Game Studios Learn To Optimize Your Fucking Games Challenge.

The “Necromancy is evil“ we see in most fantasy worlds stems from a christian view of having to honor the body after death in a certain way to ensure the soul’s safety in the afterlife. And while I encourage you to explore societies that don’t see necromancy as evil, I also encourage you to explore societies that see necromancy as evil for different reasons.

Drow might believe that after death, your body belongs to Lolth and must be fed to spiders. Reanimating a body means stealing from Lolth and must therefore be punished.

A Zoroastrian inspired society might believe that with death, evil starts infesting the body, so dead bodies must be kept away from the community, and reanimating them keeps them in the community and is therefore bad.

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

inspired by the dsmp one

My tired, d&d poisoned brain read this as Biden's staff of holding.

Biden’s staff holding a vigil when what they need to do is jump his ancient ass

I don't care about Dungeon Meshi otherwise but "Tallmen" is SUCH an elegant solution to placing humans in a fantasy setting that it's still blowing my mind. Just the term itself is enough to instantly recontextualize humans. They're no longer the default race. They're those big goobers with long legs, striding about all the time. I can so easily envision much more interesting relationships between humans and non-humans because of it. Like perhaps "tallmen" are stereotyped as shepherds by other races because they can watch over their flocks better, or as vagabonds because they are better suited to long travel on foot. And of course, they don't *literally* have to be taller than everybody else, they were just the tallest around whenever the label became the norm, or something like that. I just feel like it's so much better than what I've seen in settings like D&D that go "and humans are the... adaptable, generalist people :)!"

Why is no one talking about how the first person is playing a minor. I think that might be a bigger problem.

Lone Wolf by TheImmortalThinkTank (posted with artist permission)

Bonus:

One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.

Thank you. I really needed that.

estrulegen

All spiritual/rational/philosophical teachings have to pass what I call the Porch Test. There's a lot of things that might be helpful to you, but pale in comparison to Chilling On The Porch For 10 Minutes. For me to consider something worthy of internalization, it has to at least be as good as The Porch.

This puts tears to my eyes.

just painted an onion on a cutting board and i think it’s the peak of my artistic career