My fellow people,

I believe it’s time we pray for Steve Harrington’s survival.

I get a lot of entertainment thinking about how containers are used in video games sometimes.

well i mean, not wrong // credits: @screamingemonight on Instagram

IM WEEPING AGAHAHAHAHAGAHA

hi i’m a skyrim bandit my favorite hobby is keeping 12 gold in novice locked chests that i do not own a key for

RPG Elves by Dungeon Meshi's Ryoko Kui

I saw a post about tumblr user ages...

Reblogs are welcomed for that sweet, sweet increased data pool (aka getting more than 20 responses 😅)

imagine u lived in elder scrolls and your khajiit friend was like "ah, come and look upon khajiit's son, a fine warrior that one will be one day, yes?" and he just shows u this

How Bethesda fixed Vampires without realizing it

So there's a LOT of takes on vampires across media, and most of them are radically different from each other. The Elder Scrolls series has an interesting version that I haven't seen anywhere else, that incidentally fixes a bunch of lore issues with vampires, and yet Bethesda hasn't ever really leaned into any of that.

So, the issue with vampires in large RPGs like Elder Scrolls games, D&D, etc, is that a world where various elements of character building are supposed to be balanced, vampires are heavy on the upside and light on meaningful drawbacks. So in Oblivion, Bethesda completely reworked their vampires, coming at it with a blank slate:

Vampirism is a 4-stage affliction, with each stage increasing the numerous benefits of being a vampire as well as the middling drawbacks. Stage 4 brings with it all humanoid NPCs recognizing you as a ravenous monster and attacking you, basically wrecking the game. And, this is the unique part, you reduce stages by drinking blood. Being a vampire is LESSENED by doing the most vampiric thing out there, it actively makes you weaker.

And this is great. From a gameplay perspective, you vanish below ground to kill zombies/robots/whatever, and you grow stronger as the dungeon goes on. But if you don't rush through it, or if it's large, you surface having ignored your hunger for several days and have to do a whole second quest to sneak into town at night and drink blood, where the only reward is to engage with the game again. It's a drawback in the gameplay sense rather than the stats sense. And it lets game designers throw the player against weak vampires in town early on, and face dungeons full of max-bloodlust monsters later once the player knows how things work.

Meanwhile, from a lore perspective this is also great. Suddenly, it's not that vampires have to be evil, it's that they have a choice. A good person who flees their family to hide in a cave is going to starve, turning into a ravenous, uncontrolled, extremely strong monster. Someone who's comfortable sneaking around town drinking blood, meanwhile? They never lose control. They walk in the sun. They're perfectly human. Or as human as anyone can be while the blood of their neighbors flows in their veins.

And Bethesda doesn't DO ANYTHING with this. People you talk to in-game just treat it as "all vampires are evil, why would you expect anything else", when they've created a world where vampire morality is so much more interesting. The few vampires who exist in civilization that you're not supposed to kill don't really discuss their condition at all. And there's plenty of evil vampires choosing to live in caves running societies of vampires, when that makes no sense compared to basically any other way of life they could set up.

Bethesda games are a masterful disaster, in this as in everything else.

Ryoko Kui - RPG Elves

just talked to a 65 year old genderfluid person on an internet forum whose topic was completely unrelated to queerness. people love to tell young genderfluid people that we're "confused" or that it's "just a phase" but that just ain't the truth. we're out here, and we make it to old age, just the same as we were all those years ago, unchanging in knowing who we are on the inside. my heart is full, my skin is clear, and my crops are flourishing