Weathervein

CynnVein: World building about my fantasy world I wrote a series of books for, The Lion of Cynn.

DPWifeVein: Blog dedicated to a series of polls that I started called Wives of the Nascent Ghost King.

fingrmal: A series of polls to create party in a fantasy world. (closed)

Goodvein: I can focus way too much on the bad, so I created a sideblog just to talk about things I love.

Ingirvein: A series of polls to create a fantasy world. (closed)

mcoka: Make Canada Oh-Kay Again!

Neo-Atlantis Codex: Started as a response to a shitpost about how they should send all White Men out to sea, and someone saying we'll just conquer everyone again as the Sea People. Now it's in theory about building Neo-Atlantis, but truthfully about civics and nascent technology.

Primevein: First posting for the Prime of His Youth. This is fanfiction set after Transformers: Prime, but not including Robots in Disguise. Heavy focuses on Jack Darby x Arcee, and follows Jack goes onto become a Prime, rescue lost colonies, and allow the return of the 13, (or at least the first 12). Six books/433,284 words.

PrismaticRoseVein: A series of polls creating a medieval fantasy world using Ruby characters. (closed)

RWBYvein: Started off as a place to hold my longer RWBY dialogues, but then went onto become the home of Paladin and Firen Lhain, and the Double Rainbow Rewrite of Firen Lhain. Paladin is a dialogue-format rewrite of season 6, while Firen Lhain is a full prose write. It's parallel to RWBY for V1-5, and a complete rewrite of anything post-Haven up to the end of the series. Firen Lhain was a Pollinated Knight world, JxRWBY, because I was indecisive and didn't want to give up my precious ships. The Double Rainbow rewrite instead has White Rose and Bumblebee, (RW and BY), with Jaune's romance not starting until Season 7. Other than that, my biggest RWBY fic was Faunus Rights, about Jaune getting a bunch of Faunus pets. Full AO3 link.

Suncryst Hyperborea: A collab with @noneatnonedotcom and @bretonnianknight about a super-advanced civilization that maintained the pre-Roman Christianity that existed in the British Isles. (closed)

Weatheryear: Tales of Yesteryear. Typically rambles about major society trends.

Weatherpolls: My polls sideblog. I usually have 1-3 polls running every week.

Weathercool: Tacticool blog about the real nature of combat and survival. TL;DR: The most important thing a piece of equipment can do is survive the rigours of combat and wilderness survival.

It’s Worse Than You Can Possibly Imagine

87% of rape gangs are Muslim. Not per capita, but absolute numbers.

It has no culture. Like modern cities, it considers itself to the centre of the universe, and the game absolutely insists upon it. Everything is for Baldur's Gate.

Baldur's Gate was originally, obviously named after Baldr, the Nordic God. But, D&D focused on letting you do anything, but this means that no place has any substance. They have since forced a mythology onto a world after it was created. So, now Baldur's Gate is named after Balduran, the seafarer that founded the city as a port. It is such a generic fantasy city.

The two main points of cities in fantasy settings are:

Shopping

Politics story.

BG3 is a generic evil cult story. Again, the thing that makes a D&D campaign good is not D&D, or the setting, or the even the campaign, but the DM, and Baldur's Gate 3 has a fantastic DM. At least until you get to Baldur's Gate.

Once you get to Baldur's Gate, the evil cult secretly takes over the city, and in theory this could make a good politics game. If I had any interest in that. Even worse, though, is that it does not. You have two psychopathic murders that both offer to let you side with them against the other. You could do a sneaky, conniving plot to get them to work against each other. And that's it. There is no other political factions you could approach to affect the story. Even rescuing the Duke doesn't change anything, or even give you a new playable character.

Progressing the story requires a lot of hard skill checks.

Now, after you fail to advance the plot, a good DM will come back next week with a new plan to keep the story going, but BG3 doesn't. There are often ways to spellcast past it, but that requires you to have a character with that prepared skill, which means spending a bunch of time playing with your spells. And often times they are Spell-like abilities that can only be used once a day.

Now, 5th makes it easier, because with upcasting, you don't have to prepare every level of a spell to have the spell, but there are still 6 or 7 healing spells your healers kind of have to equip, and, often the only way through a problem is a spell you used to have prepared, but changed it at some point without remembering.

The other important part of cities is shopping, and Baldur's Gate has much worse shopping than any RNG township you would come across in Pathfinder, and you can't commission custom works. And while the new system feels more organic, it's all horribly specific stuff, and if you don't have this exact, specific case, it's useless.

They honestly could have let you categorize your stash, and let you sell from your stash.

In Pathfinder, there are rules for what you can find in what size of a city, but pretty much every city is going to have at least one master craftsman of every type you could come across. So, you tell your DM that you want to buy X. He makes a role, you instantly teleport to the shop, do your negotiations, and come back in a week. It might have a requirement to get a certain thing, which gives you a sidequest, so your DM can keep your busy while he's working on the main plot.

And time can fly as a whim. If you want to sneak into a place, you can just tell your DM that you will wait for night time.

This abstraction is what makes cities interesting to roleplay in. Without it, all you are doing is running around generic cityscapes, not even able to ask people to help you find things.