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Beyond The Limits of Imagination

@kyliafanfiction-archive / kyliafanfiction-archive.tumblr.com

All activity on this blog has moved to @kyliafanfiction (Not the lack of -archive). If you have asks or hate to send, send it there, not here, because it isn't gonna get answered if you send it here.
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Burn Notice, but with Agents of Shield Cast -

Grant Ward is the burned ex-spy, Skye is his trigger-happy gun-running ex-girlfriend, Coulson is the washed-up retired guy with buddies in every government department. 

May can be the representative from the mysterious organization that Burned Grant. 

Not sure where Fitz or Simmons would fit in tho.

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cassidy5002

I made a character list up. I changed some to the SHIELD characters to make them fit.

Michael Westen = Grant Ward Fiona Glenanne = Daisy “Skye” Johnson Sam Axe = Alphonso Mackenzie Jesse Porter = Barbara Morse Barry Burkowski = Jemma Simmons Nathaniel Westen = Leopold Fitz Victor Stecker-Epps = Melinda May Vaughn Anderson = Phil Coulson Jason Bly = Lance Hunter

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kyliafanfiction-archive

I could see these,

#Burn Notice#I mean I don't entirely agree where's Carla#but also yeah I can totally see Mack as Sam#agents of shield#queue
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Hydra believes that the world needs order. That when people are left free, chaos reigns. They look out the window and see all the war, poverty, crime and disease and wonder ‘does it really have to be that way?’ Lots of people wonder that, but for Hydra, their belief is that freedom, or at least, the amount people want to have, is the problem. That the best solution for war, terrorism, crime, starvation – everything wrong with the world – is control. Take over the world, enact and enforce strict laws, and everything will be solved.

Grant Ward to Jemma Simmons, from “Out of the Shadows and Into the Light”

I suppose it is a bit indulgent to quote your own fic, but I really like this line of mine. Here we have a Grant Ward who didn’t betray the team in Season 1 telling Simmons about Hydra in preperation for her infiltration of it in Season 2. He’s been inside Hydra, he knows the logic of how they think. Hydra is fascist, yes, and evil. But a fascist genuinely believes that their ideas are the best solution to the problems they see. Alexander Pierce genuinely believed. Hitler - god, we all know he believed. Mussolini - he believed. All the political footsoldiers that took those two men and every other fascist dictator into power… they believed. Yes, I’m sure there were Blood Knights recruited into Hydra-in-S.H.I.E.L.D. that were there just for the chance to kill, or people who joined out of resentment or betrayal (John Garrett, for example) or because they wanted something (also John Garrett, namely he wanted to survive and stay alive) or just plain amorality. But an organization that was just a bunch of selfish, resentful Blood Knights couldn’t have lasted. Hydra believes. All those Hydra Goons that get mown down in TWS, in AoU, in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. A lot of them believed. They looked out the window. They saw the terrorism, the crime, the poverty, the instability and wondered why it had to be that way. They came to the not illogical conclusion that the problem was human freedom. Freedom is a problem. It’s a problem I’m willing to live with, personally, but in a more unfree world, a lot of the things that trouble us currently would be gone… we just wouldn’t be free. And a lot of people wouldn’t be happy with that trade off. But history has shown us time and again that there are people that will. And there’s nothing wrong with that, inherently - the trade off is a value judgement, and some people can genuinely decide that their freedom is less important than their safety, and I can’t fault them for making the choice they did. I wasn’t there. BUT, the trick is that you can’t trade someone else’s freedom. You can trade your own freedom for security, for safety. But you can’t start doing it to other people, or you start crossing the line into becoming what Hydra-in-S.H.I.E.L.D. is. Its not a choice anyone can make for anyone else.  Hydra-in-S.H.I.E.L.D. is a perfect example of the intoxicating power of good intentions, and just how you pave the road to hell with them. So you’ve looked out the window. You’ve decided freedom is the problem. Now what? Obviously the rest of the world (as a whole) doesn’t agree with you. You can try to persuade them, but people are, at least in safe times, pretty attached to their freedom. You think about all the lives that could be saved right now if your solution was implemented. You think about all the lives that could be saved in the future - all the wars that won’t happen, all the corruption you’ll eliminate. All the needless suffering you can prevent.  But people like their freedom. What can you do? Can you kill them all? Kind of defeats the purpose. But you can kill some people. One person to save a thousand. That’s something most people would agree is probably acceptable, in a theoretical sense. But what happens when it becomes two people to save two thousand?  A hundred people to save a hundred thousand? Or maybe a thousand people to save a million? Once you ratchet up the numbers, it becomes a lot less defensible to most people.  But if you’re Hydra… the logic holds all the way on up. So you do what Hydra did. They made the world progressively more unstable so S.H.I.E.L.D. would get more power. So they could get more power. I think Project Insight was a result of Hydra letting the post-Battle of New York rush of power go to their head, but that was the final culmination of their logic. As pierce says, kill millions to save billions.  Hydra is fascist. And this is a point that many people have made many, many, many times. And this particularity is important. But Hydra is a distinct flavor of fascist. Its not the same kind of fascism as Hitler’s Nazism, or ISIS’s “Islamofacism” or Scientology’s profiteering through thought control or the fascistic tones one can see in the USA’s Military and Intelligence Apparatus (NSA spying, Drones, etc). And I think, at least in the MCU, Hydra’s flavor of Fascism is… especially idealistic. It seems to me to be much more concerned with building something new rather than tearing town something old. It feels… optimistic. It feels more… global. Nazism was founded on exclusionism. On a master race. ISIS enslaves and destroys the nonbelievers. Scientology labels everyone else an SP. Hydra considers those who aren’t inside it its enemies, but they want to extend their glorious regime and “protection” over everyone. They want everyone to be a member of Hydra, in a way.  Hydra’s fascism is the fascism for the modern world. And that’s what makes them so scary. Hydra is the fascism for the modern, interconnected, globaized world. Its the fascism for the world where the borders are slowly being erased. Its a fascism that can appeal to people from every background and every country and every religion and every ethnicity and every class. Because everyone can look out the window. 

(via kyliafanfiction-archive)

A somewhat Dated post, but I’m still quite proud of, in a lot of ways.

#Hydra#Queue
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kyliafanfiction-archive

Sitcom Idea

The current evil dark lord has received a prophecy that a child born on this day in this particular village will, eventually, be the one to kill him. His advisors suggest he go and kill the kid (only kid born that day in that village, only gotta kill a few people) but the dark lord, being genre savvy as he is, decides not to try something so guaranteed to fail. 

By sheer luck - no fault of his - the kid’s mother was a single mom and died in childbirth, so he goes in disguise as a member of some order of monks or whatever, and offers to take the child in and raise them in the order, a common thing for the setting. The local church priest, who had been left with the kid, sees no issue, so off the kid goes with the “monk”

And now the Dark lord is going to raise the kid and give them whatever they want, raises them well and when the kid is old enough, cut a deal with them - I keep giving you whatever you want, and then, when I’m old, frail and on my deathbed, you can suffocate me with a pillow. Deal?

But all the Hijinks getting that far, as the dark lords advisors concoct crazy schemes to kill the kid that never work, and the dark lord has to deal with being a parent (and during the most stressful periods muses ‘maybe the kid is going to kill me by stress-induced heart attack?’ and things like 'You’ll be the death of me one day, kid’) and various would be heroic mentors keep trying to convince the kid to turn on their 'father’ or whatever…

That sounds hilarious as fuck to me.

#QUEue
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buffyboleyn
Buffy University: A Virtual Bibliography & Resource for Buffy Studies.
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buffyuniversity.wixsite.com

Guess what? As part of my graduate program, I am currently developing a digital research portal/bibliographical reference source for the academic study of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

At Buffy University, you can browse academic resources by character and discipline! This is geared mostly towards undergraduates who might like to pursue projects based on the show and want a place to begin research.

It’s an on-going project (potentially indefinitely) so there are still dead links and ugliness. If you have any comments, contact via the webpage or tell me here what you think!

#Buffy the Vampire Slayer#Queued For Queues Sake
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Orion Team Masterpost

Orion Team is a sci-fi story/universe centered around the Black Ops “Orion Team” which is part of the Office of Extrafederation Security, tasked with advancing the interests of the Earth Federation in the Kolias Sector, an unorganized region of space. OES recruits from the military, civilian law enforcement or intelligence agencies and civilians in general as needed and able, and a such have a diverse array of options and styles, often mixed up and all around. The members of Orion Team are Daniel Ortega, Charkatus Victorae, Amy Kostas, Lung Jiao and Gregory Elliot. There are a number of characters in Orion Team’s support staff, but the ones of any real relevance are Arthur Wood, Sarah Townsend and Natasha Richter.

Orion Team begins in July, 2817 C.E.

In the Orion Team Universe, there are a number of alien races. The most important are:

  • Romnivirians: Romnivirians are a mammalian species, native to the world of Romnivir. They were a united planet by 1,800 BCE achieved hyperspace flight around 1,500 BCE. They would go on to conquor a great many species, and at one point, were looking to expand in Earth’s direction after scouts found it (though it would have taken them a century at their normal pace to colonize all the worlds between their space and Earth - Earth happens to be in a region of space with few sentinent species evolving on the , but a series of rebellions by the Centai Races (an alliance of five species - see below) and a civil war broke the back of the Empire’s expansionary urges for many a century. Today, the Romnivirian Empire is a close ally of the Earth Federation, and though they are plagued by rebellions, revolts and the odd small-scale civil war, they survive, albeit not... healthily. How they still exist is credited to the resiliency of the Imperial system, the alliance with Earth and their habit of having especially clever emperors or empresses rise to the throne (by inheritance or... not) at just the right time. A number of species are still subjects of the Empire, and just over half of them are full imperial citizens, with all the rights and privileges (and duties) of Romnivirian citizens.
  • The Centai Races: Over one hundred housand years ago, a species called the Raezon from either a distant portion of this galaxy, or another one altogether, settled on the planet now called Centai, and began a program of playing evolutionary god. They manipulated the DNA of five (very) different sentient species in particular (Vorcalians, Telchuri, Derach, Kopelians and Brevescari) making them each more specialized (with the intent of all five being slave races doing specific things for them) and exterminating several other sentient spaces (one of the reasons Earth is a bit lonely, as it were). The Raezon were eventually driven off by the Vestari (see Below) some 50,000 years ago These five were, in time, conquored by the Romnivirians, but eventually they rebelled and united, intially out of mutual defense against Romnivirian reconquest. Centai was picked for its central location (or so they thought) but then it was discovered soon after what the Raezon had done, and how they had manipulated the Centai Five to each see members of the other races as almost members of their own, and to want to come to Centai. While the Raezon were not there to be their masters, the five races realized that their specializations would do them well to work together, and so they do. The Centai Republic is an aggressive stellar nation, that belives the Centai Five are superior to all other forms of intelligent life. They have engaged in a great many wars of attempted conquest against Earth and the Romnivirian Empire, but with only middling success. the Earth/Romnivirian-Centai DMZ is some of the most militarized space in known interstellar history (or so say the Vestari)
  • Vestari: The Vestari are the most advanced species in known space. They achieved hyperspace 250,000 years ago. These four-armed, ten-feet tall, six-eyed beings are incredibly cagey about the specifics of their history, or about things like the Raezon, or the Hyplontians (see below) who they uplifted (partially). They do let little dribs and drabs out here and there - for example, their Ambassador to Earth once told the EF’s prime minister that Vestari had been to earth twice before the start of Earth’s atomic age, but refused to say when or why (or what they did). Its unclear if they do this for their own amusement (one common theory) or because they are playing some long mysterious game (a common conspiracy theory). The Vestari Hegemony doesn’t trade with the other powers of known space much, but every once in a while (usually about every ~50 years). they go out, purchasing large quantities of raw materials and selling tech that is just ever so slightly better than what is currently available. Non-Vestari are only welcome in one city on the moon of the Vestari Homeworld, Vestar Prime, which is colloquially called ‘The Alien City’. When asked about what they do, or why they do things, Vestari will be maddeningly vague if they answer at all. Sometimes though, they’ll drop mutually contradictory hints, answer questions with seemingly suggestive questions, or (rarely) the asker will wake up two days later, be told they were told the answer to their questions and the answers proved too much for them that they beged the Vestari to remove them from their memory.
  • Hyplontians: An insectoid, hive-minded species ruled by Queens and the handful of non-Drone breeds, the Hyplontians were uplifted to sleeper ships and relatavistic drives some 4,000 years ago by the Vestari for reasons of their own. Each Hyplontian Planet is riled by one or more hive queens, and each Queen struggles for dominance over their peers. But when they are united, they are formidable. Xenophobic to the extreme, they will often launch wars of invasion aginst the Earth Federation, all of which have always been only just more or less held back.During times of peace, the Hyplontians and the EF maintain a Neutral Zone. The Hyplontians trade with no one, though they do have an embassy to the Vestari.

There are other alien species (examples - the Sytala, the Eltherians, the Mascari, the Cailax, etc), but those are the big four/eight (since there’s five Centai species), plus humans.

Humanity is not united, however. The Earth Federation is the most populous and most powerful of the Human Stellar nations, but there are others. The ones with the political, military and economic muscle to operate beyond their solar system and maybe one or two others nearby are

  • The Systems Confederacy: A loose economic, military and political union designed largely to allow each member world to retain their own unique identity in the face of the EF’s steady advancement. Territorially, the largest human stellar nation, but has about half the population of the EF. Were it not for the Hyplontians and the Centai (and the EF’s desire to not launch overt wars of aggression - they like to see themselves as the good guys), the EF could, with significant cost, beat the SC in a war with ‘ease’ (as it were.) The Systems confederacy is backed by the renegade megacorp, Epsilon Industries. 
  • The Halifax Unity: Advanced genetic manipulation is against the law in the Earth Federation - the Halifax Unity was founded by the Halifax Group, a cabal of geneticists and philosphers who believed that humanity should uplift itself into better, smarter, stronger, etc forms through genetic manipulation from the Fetus on up. They are very small, compared to the EF, but continue on because the EF A) hates overt wars of aggression, and B) likes to use the Halifax Unity as a convenient dumping ground for scientists and the like who reject the EF’s draconian laws on advanced genetic modification. Also as a scary example to hold up and say ‘see! This eugenics-obsessed state is what happens when we let genetic modification run amock!’ Man for man, any given Halifaxer is stronger, faster, healthier, longer lived and ‘smarter’ than a non-modified human, however. Just... not anywhere near as many of ‘em. 
  • The Newflesh Dominion - basically the Halifax Unity, but with Cybernetics. Right down to the scary example and dumping ground qualities)
  • The Varis Republic - a somewhat libertarian (albeit sane about it) state that expects the EF will absorb them sooner or later, but hopes to cut a deal to allow them to be absorbed as a single unit and keep some of their own preferred economic policies. In the meantime, it plays the Systems Confederacy and the EF off against eachother. 
  • Imperium Novae Romae - The Empire of New Rome. Founded initially some 450 years ago, when a trio of sleeper ships that left earth in 2081, financed and led by the Classical-History obsessed billionaire Fredrich Zoloman. Today, they speak Latin, organize themselves in ways modeled on the Romans and in general, act exactly as the name suggests. They entertain the notion that they can make conquering them by force too much of a hassle for the EF to ever try it, and to resist EF economic manipulation, they have a close relationship with Epsilon Industries subsidiary, Gladius Corp. 

Again, there are others, but those are the biggies.

Post Registry

#Incomplete Post#Reference For Myselfe#Queued For Queues Sake
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wordsnstuff

Useful Writing Resources

This is an extensive list of resources for every problem you could come across while writing/planning/editing your novel. Use it well;)

{ *** } Indicate a Highly Reccommended Resource

Planning/outlining Your Work

Writing Your Work

Characters

Editing

Setting

Miscellaneous Resources You Can Use In Between

Writing Sketchy/Medical/Law

Writers’ Block Help/ Productivity

Info You Need To Know & Words You Didn’t Think Of

Using Feedback And Reviews

Authonomy Teen Ink Figment Fiction Press ReviewFuse
These Are Trusted Critique Sites ;)
#Reference#Queued For Queues Sake
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artemis-entreri

Rations for various RPG Races

[[ Source. Original creator: wats6831. Additional information and images linked under each one. ]]

Universal:

Homemade artisan herb bread, home grown and dried apples and prunes, uncured beef sausage, munster cheese. Made a small bag from cheesecloth and tied it closed.

Discussion thread here.

Dwarf:

Garlic chicken livers, smoked and peppered cheese, spiced pork sausages, hard tack, dried vegetables, dried wild mushrooms.

Discussion thread here.

Elf:

Top left to right: Evereskan Honey Comb, Elven Travel Bread (Amaretto Liquer Cake with custom swirls), Lurien Spring Cheese (goat cheese with garlic, salt, spices and shallots), Delimbyr Vale Smoked Silverfin (Salmon), Honey Spiced Lichen (Kale Chips), and Silverwood Pine Nuts.

Discussion thread here.

Halfling:

From upper left: “Honeytack” Hard tack honey cakes, beef sausage, pork sausage mini links, mini whole wheat toast, cranberry cheddar cheese mini wedge, mini pickles, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, lower right is my homemade “travel cake” muesli with raisins, golden prunes, honey, eggs and cream.

Discussion thread here.

Half-Orc:

Wrapped in cheesecloth and tied in burlap package. Forest strider drumsticks, molasses sweet wheat bread “black strap”, aged Munster, hard boiled eggs, mixed wild nuts.

Discussion thread here.

Orc:

Orcs aren’t known for their great cuisine. Orcs prefer foods that are readily available (whatever can be had by raiding), and portable with little preparation, though they have a few racial delicacies. Toughs strips of lean meat, bones scavenged from recent kills, and dark coarse bread make up the bulk of common orc rations.Fire roasted rothe femur (marrow is a rare treat) [beef femur], Strips of dried meat (of unknown origin) [homemade goose jerky], foraged nuts, only edible by orcs….nut cracker tusks [brazil nuts], coarse black bread, made with whatever grains can be pillaged [black sesame bread], Pungent peppers [Habanero peppers stuffed with smoked fish and olives].

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Gnome:

Pan fried Delimbyr smelt, spiced goat cheese (paprika crusted hand pressed Fontina), Gnome shortbread (savory pistachio), glass travel jar filled with Secomber Red (wine), hard boiled quail eggs packed in rolled oats (to keep safe), dried figs from Calimshan, and Southwood smoked goat sausage (blood sausage).

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Lizardfolk:

Lizardfolk are known to be omnivores, forage for a surprising variety of foods found within the confines of their marshy environs, in this case the Lizard Marsh near Daggerford. Fresh caught boiled Delimbyr Crayfish on wild chives, coastal carrageen moss entrapping estuary brine shrimp (irish moss, dried brine shrimp), Brackish-Berries (blackberries), Blackened Dart-Frog legs (frog legs) on spring sprouts (clover sprouts), roasted bog bugs on a stick!

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Drow:

From top left: Menzoberranzan black truffle rothe cheese (Black Knight Tilsit), Donigarten Moss Snails (Escargot in shallot butter sauce), Blind cave fish caviar in mushroom caps (Lumpfish caviar), faerzress infused duck egg imported from the surface Realms (Century egg), Black velvet ear fungus (Auricularia Black Fungus Mushroom).

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Drow will also eat A Fucking Rock if it’s goth enough

you know what im gonna reblog this to my main as well as my aesthetic blog because this post kicked my ass

#Lore#Worldbuilding#Queued For Queues Sake
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astreiants-archive

because you can never have too many lgbtq+ rec lists right? here’s yet another one for your pleasure. i’ve tried for the most part to include books by lgbtq+ authors (there are some that aren’t, i realise, mostly because they were so good i had to include them), and i’ve also, to the best of my knowledge/memory, put trigger warnings alongside.

criteria for inclusion

  • happy ending
  • no bury your gays
  • lgbtq+ character is the/a main and gets a pov
  • not harmful representation
  • lgbtq-ness is not the only plotline - tho there may be argued to be some exceptions to this included. i mean more like, the plot does not revolve around them realising they’re gay and having a terrible time of everything before someone (usually straight) tells them they’re allowed to be happy or whatever. you know what kind of book i mean.
  • most importantly (lol) i liked it

p.s. there will be more parts to this, as i read more. if there’s one not on here that you think should be, feel free to ask about it. i’ll either have not read it or it’ll be excluded for one of the reasons above. equally, if there’s one on here with bad rep of any sort, let me know and i’ll take it off.

Keep reading

#Books#Queued For Queues Sake
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prokopetz
Anonymous asked:

Are there any TRPGs that involve little to no combat and encourage conversation and interaction between players more than anything else?

prokopetz answered:

A few past recommendations that might fit the bill (links to the relevant recommendation post included):

  • Breaking the Ice - A two-player RPG about two characters going on a series of dates. It’s arguably designed to be played as part of a date, so it’s quite specialised as tabletop games go. Many of Emily Care Boss’s other games - some of which are available for free - might also fit the bill.
  • Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine - A slice-of-life game about the daily drama of young gods in a pastoral small town. Notable for how it mechanically encourages personal narrative arcs; in some genres, having heartfelt conversations with other players is literally worth XP.
  • The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - A game of competitive bullshitting. It’s a bit of an odd one for your requests, as the resulting stories will very often involve combat, but it’s not something the mechanics engage with - it’s just something you describe happening.
  • Golden Sky Stories - A localised game about magical talking animals having whimsical adventures in rural Japan. The objective is literally to score friendship points. Basic combat mechanics are included, but actually using them ranges from pointless to actively counterproductive.
  • Noumenon - Player characters awaken, amnesiac, in the bodies of giant insects, and explore a sprawling, seemingly inescapable mansion outside time and space in search of enlightenment.You do fight things from time to time, but it’s not a big focus.
  • The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach - A competitive, GMless game of campus politics in a New England university town; you and your fellow players may or may not be possessed by a soul-eating telepathic cockroach from the dawn of time.
  • Sufficiently Advanced - A politics/exploration-based game set in a post-scarcity transhuman future. Everything from “regular human” to “sapient city” can be a rules-legal starting character. The current edition includes several settings, some of which encourage combat and some of which really don’t.
  • Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist - A high concept tabletop-roleplaying-games-as-art piece in which players collaboratively define not only the world the game takes place in, but the game mechanics that govern it. It only has combat rules if you choose to define some.

I’ve also got a few games I haven’t plugged before that could be what you’re looking for:

Adventures of the Space Patrol

A semi-comedic game about a bunch of high-powered weirdos from space who go around solving people’s ridiculous personal problems. To get an idea of the tone, picture a cross between old-school Boys’ Own adventure stories and Star Vs. the Forces of Evil and you’ll be in the right ballpark. Fighting does happen from time to time, but it’s explicitly not allowed to solve the problem at hand, and nobody ever gets killed or even seriously injured as a result - there’s really no game-mechanical incentive to do it.

Though nominally a standalone game, it’s based on Fate Accelerated Edition, so familiar with the latter may prove necessary. Fortunately, FAE is a pay-what-you-want game, so if you’re flat broke you can still get it for free.

The Dance and the Dawn

A fairy tale/puzzle game in which players take on the roles of the Ladies of Ash, who’ve come to the Ice Queen’s crumbling palace to court the enigmatic Lords of Ice. The core conflict resolution mechanic is ballroom dancing, represented with playing pieces on a chess-board. Admittedly a bit heteronormative in its premise, but there’s no rule that actually demands that the Lords of Ice have to be men - you can tweak that aspect of it pretty easily.

Unfortunately, the PDF version seems to have been temporarily withdrawn from sale at the time of this posting - I’ll definitely update if that changes. In the meantime, there’s also a LARP adaptation you can check out, though the fact that it requires a minimum of sixteen players means it’s likely to be one of those games you’ll read and never play. (The tabletop version demands a more forgiving 3-5 participants.)

Itras By

A localised Norwegian game about surreal urban fantasy in a city - the titular Itras By - that’s vaguely reminiscent of the major metropolises of continental Western Europe circa 1920. The basic premise is that, while the city centre is stable and relatively “normal”, reality becomes progressively more unhinged the further you stray toward the outskirts, eventually breaking down into pure psychedelia. Player characters are, of course, people who have some pressing reason to stray. The rules are collaborative, improv-oriented and very light, revolving around a deck of printable cards that, when drawn, specify what you’ll need to do or sacrifice in order to succeed (or lessen the sting of failure).

Both the PDF and print versions (in a bewildering variety of formats) are available here. If you go for print, the standard colour option is mostly good enough; the interior illustrations are actually black and white, with colour being used only for the headers and page borders.

(Also, at the risk of being somewhat self-serving, you might check out my own Costume Fairy Adventures. It can involve a lot of combat or very little, depending on your players’ inclinations, but combat isn’t “special” in game-mechanical terms - it’s resolved in the same way as any other disagreement between characters.)

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prokopetz

Just bumping this post to note that The Dance and the Dawn - described above - has become available in PDF again. It can be purchased here, if anyone is interested (and I know some of y’all are, since I’ve received several asks about it since the original post went up!).

#roleplaying#Queued For Queues Sake
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prokopetz
babahasgun asked:

Hey, what are some of your favorite tabletop RPGs?

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prokopetz answered:

Hoo, boy - that’s a tough one!

Well, first off, I’m not too much of a gaming hipster to put Dungeons & Dragons on my list. I wouldn’t pick out any one edition as a clear favourite; I appreciate both OD&D and 4th Edition for the focus and rigour of their mechanical design, for all that they’re aiming at very different design goals, 2nd Edition is my favourite for setting fluff and general high weirdness, and I admire 3rd Edition’s purity of purpose, if not always its actual execution. I imagine I’ll even come around on 5th Edition, once it finally decides what sort of game it’s trying to be.

Beyond D&D, I’m not much of a fan of many big-name titles - I never said I wasn’t a gaming hipster at all! - so it’s mostly high-concept indie stuff from here on out. This shouldn’t be taken as any sort of top ten; they’re merely the first ten that sprang readily to mind. Here we go:

  • Among the Beautiful Creatures (direct PDF link) - A playtest draft of an unreleased game about a world that’s perpetually ending, populated entirely by shapeshifting monsters who resemble nothing so much as Muppets. Picture Jim Henson does Fritz Leiber and you’ll be in the right ballpark. (Content warning for graphic descriptions of child abuse, including in the introductory fiction.)
  • Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine - A game about young gods growing up in a pastoral small town. The core system is a downright fascinating piece of game design, basically taking the idea of XP rewards for roleplaying and driving it to its logical-yet-absurd conclusion: quests take the form of specific character development arcs, which you advance by invoking appropriate tropes and story beats. Conflict resolution uses a combination of blind bidding and semantic arguments (yes, really!).
  • The Dance and the Dawn - A narrative game for 3-5 players who take on the roles of the Ladies of Ash, come to the crumbling palace of the Ice Queen to court the enigmatic Lords of Ice. (Or ladies, if you prefer; the default setup is admittedly a bit heteronormative, but there’s nothing that actually demands the Lords of Ice be men.) The game is diceless, with resolution employing pieces on a chess board.
  • Fate Accelerated Edition - Unless you’re totally new to the tabletop roleplaying hobby and/or you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, you’ve probably heard of FATE. FAE is a super-lightweight version of the game, perfect for casual or pick-up-and-play games. By default, it’s focused on YA fantasy adventures, though there are expansion packs available that adapt it for everything from giant robots to competitive cooking to a tabletop adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit - and no, I’m not making that last one up.
  • Lady Blackbird - A fantasy space opera game that’s a true masterclass in minimalist design. The entirety of the basic core rules fit on your character sheet, so everything you might need to reference as a player is right there. The book is a game and adventure in one, with the default scenario revolving around helping the eponymous Lady Blackbird (who can be a player character, if you want) escape from an arranged marriage and meet up with a notorious pirate lord.
  • Nobilis - A companion game to Chuubo’s (see above), this is a much higher-powered iteration of the same basic idea, focusing less on heartwarming small town life and more on punching the Sun. It’s in the running for the RPG with the most descriptively high-powered player characters; a correctly built starting PC is capable of performing miracles that affect the entire observable universe, and matters only escalate from there.
  • Ryuutama: Natural Fantasy Roleplay - A localised Japanese game about people going on overland journeys; think Oregon Trail by way of Hayao Miyazaki. Fairly old-school in its design sensibilities; if you’re a D&D fan, you’ll find a lot that’s familiar here, along with a lot that’s not. The GM is an actual character within the game, taking the form of an invisible dragon who watches over and guides the party’s travels.
  • The Shab-al-Hiri Roach - A competitive, GMless game of campus politics in a small New England university town. The twist is that any given character may or may not be possessed by an evil brain-sucking cockroach from the dawn of time; if you’ve got the roach, you’ll occasionally be subject to irresistible telepathic commands, represented by randomly drawn cards written in ancient Sumerian (with English subtitles, of course).
  • Valley of Eternity - A game in the classic swords and sorcery mould, focusing on gritty adventure in an unforgiving wilderness. Players take on the roles of outcast warrior-philosophers, sworn to defend the very communities that shun them, both through strength of arms and with the aid of esoteric mental disciplines that allow them to craft cunning illusions, manipulate objects from afar, or even imprison enemies within their own minds. Also, all playable characters are penguins.
  • Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (direct PDF link) - When folks talk about tabletop RPGs that are so high concept they’re barely playable, this is what they mean. Player characters inhabit a world that does not, properly speaking, exist, and it’s their responsibility to bring it into being. Includes rules for players declaring setting details, inventing new game mechanics on the spot, and even deposing the GM and taking her place!

Other favourites that didn’t get full descriptions only on account of I didn’t think of them first include Blades in the Dark, Blue Rose, Danger Patrol, Die For You, Dogs in the Vineyard, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Feng Shui, Golden Sky Stories, Hero Kids, Itras By, Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, Paranoia, Perfect (Unrevised), Pokéthulhu, Risus, Sufficiently Advanced, Tenra Bansho Zero, Traveller, and Unknown Armies; I’ve included links to previous recommendation posts where the game in question is discussed, if available.

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#Roleplaying#Queued For Queues Sake
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reblogged
roksanalyasin
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alliaofrph
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writeinspiration

WRITING HELP/CHARACTER

How about some writing resources for those post-NaNoWriMo blues?

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asoulonfire

So many writing references! Now I have to actually … well…. write.

#Writing References#Queued For Queues Sake
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