schemer table enjoyer

Critical Role | Campaign 4 | Ep 29

that's kinda the dynamic that shows chaotic and sassy side of orym most clearly

Primus Tachonis is an all-purpose personal tragedy creator sure to spur your character to adventure specifically so they can get his ass. Whether you need an old money asshole muscling in on an institution beloved to your PC or an evil sorcerer to slaughter their entire family Primus Tachonis has the magic and the social station to create whatever tragedy is required to serve your backstory.

Primus Tachonis is so versatile as a backstory tool he has professional D&D players raving:

Primus Tachonis killed my character's best friend and now she has to figure out who she is without him! -Laura Bailey I wrote a light backstory because I was still feeling out the setting and my dungeon master used Primus Tachonis to turn my brother into a statue! -Travis Willingham Primus Tachonis is trying to take over my character's magic school and endangering her students, and she will not have that! -Marisha Rey I had intended my character to have a tense but ultimately repairable relationship with his father, but then my DM used Primus Tachonis to rip his skull from his head. Now my character is on a quest to kill every member of Primus' noble house! -Matthew Mercer My character was a happy and established local playwright until Primus Tachonis had his little brother executed. Now he's taken up the sword again in his brother's stead! -Liam O'Brian I needed someone to murder my character's wife and daughter and my dungeon master suggested Primus Tachonis, and I couldn't be happier with the result! -Robbie Daymond Even works on members of his own family! -Alexander Ward

hello halaire nation

(song: Babydoll—Dominic Fike)

I have to preface by saying I hold absolutely no resentment towards marisha for her character choices — murray is without a doubt one of my favorite characters of the campaign. I think it makes total sense to be suspicious and fully think through what might happen at the theater, given that thousands of innocent people would be attending. But I also think the bird watching mission being short-staffed falls heavily on her shoulders, because she was the first person to bring up the possibility of something terrible happening on opening night, and she aggressively defended the idea from the very first moment it was challenged.

It’s that refusal to let go of her theory that really intrigues me, mostly because I’m not sure if it was intentional or not. Brennan dropped quite a few hints that the theater ritual was going to be a positive thing during the last few episodes, but it kinda seemed too little too late because the mindset that the theater was “ground zero” was deeply ingrained in the party by that point, which makes it hard to tell if murray’s insistence was purposeful.

Assuming it is intentional, I think that’s a really interesting character flaw for a character that hasn’t shown all that many glaring flaws as of yet. As an academic, she should know how important it is to consider all angles of a theory, especially angles that could disprove it. However, given the way she grew up and her role at the Penteveral, it stands to reason that murray has had a lot of her ideas shot down by muckety-mucks that didn’t really give a shit about the merits of what she was positing.

I would be reluctant to use fridging in this exact context, because this isn't some imaginary scenario to generate manpain for a white hero, this is a much more common experience of Native American and First Nation people, having their wives and daughters and sisters (in particular, but not exclusively) go missing. And never getting answers, never learning what happened, and not being believed that there's a problem in the first place.

This is like how being rescued from a tower by a prince is not particularly empowering or affirming to cis physically able straight thin perisex white women and girls, but can be for basically anybody else. Particularly black girls and women, who do not get a lot of cultural messages that treat them as people who are so valuable and precious, who may not have the strength to save themselves, or may wish that they didn't fucking have to save themselves (and everyone else) all the time.

White men have this story so often happen that we have a trope name specific to one specific and particularly egregious version of this, but you don't often see men who look like Robbie dealing with this type of story in fictional settings, even though it happens for men like Robbie in real life with horrifying frequency.

I change my thought process and the intention of the spell to request that Dame Seremai protect me one more time.

Letting the preparation pay off.

Azune and a fuckton of Magpies on security detail.

Murray with eyes on the crowd.

Vaelus and Hannan ready at the front row.

Hal and Thaisha locked and loaded in the wings.

Kattigan (unfortunately MIA, RIP) in the Tintazi Wood.

Plus! The surprise cavalry of the fairies!

Brennan looked at this whole layout, looked at the initial plan for a big Halovar fuss to throw a wrench into the works, and scrapped it as soon as Murray led the way to a little pixie prank shooing the Karen-descent Creed out the door with no disruptive violence at all. Because in the face of so much prep, the original planned out scuffle would have been moot bordering on pesteringly inorganic. The Hallowed Round is currently jacked with powerhouses and backup. Even if it was an overabundance of caution just in case something went scary with the paint-blood ritual, it circled back around to being extremely useful in being an already-primed rebel army presence ready to swat any outside enemy from fucking with the show.

Thjazi’s real plan for the Rungjani and the afterlife of the Dying Fields finally getting a bridge out of spectral torment gets to occur in all its grandeur and spiritual release with no interruption!

And all the people who most needed to witness this are witnessing it.

Hal and Thaisha actively forging this miraculous ritual and beholding it at the same time as their people’s souls are freed from the endless pain they died to save their descendants from. The intent of the rite transforming a sacrificial pit into a display of story, a story turning defeat into the stepping stone to victory, art uplifting the spirits of those it was made for, both in metaphor and truth. Thaisha herself is leading them to the Old Path! Hal and his play are holding the door open to the bridge between, knowing now that his brother never betrayed them, but gifted them something precious beyond words, all from beyond the grave!

Vaelus seeing the truth of what the Shapers’ rule was like to those outside their favor, which was so much of the world. Hannan weeps for the display. They clasp hands and lay the groundwork for another what may be another miracle, this one to their people and the Fae.

Murray reveling in the unique joy of being so convinced that something horrific was around the corner, primed with suspicion and worst-case scenarios, only to witness something almost deliriously wondrous in its benevolence and beauty. Sometimes it’s great to be wrong. Sometimes good things get to happen. Sometimes you can trust a rogue, even if the guy left a mountain of questions and gaps in intel behind him. Sometimes you get a damn good show.

Azune, still so steeped in crises of faith in his hero and his own identity, having that ever-heavier weight of doubt grow lighter in seeing what Thjazi Fang truly wanted come to fruition. A complicated man he might have been, perhaps not the best person to all who knew him, but a man striving to deliver the best lives and futures he could to others. And so he has here. Blood to paint, art into a bridge. What a relief, a miracle, a small step out of the mental and emotional quagmire, at least on one front.

I am perfectly willing to concede that Taliesin is outright 100% wrong about this. I don't agree, I think his perspective is more nuanced than what people are allowing for, but I'm fine with conceding the point. As we all well know, Tumblr is not a place for discussing nuance. So, fine, sure, he's wrong about Thjazi.

So?

I have yet to see anybody make a coherent argument as to why it's worth writing breathless essays about how wrong he is. Why should people care?

If real life Taliesin Jaffe is wrong about Thjazi, he is wrong about Thjazi in a way that plays into his character's point of view on Thjazi. Which has been clear as soon as we got Bolaire's backstory.

Brennan started the game knowing Bolaire felt this way. This was always already part of the story. It's already been worked into the story. It's already part of the themes. It's baked into the narrative, and always has been. It's already part of the story being told.

It's fine if you don't like the story, and it's fine if you don't like the character, and it's fine if you don't like the actor (though I definitely think a lot of that is homophobia and ableism), but a lot of what's being said and passed around reads like fucking callout posts. Intentionally written that way or not, they read like attempts to whip people up to be mad at a real life human person, which is absolutely disgusting behavior.

Hal's choice not to fight in the Falconer's Rebellion was a personal choice about prioritizing his own family (and whether he could even leave his two older children with Elodie to go off and fight is not totally certain). But it was, of course, not a choice made in isolation. He argues that even their father decided to hang up his blade at some point, but our understanding of the lot of orcs before the Shaper's War is that that wasn't a choice their father could have made 60 years prior. That under Azgra, Hal would almost certainly have been forced to march to war, never mind his three young children at home. There were clearly orcs who weren't on the front lines, orcs who built the cities and smithed the weapons and provided whatever food the community had, but by and large orcs were made as weapons and used as such. Thjazi's letter referenced turning swords into plowshares. In some ways, Hal's whole life between the War of Axe and Vine and now has been a version of that. The Falconer's Rebellion was a just cause, and it's probable that if more people had been willing to join it, Araman wouldn't be in the mess it's currently in. But Hal's choice to abstain is a very different choice from Aranessa's choice to abstain. The politics of an orc saying "I will not fight" even when the cause is just are far more nuanced. Because isn't this part of the freedom Vokjan Murzat fought and died for? Orcs in nice clothes, with flowers all around, and time to go see beautiful art made by their own people? Orcs who raise children and start businesses and hang up their swords? A life free from war? Finally. We don't know whether Hal was thinking about those politics when he made his choice. I suspect he was "I choose the Rungjani" indicates that to me, but you can easily read the scene another way. Whatever your take on his thought process, the politics of the choice are undeniable. A healthy orc in his early 30s refusing a call to arms barely 50 years after Azgra's death means something for the Rungjani.