#fantasy meme

dialogue prompts from a sunny place for shady people: stories by mariana enriquez.

i get scared sometimes, too.

denial is a powerful drug.

just a little discretion: that's all i ask.

you're not the only ghost around.

it's [name]. call me [name], please.

it's easy to have ethics when what you love isn't in danger.

how are you different from the others?

things happened to me there that can't be exorcised.

it's time to go back to the places that hurt.

we need a miracle.

memories never come at predictable moments.

i love you, but i don't like you.

who put you in charge of my life?

put on some pants. it's cold.

i always hoped i wouldn't have to tell you.

they always pathologize us.

the sun always rises again. always.

don't worry. we'll figure something out.

no one's ever going to kiss me.

it's so hard to kill someone. who would have thought?

don't hate. everything comes back around.

positive thinking is perverse. same as goodwill.

i don't like to sleep in the dark.

you're morbid at heart.

how do you run from something that doesn't exist?

you know how to keep secrets.

i hope i die before i get old.

do you really want me to tell a therapist what we did?

you really know how to play dumb.

what happened to us was simple bad luck.

forgetting is much easier than people say.

what's the worst thing you've done in your life?

chickenshit asshole.

you've always been boring.

i expected this, but i'm still disappointed.

there's something sad about your smile.

you are excessively compassionate.

i wanted to be wrong.

you're too direct. you scare people off.

you're more mysterious than you seem.

there are some feelings that don't have words.

ADHD King: [who was only half paying attention] Suddenly I feel like we need to strengthen hunting restrictions on gryphons immediately. We must ensure no one harvests their talons!

Evil Chancellor: My liege, you don't really want—

ADHD King: [now hyperfixating on saving the gryphons and not listening] Sorry, hold that thought, I need to go inform my guards that gryphon poachers must be executed on sight.

So try this. You make a dungeon. Everything in the dungeon is positioned and behaves as if there are walls. In reality, there are no walls. There are incredibly high level illusions if walls. The doors are real, the floor is real, all the items in the dungeon are real. Some of the doors are even locked. But there's no walls.

And the trick is, unless a player specifically says they touch a wall or they lean up against a wall or anything like that, you say nothin to give them even a hint that the walls aren't real. Because they're going to assume that there are walls, even if you don't have miniatures, or a VTT map, or you don't describe them. It's unreasonable to poke around at every aspect of your surroundings to see if they're real or not.

With perceptive skill alone, a player requires an absurdly high check. 35 or something along those lines.

So there are really only four ways to discover the walls aren't really there.

1) player touches the wall and realizes that it isn't there.

2) player uses magic to detect or see through an illusion. I'm considering extrasensory ability in this category as well, but sensory still has to be mostly intentional because they have to have a reason to distrust their eyes.

3) skill check. They try to look around them to find something. They might notice a slight improbable repeating perfection to the illusion.