This website is too mobile focused these days. Reblog and tell me what your desktop/laptop background is.
it looks like this
just think tumblr should see this error message i just got
airic-fenn asked:
Alright, number 4 for the asks. What creature do you believe in?
gallusrostromegalus answered:
I know for a fact that the Colorado Bigfoot is real, but the truth is that he’s my friend Todd’s dad, Woodstock.
Woodstock is 6'8" and looks like if Treebeard did way too much acid in his youth. He’s an Authentic Mountain Man, and owns a Bison-hide bodysuit from the 1800’s he found in a goodwill that he likes to go hiking in. He also doesn’t believe in property lines or shoes.
So, intermittently, there *IS* a tall ape covered in shaggy brown fur and size 16 feet wandering around the Rockies. But it’s just a former middleschool woodshop teacher.
Environmental storytelling toilet skeleton with the obligatory ominous personal journal lying on the floor beside it, except the journal entries continue beyond the writer's death, with periodic updates describing events occurring in and around the abandoned restroom where the skeleton is located and offering wry observational humour about the process of decomposition, all in the same highly distinctive authorial tone as the entries from life. Following several large time skips owing to nothing interesting happening during the omitted spans, the final entry ends with a notably uncomplimentary description of the player character entering the restroom.
"[Entry Date Today]
And then there's THIS asshole."
from-tiny-acorns asked:
Your post about the origin of paladin in D&D made me think of a long standing pet peeve of mine - when people insist that a knight, guarding a palace, without employing holy magic, is not a "real paladin" in modern media. Do you have any particular thoughts on the way that D&D has so heavily coloured definitions of things in this way?
prokopetz answered:
(With reference to this post here.)
It’s just basic lack of media literacy. People who get hung up on how Dungeons & Dragons defines its character classes are in the same boat as folks who misidentify bog-standard sword and sorcery fantasy tropes as Discworld references because they’ve only ever been exposed to the genre via Terry Prachett’s parodies of it, or folks who see colour-coded alchemical symbols and think they’ve caught you name-checking Homestuck – they all need to read a second book!
What you say: Well ACTUALLY, that's not a dragon, it's a wyvern, because—
What literally everyone else hears:
To be fair I was having this argument recently and it seems like the wyverns thing has some basis in historical definitions for these things. It's still an annoying nitpick, you're allowed to call things whatever you like in your worldbuilding, but it's not as D&D-brained as I had thought.
It might not specifically be a D&D thing, but it's drawing on equally narrow sources.
The "historical definition" that almost always gets trotted out is specifically from the heraldric traditions of the British Isles (i.e., painting shields and coats of arms); in this context, it makes sense to have very narrow definitions of what various beasties look like, because most people would only know coats of arms by verbal descriptions, and would thus need reliable rules in order to know what they were looking at. However, the particulars of those definitions are specific to each heraldric tradition, and aren't even necessarily consistent with those of cultures right next door. This is true of the example at hand – the heraldric traditions of continental Europe use completely different rules to distinguish dragons from wyverns, if they make that distinction at all.
Getting tetchy about calling a quadrupedal beastie with winged forelimbs a "dragon" is perfectly reasonable provided that the beastie in question is painted on the shield of a British knight; in literally any other context, it's as about sensible as arguing that it's wrong to call a fireball-chucking magic user in non-D&D media a "sorcerer" because their mom didn't fuck a dragon.