#dawncaster

Fabian watches Buddy down a—is that real beer? Yeah, it must be, it’s sticky golden-amber mead dripping down his chin on either side of where the cup meets his lips—

The cleric tosses the drained cup to the side, steadying himself in a fighter’s stance as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. If Fabian were paying close enough attention—and he isn’t, shut up, Kristen—he’d be able to see the burning coals in Buddy’s hazy eyes, the slight uptick on the side of his mouth as he scans the crowd. “Hey, Durden!” he yells suddenly, and with an almost cartoonish efficiency, the crowd parts to reveal the poor kid in the middle of a massive fantasy bong rip. Fabian’s eyes flick back to Buddy, and for a second, he thinks he sees a true, genuine grin of mirth—but he must imagine it, because before he can blink, his pretty pink lips turn up into a sneer.

“C’mon, Durden!” Buddy’s insisting, crackles of red light circling his fingertips as he steps closer. Fabian feels his hand go to his cutlass, on him even now. “You think I’on’t know what you been sayin’ ‘bout me behind my back? You got some’in t’say, say it to my face.” But despite the threat of magic Fabian can nearly see thrumming under Buddy’s skin, it doesn’t go beyond that; his words hang in the air, crystallizing like honey.

Fabian means to keep watching, to determine if Buddy’s going to start some real shit or if it’s all posturing, but suddenly Gorgug appears from nowhere—surprisingly quiet for someone so tall—and touches his shoulder. “Adaine’s having a vision. I think it’s important.” Fabian nods, eyes still glued to Buddy as he prowls towards Max. “Fabian!”

“Okay, okay!”

Fabian finds them later in his basement, exchanging heated barbs between wet, open-mouthed kisses. Buddy’s in Max’s lap, lavender hands running up under the hem of Buddy’s soft-looking tee and squeezing, scratching, grabbing the freckled flesh beneath, and they’re both moaning—louder than appropriate, practically performing for the rest of the stoners still taking up every square inch of Fabian’s basement, but they’re both clearly too intoxicated to care.

“Alright! Party’s over!” Fabian announces, just a touch too loud to be casual. There are groans of displeasure, but most only need one warning to start their slow ascent to the rest of the manor. Buddy and Max, however, do not.

They’re not even listening. Buddy’s moved down to Max’s neck, sucking dark purple bruises that should blend but instead only bloom on his skin, and Max is going for Buddy’s jeans, and Fabian knows that if he sees any more of the cleric’s body that he’s going to actually lose his mind—

“You two! Out!”

Buddy does look up, then, blue eyes glazed over with liquor and lust. “Oh, but, Mr. Seacaster,” he drawls, vowels long and honey-thick, “we were jus’ gettin’ started.” Fabian feels an insistent pulse between his legs, and immediately knows that this can’t be allowed to stand. This is his house, and he is the master of it, and he cannot and will not let some haughty Highcourt human playacting at being a rebel ruin his reputation of Maximum Legend.

“Don’t make me drag you out myself,” he warns, and he thanks Captain Seacaster below that Buddy’s level of inebriation means he doesn’t notice the frayed edges around his words.

“Alright, alright. Goddamn, we’re goin’,” he mutters, clambering off of Max’s lap; Fabian’s momentarily surprised at his curse, before getting the distinct feeling there’s one god in particular Buddy’s trying to damn.

Durden, to his credit, looks faded to the stars, sluggish and pliant with gorgonfern without the confidence or adrenaline of bad baby milk to back it up. He just grins dopily at Fabian, giving him a two-fingered salute as Buddy drags him up the stairs and pushes him past the host. “Great party, man!” he calls behind himself.

Buddy, though, lingers. Fabian’s got a couple inches on him, and he spends his sweet time dragging his eyes up each one. “You gotta be quicker’n that next time, Mr. Seacaster, if you wanna claim your prize.” His words are slightly slurred, but the gleam in his glazed eyes and the uptick of his lips shows the challenge for exactly what it is. “Y’all have a good night, now.” And he slips past Fabian, after Max, leaving the faint scent of campfire smoke and popcorn in his wake.

"What’s your alma mater?"

"The Aguefort Adventuring Academy in Elmville, if you can believe it," Buddy sighs.

The deacon pauses in his paperwork, looking over again. "You said it’s your ten-year reunion?"

"Surely is."

"Isn’t that…do you mean to tell me you went to the Academy when all those crazy plots were going on? Geez, what was it—fifteen gods, by the end of it?"

"No," Buddy says sharply. "Five."

"Only five? Well, dadgum," the deacon hums. "But you were there?"

"I was there," Buddy says, suddenly exhausted.

-

Tribes of Twilight - the Dawncaster TTRPG, Sunforge, 2023

Dawncaster is a deckbuilding phone game with a fantasy bent. If you've played Slay the Spire, it's vaguely similar, with more story and slicker graphics. Not the world's best-written story, but for something that's mostly there to tie together card mechanics it's surprisingly decent.

The tabletop game was created by Sunforge, a fan group for the game. They gathered together some people with D&D experience and some pretty great artists, got permission from the devs for a semi-official tabletop RPG, and threw together a seven-month project for this that actually successfully made a game! Normally that kind of thing takes seven years! The project also ran someone $34k in credit card debt (sadly not that unusual), generated a HobbyDrama thread (slightly unusual), and resulted in two restraining orders (wait what). Now the one remaining person who's involved keeps it up to date under a different screen name to maintain anonymity.

The tabletop game hews very closely to the digital game. You have three stats (Dexterity, Intellect, and Strength), and six classes that are either single-stat or a combination of two of them. Abilities are named after the cards. The game is level-based, theoretically open-ended but generally 1-10. Level-based abilities are technically available to every class, though really you wouldn't bother to pick certain ones up for certain classes. Niches are less about classes and more about weapon choice and abilities.

The digital game uses randomized abilities and takes about 2 hours to play through. The design team luckily realized that rolling randomly for your next set of abilities was less than desirable in a campaign-oriented TTRPG. They let you pick your abilities, and then threw a few d6s into the mix to add some randomization on your damage. You still get some randomization in what you can do every turn, which the book explains away as abstract tactical opportunities.

The art is pretty great. It's comic-book dungeonpunk, which is a pretty typical aesthetic these days, but there's something on every other page, and there are recurring characters throughout. Honestly it's on par with WotC's work.

Despite all that good stuff, the game is currently massively broken. One of the unfortunate effects of a 7-month development cycle is that the game is thoroughly unbalanced. They duplicated some of the phone game's abilities directly, which means there's a "+1 action options" ability right next to a "+2 action options" and no reason to choose the +1. By 3rd level you can set up an infinite loop of actions. Super-fun in a roguelike; utterly baffling in a tabletop RPG. There are no tactical options, so you're in the back-and-forth roll-off scenario. The setting is also extremely sparse. Most of it is written purely from what you can see in the phone game with nothing added. There's also a bunch of in-character fiction vignettes that have a very "original character do not steal" feel. In short, it's undercooked by a lot.

The Life That Shines Anew

The commission illustration for Eyindriel

your absolutely amazing idea of fabian being jealous of buddy dawn/max durden perchance <3

okay this did in fact get some creative juices flowing so ykw happy halloween. thanks anon :) original post here

cw for mild reference to underage drinking