The Lazy Sunday Post

HUMAN INFANT OWNER'S MANUAL

CONGRATULATIONS on becoming the proud new owner of a GENISIS brand HUMAN INFANT. Properly used and cared for, your HUMAN INFANT can provide you with a lifelong sense of love, purpose, and achievement.  This owner’s manual comes included with purchase to ensure that you can get the most out of your new product.

Specifications:

Manufactuer: GENISIS brand Make: HUMAN Model: INFANT Serial Number: 04252001 Size: Small Weight: 8 lbs

Your GENISIS brand HUMAN INFANT comes with the following:

Two (2) onesies

One (1) pacifier, specially designed to be easy to lose

Seven (Not enough) diapers

Removing your GENISIS brand HUMAN INFANT packaging:

Method 1: Under normal circumstances, the GENISIS brand HUMAN INFANT should remove itself from its packaging with minimal coaxing. Some owners report dropping hot sauce or other spicy food into the box as a successful way to coax the HUMAN INFANT into leaving its packaging, but results of these efforts were mixed.

Method 2: On occasion, your HUMAN INFANT may have accidentally been manufactured too large for its packaging, and as a result will be unable to exit on its own. Under these circumstances, carefully make an incision along the width of the packaging and remove the HUMAN INFANT through it.

*It is strongly advised that if at all possible, you do not remove your HUMAN INFANT from its packaging prior to the recommended date.

Programming

Once removed from its packaging, your HUMAN INFANT will auto-activate, and has access to the following preprogrammed modes of behavior:

Docile (Default)- In this setting, your HUMAN INFANT is largely inactive but content. It may suck/teeth on something, stare at things, drool, or occasionally coo. This setting is active by default, and your HUMAN INFANT will revert to this setting in the event of a reset.

Curious (Default)- This setting is also active by default. Your HUMAN INFANT is built to learn, and learn fast. To aide in this process, while this setting is active your HUMAN INFANT will look around at everything (this behavior is at its highest if your HUMAN INFANT does not yet have object_permanence.exe installed), grab at things, and put just about anything into its mouth that it can get its hands on, whether it belongs in its mouth or not.

It is important to keep a close eye on your HUMAN INFANT while this setting is active, as it has been known to cause HUMAN INFANT models to do things that more sensible GENISIS brand products (HUMAN TODDLER, HUMAN CHILD, HUMAN ADOLESCNET, HUMAN ADULT, HUMAN CURMUGEON) would know to be dangerous or otherwise silly.

Crying- Your HUMAN INFANT will automatically enter this setting to alert you to its needs, without bothering to get into any specifics about what those needs are. You can induce this setting manually by smacking your HUMAN INFANT to any real degree, making loud noises, or in some cases, by being ugly. When this setting is engaged, your HUMAN INFANT will cry louder than you assumed was physically possible given its size, and will not stop until its needs have been fulfilled. (See Troubleshooting below).

Sleep- Due to the complexities of its inner workings, your HUMAN INFANT has a very short battery life. When its batteries are low, it may enter Crying mode to signal its desire to be placed in Sleep mode to recharge. Alternatively, if you’re insanely lucky, your HUMAN INFANT may activate this setting on its own. Your HUMAN INFANT typically will not need to remain in this setting for very long to reach a full charge, however, should you force cancel this setting by making a loud noise, disturbing the unit, or having the poor judgement to believe that you have time to rest while the unit is sleeping, the unit will exit Sleep mode and reactivate its Crying setting.

Troubleshooting

Problem: My HUMAN INFANT is crying, what do I do?

Solution: Check your units diaper to determine whether or not it has been soiled. If so, change the diaper and then attempt to put the unit back into Sleep mode.

Problem: That didn’t work!

Solution: Your unit may be hungry. Feed the unit milk or pureed baby food as deemed appropriate by the mileage on your unit. It should quiet during feeding. Be sure to burp the unit after feeding to avoid further issues.

Problem: That worked for a second, then it started crying again!

Solution: Your unit may be tired. Set it to Sleep mode to allow it to rest.

Problem: It woke up and started crying again!

Solution: You did feed it a while ago. Check the diaper.

Problem: This thing’s cute, but I’ve had it for like two years and I’m getting tired of it.

Solution: This is a perfectly natural response most owners have around this time. Might we recommend turning in your old HUMAN INFANT model in exchange for a free upgrade to a HUMAN TODDLER model?

Disclaimer: GENISIS brand is not responsible for the condition of your HUMAN INFANT unit either before or after it is removed from packaging. GENISIS will not replace stolen or damaged units. Any owners found in the possession of a damaged unit or a unit that has been rendered nonfunctional will face criminal charges. You may not return your HUMAN INFANT unit, but you may donate it to another party provided proper legal procedures of your state of residence are followed. In some states, you may not cancel your order for a unit once it has been submitted, even if the order was submitted without your approval.

This has been sitting in my Drive for ages, and I figured it was past time I stopped hoarding it to myself and reintroduced some variety into the Web Originals tab. I first wrote this for a Creative Writing Class in college, but it remains one of my favorite creative pieces, and the concept behind it—using non-creative formats as an opportunity for creative expression—remains endlessly fascinating to me, to the degree that it may or may not serve as the inspiration for a future project.

So, fairly recently (at time of writing), a fellow writer decided to disparage authors who cut their teeth writing fanfiction which, in their words “actively teaches you to write worse.”

Now, as someone who did cut their teeth writing fanfiction, my gut instinct to seeing this tweet was to angrily quote tweet it with the reply “Oh fuck off.” But that much as a I wanted to do that, I didn’t for several reasons. For one, I just generally try to be restrained and selective for who I get that angry and confrontational with online, reserving it mostly for politicians, celebrities, and DC’s Titans. Entities at once morally bankrupt, and largely immune to any kind of damage that I personally can inflict due to an absence of actual humanity.

And that all being said, this person was… well a person. A person with a narrow-minded and incorrect opinion, but still a person. And a fellow writer. So then I thought about refuting their bad-take, but that felt too much like swooping in to mansplain writing to someone who by all accounts seems to have been doing it at least as long as I have, and who’s been considerably more professionally successful at it.

Plus, like I said, I got my start in fanfiction. My origins are quite literally being targeted and attacked here. And feeling targeted can make people say and do some really stupid stuff if they don’t stop and think beforehand.

Basically, I didn’t want to start a Twitter beef over this because quite frankly the internet would be a happier place if we all just did that less, but I still saw a lot of bad arguments and missed points, so I couldn’t just say nothing. And so here we are, at a compromise between Twitter arguing and saying nothing—blogging about it.

The writer in question turned her single tweet into an entire thread that brought up a lot of very different, very unrelated issues, some of which I want to touch on as well, but before I do any of that, I want to answer the central argument, taking it as much as I can on face value and inferring as little else as possible: that fanfiction “actively teaches you to write worse.”

Does it?

Twitter is a terrible medium for communication. It rewards broad, inflammatory statements and its character limit leaves little room for nuance. Some people attempt brute-force circumventions of that limit, but most don’t, and the site isn’t suited to it. So it is unsurprisingly difficult to parse out exactly what they meant, but I can take a stab at it by covering as many bases as I could think of.

Does the medium of fanfiction inherently teach poor writing fundamentals, like prose, plot structure, or character development?

No. Writing, like most skills, is honed by practice. Every time you think about the best word to put on a page or the best way to structure a sentence or story, you are getting better at writing. You start a sentence, and think to yourself, “Hang on, there’s gotta be a better way to word that.” And that moment, where you reflect on your craft and look for ways and spots to improve it—that is you learning. Developing. Maybe you think of a way to word that sentence better, maybe you don’t. But the act of thinking, of searching, of even just acknowledging that it could be better is still work towards improvement. Doesn’t matter if it’s dialogue written for Harry Potter or for your original character, do not steal.

90% of fanfiction is crap. But 90% of everything is crap. Fanfiction is perhaps more famous for being mostly crap, but it’s really not hard to understand why. First off, the only barrier to entry for writing is basic literacy. If you can read this sentence, you can try your hand at writing. The difference between fanfiction and say, traditionally published works, is that fanfiction kind of keeps that low barrier to entry, whereas to get traditionally published you typically have to impress at least two other people—your agent, and then the editor you agent sends your shit to. And even then, that’s not a insurmountable barrier to entry. A metric butt-ton of people do it all the time.

In short, with fanfiction, the “slush pile” is open and visible, whereas with most other stuff, the only people who have to read that garbage are agents and editors, God have mercy on their souls. But rest assured, there is just as much shitty original fiction as there is shitty fanfiction.

In addition to the low barrier to entry, fanfiction is where a lot of people first dip their toe into this gig. And unless you are an unparalleled prodigy, when you’re new at something, you are bad at something. Which is fine. Doing something poorly is the first step to doing something competently. Practice is practice.

Now, you can practice something incorrectly and do yourself wrong—anybody who knows about proper weight lifting form can tell you that. But for the most part, a writer working on fanfiction is no more likely to do this than someone writing anything else.

The two exceptions I can think of are character and worldbuilding. Somewhat unique to fanfiction (we’ll talk about that in a minute) versus original fiction is that in fanfic, the characters and world are already established. Depending on the kind of fic you write, you may very well not get practice or experience making characters or worlds, since you’re using someone else’s work to basically cover that for you. So, sometimes, in this one specific area, fanfiction does feature something of a crutch that could theoretically lead to deficiencies in a writer’s fundamentals.

That said, that is very much dependent on the type of fanfic. Some works feature entirely original casts, telling a new story with new characters in an established setting. And even in fics which predominantly focus on the established cast, fanfic writers are downright notorious for adding new, original characters into the mix. Most of them are… awful. But we already covered why that is. Remember, bad writing is not the same thing as bad practice.

Ditto worldbuilding, where we’ve got plenty of fanfics that outright replace the world of the established story. The Alternate Universe concept is a very popular one in fanfic.

I will say in a closing than with worldbuilding and character, fanfiction does typically replace only one of these while keeping the other. Mainly because if you changed both, you’re liable to have left the realm of fanfiction altogether.

Does fanfiction, by its nature, leave you unprepared for making the transition to the professional writing world?

Let’s pretend for a moment that we didn’t just shoot down the idea that writing fanfiction means you never honed your ability to create your own original world and characters. That’s nonsense, but let’s say for purely hypothetical arguments sake, that if you start out writing fanfiction, your character-creating muscles will atrophy and you’ll only be able to work with pre-existing concepts, worlds, and characters. Does fanfiction leave you unprepared for making it in the world of professional writing?

For your consideration, I present: the very concept of episodic television. TV shows regularly bring on writers who did not originate either the show or its characters. TV writers craft stories borrowing a world and characters that somebody else came up with. The only difference between them is fanfiction is they got paid and get to be stamped as canon. Same muscles getting used. Same kind of exercise.

The spec script, the method by which most people showcase their ability to write for TV, is literally just fanfiction.

Then we have adaptations and retelling of both licensed and public domain properties, where once again, we have scores of writers, taking characters and concepts that they did not come up with, and using them to tell their own stories, or even just put different spins on the originals. What if Hades and Persephone, but without the whole “against her will” thing? Hey Marvel, can I use your Norse god character to tell a story about how societies built on the back of colonialism are inherently flawed and shouldn’t be preserved at the expense of the people?

The skillset of playing with other people’s toys to make something compelling is an incredibly valuable one for a writer to have. If anything, I’d argue that fanfiction is even better suited to teaching this skillset than writing original fiction.

And as a quick aside, that practice of playing with other people’s characters and constantly asking “Is this in character for them?” is a very useful practice that actually translates very well to writing your own characters. When you invented a character, it can be tempting to declare anything you write “in-character” since, well, you wrote it, and they’re your creation. But that thinking can easily lead to disjointed characterization.

I routinely ask “is this in-character?” while writing for characters I created. It makes me a better writer, and I learned how to ask that question and how to identify the answer from writing fanfiction.

Does fanfiction distort your sense of good taste?

This is the closest I could possibly come to agreeing with the original argument. The last time I was actively involved in it, the fanfiction community had pretty low standards, actually? I say this, because when I was writing fics, I was actually heaped with praise and attention, almost all of which was near universally good.

But I was not good. I was bad. I was very bad. Because I was in junior high, and an idiot, and those fics were the first thing I ever wrote that was longer than seven pages. But I updated my fics daily over the summer, in a very popular fandom that predominantly targeted people my age. So I got lots of fans and praise, and I started to think I was a good writer. Even worse than that, other people thought I was a good writer, and told even more people that I was.

Which is an affront to good taste.

That having been said, even though I do hold fandom and its nature partially to blame for the single most humbling aspect of my entire life, I also just hold adolescence in general to blame? Maybe? I like to think that much as I grew beyond my poor grasp of my own woeful incompetence, so too did my audience grow up and get a better understanding of what actually good writing is.

But then again, EL James and Reki Kawahara have made more money than I’ve ever seen in my life. So maybe neither fanfic nor adolescence is to blame. Maybe sometimes trash just sells.

As an aside, I hope this doesn’t come off as me trying to be mean or make fun of all those people who liked my old stuff. I know I’m embarrassed by it, and the only reason I haven’t deleted it all is because I need an ego check every now and again (and they’re also how I met my wife). But whether you also did a 180 on my old stuff as you got older or you still unironically think it’s good… thank you for the support. You are my humble beginnings and I would not be the person I am today without all of you.

…and that’s enough getting sentimental and making this about me, let’s go back to debunking opinions that are objectively wrong because I disagree with them.

The Other Stuff

I feel I’ve thoroughly said my peace on the original argument put out by my colleague. Namely, that they are wrong. But I’d also like to very quickly address the everything else they spewed out. My takes on this are considerably less long winded and probably could have been sanded down to a Twitter reply, but I still figure their inbox is getting enough shit already, and I want to make this more about the arguments than the person.

I’m not going to cover everything in detail, especially since I am super not qualified to speak on some of them—there is only so much I as a cishet dude feel comfortable giving my opinion on—but I will cover the bits that stood out and ground my gears.

EL James and Cassandra Clare are “fucking terrible”

No disputing the EL James part. Her character work is atrocious, her understanding of actual kink and BDSM dynamics and lifestyles is woeful, her plot bears clear evidence of serialized work that was not properly cleaned up prior to publication.

I haven’t read Cassandra Clare’s work. I have heard both good and bad things about it, but let’s say for argument’s sake she’s also not great.

This comment shows a distinct lack of knowledge of just how many authors, many critically acclaimed, write fanfiction on the side or got their start in it. Neil Gaiman writes fanfiction—and usually manages to get paid for it. I could go on with a long and yet still non-exhaustive list of authors who have done or still do it. Bottom line, there are some very high profile, not good writers whose start in fanfiction has been effectively weaponized against them to further underline their badness—“Of course EL James is bad. What did you expect from someone who started in fanfiction—while simultaneously many good writers have their connections to it downplayed by either choice or their own profile.

“Low effort formulaic lowest-common-denominator writing is bad actually”?

I almost brought this into main discussion, but I said I would infer as little as possible and on its own, this tweet didn’t directly say it was talking about fanfiction. I would argue it heavily implied it, and I very much doubt the author of the tweet would disagree with me, but I made the no inferring rule and I stuck to it.

I’m actually still going to take this argument on its own for a moment. I’ve already covered how and why fanfiction is generally seen as bad—low barrier to entry and the bad stuff is as easy to find as the good stuff—so I want to talk about something else. “Low effort writing is bad. No real arguments. I could jokingly say Neil Gaiman could drunkenly scribble something on a napkin that would outclass my best efforts, but I actually don’t have that low an opinion of myself.

Lowest-common-denominator writing is probably bad. In general, I think trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator is a good way to make uninspired trash, but on the other hand…fuck it, I’m liable to be included in that lowest common denominator most of the time. That’s the whole goddamn point of the LCD. It casts a broad net. And there’s a place for that. I don’t think it should be a big place, but still a place.

“Formulaic writing is bad” though? That I also just straight up disagree with. Formulas are a tool. And like every tool, they can be used really well, or really poorly. Used well, a formula can provide a solid structure around which to build interesting stories or ground the audience in otherwise unfamiliar settings. Don’t call a hammer a bad tool just because you’re hitting the nail wrong.

Several arguments discussing fanfictions relationship to queer and female audiences/writers/identities:

Nope, not touching that.

Oh fuck off.

Fanfiction isn’t collaborative or about community because “it's all corporate IP” and “Ultimately, someone else legally owns it, and you are choosing to give a corporate entity your creative energy.”

And this is actually something that’s been bugging me a while, specifically regarding the relationship people have with corporately owned IP and how it being owned by a corporation doesn’t automatically invalidate it as a source of emotional investment or cultural symbolism. But quite honestly, that really deserves its own post, so I’m just going to put a pin in this that and say we’re done here.

Glad I got all that off my chest.

So that was a thing. If you’ve got your own experiences with fanfic, good or bad, I’d love to hear them in the comments or over on Twitter.

If your curious about my history in fanfiction, like I said, it is all still technically out there, and very bad, but I’m not so much of a masochist that I’d link it here. I wouldn’t read it if I were you.

The doors of the war room burst open as Selena staggers in. The heir of House Kaslana and patron of the Phoenix Knights is a mess, her robes stained and her hair is tangled with twigs. The other senior members of the order look up from the map of the surrounding area that they’ve been studying.

“So how’d the scouting mission go?” Tina asked flatly.

“Goblins,” she says. “Lots of goblins.”

The sorceress collapses into a chair, exhausted. She’s spent the last two weeks narrowly avoiding getting cornered by goblin patrols. Stumbling on the camp had been more a result of luck than any of her tracking efforts.

“So, poorly,” Tina surmises.

“Not completely,” Selena says, pausing to catch her breath. “I think I found their camp.”

“According to our new recruit, those things are everywhere,” Camdyn says. “If we can hit wherever they’re based out of, it’d go a long way in getting the Bluffs under control.”

Selena nods, resting her head on the table. “Agreed. We should send a team to attack.”

Camdyn rises from his chair. “I’ll get my armor.”

Selena looks up. “What?”

“I can have Emily meet you two out front.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’m not finished with Dominik’s sidekick, and she could use the experience.”

“Say no more.”

Before Selena can finish, both Camdyn and Tina leave the room, headed in different directions. Selena stares out the door, feeling her heart sink. To no one but herself, she mutters, “Can I at least shower first?”

Camdyn, Emily, and Selena set off, following Selena’s scouting notes in search of the goblin tribe’s main camp. Along the way, Camdyn opts to test the Emily’s marksmanship against his own—and is handily one-upped by the junior knight in an apple shooting competition. Selena watches the two compete, smiling to herself.

The Phoenix Knights had begun as an extension of her own ego. She hadn’t expected living and working alongside would-be heroes to be so comforting.

And Camdyn had not expected the inexperienced soldier to be such a good shot.

In the middle of the night, Camdyn is awoken by some bumping into him. His eyes shoot open, and he sits up, the the arc gem in his chestplate already whirring to life—only to see Selena curled next to him, still asleep.

Her face is fixed in a deep frown as she tosses and turns in her bedroll, whimpering.

“No… no!”

“Hey,” Camdyn says, nudging her. “Selena.”

The noble woman gasps, shooting upright and panting for air. Camdyn immediately scoots back to give her some space, raising his hands up. In the faint glow of his own armor, Camdyn can just make out Selena’s face as she takes in her surroundings; first afraid, then disoriented, and finally embarrassed. Her shoulders sag, and she hugs herself as her eyes drift to the floor, unable to look him in the eye.

“Bad dream?” Camdyn asked.

Selena still doesn’t look at him, but nods.

“Need to talk about it?”

A pause. She shakes her head.

Camdyn doesn’t believe that, but he shrugs anyway. “Well. Try to get some sleep then.”

He lays back down, and a soft whir emanates from his chest as the arc gem in its center powers down once again. Selena sighs, flopping back down and staring up at the black ceiling of the tent. For a few moments, all is silent.

“I just…I’d never gone out on my own like that,” she says. She’s not even sure if Camdyn is still awake. “When I was out scouting, it…it almost went really bad. I managed to get away, but there was a moment… I thought…”

“Hey.”

Selena stops as a gauntleted hand finds her shoulder, and for the first time since waking up, locks eyes with Camdyn.

“You made it. You’re okay,” he says, and she believes him. All at once, she wonders whether or not he can see her blush in the dark.

“R-right,” she says, quickly turning away. “Thanks.”

Camdyn raises an eyebrow. Selena doesn’t seem scared anymore, but something still seems a bit off. He decides to leave it be. If she wants to talk about it, she will. He lays back down. “Anytime.”

The camp is only a day away as the trio greets a new morning to find Selena has come down with something. Emily guesses exposure sickness, and Camdyn profusely apologizes for not setting up their camp to properly protect from the elements. The two of them debate stopping before Selena insists that she is fine, just sore and a slight headache. They don’t have time to wait for her to get better.

Soldiering on, only a few hours later the party encounters goblin scouts riding worgs. Expecting the the worst, the party takes cover, bracing for a fight, only to watch the scouts immediately make a break for a nearby cliff face to try and escape. Almost too late, the trio realizes what’s at stake: they’re retreating to warn the main camp.

The party spring into action, trying everything they can to escape. Selena triggers a rockslide with a well placed firebolt, slowing their climb. Despite their best efforts, one worg makes it up the mountain. It’s already out of almost everyone’s range.

“They’re getting away!” Selena shouts.

“No they’re not.”

Emily takes a few steps back before nocking back an arrow, holding it. She feels the wind on her face, and takes note of how the trees further up the mountain are moving.

“You think you can make that shot?” Camdyn asks.

“I hit the apple, didn’t I?” Emily retorts.

She lets the arrow fly, and it arcs over the cliff edge, disappearing. A tense second follows, before the party hears the dying yelp of a worg. The scouts are contained, and the party sets out once again. As they draw close, Emily breaks off to scout ahead, and count the enemy numbers. Quite a number of goblins, but no sign of the bugbear Selena had mentioned in her report.

The trio plan their attack, moving in stealthily to find an optimal position. That is, until Selena sneezes, and ever goblin in the camp is alerted to their presence.

A hail of arrows rains on the heroes’ position as they dive for cover among the surrounding ruins. All the while, a bugbear charges toward them, brandishing a morningstar. Weathering a hail of lightning, arrows, and even one of Selena’s last spell slots, the bugbear crashes on Camdyn and Selena’s position, smashing everything around them with its frenzied swings. Just before it can land a deadly blow on Selena, an arrow shoots out the back of its throat.

It collapses to the ground dead, and Emily offers Selena a quick salute. One of the goblins points out the sniper, shouting in goblin. In revenge for their fallen comrade, the goblins rain down a hail of arrows—exclusively on Emily. As the two women try to find cover, Camdyn charges the camp, blasting his way through the goblins within. Finally, the last of them have fallen, and a quiet descends on ruin.

“Emily, you alright?”

“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” the junior knight says, pulling out one of several arrows in her body. “I’ve gotten hurt worse training with Tina.”

Back at the castle, the young squire Bartholomew is receiving “training” from Tina Cox, in the form of several punches to the face and stomach.

“WHY. AREN’T. YOU LEARNING?!”

Emily pulls out another arrow. “I am in pain though.”

Camdyn nods. “Well, I’d say we’re about done here. The goblins are dead, and any from this tribe that weren’t here should know this part of the Bluffs isn’t safe for them anymore.”

Selena looks around at the bodies of the fallen monsters. “Yeah… but do you think maybe they might want revenge for this?”

“Maybe. But there’s not bound to be very many of them who weren’t here. Certainly less than the number that were,” Camdyn says. “And I don’t think they’d be stupid enough to attack the people who wiped out their whole camp.”

The party was later attacked on the way home by a small group of goblins seeking revenge for their fallen comrades.

So this was a pretty short session. Emily, Tina, and Camdyn’s players opted to go in with just the three of them, mostly just on the idea that if they couldn’t handle things with just the three of them, they could always run away and wait for backup. And there isn’t too much to talk about on the post-mortem side of things, which is to say I’ll probably only write a small essay instead of a full blown thesis.

So what was all that business with the apple shooting and Selena getting a nightmare? Well, I’ve long wanted the travel in my D&D games to feel like it takes time, and that characters are actually interacting with each other on the journey. This goes way back to some of my earliest exposure to the hobby, the Sanspants Radio podcast D&D is for Nerds, where while the players were traveling in search of a bounty, there was a whole bit about one of the players attempting to play the lute and the others hiding his lute from him because he was so bad at it.

This, I would later learn, was the cast filling in dead air while the DM did some behind the scenes set up (which, by the way, I cannot recommend enough as a player habit to pick up. Just shooting the shit as characters about whatever while the DM does DM things is a great way to take the pressure off of your DM and make them feel like they aren’t holding up the game while they look up a rule or double check their notes), but at the time, I just appreciated for this moment of simple bonding between characters. A similar thing occurs pretty frequently in Critical Role, where during transit to various places, the cast likes to have intraparty conversations.

And I just really like that. In D&D, the party can often be traveling for days or even weeks to get to a destination, and if it’s just skipped over, it kind of takes me out of it, because a lot of the time, it feels like character dynamics are just on hold while the party travels. Like no one talks to each other or says anything. But I mean, it was days. You had to do something. Surely somebody talked to somebody else.

In an effort to remedy this situation, I created a Travel Events chart, where players roll to see what sort of stuff their characters get up to while they’re trying to get wherever they’re going. For the sake of time and simplicity, each person rolls once on the chart, resolves their result, and then the party gets where they’re going. It’s mostly RP prompts, but there are a few results which are more impactful. Meeting Ophelia was a result of the travel chart, as was Selena getting sick.

Now, I ruled that her sickness had given her a level of exhaustion, and when I said that, the players’ first response was, “Oh we’d better rest and let you recover that,” before one of them remembered, “Wait, a it’s a long rest to remove exhaustion, and our long rests take a week now. Shit, maybe we should just keep going? What’s the level 1 exhaustion penalty? I’ll take it.”

I found that gratifying and interesting. Gratifying in the sense that the gritty realism resting rules really is eliminating that “we immediately long rest” behavior that pretty much all D&D I’ve played previously was plagued by, so it is absolutely working as intended. I saw Selena rationing her spells and people considering whether or not they could continue on the HP they had.

But it was also interesting because at that moment, the only thing they stood to lose from long resting was time, and they weren’t on the clock for this adventure. There was no time limit. But still didn’t like the idea of losing a week. And I wonder if part of that is because of how downtime has been used in the game so far. With downtime, they can get intel or unlock fun character beats through socializing, so now, every day spent just traipsing through the woods has more of an inherent cost.

Or maybe they’re just impatient people. Who’s to say?

The actual fight went okay? The map I used had a decent sized gorge with a broken bridge crossing over it, and I had sort of planned on finding a way across being a decent part of the encounter, but the entire party was ranged characters, so it mostly just turned into a shootout. Which was still kind of fun for me, imagining the two sides trading shots at each other.

The one thing I did not like how it worked out was the bugbear. He actually took his average HP in damage just getting within 30 ft of the players, so if I’d given him default HP, he’d have died without doing anything. So, on the spot I bumped him up to max HP for a standard bugbear, and that gave him another round and a half of life. He took a swing or two, but I don’t think he ever actually hit anyone. Maybe he hit Selena. Maybe.

Either way, on reflection, having him just charge across at the entrenched players was pretty stupid? Especially since he took multiple rounds to get close enough. What I should have done was started him within 30 ft of the players, probably flanking them from the other side of the map. They started the fight not being able to see him, because Emily didn’t roll high enough on her Perception while scouting, so I could have done that and it would’ve been perfectly believable.

Especially since bugbears are proficient in stealth, and have the Ambusher feature, implying they are supposed to employ surprise tactics. And I just…never do? I dunno, my mental image of bugbears is always of them just foaming at the mouth and charging you straight on, but I guess I need to adjust my expectations of them…or adjust their stats.

When the players finally got back to base, they did some more downtime stuff, but nothing too exciting or worth talking about. Except for the fact that Issac tried to prank Tina, and got beaten up for his troubles. That was hilarious. Tina is comedy gold, I love her. Even if a part of me thinks her player’s real main character is Emily.

Oh, and the Selena having a nightmare thing was a result of Camdyn rolling on the Travel Events chart and getting the result “Shipping fodder ensues.” Which I think is pretty revealing for the kind of table I run.

Making playlists for your characters is, at worst, a really fun way to procrastinate actually writing. But, at its best, it’s a fun way to explore characters in a way you probably wouldn’t be able to with your standard character profile, and the tl;dr of this post is that you should totally try it and I came up with some rules to help make sure you get something out of the experience.

If that sounds like fun, and you don't want to read about my own personal nonsense, just skip down the “The Rules of Engagement.”

I was first exposed to character playlists by Critical Role back in the ye olden days of 2016, when the cast was putting out Spotify playlists for their characters, and I basically immediately fell in love with the concept for a dozen reasons. I loved getting insights into how the players saw their characters, I loved getting exposed to all kinds of music I’d never heard before, and I immediately wanted to do it myself.

Eventually, the well of personal D&D characters I was invested enough in to justify the effort sort of dried up, and I retired the process for a while. But then, through a series of chance events, I ended up listening to the song "Don't Threaten Me with a Good Time" by Panic! At the Disco, and almost immediately, I had a character in my head. That character reminded me of another song, and another, and before I knew it I had another character playlist for a character I hadn't even played yet.

Eventually, that character spun himself into his own book, and that's how both Brass and They Met in a Tavern were born.

Since then, I've started making more playlists for all the characters in the book, and it has been equal parts fun and educational. Not just in exposing myself to new music to find songs to fit the characters, but in learning more about the characters as I built the playlists.

And let me tell you, that magic of hearing a song and thinking to yourself, "Oh my God. I know who this is for," is something else. And once you start doing this, I don't think you'll ever listen to music the same way again. I certainly don't.

The Rules of Engagement

Now, I don’t know what process the cast of Critical Role used to pick their playlist songs, but I devised my own rules for doing so which helped me get a lot out of the experience. That said, if you don’t like mine, ignore them or make your own. I’m not your dad.

CR’s cast used Spotify for their playlists, but I’ve used both Spotify and YouTube, and quite frankly, use whatever you want to actually compile the songs to suit whatever your music consuming/sharing habits are.

1. One song per artist.

This was the very first rule I nailed down, and I think it’s the most important. If you only follow one rule in this challenge, make it this one. It’s here principally to encourage variety, especially if you’re like me and before trying to make a playlist you only really listened to the same three bands on repeat.

But it can also help you really drill down into what makes a character tick. Me personally, if I didn’t follow this rule, Brass’s playlist would be 90% Panic!, since he was born from one of their songs and basically everything they put out reminds me at least a little of him. But because I can only pick one song from them, I had to really drill down on which specific song fit him the strongest, and to do that, I had to understand who Brass was.

2. One song per character aspect/event/relationship.

When you’re putting together the playlist, you’re going to find some songs that really sell a part of the character’s personality, and others that perfectly fit an experience they had. But it’s very easy to start just filling the playlist with songs treading the same ground. Especially if they’ve got a romantic subplot.

Trust me, with the sheer volume of songs that have been written about love, you will find dozens of songs that make you think of the character and their own romantic entanglements. People can and do fill entire playlists just with songs that make them think of their favorite ship.

The playlist is supposed to encapsulate the character. Don’t let them be defined by one relationship! Or one anything for that matter.

3. Minimum of eight songs.

This ties nicely into rule two. Since you can only have one song for each aspect of your character, the song minimum ensures that you have to think of at least eight different things that define the character. Their relationships with other characters. Their happiest memories. How they feel when their angry. Their thoughts on the future.

Find songs for all that stuff.

Annnd… that’s it. Those are the rules. Go. Make playlists for your protagonists, your D&D characters, your DeviantArt OCs. Go forth, and be creative.

Extras

…but I mean, if you wanna have some more fun with it.

4. Bump that minimum up to 10.

My original minimum for a finished playlist was ten, but that was kind of hard sometimes, and finding those last one or two songs sometimes felt like pulling teeth. But if you want the extra challenge, go for it. And why stop at ten? Make this thing as long as you want.

5. Include at least one instrumental song.

I feel relatively confident that the major of the people reading this primarily consume lyrical music. So if you want to really be forced to look outside your comfort zone.

6. Ignore all the rules

At the opposite end the spectrum, ignore literally every rule I’ve laid out and all semblence of structured challenge, and just go make playlists for your characters because its fun, it helps you learn about them, and its much easier than actually sitting down and hashing out that next draft.

I have long, long thought that buried in the new X-COM games is the recipe for a great D&D campaign. Something about that core loop of base-building and going on missions feeding into each other, coupled with the ability to customize soldiers, is just so captivating, and the turn based, class based combat gave me the same kind of warm fuzzies D&D usually does. Except, you know, it was guns instead of swords, and aliens instead of monsters. And I actually really missed the swords and monsters after a few dozen playthroughs of X-COM.

So, a while ago, I started crafting some fairly simple systems centered around researching and crafting magic items, and some base building mechanics largely cribbed from the Artisan Followers section of Strongholds and Followers, and eventually I had enough of it built that I was ready to put it in front of the my longtime and long suffering friends and players. The result is a campaign I’m calling the Castle, which, with any luck, will be the campaign I run for my friends for a long time to come.

I started off the way I always do, floating the basic pitch of the campaign to my friends, and when they seemed receptive enough to the concept (Though, I think they just really wanted to play D&D and were willing to accept my weirdness as the price of admission) for me to float them a few documents to get them started with character creation, laying down the basic state of the world, starting level, and what races were most common to the world. And also clarifying that this was a standard fantasy setting, something we have to do in my group because we have played D&D with just about every kind of coat of paint you can image.

When I was first coming up with the campaign, I was more focused on the structure than story or setting, so I didn’t actually put too much thought into the broader world, but I did eventually decide that the campaign takes place in the distant past of the same world I created for my Glintchasers novels and shorts. I think that decision was mostly motivated by laziness, but the side effect is a nice bit of synchronicity in any future worldbuilding tidbits I come up with for the campaign. I’ve already used the game as an excuse to figure out the original names and origins of the gods. And it already came up in game! That shit was literally never going to come up in the books.

So, speaking of the game, how did it go?

Well, to be honest, it got off to a slightly rocky start. I began the campaign with the players traveling through the wilderness in search of the ruined castle that was going to become their home base, and that I think was a good decision. It was a very evocative starting point. But then I ruined it by trying to force the characters to roleplay too early. As part of the journey through the woods, I had each player roll on a Travel Events chart I crafted for the game, which is basically just a roleplay prompt chart, but the players were not yet super comfortable with their characters, and the prompts of the chart were a little too vague, so they kind of floundered a bit and it was a little awkward. Towards the end though, they did start getting into it. One of the players got the result of seeing a shooting star in the night, and he really hammed up how his character interpreted it as a sign from the gods that they were on the right path.

So maybe it wasn’t the players, maybe some of the prompts were just crap. I think I’ll get a better handle on that as we start using it more.

Eventually, the players arrived at the castle. The secondary characters, who would be like the extra soldiers or B-Team if this were an X-COM game, scouted out the grounds of the castle while the A-Team, everybody’s main characters, went inside the castle itself. And of course, after a bit of searching around where they found some rooms and tools that would become their downtime facilities, they found some bandits it in the process of ransacking this ruin for whatever its worth.

Given the premise of the world being that its basically post-apocalyptic, I wanted to be careful to not make these guys too sympathetic. This was supposed to be the first combat where the players try out their characters. And I was worried since the world has been set up to be a very scrappy, survival of the fittest place, that the players might feel bad cutting down people trying to look for resources. So I played the bandits up as assholes, who immediately mark the players as walking loot drops, and they refuse the players offers of peace and immediately charge in. Later on in the campaign, I’d be more than happy to introduce a greater degree of moral complexity to some of the encounters, but for now, it’s the tutorial fight, and the games about fighting monsters, I didn’t see the need to overcomplicate things.

And that was really all the excuse everybody needed to go ham. The poor bandits actually really didn’t stand a chance. The “main” party’s roster is

Tina Cox, Aasimar Paladin

Selena Caslana, Dragonborn-descended Sorcerer

Camden Wayne, Artificer

Bartholomew Knightengale, Human Paladin

Dominik Leoguard, Human Fighter

So yeah, with three high armor class, heavy hitting characters, the bandits didn’t really do much more than scratch a couple of the PCs. But they had a blast, and everyone actually did a really great job of roleplaying their character during combat, which is not something you always see in combats but on reflection, I actually think my group is pretty great at doing consistently. Dominik and Bartholomew’s players especially really enjoyed the fight, since they were playing comically proud, crusading knights and effortlessly deflecting the blows of these bandits really played into the fantasy of their characters.

Dominik really shined towards the end when the last few enemies were on elevated balconies, and he, a high strength polearm user, actually had just enough reach to stab at them with a running high jump. And because he took the Charger feat, he did a lot of damage (I know Charger is actually bad, and honestly the only reason Dominik’s player took it was because he’s new and doesn’t know its bad, but hey, he managed to get some good use out of it this combat).

The last bandit actually managed to survive like three attacks on him from everybody rolling consecutive super low rolls, which just added to the hilarity that was that fight. After a few rounds of just obliterating these bandits, it took like three people to finish off one guy.

After the fight was over, I announced that the characters officially had the run of the castle, and gave them the rest of the handouts they would need to keep track of the campaign’s metagame, and gave them handouts for “Mission Leads” which are the short, episodic little quests they’ll be embarking on from the castle. And actually the first couple of them take place on the castle grounds. They needed to clear out the surrounding land, and they needed to clear out the lower levels.

But this was the point where I had to remind the players that this campaign was using the Gritty Realism resting rules, which if you don’t know, are variant rules in the 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide that say a short rest is eight hours, and a long rest is week. And immediately the two paladins and sorcerer, who had burned literally all their spells were like “Oh God! We’re useless for a week?!”

And, you know, the thing about 5th Edition D&D is it’s supposedly balanced and designed around the party having like 6-8 medium-difficulty encounters between each long rest, but the way I run things (and this is a problem a lot of people seem to run into), it’s often atypical for the party to get into more than one or two fights a day, so when I decided to structure a campaign after X-COM, a game where if you soldier gets hit they can be out of commission for a good chunk of time, I figured this was the perfect opportunity to bust those rules out and see what the game looks like when the party has to pace themselves a little bit more.

I haven’t really seen much of that yet—so far the group’s standard operating procedure is still to long rest after a single encounter’s worth of fights, but that’s partly because they’re still at a stage where they can get away with that. There isn’t currently a ticking clock forcing them to consider their time wisely, but there will be soon. And for now, just the realization of the players that they needed to be more conservative with their resources or cop a week on the bench was enough sign to me that I think these rules are a move in the right direction.

And one thing the rules did immediately facilitate was the B-Team! The players realized “Hey, there’s all this stuff we have left to do to clear out the castle grounds, but we’re tapped for the day—let’s send our secondary characters to take care of this.” And just—yes! I could not have scripted it better. The players immediately latched on to the secondary characters as a strategic option to use when they were out of commission with zero prompting from me.

So, the players sent a B-Team out to clear the castle grounds while the A-Team recharged their batteries, and this encounter led to my favorite part of the whole session. For reference, the B-Team sent out was:

Emily Thomas, Tabaxi-descended rogue (Tina’s player)

Kyle Reiner, Human Fighter (Selena’s player)

Issac Scout, Human Ranger (Camden’s player)

Kale Vulpix (Bartholomew’s player)

While the B-Team was clearing the castle grounds, they ran into some bandits and some undead. And the undead killed the bandits, the B-Team killed some of the undead, grabbed the treasure the bandits had on them, and then retreated. Which was technically mission success, but then—again, with no prompting from me—Tina’s player did a write-up of Emily giving a mission report to Tina about what happened. And since the B-Team didn’t clear all the undead, Tina told Emily “If those undead aren’t cleared out by the end of my long rest, you are going to scrub the floors of this castle until you can eat off them.”

I loved that. That was basically everything I was hoping to get out of this campaign’s structure in one hit. There was a player reflecting on how the mission went, thinking about the consequences, roleplaying her downtime, and taking the initiative to essentially create her own quest. I immediately awarded inspiration for that, and then I gave inspiration to all the character who went with Emily to go clear out the undead, which ended up being Kyle and Issac again.

And them clearing out the undead was the end of the session. And overall, I thought things went really well, excepting of course the slightly awkward start. Immediately after things were over, all the players pretty much immediately told me that they liked the campaign’s whole shtick and were looking forward to more, which was music to my ears and I think a pretty good sign things are working as intended. Event the first bandit fight, which was kind of a cakewalk, was still fun, and it served as a proof of concept for a little extra ability I’d given them.

Thanks for checking out the campaign diary! I’ve been running D&D since 2015, and I’ve wanted to share my experiences with it for a while, but this campaign was sort of the first time I ever actually knuckled down and started writing about it while the experience was still fresh in my mind.

Eric was sprinting for his life, kicking up puddles left behind by the rain. Feral howls echoed behind him as flaming arrows rained down, peppering the flagstones of the bridge. Griselda had already made it to the other side of the bridge, and were doing their best to cover his retreat by slinging spells. Icicles flew from her hands like daggers, dropping another Hunter with every one.

She was going to get herself killed.

"Blow it!" Eric shouted.

Hunters didn't get tired. If the bridge wasn't destroyed, they would keep up the chase until they caught their quarry. Between the two of them, Eric and Griselda could kill dozens of them. But then the dozens left would tear them apart.

"Just run!" Griselda shot back.

She wasn't going to do it. Not while he was still on the bridge. The next moments played out in Eric's mind. Griselda would wait until Eric was clear to blow the bridge. There was just enough of a gap between him and the head of the pack that should could trick herself into thinking there was enough time. But there wouldn't be. Hunters would make it to the other side before the bridge was destroyed, and then, too exhausted to keep running, the two of them would fight. And they'd lose.

Resolve guided his hand to the hilt of his sword. He refused to let that happen. With one motion, Eric drew Stormcutter from its sheathe, feeling the blade hum in his hand as the clouds above rumbled. Griselda's eyes widened as he realized what he was going to do.

"NO!"

With a stroke, the sword called down a single, massive bolt of lightning, straight down onto the bridge. The powder kegs they'd planted on the way in went off in a chain reaction beneath his feet, and stone cracked apart. The bridge shook underneath Eric as he staggered forward, trying to outrun the collapse. He didn't dare look back, but he could hear the stones and Hunters tumbling into the gorge behind him. Their guttural shrieks echoed all down, ringing in his ears.

And then the ground fell out from under him. 

He smacked chin first into the edge of the bridge before sliding off the rain-slick surface. He felt the drop in his stomach as his arms flailed in the air, until Griselda's hand latched onto him like a vice.

She grunted under the weight, and almost slid over the edge with him. But, just barely, she managed to stop them both from falling.

"I got you," she panted, chest heaving. "I got you, just…"

Bracing herself with her other hand, she pulled with all her might—and failed to lift him even a little. On the other side of what remained of the bridge, the remains of the pack of Hunters howled in frustration, pounding their chests and the ground. For the moment, they were cut off. But after only a few seconds, the packs rear rank caught up, and arrows began to fly. Panic spread across Griselda's face.

"Just hang on!"

Tears welled in Griselda's eyes as she desperately clung to Eric's wrist. He was dangling too far down to find anything to grab onto besides her, which meant her grip was the only thing between him and a hundred foot drop. And it was slipping.

Griselda was many things. Smart. Kind. Beautiful. But she wasn't strong. Not physically. Holding him without just going over the edge herself was taking everything she had, and it still wasn't enough. The bridge's surface was wet and uneven to begin with, and now after being blown apart, what was left of it was unstable. If she didn't get away from the edge soon, they were both dead. That was if the Hunter's archer's didn't draw a bead on them first.

Eric could see the strain and desperation on Griselda's face. Her wet hair was clinging to her, and her arm was shaking. The stones underneath her began to shift. 

"Griselda," Eric pleaded. "You have to let me go."

"No! No, just hang on," she shouted. Her voice cracked. "Please."

"Griselda, I—"

He would have died for any of his friends, but Eric would have lived for Griselda. If he could have. He wanted her to know that, before the end. 

But an enemy arrow finally found its target, striking him in the back between his ribs. His last words were cut off, replaced by a gargle of pain and blood. Another shot sunk into his shoulder. He lost his own grip on Griselda's arm, and he started slipping even faster.

"Eric!"

His name tore itself from her throat just as a third and final arrow pierced her arm, and he plummeted into the river gorge. The last thing he saw before being swallowed into the mists was her grief stricken face staring down at him, desperately groping the air too late to save him. He didn't scream. Partly because he didn't want to seem afraid as he fell. But mostly because the first arrow had pierced his lung, and he was having trouble breathing.

The afterlife was very brightly lit.

That was the first and most prominent impression Eric had as he came to in what first looked like a void of pure white. But as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could make out more detail. What looked like a void was actually walls, ceiling, and floor. The room was fill with strange, smooth furnishings that all held rounded, flowing shapes to them. Orbs of white light embedded in the ceiling illuminated the space with uniform consistency. There wasn't a dark corner in sight.

He was lying in what he could only guess was a bed. It was long and narrow, and its surface was at once dense and cushioning, conforming to his body but still supporting it. When he lifted his arm off it, the distinct impression of where it had been remained for a moment before slowly expanding back out.

His head was throbbing, the lights hurt to look at, and his entire chest felt sore. His muscles felt weak, and lighter than they should. A sickly, sterile taste lined the inside of his throat, though it diminished with every breath. When he sat up, the room spun.

A shred of logic forced its way through the haze of discomfort and disorientation. He was breathing. He could still feel things. Either several priests and holy books had grossly misrepresented what happened after death, or he wasn't dead at all.

But that just left more questions.

A portion of one of the white walls parted open, allowing in even more light and someone clad in form fitting grey and white robes and a narrow skirt that reached to the floor. The figure was hooded, and their face was obscured by a solid, shale white mask. Simple engravings decorate the otherwise smooth face, evoking the vague shape of a face without depicting one. 

It was unsettling, and yet vaguely familiar. Memories of icy water and jagged rocks floated through his mind, but the more he tried to place them, the fuzzier they became. It was like his brain was steeped in a thick sludge.

"Welcome home, Eric. How are you feeling?" 

The voice matched person's feminine frame, but Eric didn't recognize it. He certainly didn't recognize this place.

"Where am I?" he asked, looking around at the all white room. "Who are you? Where—"

"Shh."

With a gentle hand and steady voice, the woman eased Eric back until he was lying down on the unnaturally soft bed again. She rested two fingers on his forehead.

"You're safe here," the woman assured him. She removed her fingers. "I'm your doctor, just checking to make sure you're recovering."

"Recovering from what?"

"Your surgery."

She said the word "surgery" as if it answered all of his questions. He had no idea what it meant.

"In addition to normal prep all applicants undergo, your body suffered severe injuries that needed to be repaired," the woman explained. "Do you remember what happened to you?"

Eric strained to make sense of the fragments in his mind. The cold. The rocks. Arrows. Blades. A voice screaming his name. Falling.

"My head…"

"A perfectly normal side effect," she said. "Your body is adjusting to its new normal and working through the last of the anesthetic. Everything should feel fine in a few hours."

The permanent smile was audible in her voice, but it didn't make Eric feel any better. She kept using words he didn't understand. She knew his name. Called a place he had never seen his home. Nothing made sense, everything hurt, and his heart ached.

She asked more questions about how he was feeling. If he could move his toes. What his stomach felt like.

"What happened to me?"