over the castle. He will reward his own art if he is helped to find his supply room.

Gumther Gumdrop - Vigilante in the Role of The Priest: Gumther is a farmer who grows sweet-tasting fruits that grant magical healing abilities. He sells his fruits in fruit stands all over the castle but it comes with a price.

Butler Scotch - Gerome in the Role of Pepperman: Scotch is the butler of the Royal Candy Family, who were the original owners of the castle before signing an agreement with Candyboy Corp. Scotch is the first boss Teddy has to fight due to one of the Royal Candy's prince (originally intended to fight Ted) left Scotch to stand on guard as he goes out for lunch.

The Pope - The Priest in the Role of The Vigilante: The leader of the Caramelist religious group and overseer of the Basilicaramel Church. After Teddy destroys the church during one of the levels, The Pope seeks to cleanse Ted of his sins by fighting against him.

Granny Candydimples - Granny Pizza in the Role of Pizzaface: The oldest member of the Royal Candy Family who was demoted and forced to the role of the CEO's assistant. She's kind-hearted and honest with no ill intent unlike her boss, going out of her way to disobey him sometimes.

Uncle Candiesworth - Pizzaface in the Role of Granny Pizza: The Uncle of the Royal Candy Family. He's one of the few family members who rebels against Candyboy Corporations and agrees to help Teddy and his friends destroy the castle. He's grumpy, bossy, and insults people constantly, but he has a good heart.

The Teddy Doll - Role of Fake Peppino: A cursed doll resembling Teddy. It's been presumed to have been cursed with dark magic, cast on by a cult. It is unknown what the purpose of this doll was for. All we know is that you won't see it in the same place it was left at the second you turn your back towards it.

Cookie Blair - Role of Mort the Chicken: Oh boy! It's Cookie Blair from the hit 90's 3D point-and-click PC abandonware game Cookie's Bustle! Watch as she and Teddy travel across Cookie City as Ted tries to hide Cookie from the police trying to remove her entire existence for good. (To whom it may concern (looking at you), I am not profiting off this project, therefore not profiting off Cookie's Bustle. Please don't copyright strike me or this project.)

Nezukira - Brick in the Role of Snick: Nezukira is the world-famous thunder rat character from the equally famous elemental critter collecting and fighting video game "Sackicritt". Nezukira is heavily merchandised with its adorable appearance; from plushes, socks, gummies, and cigars. Besides Nezukira, there are several other Sackicritts to obtain, with "Net Handlers" who accompany them.

Jen Beam - Role of John Pillar: Jen is the older sister of Butler Scotch. She is the caretaker/ruler of all the levels in the castle, making sure that everything is in order and won't crumble to the floor. She guards the door to each "dimensional control room" that deactivates the levels in the castle. She will only let people pass if she is given gourmet candy with the finest ingredients.

Candyboy - Role of Pizzaboy: Candyboy was the prime mascot and face of Candyboy Corporations. He's a happy-go-lucky, fun-loving, eccentric kid with all the childhood innocence packed into one. He loves candy and is very marketable. Despite Candyboy's innocent presence being long gone, he is still the face of the company.

The Candyman - Role of Pizzahead: The Candyman is the man behind the whole corporation, mostly know as the CEO. Not many have had the chance to meet The Candyman in person, but he's been said to be demanding, ruthless, and manipulative to get what he wants. He will do everything to gain the title of being the best confectionary business. If it exists, he wants it in his company.

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And that's it for character introductions! I am planning on adding characters that will be entirely original in this AU like new friends that will accompany Ted, new bosses, and other characters that will build the world for this AU. Other stuff such as levels, music, and game mechanic ideas are in the works too. Lots of stuff is planned for this AU project!

If you want to make fan art for Confection Castle, go ahead! I love fan art! Just make sure to tag me if you post it. Other fan stuff like music is cool too!

Thanks for reading y'all.

(Also, I am not planning on making this an actual game as I have no experience with coding or stuff that is needed to actually make a game. But if anyone with experience with game design wants to make it happen...hit me up haha.)

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