So Beautiful....

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25 Traps & Tricks For Your D&D Game...

A collapsing staircase creates a ramp that deposits the Party into a Pit at its lower end.

A ceiling block, or even the entire ceiling, collapses down upon the Party.

The ceiling lowers slowly into the room, as the doors lock shut and trap anyone inside.

A chute opens in floor, depositing the Party in a lower level of the Dungeon.

A loud clanging noise rings out, attracting any nearby monsters.

The door of the Dungeon Room (or other object) is coated in a deadly contact poison.

Touching an object in the Room triggers a Flesh to Stone Spell.

The floor collapses, or is an illusion, sending the Party falling down into another level of the Dungeon.

Several small slits in the ceiling act as a vent that releases a deadly gas.

The floor tiles of the Room are electrified.

A huge statue on wheels rolls down corridor, running over and crushing anything in its way.

The doors of the Dungeon Room lock as the Room slowly floods with water or acid.

A weapon, suit of armor, or rug animates and attacks anything that touches it.

An enormous pendulum, either bladed or weighted as a maul, swings across the Room or down the Corridor,

A hidden pit opens up beneath the Party, causing them to fall into a  Gelatinous Cube that fills the bottom of the pit.

A hidden pit floods with acid or shoots gets of magical flame.

The Party falls into a empty hidden pit. The pit then covers itself as it slowly floods itself with water or acid.

A set of brittle stairs collapse over a pit of spikes.

A large stone block smashes across the hallway.

The walls of a Corridor slowly slide together to crush anything unlucky enough to be stuck there.

A magical crown, when worn, ages the Creature by 1 Year.

A magical staff that, when touched by a living Creature, reduces the Creature’s Size by 1 Category (Medium becomes Small, Small becomes Tiny, etc).

A jewelled skull that gives false directions to any Creature it has not seen before.

A locked wooden chest that induces a great greed in any Creature that successfully opens it.

A scroll case that contains a false map of the Dungeon.

All right... I’m = Lawful & Chaotic Origins. I play the prologues a lot, I’m a total lore nerd and read all the codexes I get my hands. I’ve played past Ostagar a lot. Usually slow down around Orzammer because Deep Roads. Only made it past a few times. I romance everyone fairly equally & can make mean choices if it suits the character too. For DA2 = Neutral fits best, believe 2 is problematic but has some strong points. Love the characters and purple dialogue options because sarcasm is such a mystery to me so having guide to how/when it happens is helpful and fun. Played diplomatic nice blood mage support focus before which makes me slightly annoyed at Inquisition’s Hawke... Sitting there thinking, but aren’t you a blood mage, Hawke the whole time? That was confusing why they did that. INQUISITION = Chaotic = While, I like guides for sidequests, because open world games are too much at once and I need help when there’s 50 things a minute. I fought a dragon way too early, kept trying until I won. Jumped everywhere, the novelty didn’t wear off, tried jump glitch my way up cliffs. Shortcuts! :) Skyhold indulged my eagerness to jump further.

Dragon Age “Favorite Game” Alignments:

Lawful Origins -knows everything about the DA universe -reads all the codex entries -actually knows things about story structure -nerd

Neutral Origins -romances alistair every time -can never bring themselves to make evil choices -loves the music -cries a lot

Chaotic Origins -“FINE DWARVEN CRAFTS DIRECT FROM ORZAMMAR” -just replays all the different prologues over and over -restarts when they get to ostagar

Lawful 2 -thinks DA2 was unfairly judged in comparison to origins -has Strong Opinions ™ about anders -thinkpieces and meta -secretly bitter

Neutral 2 -really just loves all the DA2 characters -like, REALLY loves them -a lot -fix-it fic and coffee shop AUs -probably bisexual

Chaotic 2 -has only played 2 -“wtf is a darkspawn lol” -purple dialogue options -probably a blood mage

Lawful Inquisition -enjoys fetch quests -takes time to craft new weapons and armour at regular intervals -talks to every companion between every single mission -looks up walkthroughs and quickloads whenever a companion disapproves

Neutral Inquisition -Inquisition was their first DA game -avoids fandom drama -just genuinely enjoys all the games -the most chill

Chaotic Inquisition -“HOLY SHIT YOU CAN JUMP” -spends 90% of their time falling off of roofs in skyhold -runs into dragon battles 20 levels too soon and gets destroyed -tries to glitch on purpose

This is incredible

Join us in our talk on Torterra tree care, much needed after our PoGo community day recently.

The water ripple effects on the floor of Palace might hint towards the Sea of Unconscious, a reoccurring idea in Persona. Maybe?

I just thought of something.

So people have pointed out that rain seems to be making an appearance again in Persona 5. The floor of the Palace seems to be wet (as judging by the ripples the characters make when they walk on it), and in that big sequence at the end of PV04 it’s raining pretty heavily, going up to their ankles.

I was wracking my brains as to what the symbolism here would be (it’s Persona, it’s symbolic), when I figured it out.

One of the most significant appearances of rain in any mythology is the concept of a “great flood”, with the most famous of all being Noah’s Flood in the Bible. This flood was created to drown all of the sinners in the world, with only the chosen good people and animals surviving in an ark.

Is a Persona version of the biblical flood coming? I wouldn’t be surprised if our big bad supernatural being with human pawns this time was trying to “wash away” those who don’t fit into its ideas of what is a “good society”. So, it literally and metaphorically floods the Earth, and our heroes have to stop it.

This sounds amazing

An rpg that starts off in new game+ but the party has no memories of their original adventure but everyone else does.

Fun!...

some dnd backstory ideas that give your character a reason to leave home that isn’t “everyone in my family died.” (just to say: i have nothing against those backstories (i use them a lot), but its fun to mix it up!)

family/friends/personal

someone close to you is sick. you need to adventure to find a cure

someone stole something important from you and you need to find it

you’ve received a message from a long lost relative and are trying to find them

someone that you love has been kidnapped (maybe you have to earn money to pay a ransom or complete some deed…)

adventuring runs in the family! everyone is expected to complete one quest in their lives

your family/culture sends people out to complete certain tasks when they reach a certain age as a rite of passage

another player’s character saved you in the past so you feel indebted to them and travel with them, protecting/aiding them

there’s a magical drought in your hometown and you have to fix it

your hometown doesn’t have a lot of jobs so you have to travel and send money back home

some childhood friends and you made a “scavenger hunt” where you try and complete a checklist of certain tasks (ie. defeat a barbarian in hand to hand combat, steal x amount of gold, slay a dragon, etc) in an allotted amount of time

quests/jobs

a god/patron has sent you on a quest to do something for them

you’ve been hired by someone to complete a task (and you get sucked into the big adventure along the way)

you’re on a quest for knowledge. maybe it’s to learn the best ways of fighting, maybe it’s something more academic related

your priest received a vision from your god and they sent you on a quest

you’re writing a book about the world and different cultures and you need first hand experience

you’ve found every map you’ve come across is shitty, so you decide to become a cartographer and make your own

you’re a detective who helps solve crimes and need to travel to solve a particular case

you’re a collector of a certain object and travel across the land to find it

you’re apart of an adventuring academy and have to complete a quest to graduate

you’re an artisan and you travel with your wares, trying to sell them. alternatively, you’re trying to spread word of your business and gain new business partners

you worked at a tavern your whole life where an old bard would sing songs of their adventuring party and that inspired you to go and do some adventuring of your own

feel free to add some of your own!

Reblogging for future reference. Very informative.

Injury angst for writing dummies.

Hospitals and injury are always such a staple of angst fics, but 9 times out of 10 the author has clearly never been in an emergency situation and the scenes always come off as over-dramatized and completely unbelievable. So here’s a crash course on hospital life and emergencies for people who want authenticity. By someone who spends 85% of her time in a hospital. 

Emergency Departments/Ambulances.

Lights and sirens are usually reserved for the actively dying. Unless the person is receiving CPR, having a prolonged seizure or has an obstructed airway, the ambulance is not going to have lights and sirens blaring. I have, however, seen an ambulance throw their lights on just so they can get back to the station faster once. Fuckers made me late for work.

Defibrillators don’t do that. You know, that. People don’t go flying off the bed when they get shocked. But we do scream “CLEAR!!” before we shock the patient. Makes it fun.

A broken limb, surprisingly, is not a high priority for emergency personnel. Not unless said break is open and displaced enough that blood isn’t reaching a limb. And usually when it’s that bad, the person will have other injuries to go with it.

Visitors are not generally allowed to visit a patient who is unstable. Not even family. It’s far more likely that the family will be stuck outside settling in for a good long wait until they get the bad news or the marginally better news. Unless it’s a child. But if you’re writing dying children in your fics for the angst factor, I question you sir. 

Unstable means ‘not quite actively dying, but getting there’. A broken limb, again, is not unstable. Someone who came off their motorbike at 40mph and threw themselves across the bitumen is. 

CPR is rarely successful if someone needs it outside of hospital. And it is hard fucking work. Unless someone nearby is certified in advanced life support, someone who needs CPR is probably halfway down the golden tunnel moving towards the light. 

Emergency personnel ask questions. A lot of questions. So many fucking questions. They don’t just take their next victim and rush off behind the big white doors into the unknown with just a vague ‘WHAT HAPPENED? SHE HIT HER HEAD?? DON’T WORRY SIR!!!’ They’re going to get the sir and ask him so many questions about what happened that he’s going to go cross eyed. And then he’s going to have to repeat it to the doctor. And then the ICU consultant. And the police probably. 

In a trauma situation (aka multiple injuries (aka car accident, motorbike accident, falling off a cliff, falling off a horse, having a piano land on their head idfk you get the idea)) there are a lot of people involved. A lot. I can’t be fucked to go through them all, but there’s at least four doctors, the paramedics, five or six nurses, radiographers, surgeons, ICU consultants, students, and any other specialities that might be needed (midwives, neonatal transport, critical retrieval teams etc etc etc). There ain’t gonna be room to breathe almost when it comes to keeping someone alive.

Emergency departments are a life of their own so you should probably do a bit of research into what might happen to your character if they present there with some kind of illness or injury before you go ahead and scribble it down.

Wards

Nurses run them. No seriously. The patient will see the doctor for five minutes in their day. The nurse will do the rest. Unless the patient codes.

There is never a defibrillator just sitting nearby if a patient codes. 

And we don’t defibrillate every single code. 

If the code does need a defibrillator, they need CPR.

And ICU. 

They shouldn’t be on a ward. 

There are other people who work there too. Physiotherapists will always see patients who need rehab after breaking a limb. Usually legs, because they need to be shown how to use crutches properly.

Wards are separated depending on what the patient’s needs are. Hospitals aren’t separated into ICU, ER and Ward. It’s usually orthopaedic, cardiac, neuro, paediatric, maternity, neonatal ICU, gen surg, short stay surg, geriatric, palliative…figure out where your patient is gonna be. The care they get is different depending on where they are.

ICU.

A patient is only in ICU if they’re at risk of active dying. I swear to god if I see one more broken limb going into ICU in a fic to rank up the angst factor I’m gonna shit. It doesn’t happen. Stop being lazy. 

Tubed patients can be awake. True story. They can communicate too. Usually by writing, since having a dirty great tube down the windpipe tends to impede ones ability to talk. 

The nursing care is 1:1 on an intubated patient. Awake or not, the nurse is not gonna leave that room. No, not even to give your stricken lover a chance to say goodbye in private. There is no privacy. Honestly, that nurse has probably seen it all before anyway. 

ICU isn’t just reserved for intubated patients either. Major surgeries sometimes go here post-op to get intensive care before they’re stepped down. And by major I mean like, grandpa joe is getting his bladder removed because it’s full of cancer. 

Palliative patients and patients who are terminal will not go to ICU. Not unless they became terminally ill after hitting ICU. Usually those ones are unexpected deaths. Someone suffering from a long, slow, gradually life draining illness will probably go to a general ward for end of life care. They don’t need the kind of intensive care an ICU provides because…well..they’re not going to get it??

Operations.

No one gets rushed to theatre for a broken limb. Please stop. They can wait for several days before they get surgery on it. 

Honestly? No one gets ‘rushed’ to theatre at all. Not unless they are, again, actively dying, and surgery is needed to stop them from actively dying. 

Except emergency caesarians. Them babies will always get priority over old mate with the broken hip. A kid stuck in a birth canal and at risk of death by pelvis is a tad more urgent than a gall stone. And the midwives will run. I’ve never seen anyone run as fast as a midwife with a labouring woman on the bed heading to theatres for an emergency caesar.

Surgery doesn’t take as long as you think it does. Repairing a broken limb? Two hours, maybe three tops. Including time spent in recovery. Burst appendix? Half an hour on the table max, maybe an hour in recovery. Caesarian? Forty minutes or so. Major surgeries (organs like kidneys, liver and heart transplants, and major bowel surgeries) take longer. 

You’re never going to see the theatre nurses. Ever. They’re like their own little community of fabled myth who get to come to work in their sweatpants and only deal with unconscious people. It’s the ward nurse who does the pick up and drop offs. 

Anyway there’s probably way, way more that I’m forgetting to add but this is getting too long to keep writing shit. The moral of the story is do some research so you don’t look like an idiot when you’re writing your characters getting injured or having to be in hospital. It’s not Greys Anatomy in the real world and the angst isn’t going to be any more intense just because you’re writing shit like it is. 

Peace up.

Awesome reblogging because Ancient alphabets are awe-inspiring.

Ancient Alphabets. Thedan Script - used extensively by Gardnerian Witches Runic Alphabets - they served for divinatory and ritual purposes, as well as the more practical use; there are three main types of Runes; Germanic, Scandinavian/Norse, and Anglo-Saxon and they each have any number of variations, depending on the region from which they originate  Celtic and Pictish - early Celts and their priests, the Druids, had their own form of alphabet known as “Ogam Bethluisnion”, which was an extremely simple alphabet used more for carving into wood and stone, than for general writing, while Pictish artwork was later adopted by the Celts, especially throughout Ireland Ceremonial Magick Alphabets - “Passing the River”, “Malachim” and “Celestial” alphabets were used almost exclusively by ceremonial magicians

Amazing! Reblogging to remember for writing & character inspiration

Advice from an (Amateur) Archer on Writing About Archers and Archery

Admittedly, I don’t have the widest range of experience when it’s come to archery. I’ve only been shooting for a year now, and the time that I do take to shoot have long months between them. Still, I think it’s important to outline the basics for anyone who wants to write an archer in their book and wants to save themselves the embarrassment of having the archer do something that an archer would never do in a million years.

- Archers usually unstring their bow after battle. Unstringing a bow is exactly what it sounds like: removing the string from the bow’s limbs. Usually, archers then wrap the string around the now-straightened bow so they don’t lose it as easily. Archers unstring bows because everytime the limbs are bent by the string, there is a large amount of tension in the limbs. If the string is on too long and the bow has not been shot for a while, the limbs will start to wear down and lose their power, resulting in an archer needing to buy new limbs or an entirely new bow.

- Archers always retrieve their arrows after battle. Arrows are expensive and take a long time to make, so archers want to conserve as many arrows as possible. Sometimes they have a repair kit with them at the ready, in case they find an arrow with a loose arrowhead or broken fletching that can easily be repaired. 

- Training arrows are not the same as battle arrows. Training arrows have thinner shafts and usually blunted tips so they can easily be removed from targets. Thinner shafts break more easily, and the blunted tips – whilst they can pierce skin – usually won’t get very far in the flesh. They’re also easier to make. Battle arrows are thicker, and their heads are pointed at the tip and have two pointed ends at its sides. This arrowhead is designed to easily pierce through flesh, and is incredibly difficult to pull out because its two pointed ends snag onto flesh. If you want to pull it out, you’d have to tear the flesh away with it, which can lead to an even larger wound.

- Arrows are fatal, and one can incapacitate a soldier for the rest of his life. Arrows are not easily snapped off like you see in movies. The draw weight is too strong, and they can sometimes be as strong as bullets. They will pierce through bone and tendons, which do not easily heal. Furthermore, if you want to remove an arrow, you either have to go through surgery, parting the flesh away from the arrowhead so it doesn’t snag onto anything, or you have you push – not pull – it all the way through the body.

- Bows are not designed for hitting people with in close combat. The limbs are specifically made to flex. Imagine hitting someone with a flexing piece of wood. If you hit with the middle of the bow, it still does very little because there is no weight behind the bow, and so you might as well be hitting them with a pillow. It might be annoying to the opponent, but it won’t save you. Archers need a secondary blade in close combat. They cannot strike people with their bows and expect to win.

- Draw weight affects speed, range, and impact. Draw weight is measured in pounds, at least in America, and it is measured in how much weight must be pulled when you draw back the string. A high draw weight means stiffer, thicker limbs that can shoot further and hit harder. But, this is at the cost of speed. A low draw weight means thinner, more flexible limbs that can shoot smaller distances and have low impact, but can be shot faster. Before you acrobatic fanatics immediately seize the smaller bow for its speed, understand that a bow’s advantage is in its range. No one can hit an archer from 300 meters away with their spear or sword. The archer has complete dominance over the battlefield in this way, and their arrows can kill anyone who gets too close. Not hurt. Not annoy. Kill. And a higher draw weight means a better chance of piercing through specific armor, then flesh, then bone. A lower draw weight means less range and, even worse, a lower chance that the arrow would even pierce through armor if the arrow even hits its target. 

- Bows will always be outmatched in close combat against any other weapon. Bows take too long to draw and shoot, and at such close range, the opponent has an easier chance to dodge oncoming arrows. I already explained that the bows themselves cannot be used to take down a foe. 

- Bowmen on horseback are utterly terrifying. Archers usually can’t move from their spot because range is more important than mobility, and at such a long range, you usually don’t need to move from your spot anyways. Bowmen on horses, however, are closer to the battle, and worse, they are faster than almost anyone on the battlefield. Not only are they difficult to hit, you have no way of predicting where they will shoot next because they can circle around you in confusing ways. If you want an interesting archer character, I’d advise trying these guys out.

- Never underestimate armor and padding. Arrows will never be able to pierce through plate armor because its curved surface will always deflect oncoming arrows. Arrows can pierce through maille because maille is made out of metal rings that can be bent and can fall away. However, padding usually lies underneath, which is surprisingly durable and can stop an oncoming arrow, as well as absorb some of its impact. Because of this, make certain that the archer is focusing on gabs in the armor. To know this, you MUST study armor. Gabs usually lie where the joints are because soldiers need those gabs open so they can move. Typical gaps lie in the neck, the armpit, the inner-elbow, the knees, and the palm of the hand. Impact is also an archer’s friend. A war arrow shot by a hundred pound bow, hurtling at incredible speeds and gaining momentum the further it travels, can evoke serious damage. To be hit by one of these arrows will feel more like being hit by a horse than being hit by someone’s fist. 

This is so pretty!! 🤩 I am reblogging this so I can remember to figure out where this from later & so I can go… oooh pretty architecture!

Okay I'm officially in love with the new backgrounds for the new story