#brontide

BRONTIDE, my queer fae romantasy series starter, is available through Sunday for just $0.99 as part of the QUEER YOUR BOOKSHELF event! The event formally starts tomorrow and TONS of books will be discounted, but I decided to give y'all a little gift early. Start your weekend with the first book I ever wrote, a tumultuous illustrated romance about Corbet, a French traveler, finding out what he's willing to do to survive after finding himself kidnapped by the Faerie King Ruari. Courtship, folklore, and political intrigue abound.

Grab BRONTIDE directly: https://www.amazon.com/Brontide-Tempest-T-D-Cloud/dp/1537377221/

[image description copied from alt text: A digital drawing of my ttrpg character, Brontide (he/him/they), from the chest up. Brontide is a slender air genasi with pale grayish-white skin and short white hair resembling a cloud. He's wearing a sparkly gold spaghetti-strap top with short sleeves of turquoise feathers, sparkly gold eye shadow, bright blue lipstick, and a gold letter B earring. He's grinning and sticking his tongue out, one eye closed and one peeking open. The background is light blue with yellow sparkles. End ID.]

30 Day Writing - Day 1

Hello, this is the fourth part of the four pieces of writing (let's pretend I posted this yesterday.)

This is based off of some ocs from the 323rd battalion created by @youeverjustmarryabountyhunter (with several people including @multi-purpose-paperclip)

The first prompt is 'Beginning' and this is the beginning of Brontide's story.

This is the list of prompts btw, so you know whats coming up.

Brontide rolled his shoulders back as he pulled at the ends of the fabric he was wearing - he wasn’t sure what it was called. The trooper next to him - his batchmate called Icicle, a name that was now very fitting because of the brittle cold terrain they’d been stationed in - scoffed loudly upon watching two troopers tackle each other.

Snow and Flake were batchmates with each other and acted like best friends, which they were. They were a playful pair and brought the troop much more laughter than they would probably have gotten if the pair weren’t there.

this is the first campaign I've ever gmed. I've run one- and two-shots aplenty, but this game is the first that's endured. it wasn't easy to get to that place; oops all dwarves saw a couple different iterations before it settled here, in this world, in this system, with these players, with these characters. with this gm.

besides a two-shot I ran for the reforged crew, I was the only one of us who had ever played savage worlds before. we were all far more familiar with 5e, but that system didn't work for us, for what we wanted from this game. did I think savage worlds was the perfect system? not necessarily. but it's the one I was most comfortable running. I didn't want to spend months of my life trying and failing to find something better. I was sick of waiting for someone to hand me the campaign.

in all things I do, and in dwarves particularly (with regard to starting the campaign at all), there's an element of "if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself." but I haven't done it myself. the best of this game is not what I have done myself. I sat down with my players in january of 2022 and said, "here's a homebrew world I've been working on since 2017. I know everything about one corner of one continent. let's start somewhere I know nothing about." and we built the city of Reverie, its geography, its culture, three thousand years of its history. my players made the decisions that I keep coming back to, again and again, whenever I need the world to feel alive. and I always need the world to feel alive.

what could have been a silly game of crime and poor impulse control and delayed adolescence and instant gratification has instead become a story about self-determination, about independence and interdependence, about personhood. about identity. about community. about devotion. about love.

maybe you're Fix (it/its, played by @kingfisherkink), a twelve-foot robot built during the technological renaissance of the 3300s when artificial intelligence was discovered. maybe you were built to serve as an assistant to some rich entitled bastard. maybe your ownership was passed down through the family for two hundred years until the world finally understood that robots are people. maybe you lived through the liberation movement, and changed your name, and set up a mechanical/medical clinic in the small robot enclave the city carved out for you. maybe time has passed. maybe you've been around for five hundred years, now, and you're getting old, and your systems don't work as well as they used to, and sometimes your joints get rusty and sometimes the cuckoo clock in your chest won't stop ringing and sometimes your voice box shorts out. maybe you're a creature of faith. maybe you worship the god of community and protection and the equality of all living things, and maybe you worship as well the god of choice and privacy and healing. maybe you find an innocuous but sacred artifact in the midst of some petty crime, and it fulfills you, so you keep it in a place both hidden and reverent. maybe you want to have children. maybe you start to build them in secret, because making new robots has been illegal since 3561 on the grounds of it being unethical. maybe you plan to name them Change and Kind, in the hopes they will embrace those ideals. maybe you find a friend in some teenager who has nowhere else to go, and you have no idea the limits of what you would do to protect them. maybe it frightens you that you don't know. maybe you kill someone you'd been trying not to harm, despite how much you hated him. maybe you have to tell your friend, "I'm sorry, I can't do that for you, even if it would save your life." maybe you find out that the artifact you kept would have gotten someone else out of a fatal situation. maybe you have a one-sided rivalry with some other robot doctor, because everyone mistakenly believes it's better than you. maybe you're arrogant and selfish. maybe your altruism has always been arrogant and selfish. maybe you give up every last cent you have to pay the ransom of someone who doesn't like you and will never trust you. maybe you hope Change and Kind will be both of those things without exception, without hypocrisy.

maybe you're Archie (they/them, played by @travismatagot), a human kid on your own for the first time. maybe you were raised in a secret government facility and trained to commit espionage. maybe you don't have any memories from before they took you— maybe you were just too young, or maybe the experimentation and manipulation and conditioning they put you through to give you psionic powers got rid of the memories for you. maybe you were always a bit of an underachiever. maybe you turned eighteen and graduated and your handlers send you south to a new city on a new continent so you can do your work. maybe when faced with the freedom and choice and fear of being utterly on your own for the first time, you freeze, and you don't get off the boat, and it keeps moving, and you wind up in Reverie. maybe you wind up sleeping in a hammock in a mechanic's shop in the robot district. maybe you get swindled a little bit by a pair of tempestuous twins. maybe you start growing your hair back out to cover some of the magical tattoos on your skull, though you'll never be able to mask the tattoos on your face. maybe every time you look in the mirror for your entire life you'll see the evidence of the person you were supposed to be. maybe you learn to knit and make the ugliest vest your new friends have ever seen. maybe you run into someone from home— one of your peers from the program who always hated you, and she's advanced in the ranks, and she threatens to rat you out, and she doesn't understand how you can be so ungrateful for everything your superiors did to make you special. maybe you leave a to-go box full of tapas where you know she'll find it. maybe you do that a lot. maybe she asks for your help assassinating a well-known political figure, and maybe you say yes. maybe you've been saying yes to everything lately. maybe you've been saying yes a little too much. maybe you don't know what you like and what you want, so you might as well try everything and have everything and do everything. maybe you get some more magical tattoos even though you thought you wouldn't. maybe you go to a punk show to meet people your age but you don't talk to anyone. maybe you can read minds. maybe you never do. maybe you're consciously rejecting your training, or maybe you just forget about it. maybe you know people can be awful and cruel— you were raised by the awful and cruel to be awful and cruel— but maybe people have also been nice to you here. maybe you're waiting for the consequences to come. maybe there's a part of you wondering if they ever will.

maybe you're Brontide (he/him, played by @keplercryptids), a dwarf/air genasi grifter with lightning in your blood and glitter on your face. maybe you think that that description is wrong, because it doesn't mention your twin sister, and there is no accurate description of you that does not include her, because there is no you to describe without her. maybe you have never been anything but her hands. maybe you were born to be her scapegoat. maybe you can weather any amount of vitriol and pain so long as it means she gets away clean. maybe you know exactly what to say to gain anyone's adoration and forgiveness. maybe you apologize every day of your life, and never once feel sorry. maybe you seek out any spotlight. maybe you are loud and bombastic because if they're all going to be watching you anyway then you might as well give them a show, and you might as well learn to revel in it. maybe using your magic gives you migraines. maybe they're getting worse. maybe you endure it anyway. maybe you're good for nothing else. maybe you're visited in a dream by a witch who tells you that your sister's mind is her own and yours belongs to her, too, and maybe you're supposed to feel offended, but you don't. maybe that's good and right and correct. maybe you don't want to have your own mind. maybe you don't understand why you would want anything that couldn't be hers. maybe you would do anything for her. maybe she would do anything for herself, and for you by association. maybe people keep telling you there's a difference. maybe you don't care. maybe your sister lies to you. maybe she's never done that before, at least, not to your knowledge. maybe you beg and plead and cry for her not to do something reckless and stupid— she's the one who thinks, after all, who leaves you to be reckless and stupid in her absence— and maybe she doesn't relent until you fall apart. and maybe she does it anyway, and maybe you can't stop her, and maybe you're left utterly alone until you can cash in every favor imaginable, indebt yourself to everyone you know. maybe you even tell them something true. maybe they all help without hesitation. maybe that's never happened before, either. maybe now you feel beholden to the promises you've made. maybe your life is full of new things now. maybe your sister feels entitled to the aid, feels like she's earned every penny, insists you do the same. maybe you disagree. maybe for the first time in your life you disagree. maybe it's different this time. maybe you try to tell her that you were an empty husk without her, and all these people made the world right again by putting you back in her pocket, and surely they deserve some recompense for that. maybe she says they did it for her. maybe you say they did it for you, and for her by association. maybe you tell her there's a difference. maybe she doesn't care. maybe you don't know why you do.

maybe you're me, the luckiest gm, with the most wonderful party who meet every session with enthusiasm and curiosity and delight, so invested and so inspiring. maybe you're amazed a year has gone by so quickly. maybe your heart is full of light and possibility.

for @flashfictionfridayofficial 's prompt #FFF162: The Letter. ~700 words.

I wrote this so it could be read alone, but it’s basically a follow up to this snippet which gives more context on Valentine’s job tracking down the villain

~

The villain’s letter landed on Valentine’s desk three days after he’d escaped custody.

“I’ve heard he can be…more annoying in writing,” Brontide warned. Valentine’s hero co-worker gave the envelope one last glance before returning to his desk.

Valentine sighed and grabbed the envelope. “Has this been checked for poison?” he called. Sure, their branch of the Defenders Alliance was lacking in funding, but that didn’t mean they had to throw caution to the wind.

“You’re the ex-assassin!” Brontide replied. He glanced back and flashed Valentine a grin. “Poisons should be your specialty.”

He did know a thing or two about poison. Probably the reason they’d assigned him Sundew. Unfortunately, carnivorous plants were less up Valentine’s alley, and the villain’s new acid trick had made escape easy when he’d finally been captured after a month’s pursuit.

Valentine gave the envelope a closer look. Its pale green color was unusual, but he couldn’t find any discoloration or warping to suggest the paper was carrying extra ingredients. Still, he slid on his gloves before drawing a letter opener from his desk and tearing in. A pale piece of paper came out with letters typed in dark green ink. 

My dear Valentine, Sundew had written.