I see no borders from up here my modded console.

As a short person, I found this guide very useful to face problems that arise in my day-to-day life.

There’s a lot of great stuff here, but for some reason the thing that completely broke me is having “Desert Island”, a small isle with nothing but sand and a single palm tree, in the middle of lush, green islands.

I’m sure that, if a river was drawn into this map, it would be a ten-headed abomination originating from nothing, going uphill through the mountains, and connecting one side of the ocean to the other.

(Also “Nopon” being an almost 1:1 transposition of Japan, but “Retro Tokyo” is in the wrong place lmao)

What’s Marut?

Still the most glorious piece of homebrew I’ve ever laid my eyes on.

Still haven’t been able to play it because life is a bitch.

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It doesn’t matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we’ve not lost the context of the story.

We literally did. We don’t know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don’t know when, only rough estimates.

For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.

If our civilization falls, there’s no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.

It’s not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.

For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer’s existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, “he” probably didn’t write both poems. It’s far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.

We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc…) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the “original” trilogy, but there’s no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.

There are two types of dnd players.

Those who want to live the fantasy of being able to afford rent.

And those who want to fuck monsters.

Very cool, I really like the aesthetic!

Every character I play is secretly asexual, and I don’t think anyone has realized yet.

The closest I came to come out of the closet was when my Undead Warlock married his Unseen Servant. It was his best friend, they looked up to one another, respected each other, and shared an exclusively platonic relationship.

He prepped the entire ceremony in secret as part of multiple sessions:

• He asked his mentor to put a 6th level Major Image inside his spell storing trinket, which he used to create the perfect setting for the altar.
• He took a dragon scale from the corpse of a dragon the party had slain, and spent money to have an engagement ring crafted out of it.
• He had an outfit made out of very expensive material for the Unseen Servant.
• He put the Unseen Servant spell inside a custom wondrous item that gave him infinite casts of a 1st-level spell.
• He asked the party’s cleric to cast Ceremony.

He then waited for the final battle, and the night before, he gathered everyone without telling them why, took out the ring, cast Unseen Servant and proposed to it. There were a lot of happy noises that evening, especially from the party’s cleric :)

The character I’m playing now is a lawful good city watch who is “married to his job”, and the Paladin has joked multiple times about taking him to a brothel. Bruh, take the hint.

A warforged that escaped the war, met another defector, and together tried to start a new life. Unfortunately, the kingdom sent assassins after them in order to silence them and make sure that they would not switch sides. The human died, but the warforged lived on, carrying with it the remorse of not being able to save them. To honor its friend, it kept the nickname that the human gave it - Hector, which was a pun based on its model name (Tactical Heavy Operations Robot, model H -> H, T.H.O.R. -> Hector).

Survivor’s guilt was the main idea behind the build: It was a Fighter Rune Knight built to tank damage and protect its allies as better as it could (Heavy armor master, Interception fighting style, Cloud rune).

Tanking damage is not optimal in DnD (killing the damage dealer is always the best choice) but it was meant to be a low-level one shot, so it was fine. Unfortunately work, family and other real life issues got in the way and the party wasn’t able to convene on a date where everyone could gather and play for four hours straight.

I wrote my opinions here:

https://lemmy.world/comment/4184181

Long story short: i like the idea, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and it’s basically unusable at this point. It’s very unbalanced, some buildings are clearly more useful than others, and having one bastion for each player is overkill. It also requires the campaign to stick to a very specific time schedule (a few weeks per level) that I honestly find very difficult to fit in any of the pre-existing modules, and certainly not any of the homebrew campaigns I’ve played with my friends.

“Guys, homebrews are allowed, but please, choose something that’s viable and not too abstruse.”

“No worries! By the way, I found this homebrew class in DanDWiki and it seems really cool, can I use it?”

DM screams and cries

That can only be possible when the player knows that slavery is evil, but is role-playing a character who doesn’t know it/has never really thought about it.

But the bit about wanting to be a good slave owner like a pre-civil war slaver, and that someone can only be good or bad relative to their culture, implies that it was said out of character. The fact that a person really believes that there is a difference between good and bad slave owners (and specifically mentioned the pre-civil war era, lol) is a massive red flag.

First of all, it’s stupid: just because slavery exists in your society, you don’t need to be a slaver. Good people can exist in a corrupt society as well. If they didn’t, we’d still have slavery today. Heck, one of the most famous DnD characters is a dark elf who cut ties with his people to fight for the Good (Drizz’t). If slavers are brought up in a good campaign, the obvious conclusion would be to stop them, not to take part in the evil system.

There’s also the fact that, if the campaign is specifically asking for good-aligned characters, nobody would expect someone to “well, akshually slavery can be good” them. Like, maybe it is (it’s not), but you’re explicitly not playing a good character, so why are you doing that? Join any other group out there. This group probably doesn’t want you to shift on them the burden of discussing why drowning puppies in the well is a bad behaviour, while you’re drowning those puppies.

I could also point out that (1) the fact that he doubled and tripled down on his intention of owning slaves, and quit the table because of it, is kind of moronic, and (2) depicting the girl of the party specifically as a “screaming queen” rings of misogyny as well.

Also, I’m not really going to give the benefit of the doubt to someone whose idea of a good character is a cosplay of a pre-civil war south american slave owner.

Back in the time of Reddit, I saw someone complaining because, after joining a table that expressively required only good-aligned characters, he couldn’t buy slaves at the market.

His logic was that slavery is not morally wrong by itself, and that he would treat the slave well.

He got tons of upvotes for that one, and I lost yet another small speck of trust in humanity.

EDIT: Ha! I still had the screenshot saved somewhere. Now you too can rejoice in hearing sane and balanced argumentations such as “I planned to be a good owner to them, like a good person in the pre-civil war era might do”. You’re welcome.

At least I misremembered the number of upvotes. He got a few, but not many (although, because of how Reddit works, it’s not possible to separate upvotes from downvotes, so he could’ve gotten a lot of downvotes and an even greater number of upvotes). Granted, the fact that that comment was in the positive still makes me sad…

I don’t see the problem with making my own story or filling into the blanks, but I’m not spending money on a product to do that. My imagination is free, I don’t need WotC’s permission to use it.

If you want me to pay for your overpriced books, at least make sure that those books are complete and ready to run. Running DnD modules is, for me, more exhausting than coming up with a homebrew setting. With my homebrew setting I’m in full control of my world and I know what’s where and why things are the way they are. With official modules I’m forced to read a (often poorly worded) world, trying to discern what the author’s intent was, and attempting to salvage as much of a broken product as possible while also making shit up to fill in the abysmal plot hooks and narrative progression full of plot holes and whatnot. At that point I’d much rather throw that shit in the garbage where it belongs and play my own setting.

Now, not all of the paid modules are disappointing, but most are. For example, I’d really want to buy and run the anthologies, as I find them a lot more interesting than full modules (I enjoy running my homebrew content, so I’d use anthologies as plot hooks and filler episodes in-between my own adventure), but I’m not paying for a book that has 20-ish adventures, of which only half are actually good. If there’s no quality control, or your bar is so low that fucking Book of Ravens got printed, then you clearly aren’t even trying.

Ehy guys, we saved the city! We are heroes!

Burning city in the background, people screaming and dying everywhere

That’s a lot of words to say that you like professor Birch more than professor Oak.

That lizard is the Ace card of the party.

In more ways than one.