#ashdale

here's some ocs as animal crossings

ashdale: ferret. either cranky or lazy (i'm not sure if him being grumpy or him being weird with wildlife is more appropriate) personality, catchphrase is "hmm". house is similar to lucky's and has gravestones in it.

autumn: vulture. sisterly personality, catchphrase is "dig it", house is unkept and grungy with a dirt floor and possibly some musical instruments strewn about.

you sent me a few character asks a long, long time ago for an ask meme i can no longer locate and i'm sorry and thank you for sending them. gonna answer some now with a random fact or two!

Man, I feel like you know so much about Ashdale already. Recently I've been thinking of messing with his species? He's a fetchling, which in a super simplified description is like the underdark version of a human, but that came so little into play in our actual play or plans of him after. AT MOST I think he had some level of darkvision that came in handy. It's why he's got the greyish skin and strange hair color, but I don't know if that's necessary when him being pretty ghost-touched his entire life could have affected that as well. idk, but i'm thinking about it!

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Fiacla is Cios' daughter! The two have never met however, nor know of each others' existences. She's a little less adaptable than her parent, but still has a couple forms she can easily shift into including the monster form (above) which is kind of her 'natural' state, and a couple human forms. At the start of the story she's a part of, she's bound and trapped to a cave and somewhat plagued by visions. She'll tell you about them if you bring her something good!

THE HAG IS FREED.

    Ashdale did not see the message when he first returned home, two fresh rabbits thumping limply against his leg. The village was empty, but this alone was not unusual. It had been six years since the raids and fires which devastated the area and massacred the entirety of the small populace. The only exception being Ashdale himself. It had also been six years since the ghosts had risen up in place of the living and continued daily routines as though nothing had changed at all. Sometimes, though, there’d be instances in which these deceased residents would be gone, invisible to Ashdale’s eye. But they came back. They’d always come back. So as Ashdale climbed over and under bramble and wood into the hidden little hamlet he didn’t think much of finding the place silent, nor of the burnt buildings remaining as husks rather than filling out what was missing with flickering ghostly essences.

    Ashdale padded his way to his home, the only remodeled cottage in the area. He ducked under the rough hewn trees that propped up sagging walls and tread carefully beneath a roof thatched haphazardly with various odds and ends to a humble table where he began unpacking his snares. That’s when he saw it. 

THE HAG IS FREED. 

    The message was scratched hastily into the side of Ashdale’s kitchen wall; he immediately knew from the pain in his head that it was the result of some ghostly hand. Tilting his head one angle kept the words there, but tilting his head to another and they were gone. 

So I have two tabletop characters (Sial I haven’t actually played yet but I’ve worked a lot on his backstory) that are trans men and I thought it might be kind of neat to talk about their trans experiences?

Long post under the cut, with mentions of body parts, genitals, reproductive organs, and surgery that might be uncomfortable for some folk. 

Ashdale’s pronouns are he/him. He’s a fetchling ranger from a Pathfinder campaign. He was raised by ghosts and has a ghost boyfriend and also his companion is a ghost ferret. Ashdale’s got a thing for ghosts. 

Though he experienced some dysphoria when he was younger, he really only started identifying as male as a young adult. He worked as a fur trapper in colder parts and often wore a bulky cloak that made him look like a blob of a person–that, plus his tall height and people’s preconceptions, meant that he was often referred to as ‘he’ or ‘sir’. Ashdale had a responding feeling of “Ah. That feels correct.” whenever that happened. He started purposefully presenting as male. 

Ashdale has had top surgery and is on a sort of HRT process from a different surgery. Also he gotten a lot of nicks and scars from his adventuring life. 

This is Adleweiss (she/her), an old gnoll with bad cataracts in one eye. She was once a renown surgeon–technically what we’d consider a cosmetic surgeon–but for some reason is alone in the woods. Ashdale strikes up a friendship with her and she’s who preformed Ashdale’s surgeries. 

Adleweiss uses a combination of surgery and different types of Polymorph (check that spell out here) to alter appearances or the nature of things. Polymorph generally doesn’t work the best on people–usually people are too complex for the spell to be permanent, and you have to deal with how the individual’s will power will affect the spell. But Adleweiss realized it works better on parts–on smaller portions of a complex thing, rather than the whole complex thing itself. So instead of just polymorphing Ashdale into a body more true to what he feels and having that wear off or such, she removed his breast tissue and got down into his ovaries and polymorphed them to basically start producing testosterone. 

The effects of this are very similar to someone in real life injecting testosterone–Ashdale got more body hair, deepened his voice, had his clit grow, got greasy and got acne, had muscle mass shift, etc. This is an ongoing process and in game he was just starting to hit the height of these changes.

I’m not the best with tabletop mechanics and there’s probably some loose ends with how polymorph would work in that setting–but I think it’d work, and that’s part of Ashdale’s transition.  

(And then in game Adleweiss started using her skills for some real immoral shit and Ashdale broke off their friendship but that’s another story.)

Sialodil Witherwoe’s pronouns are he or they. For this post I’m going to use mostly he/him as his preference leans just slightly more towards that, but he enjoys when they/them pop-up too. Sial is a drow warlock who was ‘gifted’ a spiky slashing gauntlet from his patron (more like ‘accidentally got’ as their relationship is like him being a barnacle on a whale that doesn’t know he exists). Sial is for a Curse of Strahd D&D campaign planned for the future and he likes putting silver flakes on his face to feel pretty. 

Sial has not medically/surgically transitioned like Ashdale, but instead uses a vest that functions similar to how one might use a binder in real life–with some differences. 

For the sake of comparison/explaining the vest, let’s first look at a Bag of Holding. (There’s also a Handy Haversack and Portable Hole, which honestly the vest is closer too, but the Bag of Holding is more iconic and easier to draw. All those items are clickable if you want to learn more about them.) The Bag of Holding’s opening is essentially a portal to a larger interior space than what just a bag would have, it can hold a ridiculous amount of items–and even living creatures for a very short period of time (no air, as I understand it). 

And this is the Vest of Holding! There are two pocket-sized openings on the inside of the vest that lead to that ‘larger than the exterior’ space. A user would slide their breasts into these pocket-openings wherein they’d be hidden from this plane (technically no longer existing on this plane) to achieve a flat-chested look.

Unlike the Bag of Holding, the Vest requires a lot less space–both for the pocket and inside the pocket, so it’s not a great place to store anything besides the intended body part. It also has a lot of benefits as opposed to regular binding! Like the fact that you can be flat-chested regardless of how large the breasts actually are, you can wear it for extended periods of time, can exercise no problem with it on, and little to no stress on the ribs without the need for actual binding/constriction. 

Though… there’s probably some cons too. If a Bag of Holding is torn or pierced it ruptures, everything in it spills out, and it becomes useless. I think that could be dangerous and the Vests are probably made with a very durable leather padding over the Pocket openings. But because of that, wearing leather that close to the body with extreme adventuring probably means there’s a greater chance of overheating and such. 

But yeah, I think they would have been invented by a trans NPC for trans folk. Sial got his hands on one and loves wearing it–sometimes with a packer too, and sometimes not. He prefers the Vest to usual binding for the sole reason of it being easier for him to wear lower cut shirts but still feel masculine. 

@aeori-o got me a set of early birthday dice for sial and they fit him so well i could cry!