We are Storyteller

Please Note: This run is largely complete. While I appreciate any advice, and thoughts, nothing you say will change this run. I just have poor drawing skills so I can’t commemorate this in art, or in comic form, so I wanted to write it all down the only way I know how. Please. Enjoy! —————————————————————- Alright, everyone. This is my story of facing the hyper-competitive Galar League. For all you Watching from other regions, I’m gonna be real, Galar plays harder than most of you are used to. I mean, killing Pokémon isn’t meant to happen, and outside of the Gym Challenge, it’s legit illegal. The problem, Galar fights involve Dynamax Stadiums, and these special things are called Dynamax Bands.”

There’s a sigh, as the long red-haired mess of hair looks down. “Dynamax makes some of the most insane, most powerful hitting fights around. You haven’t watched a Pokémon battle until you’ve seen a 5 foot tall Gengar, suddenly turn 80 ft tall, and slam a 90 ft tall Charizard in the chest with more Ghost energy than your local graveyard could muster in a year. The side effect is, when you have that much energy in a fight, you risk losing Pokémon. Gym Challengers are a special breed of person. On one hand. They get some serious perks. Your average Gym Challenger that survives more than one Gym, can gain sponsors for serious amounts of Cash, the notoriety and fans come in floods, and legitimately the rush of being in one of those fights is the closest you can get to being constantly naturally high.

There’s a soft chuckle. “I’ll be feeding in some of the footage I took during my challenge, on my Roto-phone, so please forgive the quality.” Another chuckle and the young man brushes some hair out of his face, tucking the long bangs behind his ear, and pinning it in place with his glasses prong.

“Oh, and to circle back for a second. It’s not like Gym Leaders or the Champion don’t face death in the League either. Last year’s challenge ended with Leon losing a Vivillion on his team, during the Championship match with Raihan, whose Dragon team takes no quarter even before they start Dynamaxing. Starting this challenge is signing a death warrant for your team at one point or another, and you’re just waiting to lose your best friends. You sell your soul for fame…

The money…. all of it. If you’re lucky, you quit when you lose someone after your first fight with a Dynamax band on. And it’s a member of your team you don’t care about. But those who are going for the win? For the ultimate glory? We’re crazy. And stuck on the Dynamax energy. I don’t think any of my team that’s still here can live without it. Something about these fights changes you. I’ll talk about that later, and maybe you’ll understand. But for now, let’s start talking about how I got started on this insane freaking path.”

-scene Change. Title Card. All that shit, and switch to narration-

So, when I woke up, on that wonderful March morning, I never expected that I was gonna go full crazy. I was watching the Match between Leon and Raihan, and missed the slamming blows between the two of them. My neighbor, Hop, comes sprinting in, and practically drags me over to his house, because of Leon. Yes, the same Leon I’m busy trying to watch on TV, is coming home. Hop is one of those guys that has an older brother complex, where he needs to be better than his brother when he’s able to show him up. Out here in Postwick, the roads are constantly filled with local wild Pokémon, so his Wooloo keeps us safe, and we go catch Leon at the train station.

Now I’m going to tell you three things.

1) Leon is as charismatic and amazing as he is on TV as he is in person. So freaking humble, and a great guy.

2) His Charizard is a terrifying monstrous beast. This thing is a good foot and a half taller than most Charizard, sitting at a solid 6’8, and has to be close to 280 pounds of solid steel muscles, fire, and scars.

3) Leon is a bit of a Himbo. He means well, but this guy… I swear his Charizard is the only reason he hasn’t permanently gotten lost in a Weald somewhere in Galar.

With that out of the way, we bring Leon back to Hops house, have a wonderful Barbecue, where we talk out the insanity of the Challenge’s final battle’s this year, and the Star Tournament that’s coming up next year, after the Gym Challenge coming in May, after things reset themselves.

After filling ourselves, Leon says he’s brought back gifts and takes Hop and Me outback. No joke, he’s bringing back Pokémon. Great Pokémon by the way. Despite being offered first go, Hop lets me choose first, and the only reason I know is that he’s got his eyes on the Sobble that’s now bouncing around his family’s garden, and squirting little blasts of water at a Scorbunny that’s sprinting around. The dude’s already planning on trying to beat Leon’s Charizard with proper Type Matchups.

I ignore the craziness that’s going on over there and instead go to this little Green Monkey Pokémon, that’s currently beating his little wooden drumstick on the rain gutter, and making a complete racket, but he’s making a good beat and some half-decent noise by hitting different parts of the pipe. I sit down next to the little guy and, using my hands, match his beat a little bit until Leon and Hop’s mum shouts at us to stop shaking up her entire house.

We both stop, and I’m turning all shades of red, but this is how I meet my boy, Ringo.

Hop, love my boy here, but Hop has absolutely no Chill. 10 minutes after getting Ringo, and he already wants to battle. No stakes. No Dynamaxing and he wants to fight my type superior Pokémon, just to prove that he can beat the type matchup.

That’s right. My first fight, after receiving my first Pokémon, is against my neighbor, and good mate, who’s gonna do me dirty and send two Pokémon against 1.

Ringo and I do pretty well, bringing Hop down a peg, by managing to dodge around his Wooloo’s insistent slamming Tackles, and then using his branch drumstick to just slap his Sobble around like a putty ball.

No harm, no foul though, as Leon heals up all of our Pokémon with his medicine stash, and spends the next half hour, listening to Hop practically begging for his brother to sponsor him into the League.

Leon at this point, I think knows that Hop isn’t going to stop, but he knows that Hop isn’t ready, and absolutely will be crushed if he just jumps for it. But he shuts Hop down and instead says we should go check in with the Pokémon Professor, Professor Magnolia. Get a quick checkup, and make sure our new Mons are strong and healthy and all that, tomorrow morning. Just get our shit together, you know.

We relax, enjoy talking shit about the match which we finish watching the Match Hop recorded, and I head home. Now, at the time, I didn’t realize Leon was being very quiet most of the night, especially rewatching his battle against Raihan. Having experienced loss with my Pokémon, I get it. Sometimes sitting through the replays of my worst fights? Watching some of my Pokémon lose….. everything? I can’t talk about it at the moment, and seeing their final moments again?….. well. I have a lot of respect for Leon, I don’t think I had before.

The next morning, my mum surprised me with a small stack of Pokeballs, and told me under no circumstances do I go all the way through Wedgehurst and to the Professor without a few extra Pokémon to keep myself safe. Even if killing other trainers Pokémon is illegal, unless you’re a Challenger, boosted up on Dynamax…. it still sometimes happens in the Wild. Wild Pokémon that hasn’t been tamed yet? Extremely dangerous. Dynamax energy can be found in the wild and can boost random Pokémon that will wreck you, your pet Pokémon, and your day, as you end up in the hospital. No joke. This can be real as shit. I ended up in a hospital for a week, when a wild Wooloo ended up tackling me mid-road as a kid, and I broke my leg. Crutches and cast rocked…. no. No, they didn’t.

Anywho, Ringo makes a Mess that morning, spilling a whole bowl of food that he’s eating, just because he wanted to drum on the Bowl.

He’s a good kid, but this is 90% of the reason we ended up in trouble later on before he started to chill out a little later on.

Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:

-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.

-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”

-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?

-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.

-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.

-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.

-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.

-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.

-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.

-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.

-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.

Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html

It would be a shame if the protesters noted that plainclothes cops can be identified a number of ways, such as wearing steel-toed boots; an armband or wristband of a particular color; driving white, black, or dark blue cars with concealed lights; or having the outline of cuffs visible in the back pocket or the bumps of an armor vest’s shoulder straps under their shirt.

It would be a shame if the protesters began making their signs out of inch-thick plywood to stop rubber bullets, forming a tight shield wall to prevent police from singling out and mobbing individual protesters. It would be a shame if the people behind the shield wall held up umbrellas so that tear gas canisters fired over the heads of the front line will be bounced away. It would be a shame if protesters began constructing improvised armor vests out of duct tape, hardback books, and ceramic tiles.

It would be a shame if protesters started wearing safety glasses, hard hats, respirators, and gardening gloves, all of which can be found at the same hardware stores as the plywood. It would be a shame if they started using traffic cones (the kind without the hole in the top) upside-down buckets, or other improvised lids to contain tear gas by placing them over the canisters.

It would be a shame if protesters learned that police scanners are legal to own in the US, allowing them to learn where police are moving and what routes they intend to take. It would be a shame if they discovered that these scanners can be used to send as well as receive, allowing them to flood the scanner frequencies with noise.

i know people who are trump supporters. talking to them is the perfect opportunity to say “i’m antifa” or “i support antifa” watch them freak out and then follow up with: “antifa just means anti-fascism - it’s not an organization.. are you for fascism? because i’m anti-fascist.” 

That said - if you’re worried you’re not delivering a full experience, or that maybe your players are holding back, I’d try to wrap up your games with a sort of open discussion where they can talk about their favorite parts as well as parts that didn’t land as well.

No two players are the same, which means not every experience will be received the same. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad, just not what they were looking for. And sometimes the things that stick with your players aren’t what you expect.

I do this with most my games - let them chat, ask them about certain story points that came up, see what they enjoyed, and see what they didn’t enjoy as much (where did things drag, where did it feel railroaded, etc…) You have to have a constructive environment for it, and be receptive, but I find it really helps alleviate my concerns of people not enjoying things (because I know what they don’t like - there’s nothing to worry about) and assures me that they are enjoying things.

Plus, it helps me figure out what my players are looking for out of the gaming experience. For years I’ve run with a group who really prefers a lot of Roleplay heavy sessions and strives to find non combat solutions when they can. Recently, however, I’ve had a player join who prefers combat a lot more. So after a session I could tell wasn’t landing with them, and I kinda prompted them a bit with what they thought of the game and they admitted that while they had fun with certain aspects, they do like having combat and wished there could have been better combat opportunities. That doesn’t mean my game was bad, or that I wasn’t a good DM - I just didn’t know what my player was looking for, and now I do!

You're going to be using your voice a lot. Take a few minutes before the game and practice just making weird noises. Not like monster noises, but stretch out your mouth, and make some silly sounds. By forcing yourself to act silly, you actually help get your brain out of scared and afraid, because you usually end up laughing at yourself making weird sounds.

Next, shake it out. Imagine you're a dog getting out of a pool. Shake out everything. Down to your fingertips and toes. This gets rid of physical stress in your system, and helps force anxiety out of your mind, again by being a bit ridiculous, but also by resetting most of your body which is tense and scared.

You can find them here:

https://twitter.com/WagaduChronicle?s=09

They are self described as "An Afrofantasy World |

5e Pen&Paper Adventures & an upcoming online game"

The elves of Kalio, or Ilsiri, are meant to evoke parts of nature. The Sylvain (Wood Elves) are plant like, you can get bark textures, stems, petals, all sorts of things. Sure you'll get paler flower colors in there, but literally none of it should Be Caucasian or African or Asian, or ANY real world analogue. Same with the Jesari (Elves of Stone), Nautil (Water Elves), Hadori, or the half dozen other types of elves I have.

And I apply that policy towards every single race I have, except Humes. Vaulters (Dwarves) are based on aspects of mythologial elements, like Fire, Air, water, earth, Light, and Void. The Hakir (Orcs.... kinda.) Are based vaguely on the idea of the things that Make Imperialism work. (I'll be honest, I'm still working on the setting, and I've spent a lot of time redesigning them, because they were too fantasy stock orc, and a didnt like it. My round 2 was just a poor allegory for historical ideas on Prussian empiricism and I didnt like it either. So I'm in my 3rdish version of them, to try and make them better)

And even with the Humes, I'm trying to not focus on white/caucasian/European analogues. I've run 4 or 5 games in Kalio so far, where most of the game took place in a desert and the surrounding areas. Frankly, life and evolution does not make a lot of pasty people in those areas. Hume skin colors make sense for the Environment they're in. Not a lot of sunlight? Might be kinda pasty. Lots of sunlight? You probably have more of a darker skin tone. Evolution gave you that Melanin to protect your skin. I also leave room for magic to interfere. I've got hair and skin colors that just are, because they are. Magic fucks with evolution, just because you know it will. Theres gonna be that sorcerer or Wizard that has Amethyst hair while their skin is slowly turning more like snow, cause they're just so locked into cold magic their body is changing.

So, if there is no objection from the Collective, This evening I’ll begin the process of rebuilding what was destroyed as a leadership figure. I’ll need a list of all active collective blogs, as the original list is no more, and I will have to start from scratch.

For them I send my love and hope, and the faith that whatever they do now, they will help make the world better.

 It’s late, but here is who I have thus far. If there’s anyone missing, please inform me. I am also looking particularly for those who were recognized as official members, though I suppose by the end of things we’ll have room to recruit. My list thus far includes

@we-are-artificer​

@we-are-artillerist​

@we-are-avenger​

@we-are-fighter​

@we-are-guildmaster​

@we-are-horizon-walker​

@we-are-illusionists​

@we-are-knight​

@we-are-lawyer​

@we-are-monk​

@we-are-ninja

@we-are-pirate​

@we-are-ranger​

@we-are-scarlet-corsair​

@we-are-spore-druid​​

@we-are-trickster​

@we-are-viking​

@we-arerevolutionary​

@weare-druids​​

@wearealchemist​

@wearebarbarian

@wearebard

@wearebeguiler

@wearebloodhunter

@wearecelestialwarlock​

@wearecleric​

@wearecooks​

@wearecowboy​

@wearedark-knight​

@wearefavoredsoul​

@we-are-guildmaster​

@wearemage​

@wearemercs​

@wearenecromancers​

@weareoracle​

@wearepaladin​

@weareplanarchampion​

@weareseeker​

@wearesorcerer​

@wearesoulbinder​

@wearewarpriest​

@wearewatchman​​

@wearewitchslayer

@wearehealer

@we-are-swashbuckler

@we-are-pyromancer

@weareskald

@wearedragonrider

@we-are-manipulator

@wearehealer

@we-are-threadmage

@we-are-blacksmith