[WIP Tabletop Blog]

MY FIRST ANIMATIC HELL YEAH

A scene from her time on the Throne where she confronted the local high priest that had put a ban on non-faithful from stepping onto the island.

Drow might believe that after death, your body belongs to Lolth and must be fed to spiders. Reanimating a body means stealing from Lolth and must therefore be punished.

Listen if you spend enough time in the hobby you will inevitably get people turning up their nose, saying you need to make your PCs “realistic”. These people are wrong! Especially when it comes to DnD. There’s nothing wrong with tropes but after a while all the human fighters who used to be in the army, and elf wizard trying to live up their family legacy start to blur together.

(Like I said, this is basic courtesy; nothing is worse than the player who, when the DM introduces a plot hook, responds with “but why would MY character care? why would I get involved in this monster attack? MY character would just let the town guard handle it!” 

The answer to “but why would my character want to get involved?” is “Because you’re not the only player at the table, and you’re not the main character in a novel.” Pulling the session to a grinding halt around your character’s…lack of interest in the entire game….is rude and unfair. This is a team-based game, and an understood rule of conduct is that you are going to be playing a character who will–reluctantly perhaps, warily certainly, out of fear or self-interest by all means, but will nevertheless–join forces with the rest of the group and have some form of engagement with the plot)

And get this.

The vast majority of players snottily talking down to the actually interesting and engaging character concepts for not being “realistic” enough? They violate that one rule all the fucking time. A lone-wolf jaded rogue sitting by themself in the corner might be “realistic,” but if they keep no-selling plot hooks and refusing to engage with the plot because “it would be out of character”, then they’re not a good character for D&D and their players should have made a better one.

Literally the only law of character creation is to make a character who will in some way, shape, or form engage with the fucking story.

Make characters who are INTERESTING and ENGAGING and FUN TO PLAY and yes, don’t let assholes ruin your fun, but also: You are probably objectively better at this than they are and you deserve to keep that in mind.

It’s a proof-of-concept designed by a rock gnome architect who had several revolutionary ideas about high-density residential housing; unfortunately, while any of those ideas by itself might have worked out for the better, the architect had not entirely thought through the implications of combining all of them at once  

The castle was built with a hilariously overengineered foundation in an effort to compensate for the sandy, unstable soil – and thanks to that foundation, when the soil inevitably subsided anyway, rather than collapsing, the castle simply… descended; the inhabitants constructed new floors atop the old, and continued to do so for several generations until everyone involved came to their senses  

It’s a combination museum and containment facility for magic items considered too dangerous for general use, but too culturally significant to destroy; the “prophetic inscriptions” on the walls are, in the original Middle Dwarvish, very dry and matter-of-fact safety advisories, their meaning obscured by the considerable poetic liberties of modern translations  

It’s a 1:1 scale diorama constructed by a dragon with a lot of time on its hands; the dragon was very into the aesthetics of human architecture, but wasn’t terribly familiar with the particulars of human culture and biology, and thus had several very peculiar ideas about how a habitable human structure is put together  

Fullbody commission for @fantazeerps / @vonbaghager of his terrible gnoll woman, Caracalla, who functioned as my test dummy for like 3 new texturing techniques

Well, she called back the next day saying that she never received them and she would like them replaced. However, no one will be home during the day, so could we please deliver them to her workplace instead?

Sure! Of course! We do that all the time!

Our delivery driver had no idea what we were talking about. "I delivered them to her personally. I thought she loved them? She seemed nice?" Followed by a shrug emoji, but like in real life.

So... somethings clearly up, we just don't know what. Typically, we just kind of assume that someone doing this is in it for free flowers. This seems different, but we just can't put our finger on it.

We deliver the new arrangement to her workplace and we figure she's gotten all the extra flowers she needs from us. We move on.

Later that day she calls again, this time to tell us she wants it replaced because the vase was too small and she thought it would look more impressive. "I mean, you should SEE this thing," she said, loudly over the phone. "I will have to come to you after my shift to show you what I mean."

"We can just take your word for it," Abby said, trying to people-please as fast as they could to get this over with. "We can send you one in a bigger vase before the end of the day."

"No, no- you simply must see it in person to believe it. I will be coming by around 6." She hung up and Abby prepared for a weird night.

Abby was not prepared. No one was prepared.

At 6:00, a woman came in holding a perfectly fine vase of red roses, wearing a faux fur coat that screamed 'its me grandmama: Anastaaaahsia' over her shoulders and Abby approached her with the vase assuming correctly that this was the woman from earlier.

"Hey there! Just set that right here and we'll get it taken-"

Abby was cut off by the woman holding up a single finger to shush them. She held that position for a moment and released dramatically with a flourish.

"If you must know, I am extremely vain," she said, answering the question that no one asked. They paused, waiting bewildered for context, until she spoke again. "I won't be needing a new vase."

"But..." Abby began carefully. "Didn't you..."

She held up her hand, once again to shush them... and dramatic release. "I know what I said over the phone. But I don't want the roses." Pause for effect. "My husband is very sweet but incredibly dumb. He sent these to our home and they were lovely. But they weren't what I wanted."

Pause, again. She could have been an actress in a soap opera.

"What i wanted... what I WANTED, was for them to be delivered to my workplace so that the girls at my office could dote on how lovely they were and how amazing my husband is. That is what I wanted. And when I finally got my flowers delivered to the office, NO ONE NOTICED."

Abby stood back, wondering if the woman was going to start weeping. She did not and they were very pleased by this.

My player, a ball of anxiety with legs: hey, uh, dm? What phase is the moon right now?

Finished commission for @fantazeerps of his goblin NPC for a pirate pathfinder game!