Hello! This is my first post on Tumblr, and I hope you like my art! Likes and reblogs are appreciated.
Morrenthal is a fictional country I made up that's in Western Europe, located beside France and just above Spain. Even though it is geographically close to these two countries, its main language is Finnish because before gaining independence, its territory was ruled and settled by people from Finland. Because of this history, Morrenthal has a unique cultural mix. Many of its traditions, architectural styles, and traditional foods are strongly inspired by Finland, while smaller influences from France and Spain appear in its festivals, cuisine, and overall lifestyle due to its location. (I'll probably add more to this later.) And in the picture above, you can see the humanized version of Morenthal, inspired by Hetalia: Axis Powers, since I wanted to create a character version of the country. I havenāt fully developed most of her lore or decided on her human name for the series yet, but I plan to expand on her personality and backstory soon. You can also see the countryball version of Morenthal, along with its national flag.
(In this image, you can see Morenthal on the map!)
Thank you so much for staying until the end! ā” I really appreciate it, and I hope to see you again if you ever come across my posts in the future! :)
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Question about both the current and previous DJ&D campaigns (obviously they're not the same character but it's funny that a Drow with the same name has appeared twice during chaotic times in E'lythia's recent history): if Morenthal from The Lost Isle somehow encountered Morenthal from The Flower Crowns through time/planar shenanigans or what-have-you (or vice versa) what do you think they'd make of each other? I feel like there could be some strong opinions on both sides.
To be honest I'm not too sure! It'd depend on how Dan would want to connect them (be it related or unrelated or planal shenanigans or whatnot)
Although I reckon current Morenthal probably wouldn't like previous Morenthal, and previous Morenthal would probably think current Morenthal is beneath him.
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Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dan Jones and Dragons
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Content Warnings: Emotional/spiritual abuse. Implied child abuse. References to canonical child-murder
Summary:
Faced with a choice, Morenthal leaves.
It was raining lightly by the time they made the town proper.
The main street emptied as they passed through, residents hurrying for the cover of their doors while vendors closed shops and stalls early in anticipation of the coming storm. Ā Despite the thinning crowd, a lifetime of habit sent his eyes sweeping each rooftop and alley, automatically appraising each passerby as he followed quietly in the footsteps of the older man.
He knew the town by sight, if not by name. Ā (He suspected he had been told it once, but in their business some things were safer forgotten). Ā A cross-point, located at one of the forks in the main road passing southeast of Riverleaf. Ā Not so far from the Shard Coast as to be unreachable, but far enough that travelling there from any of their fixed rendezvous points required several days of deliberate detour. Ā Home to an even mix of Humans and Elves, a Gnome here and there, the occasional caravan passing through to the druid city. Ā Simple folk living simple lives. Ā Ordinary. Ā Unremarkable.
(The perfect place to hide something no-one expected to look for.)
Been low-key obsessed with the art and worldbuilding of Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical lately, but also wanted to draw something on-theme while catching up on the Dan Jones and Dragons VODs, so have a self-indulgent Morenthal wearing Persephone's outfit.
Bonus close-up under the cut since Tumblr compression eats the details:
The Shaper of Minds and its possible consequences for a certain character
I have finally joined the rest of the internet in losing my mind over a D&D Podcast - in my case, the wonderful Dan Jones & Dragons.Ā With Episode 26 due to stream on Danās Twitch this week, I really want to talk about some of the stuff that came up across the just-finished Gala sessions because the fallout from that has the potential to be incredibly fraught.
THE SHAPER OF MINDS
The relic the Flower Crowns were going after this mission ā The Shaper of Minds ā is a potentially fascinating narrative device that might as well have been lab-engineered to be my exact brand of personal nightmare fuel.Ā Ā Itās a small, ornate brass key that can alter any part of the targetās mental faculties/thoughts/memories at will should the wielder touch it to any part of their victimās skin.
Now, on one hand, there are a heap of interesting (and even benevolent) applications for a tool like that.Ā It could instantly grant access to skills, languages and knowledge that would otherwise take a person years of study to learn.Ā It could be used to sort through and resolve memories that had been faded by time, muddied by trauma or forcibly supressed by magical/medical means.Ā But on the otherā¦
As described and used in campaign so far, the primary function of the Mindshaper is to alter memories (and the attendant personality) with the target having no awareness that their mind has been changed.Ā Itās basically gaslighting on steroids, except that where a gaslighting victim still retains their original recollection ā and has to be manipulated by their abuser into doubting their own perceptions and instead accepting the alternate telling of events (a cognitive dissonance that can eventually lead the person to recognise the manipulation) ā the Shaper of Minds entirely replaces the original recollection of events with the version the wielder wants their victim to perceive.Ā There is no internal conflict between accounts, no inconsistencies that could alert the victim that someone has broken into their head and rewritten their perceived reality.Ā The person they reshape you to be is the person you believe you always were.Ā And all it takes is a single touch.
That is a brand of existential horror that had me on edge all throughout Session 24 (basically from the moment it was implied the key was in play).Ā Ā Reality may be objective, but each individual personās internal reality is governed by their perception ā their memories ā of the events in their life, no matter how incomplete, biased or otherwise skewed that personal perspective may have been.Ā You have value just by being you because you are not replaceable, but the thing that makes you unique is, in large part, the sum total of those inimitably specific personal memories.Ā No-one else will perceive the world in exactly the same way you do, and even a few minor changes to just a few of those perceptions can flow on to massive differences in ideals, values, priorities and future choices.Ā In that regard, the use of the Mindshaper Key isnāt so much an alteration as an obliteration of the victimās former self and replacement with someone new; even if that new stranger is largely indistinguishable from the original.Ā And, again, all it takes is a single touch.
[Sidenote:Ā This made Mister Wick an especially effective antagonist to wield the key, since his Galas functionally trap even targets who are aware of the threat within the rules of high-society behavioural expectations.Ā Otherwise-innocuous actions like a handshake or private conversation suddenly become incredibly dangerous, while being nigh-impossible for the Flower Crowns to extract themselves from without committing an atrocious faux pas and potentially tipping Wick off.Ā Perfectly designed stage for a psychological horror-thriller encounter.]
Which of course, brings us to a certain character who fell victim to the key in Episode 24ā¦Ā [put under the cut for spoiler reasons]
MORENTHAL
This poor Drow, he can never catch a breakā¦
Morenthal may not have been the most mechanically dangerous party member to fall victim to Mister Wickās manipulations although, given that the key was revealed to let its wielder read existing memories during the alteration, and that all of the Flower Crowns were fully briefed on the locations and nature of the Eversteel artefacts, him getting a hand on any of them could have been very bad plot-wise but from a character point of view I think heās the one who the keyās effects had the potential to be most personally devastating for.
The way things ended up playing out across Session 25 was precisely the nightmare scenario Gamb was fretting about out of game: Mister Wick forcibly implanted Morenthalās mind with false memories of being his lifelong trusted confidant and supporter, then ā before the Flower Crowns could reverse the keyās effect ā Morenthal discovered that Mister Wick had been killed in combat with Coil and Preston, leading to the Party having to physically restrain him so they could use the key to undo the damage, thus confronting Morenthal with the realisation that not only was everything he thought he knew about Jonathan a lie, but in actuality Jonathan had committed possibly the most invasive violation heād ever been subjected to in order to forcibly make Morenthal into one of his loyal tools.Ā That level of emotional and mental whiplash would be rough on any character, but for Morenthal itās particularly brutal becauseā¦
Based on whatās been revealed in-game so far, the core of his character is that Morenthal is an abused child. Ā This most-clearly came up in his conversation with Gelnek in Session 14; he was a child who grew up with nothing, raised by the Bloodletter Mercenaries as a tool instead of a person, and taught to see faces only as targets ā with him also mentioning to Hobson in that their ācombat trainingā involved being relentlessly beaten down until he learned to fight back.Ā During his Session 21 visit with the Nightmother, he openly admits that ānowhere feels safeā.Ā From that itās pretty clear to read that Morenthal has never felt unconditionally loved, safe or respected around other mortals.
(This also helps contextualise why heās so devoted to the Nightmother.Ā From what little we have seen of his visits to her, Iris is a fond āadultā figure, who does not threaten, does not judge, asks nothing of him aside from his company, and cares equally for all the souls that pass through her domain.Ā For a child āgrowing up with nothingā but violence, that would have been everything.)
But then, enter Jonathan fucking Wick.Ā And now, just for a short while, Morenthal has all these āmemoriesā of Jonathan being there to confide in, encourage him and support his escape from the Bloodletters.Ā Suddenly he believes someone was there for him and, while the memories might be fake, the feelings of unconditional safety they would have brought were very real.Ā Little wonder that he started acting like a Trilby-level naive goober around Mister Wick to the point of accidentally snitching on the rest of the group.Ā Only, then it turns out to be a lie and those memories are gone.
For me, I think one of the worst things Morenthal might end up dealing with in the aftermath of having his memory fixed isnāt the specific feeling of personal betrayal or the potential shame at having been caught: itās the realisation that he was always alone.Ā Ā That there was no mortal on the outside who cared or came for him when he needed them ā just him and the distant fondness of a Divine.Ā That would be awful beyond words, and yet the Flower Crowns were forced to inadvertently inflict it upon him in order to restore his mind.Ā No wonder he wouldnāt look any of them in the eye before the session closed.
Worse still, the nature of the key makes it incredibly hard not only to trust others, but to trust your own mind.Ā The players and audience above-table know that Morenthal is back to experiencing and remembering reality as it happened, but the question could very well linger for him, bringing with it a hefty dose of paranoia.Ā Sure, Morenthal correctly remembers that Coil is a straightforward, loyal person who wouldnāt be tempted to tamper with his mind beyond undoing Jonathanās manipulationsā¦ but he ārememberedā that about Mister Wick too, and wouldnāt that be a beneficial thing for the Party to have him think?Ā Ā To Morenthal, people were already Not Safeā¢, but now the one person he ever believed might be had actually violated him worse than anyone else in order to force and abuse that trust.Ā How is he supposed to trust anyone if he canāt trust the authenticity of his own recollections.Ā (I get the feeling that Morenthal probably isn't going to be capable of relaxing until the Shaper of Minds is confirmed to either be locked back safely in the Vaults of Eversteel or fully removed from the Mortal Plane by Six).
It makes it really tragic that all of this came directly on the back of Episode 23, where Gamb revealed during the above-table break chat that - even if Morenthal didnāt recognise why ā he unconsciously trusted Trilby and Gelnek enough to jump off the airship without checking that his rope was secure, because deep-down he knew they would catch him.Ā To go from that high-point to the whiplash of him first thinking the Flower Crowns had killed the only person he was ever āsafeā with, then them inadvertently subjecting him to the most painful realisation he could ever experience and potentially leaving him wondering whether he can even trust his feelings about them is absolutely gutting.
I think the thing that scares me most about how the aftermath could potentially play out is another trait that Gamb and Dan have established for Morenthal:Ā he's a flight-risk.Ā Ā He shies away from letting people get close and, if he feels unsafe enough, he runs.Ā Itās already been mentioned/implied that heās considered fleeing the group at multiple different points across the sessions. Ā And with him likely not feeling safe even in inside his own mind right now, that risk is probably at an all-time high.Ā The poor lad is staring down the barrel of a potentially-impending multi-level emotional crisis, where a lifetime of instincts will probably be urging him to run hard and fast because People Are Not Safeā¢.
And the thing is, that instinct isnāt a good one for him either.Ā Morenthal might have gotten by on his own ājust living to beā up until Filgrove, but that feels a lot more like surviving out of necessity than having an actual life.Ā Itās pretty obvious that he pushes people away as a defence mechanism:Ā if you donāt care about anyone then you canāt be hurt by them or have those people used against you.Ā But if you donāt let yourself care and feel things, youāre not really living.Ā The truly tragic part of his running being a potential foreseeable outcome is that the Flower Crowns are good for Morenthal.Ā (I doubt Morenthal realises it and canāt speak to Gambās above-table thought process but itās interesting that one potential interpretation of Morenthalās cynical, faux-apathetic, āstinkyā behaviour is that of a former abused child quietly testing the boundaries of whether heās allowed to exist in a way thatās inconvenient for others, to which the answer from the Party has largely been yes provided he isnāt actively encouraging Trilby to get himself killed, or killing people without explaining himself).Ā He survived alone before because that was all he knew, but I get the feeling he wouldnāt do so well if he tried to go it solo again after being with people (heās already confessed that the idea of Feyli being gone makes him miss her).Ā Ā Thatās not a road to walk on his best day, let alone with his current headspace and tendency towards self-destructive choices.Ā
It reminds me a lot of this article:
āStill, itās easier for us to keep blaming ourselves because itās preferable to facing the unthinkable: the fact that our parents donāt love us. ā¦Ā Most people would rather do anything than accept this as the truth.
Not only is it painful; itās humiliating.ā
So yeah, suffice to say I am incredibly concerned about how Morenthalās arc is going to play out over the next session(s).Ā Hereās hoping that Gelnek and/or Coil have enough emotional savvy to keep an eye out, and enough patience to stick to him even if he lashes out in attempt to drive them off.Ā Even if it all works out okay, I get the feeling that this oneās going to be ugly.
