The Unsung War

Magic is something anyone can access with proper education and time

There is a pantheon of very real deities who each have different purviews and distribute magic

Combat is generally slow and grindy, and your average player character or enemy can take multiple strikes from a sword and keep fighting.

Characters will get physically stronger and more martially competent as they continue to adventure, to the point of being able to fight enemies like dragons and giant demons.

Magic takes the form of a specific list of flashy and powerful effects, most of which can be performed in the span of seconds and are oriented around combat.

There is an afterlife and people can be revived

Generally speaking a character is going to have to choose between martial prowess, magical capability, and a sort of "everything else" bucket. In particular, a character specialized for combat is going to have little to do outside of it.

Some of these assumptions (leveling up, grindy combat, characters specializing in combat/magic/noncombat) are both very restrictive in the kinds of stories you can tell, and fundamental to how Dungeons and Dragons works to the point that you lose the benefit of familiarity if you try to remove it. (Good luck selling "We're playing 5e but we're not leveling up" or creating an entirely different suite of classes)

I saw someone compare D&D to Star Wars, which is more or less the most popular "scifi with magic" media; Jedi just don't fit into D&D classes; they're the biggest source of player-side magic, and their powers are a small toolkit of subtle, new-age-mysticism tricks; pretty far from wizards, clerics, and warlocks.

That's the Rule Zero Fallacy. The fact that you can ignore any rule that exists, ever, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You can use D&D to play any sort of game if you just ignore all the rules, exactly as you can use solitaire to play a tense political scifi game if you want to. You're still trying to use a hammer to saw off a plank.

Death Grips, the lore-friendly companion: FUCK WHERE YOU'RE FROM

Death Grips, the lore-friendly companion: FUCK WHERE YOU'RE GOIN

Death Grips, the lore-friendly companion: IT'S ALL ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE AT

Death Grips, the lore-friendly companion: WHAT IS IT WHERE IS IT HOW IT AFFECT ME

the courier: i think it might be a deathclaw, Death Grips

Keep in ming that this is not me shaming you, I know you have your reasons, folks. This is just a guy who enjoys clean spaces asking that you start learning now.

Here’s what I suggest as an adult who has lived with other adults who didn’t have housekeeping skills:

First and foremost, learn about all the places in your house that need to be cleaned and understand how often they should be cleaned. the American Cleaning Institute (I guess that’s a thing) has a good article about basic cleaning info. Plus this video on cleaning tips is great!

Learn how to do your dishes. HOT water is the only way to clean your dishes.

Learn how to clean your shower head, especially if you live in a place with hard water. Same goes for your sinks.

Learn how to do your laundry correctly. Even without the whole “separating whites and colors” thing, there are things you need to learn about washing your clothes. Learn what the tags mean, too.

Also, you don’t have to use fabric softener and you shouldn’t use it on towels or any fabric meant to absorb. (Learn about laundromats) And please learn how to clean out your dryer vent, it’s a safety hazard!

Get a disinfecting cleaner for your high-touch areas, especially the gross ones like the bathroom. Just because it doesn’t look dirty, doesn’t mean it’s clean!

Learn how to sweep, mop, and vacuum effectively.

You’ll also want to make sure to change out your home’s air filters.

TL;DR, here are some cleaning videos.

How to Clean Everything in Your Bathroom

How to Clean Everything in Your Kitchen

Livingroom Cleaning Routine

How to Clean Everything in Your Bedroom

Favorite Cleaning Book: it helps you work through the emotional side of cleaning (and other care tasks)

Current Favorite Decluttering Method/Concept: it helps you know how much is too much to keep and how to get started when you’re overwhelmed. (having too much stuff makes it incredibly hard to clean/organize.)

Basic Cleaning Skills: this channel is amazing! this man has a special interest in cleaning and cleans people’s spaces who deal nurodivergence that make it hard to clean. he does this for free (or at a deficit because he pays for supplies and dumpsters and transport and such) and does it all with empathy and kindness working With the people as much as people can handle instead of just coming in to “fix” an issue. these videos are a bit different from his usual ones, (the last one’s most like his usual videos) but i find having the sped up cleaning videos with a voiceover can help fill in for body doubling when im too ashamed to bring people into my messy spaces.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

I've been running this blog for over ten years now. Over that time, I've made 1999 monsters for Pathfinder RPG, all available for free on tumblr. Monster 2000 posts very soon. I'm not planning on quitting anytime soon; I've got some new ideas that'll really make 'em scream.

I am also a trans woman. Who was forced to quit her last job over being bullied by students in the classroom and the administration's insufficient response. I have gotten all of one job interview in the whole time I've been looking for work, and I didn't get that job. Although I have launched a Patreon, and I'm very proud of how active it is... it's only a fraction of my rent. And my savings are dwindling as costs are rising.

If you like the monsters I've written. If you've reblogged my posts. If you've stumbled on this site through a Google search because apparently I'm considered an expert on obscure monsters now. Please, I could use the help. My paypal is here and my Patreon is here.