Astral Dreams

Being able to create your own web layouts is the kind of freedom that a lot of people are looking for. More often than not, we can’t find exactly what we’re looking for and it can be quite frustrating, so learning how to code your layouts is the best way to solve this problem. On top of that, you can become a theme-maker yourself and share your awesome creations with people and become an inspiration yourself for those trying to learn it as well.

This post has a long list of tips on how to learn code and how to run your very own theme blog, and it’s divided into the following main points:

Learning to Code

Starting Your Own Themes

Styling Your Theme Blog

Running Your Theme Blog

Sharing Your Content

Good-Practices

“Next Tuesday, McDonald’s workers at restaurants in 10 cities will walk off the job at lunch, waging the first-ever nationwide strike to combat sexual harassment.” 

- TIME’S UP

McDonald’s Workers Are Going on Strike Over Sexual Harassment

here are some ideas!!

• Make a redraw of a very old drawing of yours! See how much you have changed or improved (:

• Remember that OC you haven’t drawn in ages? You can give them a redesign!

• Have you had your dear OC(s) for a very long time now? Draw them as how you first designed them and see how much they have changed!

• Demonize/Humanize your OCs!

• Halloween is coming, draw a character in a costume they would probably wear!

• Grab an OC and make them the opposite of who they are! They are mean? Make them kind! They are a fan of magic? Make them a fan of science! (and things like that lol)

• Make a character out a moodboard!

• Look to your surroundings, grab a thing, and give it a story! (For example.. I see my cactus, Elvis, so now I’m going to make a story for the plant or make a character out of them)

Like I run a D&D blog. I understand that D&D is the most well-known and popular RPG in the world. But a lot of the time I see people going like “Hey I want to run a D&D campaign and throw out all the D&Disms and here’s all the notes I have for running a campaign about courtly romance and chivalry in a historical setting” and I’m just like STOP YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN THIS USING D&D

There’s a sort of a mistaken assumption that because D&D is the biggest game on the market and that it’s fantasy that it should be the go-to fantasy game but look it’s not D&D isn’t a generic fantasy game it’s a very specific kind of fantasy all of its own, one that steals liberally from swords & sorcery and high fantasy and adds fucking extradimensional cube robots for good measure

So next time you’re thinking about a fantasy campaign in a decidedly non-D&Dish setting consider instead of jamming the square peg that is D&D into a round hole trying to find a system that actually supports what you’re trying to do

All right then. I’ve been meaning to dust off my own D&D sideblog for a while, so here we go with providing some examples. I’m limiting this specifically to other types of fantasy outside of the standard high fantasy and sword & sorcery millieu.

Courtly Romance and Chivalry

There are a number of options for this, and they range from standard secondary world fantasy to more historical and mythological settings. My list here shouldn’t be treated as fully extensive.

Blue Rose - based on the romantic fantasy subgenre, specifically as seen in the works of Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. A lot of courtly drama and intrigue and swashbuckling, based in a fictional world.

Pendragon - naturally based off of Arthurian mythology, and having a lot of stuff given over to the court of Camelot and the chivalric adventures of the various knights. The same company also has a kickstarter for a spin-off called Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne that might be worth checking out.

Historical Fantasy

This one’s a bit more prominent as historical settings serve as an inspiration for a variety of fantasy worlds and games, and this of course invariably extends to settings that actually use historical settings with a degree of fantasy elements thrown in. Note that I’m going to emphasise Europe here simply due to greater familiarity with games in that millieu, and as a European myself I’m ill-equipped to judge how accurate or respectful games using other settings actually are.

Because of this, feel free to add other examples in reblogs

Chivalry & Sorcery - one of the early tabletop games inspired by D&D, taking a more pseudo-historical approach. It’s based on 12th century France and strives for a degree of historical accuracy and medieval politics.

World of Darkness, Dark Ages (including Vampire and Mage) - while the World of Darkness has earned some negative attention lately (and for good reason), the dark ages RPGs are still an old favourite of mine. Also worth checking out is Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, set during the Renaissance. The Mage stuff has a really cool open-ended magic system worth checking out.

13th Age RPG

A Song of Ice and Fire RPG

AEG (A Legend of the Five Rings)

Anima; Beyond Fantasy 

Apocalypse World 

Basic Fantasy System

Blades in the Dark

Burn Bryte

Burning Wheel  

Call of Cthulhu

Castles & Crusaders 

Chroniques Oubliées

City of Mist

Cortex 

Cyberpunk 2020

Cypher System

D&D (All Editions)

Das Schwarze Auge

Dragon Age RPG 

Dungeon Crawl Classics 

Dungeon World 

Exalted

FATE System

Fallout

Fantasy AGE 

Fiasco 

GUMSHOE

GURPS 

Gamma World

Hero Games (Champions) 

Hackmaster 

Hârn

Iron Kingdoms 

King Arthur Pendragon

Labyrinth Lord 

Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk

Maid RPG 

Marvel Heroic RPG

Mouse Guard RPG

Munchkin

Mutants and Masterminds

Open Legend

Palladium Games 

Paranoia 

Pathfinder

Pokemon Tabletop

Rolemaster

Runequest

Savage Worlds

Shadowrun 

Star Trek Adventures 

Star Wars 

Starfinder 

Stars Without Number

Swords and Wizardry 

Tavern Tales

The One Ring

The Quiet Year

Tormenta

Traveller RPG

Unisystem

Warhammer

World of Darkness

Part of intro to P90X (DEATH TRAINING) is just standing, making a fist with each hand, holding your arms perpendicular to your body (like a kid ‘flying’ around as an airplane) and then moving your arms in tight circles for a minute, then reversing direction of the circles for a minute, then doing BIG, slow circles for a minute, then repeating the reversed version that.  Like, full ‘60 seconds’ ‘minute’ 

At first its like ‘lol just my arms whatever I can do this all day’ and then it turns into ‘omg my arms are going to fall off this is terrible gravity plz no’

Also, water bottles can serve as light dumbells for gentle repetitive lifting (bro do you even lift) if you don’t want to dump cash into exercising. Having a bit of air in the bottle will help your forearm no matter what you do, as you try to keep it steady.

Laying on your back and lifting one leg up - just keeping it hovering over the ground with your toe pointed can work your abs. Hovering both legs at the same time is harder. Hovering both legs while making little ‘swimming kicks’ is stupid and i hate it hard. 

We have the child of a mermaid queen and a regular human guy 

who was brought up in the human world as a free spirit,

who talks to sea creatures,

who is fated to take over the throne of an underwater kingdom (where all the buildings are round and mushroom-y)

which is currently being occupied by an evil, power-hungry relative

with an army of sharks

And their unique position, straddling the human world and the underwater world, is at first a burden but ends up being their greatest strength

Murder on the Rockport Limited: "I’ll tell you what we’ll do! We’ll draw chalk around the body is. That way we’ll know where it was…”

Petals to the Metal: "I hear you honking and I also don’t want me to be doing what I’m doing. I don’t like that I’m in that lane either, and I sure would like to get out of it!"

The Crystal Kingdom: "Is it an “E” or is it a “3”? That’s up to ye. The passwords of past you’ve correctly guessed, but now it’s time for the robot test!"

The Eleventh Hour: “All right, well, what do they do with the time machine?” “Well, now I’m embarrassed to say."

The Suffering Game: And I go: “Why are you doing this to me?” and they go: “Because we’re Delta Airlines and life is a fucking nightmare!”

The Stolen Century: "All right, there’s a Norwegian Cruise Line leaving for Martinique. Here’s my plan: you and me get very dressed up, including hats, and then we wave handkerchiefs at it until it disappears over the horizon."