I based a set of D&D villains around the six main stats called Virtues. (think Full Metal Alchemist sins, except Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, etc..) My favorite of the bunch was Charm. Her conceit was she could persuade, lie, cheat, change appearance, and manipulate the players pretty much however she wanted, but the second someone attacked her she would go down. I introduced her relatively early into the campaign, and I was a bit nervous because I was pretty upfront about her introduction. I didn't say it explicitly, but it was pretty obvious Charm was a Virtue from the offset. I thought "well, I like this character a lot, maybe I'll cheat it a little if I have to." Surprisingly, I never did.

In retrospect, I think the context of the Charm encounters was a huge boon. The party really only confronted her twice: the first time at a dinner party and the second at a war council, where leaders from various factions met to discuss retaking the main city for the finale of the campaign. Neither were explicitly combat scenarios, and both times it would have looked pretty bad for the party if they just up and killed Charm for apparently no reason. The end result was I had villain with only eight hit points to her name run around and torment my level 16 party unpunished for several sessions. Let me tell you, as a DM, that felt amazing.

To add onto this as a player perspective, Charm was immediately positioned in such a way that, in the social and emotional dynamics of the roleplay, she was untouchable.

Charms first introduction was as the foreign dignitary of a far off nation who we knew had secret ties to the Church. We were at a mansion dinner party held partially in our honor - we were in part invited directly by the King, who we were favored by and wanted favor from. Charms plus 1 at the party was our party leaders sister - they were good friends. This was all true the second time she appeared at the war council, which was not only an expressly political appearance but also one where she represented the nation from which we were trying to secure military aid from.

It didn't matter at any point that we could have rolled a few dice for an attack roll and destroyed her. To destroy Charm of the six virtues, we had to murder, in cold blood, someone who was well liked, well connected, and well loved by some of the npcs closest to the party.

The only way we defeated her was because when we threatened her, subtly, she tipped her hand. Charm openly threatened the party leader's sister, who from then on no longer believed in her. We came to the bargaining table with her and convinced her (with no deception!) she could leave the battle march and be done with us. And when she got on her boat to leave, as it left port, our Bard (independently of anyone) snuck onto the ship, snuck into her room, and killed her in her sleep. The only kill that character ever got in the entire three year campaign.

It was an extremely well executed factor of the game because it was essentially a social encounter Boss fight. We had to construct and push and change the context of the situation until we could kill her without everything else crumbling around us - personal relationships as well as political ones.

I should add, Bard character *chose* not to kill anyone. She would willingly torment enemies and assist the party in combat, but never did any killing herself. She only killed Charm after everything had been resolved and Charm had effectively exited the campaign. She would have gotten away scot-free if Bard hadn't decided to take action. It was a great moment, and as a DM I couldn't have asked for a better character death

Here's what the fight with Tenacity (Constitution) looked like:

That little red bar at the top is her health. I don't show specific numbers, but I like having the health bar available for players to see so they have a general sense of how wounded the enemy is. I believe for this fight I started Tenacity at 999 HP out of a possible 20,000.

I greatly enjoyed watching my players realize what they were in for after they hit for 50+ damage on their first attack and saw the health bar get one pixel smaller.

Ferocity (Strength) was the most conventional of the Virtues, but context was everything. The players hadn't fought a Virtue yet, and were debating whether to defend some potential allies or lay low, only for the Paladin to slip away and confront Ferocity by himself. I was personally prepared to save the fight for later, but when a Paladin does something heroic and foolish you gotta let them have it.

I did not skimp on Ferocity's stat block either. She had a greatsword fashioned out of a massive hunk of stone that dealt bludgeoning damage and was much too heavy for anyone else to even lift. She could grab players and throw them across the map, resulting in fall damage from the distance thrown. She could chuck her sword at someone and leap to where it landed from a standing position. Paladin stood no chance by himself. The result was a mad dash to the join the fray while Paladin tried to hold out for as long as possible, with new party members arriving round after round to help. It was a very close fight, and my favorite combat of the whole campaign.

Incredibly, Monk found a way to disarm Ferocity after she threw her greatsword at him. He couldn't lift it of course, but he could use his new magic item to teleport away with it and hide it in a nearby river. Ferocity spent the rest of the combat leaping around the map to find it, allowing Barbarian to finish her off. Really ingenious play.

(Pictured above, Ferocity and Paladin.)

Fascinated by stories of the - I guess you'd call it the "stolen identity" genre, like, of the Anastasia Romanov variety. But - from both sides.

Your husband has been at war for thirty years. You married when you were teenagers. The man who returns bearing his name looks... plausible, you don't remember his eyes being quite so blue, but it's been thirty years and it's not like you could ever afford to have a portrait painted. He knows your name and the names of your children and your parents, but there are curious gaps in what he remembers. But war does things to the mind. And if he's kinder than you remember? Kind enough that, maybe, you let yourself believe...

No one has ever looked twice at you, since you're just the maid, until the day a revolutionary bomb goes off, blowing a crater in the summer palace. The famously reclusive duchess and the rest of her household lie dead in the rubble. You know that you and she were the same dress size. You know where her jewels are kept. Most importantly, you know the location of the secret tunnel that leads down to the docks, and to a life overseas that would be torturously hard going for a poor maid, especially one suspected as a thief, but a lot more comfortable for a royal in exile...

The old king's most faithful retainer swears this is the heir to the throne, raised in secret and trained to one day step into his father's shoes. As the usurper as dragged off the throne, she screams that the old king's children are all dead, she made sure of it; no one pays her any heed. (Maybe they should have...)

The man in the tavern is buying drinks for the whole bar before he sets sail tomorrow for the far side of the world. He's got it all figured out - a ship of his own, retirement to a tropical paradise when he gets sick of the pirating life. His lip curls as he talks about the stultifying boredom of the aristocratic world he's already left behind. You find out that his parents recently died, and the estate is in the care of his younger sister, who was only six when her brother first left home two decades since. Between the lines, they sound like a good family; they sound like they love him, the way your family never did. Your heart aches. He shows you portraits, letters, before shoving them carelessly back in his coat pocket. They would be so easy to lift...

It's a surprisingly common concept and I just love it. It's The Return of Martin Guerre; it's multiple 90s romcoms; Agatha Christie pulls it half a dozen times. Sooner or later, it crops up in fanfic for just about any fandom with a royal or aristocratic main character.

And I can see why, because there's so much richness to it. From the outside, it can be anything from a horror story to an unlikely love story; from the perspective of the person pulling off the con, a heist movie or a tragedy or a heartwarming tale of found family. And then there are the longer-term implications: What happens if you wear a mask so long that it becomes who you are? What happens if you come to love the "replacement" to the point where you don't want to find out the truth? What is it like to uncover such a deception a century down the line, to find out that your great-grandfather... wasn't?

Just. Identity stories, man. <3

imagination (1963) - harold ordway rugg

"chekhovs cat / schrödingers razor / occams gun"

Chekov's Cat: if you see a cat in the first act, it will probably be relevant later. (example: Alien)

Shrodinger's razor: an unopened box may or may not contain the solution to the story; there's no way to know without opening it. (example: Monk)

Occam's gun: the simplest way to kill off a character is to shoot them. (example: Bambi)

i have been cracking up at this for the past 3 minutes

Chekov's Box: If there is a container introduced in the opening act, it will be opened later.

Schrodinger's Gun: Treat every gun as if it's loaded unless you've checked it yourself.

Occam's Cat: If you hear strange noises at night, it's probably a cat.

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

God I hate these fucking floating monoliths. They always go, like, 10mph below the speed limit and if you try to pass them they just fucking distort reality around them until you're back behind them again. One of them cut me off on the highway once and when I honked it banished me to a hoary netherworld where I wandered, lost and alone, for untold centuries, trapped in the liminal space between what could have been and what never was, black stars dotting the bright infinity yawning out around me as I drove out of thought and time, through endless ruined cities and blighted lands unmarked by the sun's cold rays, and when I finally got out I was more than 20m late for my dentist appointment and they had to reschedule me.

Hey? Hey holy shit

[Last Part]

Can't have a Yuzu POV without a Karin POV lol~

-0-

Karin makes it back before curfew with fifteen minutes to spare. Their brother had extended hers and Yuzu's curfew to 10pm since they'd hit their double-digits, and she's always been mindful to never break it. Yuzu isn't usually one to stay out late, but Karin likes her freedom to wander around without supervision enough that she isn't going to risk a grounding just because she couldn't be bothered to check the time. Besides, she knows kids her age don't get half as much trust or leeway from their guardians, so Karin isn't going to disappoint Ichigo's expectations by not following the few rules he'd set for them.

Not to mention she has exactly zero faith in her own ability - or honestly anyone else's - to slip under her brother's radar anyway. Only an idiot would think they could, and Kurosaki Karin wasn't raised a fool. Sneaking in late isn't even worth considering.

i just saw the tag “canon complicit” instead of “canon compliant” and im laughing its like “canon is a criminal act that i unfortunately support with this fic”

The Three Grades:

Canon Compliant: “This fic goes along with canon.” (Because I like it? Because I’m too tired to disagree by writing my own fic? Who knows? The author may or may not tell us.)

Canon Compatible: “Listen, I know it ISN’T canon, but think of it as Microsoft Office for Mac, it’s COMPATIBLE with canon, and that counts.”

Canon Complicit: “I have not died a hero, so I have become an accessory to the Villainy of Canon.”

Canon Compatible is a great term for when your fic is Probably Not What Tolkien Would Have Wanted but it doesn’t really contradict anything in canon either

#you can install this fic without canon crashing and that’s what matters

Canon Composite: “This is made up of the pieces of canon I accept, while discarding the stupid stuff.”

I grew up on stories of the Dust Bowl.

My dad’s parents were Okies–environmental refugees, before anyone had a word for it. They left their families, the land they were renting, their animals, took their 1-year-old daughter, and drove to California. My grandpa worked in a peach packing plant. My grandma cleaned houses.

They were so lonely that after a couple years they went back to Oklahoma, with their total savings of $20. Later, they bought land. Built a house. Survived.

My mom’s dad was a kid then, and his family stayed in western Kansas. Stayed because my great-grandpa was too damn stubborn to leave, stayed when their neighbors had all left, stayed because they didn’t have enough money to leave. They slept with wet rags over their faces. My great-grandpa tied a string around his waist, tied the other end to the house, and went to check on the cows, while my great-grandma tried to make soup from a little milk and a little flour. There was so much dust swirling in the air, the soup turned to mud. She cried, begged her husband once more to let them leave, and they went to bed hungry.

My grandpa’s oldest brother was the first one in the county to leave his wheat stubble in the field instead of plowing it under after the harvest. His neighbors made fun of him. His parents scolded him for having messy fields. 70 years later, at his funeral, someone told how people from Japan came to visit the farm, to see what he was doing differently.

More than 80 years after the Dust Bowl, I stood on a mountain in Ecuador watching, horrified, as a man with a tractor plowed a steep field. He would back up the hill, set the disk in the ground at the top of the field, and drive down, breaking up the soil, dragging it downhill. Dust billowed around him.

The man next to me, a rich-for-the-area farmer, sighed happily. “Look at all that dust. Isn’t that great?”

“What? No!” I was shocked.

“Why not? That’s what a modern farm looks like.”

I thought of the old black-and-white photos, dust clouds like black walls rolling in across the prairie. That’s what a modern farm looked like, too.

The next field down, four people and four oxen–well, dairy cows used as oxen–were planting. They used plows, too, but instead of a disk pulverizing the soil, their plow was a straight piece of wood, metal from an old leaf spring bolted to the end. One team of oxen used that plow to open a furrow, the women walking behind dropped maize seeds into the soil, and the second team of oxen dragged the same kind of plow just above the first, closing the furrow and burying the seeds. They walked along the hill–side to side, furrows running along the contour of the hill. If they were raising any dust, it wasn’t enough for me to see from across the valley.

The man with the tractor probably finished in an hour or two. The whole group, people and oxen and all, probably spent the whole day planting the same size field.

As the maize grew tall, you could see the difference: In the tractored field, the top rows were yellow, spindly, trying to root in the yellow-brown clay the topsoil had once covered. Down below, in dark, rich earth, the maize was tall, green, strong.

In Mali, years later, a farmer explained to a group of visiting scientists why, despite having made erosion control bunds, his rows of maize still went up and down the slope, instead of along the contour, parallel with the bunds. “Because of the wind,” he said, like it was obvious–because it was. In the rainy season, the wind comes from the south, and when storms come it blows hard enough to send dust and dishes and clothes left on the line flying and tumbling with it.

The rows of maize have to be parallel to that wind, or they’ll blow over. So sure, you can put the scientists’ earthen ridges in to block the downhill flow of water, but your rows can’t follow that meandering contour. Your rows have to face into the wind. 

For thousands of years we’ve been coaxing, wrestling, dragging our food from the soil. If we’re careful, and lucky, we can make our peace with it. If we charge into places unknown–the high plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, the steep slopes of the Andes, the storm-swept fields of West Africa–if we plow, and plant, and harvest without thinking? Without learning from the place? Dust clouds blackening the horizon, stunted maize on worn-out soil, crops blown down in  thunderstorms–the earth is forgiving, but only so far. We have time to learn, to make mistakes, to do what is easy even when it does harm, but only so much. Beyond that, we destroy the very literal foundations of our lives.

tractors and cattle and new-plowed fields

@copperbadge because I remember you using this as a plot point in Six Harvests

Oh yes – one of the reasons Lea survives as well as it does is that Wild comes home just ahead of the worst part of the Dust Bowl with a brain full of Aggie School, and gets his fellow farmers to terrace and rotate crops.

When I was researching the book, I encountered story after story like the ones above; if folks think they’re unbelievable I’m here to tell you they’re shockingly common. There are families in the midwest now who still put their plates and bowls away face-down because grandma learned as a kid that if you put them away face-up, they catch the dust. After the storms you’d have to sweep off the roof and the internal support beams because the dust would eventually collapse your house otherwise.

I will say – not to argue with but to augment the above – the farmers in the dust bowl weren’t stupid, and by-and-large they weren’t greedy or malicious. The reason we destroyed the heart of the country in the way we did is that they were fucked with. Land speculators, most of whom were greedy or stupid or both, worked on the thesis that “rain follows the plow” – that if you plant a prairie with crops and trees, rain will magically appear. Some of them based this on studies that themselves had been….let’s call it “hopefully falsified”…to support the theories of people who wanted the midwest settled; manifest destiny played a part for sure, but “rain follows the plow” was the curse of the dust bowl.

The farmers didn’t know better; how could they? They did what they’d always done, and had to do it harder and more after the economic collapse post-WWI, and the prairie simply wouldn’t forgive them for it. The indigenous people did know better, but the military genocide had already mostly swept through by the time the land was sold to farmers and stripped bare.

The fact that the midwest today isn’t a barren desert is a miracle of science and good governance, correcting what greed destroyed and poverty perpetuated. The good news is, the Earth is remarkably resilient and wants to grow things. The bad news is that it’s also indifferent to what humanity wants, and if we keep choking it, it chokes right back.

Particularly when the fragility of our topsoil is mentioned, but even these days just with discussions of climate change in general, I think often of the anecdotal story of the sign posted on an abandoned dust bowl homestead:

One hundred miles to water, twenty miles to wood, six inches to hell.

Accessibility tip:

If you want to automate your home a bit, but you don't want any "smart" tech, you can just buy remote controlled power sockets instead

[Image: Five electrical outlet enhancers accompanied by two remotes; each of the remotes has ten buttons: Two for each outlet (one on, one off).]

Cannot express enough my love for these. My entire apartment is on five circuits, controlled by two duplicate remotes. I can turn off the living room lights from my bed, if I forget, without getting up. And no apps needing so nothing to hack or spy on you.

I'm thinking about this post and i have decided that it is one of those things that is a poem in some undefinable way

There’s a lot going on in that little critter’s head right now.

1. Power move. 

2. Why do people whisked away to magical worlds just automatically believe the first creature that tells them what side the person needs to help? Where’s my isekai where the MC slowly finds out they got in with like the deranged zealots and are part of the evil faction, and not the plucky rebels? 

I think about this comic once per week. It’s funnier then anything I can conceive of. Mastery.

no, listen, when I say I want to integrate more specific solarpunk stuff in my life, i don’t mean to ask for yet again new “aesthetic” clothes that now you have to buy or make to show your support of the movement (screw that i’m consuming enough as it is), or more posts about impossible house goals, or whatever, I’m asking you what my options to build a portable and eco friendly phone charger are, im asking you viable tiny-appartment edible plants growing tricks on a budget,  im asking tips to slow down when my mind and society tell me im not fast enough, i don’t need more rich art nouveau amateurs aesthetics or pristine but cold venus project, okay, i know i should joins associations where I am tho i’m constantly on the move, thanks for that, just, you know, can we get a bit more practical ??? how do I hack my temporary flat into going off the grid for the time i’m here

Hello! ☀️ Here are a few practical suggestions for stuff you can do: 

Hope you find something useful in there! I post stuff up from time to time under my diy tag. Feel free to drop me a message if you have any requests!

New Character Unlocked!!!

Mooom, the chocolate alchemist has an accomplice now!

I love how Cedric Grolet, Versailles chef and Parisian absolute master of fruit trompe l'oeil, is seen as chocolate guy accomplice

Source ~ sash1e on TikTok

[Video Transcript:

This goes out to transphobic motherfuckers that are like "yeah but when they dig up your bones in 100 years they are gonna know that you're biologically female." Shut the fuck up, bitch! Jesus. *Begins to play guitar*

*singing* One day when they find my bones in the ground

Whoever they are will say look what we found

A historical find

A relic of time

And they'll never attest that I don't know my mind

One day when they find my bones in the earth

They will not equate who I was to what I'm worth

And they'll find your bones from the same frame of time

And they'll treat your bones just as they've treated mine

We're the same (repeat X4)

One day when they come across my remains

They won't consider assumptions you've made

They will see me not the things that you say

They'll put all my bones in historic displays

I'll be a symbol of what it all means

To be human, to know the earth infinitely

And your bones are there, too, we're both seen as art

It's ironic, the people can't tell us apart

We're the same (X4)

And one day if they find my bones it'll be

Far in the future like 4023

You were so worried about me, I don't think you noticed it

By then all the archaeologists are transgender socialists

And it'll be determined, on the hill on which you died

That in terms of history you were way off on the wrong side

I'll forgive you, with kindness, grace and elegance

And dance for eternity with your stupid fucking right wing skeleton

Rawr! Yeah.

TikTok outro music.

End transcript]

Be warned though, this strat can oneshot anything, including your GPU