• she/her, it/its

Pen name: Delila H. Smith (the H is silent). Thirtysomething trans lesbian, snugglemuffin, girlthing. Devil but in like a catgirl sort of way, perennial emotional wreck, too gay for this. Minors, please don't follow.


carrd with social media links (always up to date)
dizzythevoid.carrd.co/

Jackie-Tries-Internet
@Jackie-Tries-Internet

They should make a ttrpg where you getta have a cool sword


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

You are an adventuring party exploring the vast world of Færül, an endless land of small towns, beguiling mysteries, and magical beings. During your group's first adventure, you stumbled across the dying Elminstro Do'arnen, Færül's foremost hero. With his final words, he bequeathed you his collection of legendary weapons. Using their power, it is up to you to right the many wrongs of this land. Strike forth and do justice, Inheritor of the CoolSwords!

Players: Create Characters

  • Choose a style for your character: Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric, Minmaxer, Roleplayer, Flirt, Logged Into FF14, Political Podcast Commentator
  • Choose a type for your CoolSword: Impossibly Sharp, Impossibly Huge, Constantly Emitting Things, Transforming, Sentient, Cursed, Laser, Gun
  • Choose your Number, from 2 to 5. A high number means you're better at Sword (using your sword on people or things). A low number means you're better at Cool. (Resolving any situation without violence is Cool). If an action doesn't seem to fall into either of these, consider whether you COULD be using your sword to do that action instead. If yes, do so and treat it as Sword. If no, it's Cool.
  • Give your character a cool fantasy roleplaying name, like "Froid Baggis"

You have:

  • An outfit appropriate to your Style. (E.g. if you are playing a Flirt it exposes as much of your torso as possible).
  • A backpack full of all the basics you need for adventures (Ropes, lockpicks, implausible maximum carrying capacity).
  • Any nonmagical weapons you would like, in any quantity you would like. They all do 0 damage.

Player goal: Get involved in fantasy shenanigans and learn the true meaning of Cool Swords
Character goal: Choose or create your own: Become king, overthrow the king, become obscenely rich, overthrow the rich, slash bad guys, slash anything and everything, discover legendary treasure, solve the mysteries of existence, create your own cool sword, or make the DM smile

Players: Create your Fantasy Setting.

As a group, pick two strengths for your setting: Bountiful, Traversible, Friendly, Well-patrolled, Treasure-filled, Gods-loved, Strong Economic Currency Conversion, Cavalier Cultural Attitude Towards Wanton Murder
Also, pick one problem: Deadly Wilds, Frequently Raided, Haunted, Strict Laws, Everyone Is Mad At You And You Can't Remember Why, Constant Political Infighting, Overly Complicated Lore Backstory, Swords Are Banned Here

Also Also, pick a Look (Lush, Dry, Mountainous, Coastal, Rocky, Islands, Plains, Cityscapes)
And a Vibe (Rustic, Adventurous, City Living, Survival, Summer Vacation, Decaying Empire, LARP)

Rolling the Dice

When you do something risky, roll 1d6 to see how it turns out. Roll +1d if you’re prepared and +1d if you’re an expert. (The GM tells you how many dice to roll,based on your character and the situation.) Roll your dice and compare each die result to your number.

  • If you're using your Sword on someone or something, you want to roll UNDER your number

  • If you're keeping your Cool, you want to roll OVER your number.

  • If none of your dice succeed, it goes wrong. The DM will say how things get worse.

  • If one die succeeds, you manage it but there is a complication, harm, or cost. If you were rolling Sword, the complication should involve collateral damage.

  • If two dice succeed, you do it well!

  • If three dice succeed, you get a critical success! The GM tells you some extra effect you get.

  • If you roll your number exactly, you have a Cool Sword. Treat the roll as a success, and also choose one of the following:

  1. You realize something important about your Sword. Say what it is, and increase or decrease your Number by one as fits the fiction.
  2. Everyone within view of you is so incredibly impressed/terrified by your Sword that they will give you whatever you want for the next 5 minutes.
  3. You do something incredibly cool with your Sword beyond the bounds of any normal fictional reason or scope. (Chopping a mountain in half, Destoying an entire army, cutting someone's memories away, carving a wormhole into existence, instantly chopping every vegetable in town, destroying a CoolSword)

Helping: If you want to help someone else with rolling, say how you help and roll. If you succeed, give them +1d. If you fail and you were rolling Sword, cause some sort of collateral damage.

DM: Create a Fantasy Adventure

Roll or choose on the tables below

  • An mysterious...
  1. Magical Treasure
  2. Evil Wizard
  3. Political Figure
  4. Innocuous-seeming Quest we took on
  5. Setting-inappropriate Technology
  6. Lore Dump
  • Has...
  1. Become the focus of a nation-wide hunt
  2. Activated a long-sealed spell
  3. Caused mass political upheaval
  4. Trapped an entire city in the bowels of the earth
  5. Set off a countdown to an apocalypse
  6. Caused the players to mistakenly kidnap the king
  • And...
  1. There's a big bounty on offer for anyone who'll solve the problem
  2. Triggered a sudden and deadly invasion
  3. Thrust us into a civil war
  4. We accidentally got conscripted into the revolution
  5. Only CoolSword wielders can bring it to an end
  6. Now we're wanted criminals
  • Which Will...
  1. Probably End Poorly For Everyone Involved
  2. Probably End Poorly For Everyone Involved
  3. Probably End Poorly For Everyone Involved
  4. Probably End Poorly For Everyone Involved
  5. Probably End Poorly For Everyone Involved
  6. Probably End Poorly For Everyone Involved

GM: Run the game

Play to find out how the players deal with the Situation you've created. Thrust them directly into the action and don't let up. Before a threat does something to the characters, show signs that it’s about to happen, then ask them what they do.
"The Great Dragon rears up on its hind legs, ready to slide the peice and capture your rook. What do you do?"
"Zoel smiles and pats your head. 'It's okay. Just because your sword turned me into a slime catgirl and I'm off to rediscover selfhood in my new body doesn't mean you'll never find love again.' What do you do?"

Call for a roll when the situation is uncertain. Don’t pre-plan outcomes—let the chips fall where they may. Use failures to push the action forward. The situation should always changes after a roll, for good or ill - let failures bring about a new situation. Use collateral damage and destruction like salt, especially when players use their swords.

Ask questions and build on the answers. “Have any of you ever prepared seared fish with a flaming greatsword before? Where? How many people died?”




man.

In the IDW comic, Sonic's character arc is wild. It's all about how it's a bad idea to give his enemies "a chance to turn over a new leaf" by just saying something to encourage them to change and then 100% leaving them to their own devices. Like, just the Mr. Tinker thing -- probably more than half the named cast has called Sonic out on that whole mess. Sonic justifies it to Surge by saying he believes in ultimate freedom, which includes the freedom to do bad things and face consequences for it, and killing people would take that freedom away. However, 1. Sonic doesn't actually give them any lasting consequences, and 2. he has enemies who will continue to do bad things, no matter how hard he Gives Them A Chance.

He isn't really wrong to want people to change, of course; Sonic the Hedgehog clearly does not believe in retributive justice, and in fact his philosophy goes all the way through rehabilitative and restorative justice and into, like ... "redemption arc"-ative justice? Generally speaking, this in and of itself is treated by the story as not really wrong, because Sonic The Hedgehog (IDW Comics, 2018) is a children's story, and as such, it has a very black-and-white morality. It's just that Sonic's way of getting what he wants is objectively a mess.

And the next reason for that is because by framing it in those terms to begin with, Sonic is turning this into a direct attack on other people's ideologies. He's not just fighting you because he wants to stop you, he's also fighting you because he wants you to change your worldview and principles to align with his. Kitsunami, of all people, is the first one who calls him out on this, comparing Sonic's desire for his and Surge's redemption to Starline's mind-control.

And I mean like, okay, of course Kit is wrong and his view is warped by said mind-control, and of course Kitsunami and Surge in particular are probably going to end up better than they were after Starline scrungled their brains. But asking people to change their principles, to change themselves, to change that much, isn't necessarily reasonable! And in particular, the fact that Sonic isn't actually going to do anything to you except ruin your immediate plans means that you have no incentive to change! Sonic doesn't even try to debate his enemies, either; he just takes it as a given that his way is The Right Way and that maybe they'll "come around" someday! And it is shown in the story that this doesn't work! It's kind of a wild thing to happen in a story targeted at The 9-To-12-Year-Old Reading Range.™

Do I think Sonic's character arc is going to end up with him snapping necks? No, of course not; even if this wasn't a kid's story, it's also not reasonable to demand that Sonic should change his principles. Do I think Eggman is going to get redeemed? Also no; Sega's obviously not gonna let that happen, so Eggman has been written in the IDW comic as just not being the kind of person who changes.

But I do think that Sonic will ease up on his all-or-nothing approach to Personal Freedom, and he'll at least start to see that there is in fact a middle ground between "killing people, which you should never do ever" and "doing absolutely nothing and hoping really hard that the bad guys change their minds". Maybe some of the comic-original villains will get redeemed, and maybe they won't. Who knows! (If this wasn't a simplified black-and-white-morality kid's story, I'd want someone to sit down and explain to Sonic that you can't reduce the sum total of all ideologies to "the right way" versus "people being bad and/or making mistakes".) But Sonic's going to come to terms with a slightly more complex world, and the story will start furnishing new and idiosyncratic ways for Eggman or the Deadly Six or whoever to escape.