All Strange Serenades

Nobody gives two shits about an ENTIRE COUNTRY being hit by two cyclones consecutively. It’s displaced over 160,000 people and destroyed over 30,000 homes.

Yet no one cries.

No billionaires or other countries have talked about donating or helping the country out.

Please help by donating to charities and fundraisers dedicated to helping provide humanitarian aid to Mozambique!

https://support.savethechildren.org/site/Donation2?df_id=3241&mfc_pref=T&3241.donation=form1&cid=Social_Network:Twitter:Emer_Mozambique:Scus_Lp_Post2:031919&hootPostID=23abdd2d4250de3d6b684c68a4fb250b

https://www.allhandsandhearts.org/programs/mozambique-tropical-cyclone-relief/

https://www.msf.org/msf-response-wake-devastating-cyclone-idai-mozambique-malawi-zimbabwe

OH ALWAYS

I’m just gonna list a couple things that I personally would have found helpful when I was making The Barde.

- Take some time to go through the subclasses, even though they come in at level 3. There are some great prompts there that might help you visualize their personality a little bit better! Bard subclasses rock, they’re weird and good and there’s 1000 of them to choose from if your DM allows some homebrew.

- It depends how you build them, but bards are not often the biggest badasses when it comes to dealing damage. The bard spell list is more fitting for support and bringing some magical chaos to the game! You may have to improvise with them a lot during combat, so take a good look at your spell list and consider which ones will best fit their personality. Many of them are quite bastardly and I love them a lot. “DMs hate them, learn to break the game with this fantastic 1 action trick.”

- Again, it depends on their abilities, but if you’re gonna go for a bard on a squishier side with mediocre hp and ac, get used to staying in the back. If you’re not used to playing a support caster, that’s often an important part. If you want to play a more brawly bard, best to choose a subclass that grants you fun combat skills, shield and weapon proficiencies. And put some more stat points into your constitution and dex.

- Remember that having high charisma does not necessarily mean you have to play a ‘classic’ horny hot bard. Charisma means a lot of things. They can be scary, insufferable, or just too cute to say no to. Consider what part of their personality reflects on their charisma most.

- The thing about bards is they can be good at literally anything they want. Take a good look at the skill list and pick the proficiencies that are gonna be the most fun for you. Wanna be nerdy? No problem. Wanna be a super great liar? You got it. Wanna play a nosy bitch that never fails perception or insight checks? Nobody can stop you.

- Consider what kind of performance your bard enjoys most, and how their music/acting/whatever career reflects on their backstory. A big part of why i love the class is they learn to do magic in their own way. What kind of artist are they? Are they a drama queen or a chill art student who always has weed? What kind of music do they play? Again, look at the subclasses, they slap.

- Make a playlist. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to make a playlist.

The concept of some humanoid or near-humanoid species being naturally inclined to evil is a racist one, and, unfortunately, a prevalent one in Dungeons & Dragons, exacerbated by the fact that these “evil species” are frequently the “ugly” ones. Drow are a particularly glaring example - “made black because of their ‘evil’”?! Fuck you - but the duergar - “the slaves … learned only to enslave, really makes you think don’t it” - and the orcs - “they feel the CALL to evil in their Gruumshy HEARTS” - are also super not good. (There’s also a fair degree of ableism, with “insane” monsters - in such cases, I honestly think “unaligned” would be a better description for “too far gone to understand morality”. Evil implies a choice.) Honestly, I wouldn’t mind so much if these weren’t supposed to be naturally-occurring species - always evil demons or fey are fine, because they’re made of magic and stories, although care should of course be taken not to make them look like naturally-occurring species - but elves are really just fragile pointy-eared monkeys, and they have excuses. However, these evil humanoids are also genre staples and often quite aesthetically good. To that end, I offer the Unfucking D&D Guide, which provides what I think are solutions to this problem. (It should be noted that I am whiter than plain yogurt, so my ideas should be taken with a grain of salt and definitely not take precedence over the ideas of non-white folks. If I’ve said something fucked-up in this, please let me know and I’ll fix it.)

Duergar. Keep the “enslaved by illithids, made grim & psionic” bit, toss the “learnt evil from them” part. The duergar are joyless, or can appear so - you can play them either as gloomy and fatalistic or as eccentric and unreasonably concerned with “corruption” - but despite whatever mood they possess, make sure that they are thoroughly dedicated to making sure the horrors of the Underdark stay in the Underdark, and are as righteous and honorable as their hill and mountain cousins.

Derro. The derro are an “insane” species; I bring them up only because I saw them confused with duergar in one post about racism in D&D. Their lore has not been constant - the current lore is “dwarves enslaved by illithids, tortured into madness, and now they’re eeeeeeeevil”, which is ableist, not racist - but their metatextual origin is among the detrimental robots, or Deros, of pulp author Richard Sharpe Shaver’s stories (or possibly delusions). “Born from the dreams of a mad author” would actually be good lore if you can make that author a tragic sufferer of schizophrenia in a time before it was understood rather than an ~*~eViL mAdMaN~*~, but in any event, change their type to construct, fey, or fiend, and, most importantly, don’t take them seriously. The derro are pulp villains, and their evil is grandiose and nonsensical. They ought not to be seen as realistic; they ought to be seen as Snidely Whiplash, Commander Claw, or Heinz Doofenshmirtz. “Reasons” are for other genres.

Drow. Return drow to their mythical roots as trow, nocturnal hunters, tricksters, and magical artisans dwelling in the hollow hills. There’s high and wood elves; dark elves can find a niche. Lolthite culture is good villain fodder, but make sure that you can handle an “evil religion”, and make sure that all types of elves participate.

Goblinoids and trolls. Make them fey, and abandon Tolkien for Rossetti and folktale. Goblins make cruel bargains; hobgoblins attend faerie courts; bugbears hide in closets and create electricity from feed on children’s screams; trolls lurk under bridges and love riddles. As fey, they’re not evil, simply alien and lacking in empathy towards mortals.

Gnolls. If you use the Volo’s lore, change their type to fiend and be done with it. If you want to have them be natural humanoids, go read Ursula Vernon’s Digger for the best-written hyaena-furries in literature and base gnolls off that once you’re done crying.

Kobolds. Kobolds are already draconic cleaner wrasses in lore; there’s no reason that metallic dragons can’t enjoy them as well and influence some populations to good.

Illithids. The mind flayers certainly have great potential as villains. However, there is nothing about their psychology that impels them thither. Their biological requirements could easily be met by feeding on those close to death, whom I might imagine would willingly donate their brains as food or tadpole incubators in exchange for a painless death and the surety that their memories would live on in the illithid. Also, create food and water spells exist.

Ogres. Ogres are wilderness-dwellers who prefer to maintain their personal territories through fear instead of actual force of arms; the idea of the monstrous, anthropophagous ogre is a deliberate sham. They are actually capable of great heroism, even if they aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed and okay to be honest I started out trying to build up to a Shrek joke but I think I’d take this over canon lore.

Orcs. Orcs are an easy fix; all you need to do is remove Gruumsh from the equation and they don’t have a bullshit “call to evil”; in Eberron, without objective gods, the people of the Shadow Marches believe that half-orcs are the proof that orcs and humans are one people, so there’s even in-game precedent for orcs as members of society.

Yuan-ti. There are two ways to do this. One is to dump all the lore and just have sexy snake cults, although don’t dress them like Asian or Aztec stereotypes like a lot of the art does. (The 3.5 Monster Manual yuan-ti pureblood looks like she’s constantly accompanied by an inappropriate bamboo flute riff, I swear to Istus.) A sexy snake cult (and I am including malisons, abominations, and anathemas in the term “sexy”, not just purebloods) should be fun for everyone.