His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

anyone else thinking about the way that gaya seremai and tertia tachonis became undead?

and by that i don't mean what resurrected them i mean what they became. tertia in a ritual that involved no scorpion components (i can't imagine saharkis would have still been alive if it did), gaining a scorpion tail in death. gaya just being resurrected by occtis casting summon undead getting the snake fangs and poison abilities from her house's associated animal

and i keep thinking about how despite this campaign multiple times mentioning that occtis is unique for being able to return from death as himself, that doesn't seem to mean everyone else gets raised as faceless undead indistiguishable from any other undead. we know the shades on the palazzo fight had no identity specifically because they'd traded it away for survival, but tertia and gaya if anything became more themselves, as if the act of adding magic to something only half there anymore sort of exacerbated the symbolism of their personalities to bridge the gap

@wiliowtreemarch okay you say tangentially related but fun fact an earlier draft of this post said almost exactly that!!!

(i ultimately didn't include it bc in the context of this post the thing i wrote i think felt a bit too much like saying occtis only got full access to that magic by becoming undead, in the same vein as the others, and that would be disregarding all the work he'd done to get here)

[Brennan, narrating: —and they drop two heavy sacks behind them, one of which drops with a [small whimper], and the other drops with a… Robbie what noise would you make when you get dropped?

Robbie, off camera: OUGH]

On the "surely there are other sorcerers" end, there is a bunch of mostly circumstantial evidence/logic:

There are clearly many people capable of various forms of magic in Araman despite wizardry being brand-new (e.g., all the people who were previously enchanting spell glyphs in Orus' operation), and it would seems kind of weird if only human nobility got a lock on sorcery, especially when the Sundered Houses themselves got it from various sources, including fae and primordials who aren't related to Tansul.

It would seem especially weird of all of Tansul's special guys got sorcery, but none of the gnomes shaped by the goddess of magic did?

Brennan described the other Arcane Marshals as having "innate magical gifts," which to me implied sorcerers/sorcadins, and I can't imagine the Arcane Marshals are exclusively staffed from descendants of the Sundered Houses. (But if Brennan ever explicitly called them sorcerers, I can't find it.)

Azune's magic doesn't seem to be particularly shocking to most people or typically cause any speculation about his heritage. The Einfasen's questioning about that didn't start until after he'd claimed to devote himself to serving their interests and been subtly shaping his face to look like them for a while.

On the other hand, there was the very clear GM explanation that King Gus was super-interested in wizards because the Sundered Houses have enough of a monopoly on effective anti-sorcerer magics to run an effective protection racket. 🤨

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

and then we learn last episode "yeah the only thing left that you could see were their footprints and tracks from the day".

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

Anyway, here’s them. Everyone needs a knight in shining armour sometimes 😇 I love them all to bits!

(Please do not repost without credit 🫶)

SOMETHING big and magical would almost certainly happen.

It was prooobably meant to be a good thing? Because we trust Thjazi’s intentions, if not his methods?

It would almost certainly involve the souls of long-dead orcs.

If it went wrong somehow, either by Sundered interference or because Thjazi’s plan wasn’t actually ready/safe or because our team just didn’t have the knowhow/ability/unknown other tools to pull it off, 5,000-10,000 innocent play-goers (Brennan’s numbers varied) were in the immediate blast radius.

(The players and PCs haven’t put this together yet, but the last time something like this went wrong, à blast of pure necromantic power nearly destroyed the heart of Faerie.)

That was IT. That was ALL they could be sure of.

So they staffed it with a variety of troubleshooters for Magical Potential Disasters:

Hal had to be there.

Thaisha pretty much had to be there too, because caring for the souls of dead orcs is a key part of her life’s calling; and as an expert in natural/druidic magic.

Vaelus because she and Thaisha are now partners in deathly spiritual things, and as the closest thing they have to an expert in divine magic, and because as discussed she’s sure as hell not taking the Stone of Nightsong to the homes of the Tachonises or Halovars.

Murray as the expert in arcane magic.

Azune is, admittedly, mostly just there to publicly be a Revolutionary Guard (for the Einfasens & Halovars) and more discreetly lead the ~350 magpies. Murray or maybe Thaisha could’ve done the latter, and the former wasn’t strictly necessary, but… Similar to the risk of taking the Stone anywhere else, Azune is now in such a careful position between the Einfasens and the Halovars that him joining Team Spy—likely appearing to both Einfasens and Halovars at once, after the Einfasens said not to come—would be threading a tricky needle. And him joining Team Birdwatchers…could be useful if they didn’t get caught. But if they DID get caught…if just Occtis, Julien, Thimble, Teor & Cyd get caught, that’s 1 neat story told to the Tachonises. If Azune is there too, it’s everyone else PLUS a loose thread to the whole Schemers tapestry.

The ~350 magpies are there to fight if the Sundered Houses try to physically disrupt Thjazi’s scheme, or maybe fight undead if the ritual goes wrong (or right?), or to help with crowd control and/or evacuation (of 5-10k people!) if necessary.

Kattigan WAS extraneous. He should’ve joined the Birdwatchers, if he didn’t want to get kidnapped like a chump.

In hindsight, adding Bolaire and Kattigan to Team Bird Watch might have been a helpful, but Team Bird Watch was very clearly planning to sneak in and try to avoid fighting so they weren't going for numbers. Azune wasn't exactly needed at the theater, but 1) your apparently squeaky-clean law-enforcement guy who's convinced multiple politically powerful enemies that he's on their side should not risk being caught breaking into someone's house and 2) if the Candescent Creed hadn't been repelled by the fairies, Azune probably had the best odds of shuffling them back out the door insisting he'd take care of it.

Equiping an armor tutorial

"If someone breaks in dude, you beat the ever-loving shit out of them real hard dude, you beat the shit out of them, Chancho, you hear me?"

"You just beat the shit out of anyone who breaks in!"

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