Title of the Day: Cosy Wilds

Cosy Wilds is a Dungeons and Dragons supplement inspired by my experiences playing Breath of the Wild. There are tables of fun, non-combat encounters, as well as mechanical bonuses for bonding around a campfire or over a nice cup of tea!

Get it for a very special deal below:

Instagram credit: secondsforeternity

🌾🤍🍃🌻

🎉🎉 Happy 2024 🎉🎉

Mipha made the mistake of falling asleep first at the sleepover 😢😈💤

Look, I’m a slut for fictional men and fey princes, but it is now just frankly embarrassing to admit that I am in love with a figment of someone else’s imagination called ‘Wendel Bambleby’, of all things. Like that is crossing some kind of line.

NEW VIDEO!

Looking for a cozy vision of the post-apocalypse? A Psalm for the Wild-Built may be exactly what you need!

one of my comfort books is “a psalm for the wild-built” by becky chambers, as well as its sequel, “a prayer for the crown-shy.” these books are so utterly wonderful. i cannot recommend them highly enough, i feel. they are comforting, warm, like a strong embrace from a beloved friend or a cup of herbal tea on a rainy day. they tell the story of a tea monk and a wild robot as they make a journey through a forest together. they're soft and sweet and heartfelt in all the greatest ways. they're short, too, because sometimes reading takes a lot from a person, i understand that well. they helped me, at the very least, with my derealisation and depression, in a tiny but meaningful way.

cosy gaming on my pink ds lite 💗🎀☁️

Half-Price D&D Titles for the Holiday Season

Cosy Wilds: inspired by farming sims and Breath of the Wild, this supplement for 5th edition excludes farming mechanics, as well as ways to reward genuine heart-to-hearts between characters. Also comes with some cosier encounter tables.

The Frigid World of Illambria: a Pleistocene fantasy setting for 5th edition! Includes new creatures, enemies, subclasses and spells.

The last Fishnet Friday of the year... 😱✨

Treat me ~ Tip me

⛅️🍃🪸🐚

you're not from this realm, are you? 🧚‍♀️

July 21, 2020

Tea and Coffee on a Winter’s Night: Psalm for the Wild Built, Legends and Lattes and the Welcome Rise of Cosy Fiction

Narrative structures in fiction have traditionally been fairly straightforward: give your audience stakes, the higher the better. If the entire world (or even universe) isn’t in peril, you’re probably not trying hard enough.

That said, as we reach the winter months here in Australia, like a lot of people I have begun to wonder if there isn’t demand for worlds in which the intensity level is set a little lower. During the lockdowns of Covid I sought solace from my fears in the world of the Nintendo videogame Animal Crossing, in which players are thrust into a new life on an idyllic tropical island, making friends with the creatures that live there and gradually improving the infrastructure of the town around them. Those who ask how to “win” the game have to be content with a non-committal shrug: Animal Crossing offers things to do and achieve, certainly, but the concept of ultimate victory is at odds with its essential nature. It is a safe place—all of the pressure of outcome washing away on a gentle tide. Similarly, for years the concept of “escapism” in literature has been a term of derision: a label that implies that both reader and writer are sharing a delusion in order to hide from their own realities. It is intriguing, then, that the genres of science fiction and fantasy—most commonly attacked with this charge—have embraced a recent turn towards an intensified version of this feeling. In “cosy” fiction, the danger is dramatically lowered, the tone is introspective and internally transformative, rather than externally so, and there is a focus on comfort: heart, hearth, armchair and hot beverage.

Cosy novels are cottagecore. They are the kinds of books you might read upon waking from a nightmare, the literary equivalent of a hot drink by the fire on a cold night.

I would love to introduce two of my favourites to you.

A Cup of Tea:

Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers’ glorious science fiction story (winner of the Hugo Award for Best novella) is the story of Dex, a non-binary tea monk who travels from town to town, composing bespoke blends and listening to the problems of the citizens that live in the places they visit. Dex always feels that something is missing, and one day they decide to brave the forbidden wilderness surrounding the urban areas. The wild is home to the world’s robots, who generations ago gained sentience and requested release from human society. One of them, Mosscap, finds and greets Dex. Together they continue their exploration and shared mission of helping soothe the ills of the troubled while finding purpose in their own lives.

Chamber’s book can be read in only a couple of hours, but its effect is longer-lasting. It is a tale that reminds us that acts of kindness may seem small, but their impact has echoes. Tea is the perfect symbol and metaphor for Psalm for the Wild-Built, a novella that is by turns soothing, meditative, and which never fails to warm some small forgotten corner of the human soul.

A Cup of Coffee: Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

Travis Baldree’s offering to the genre of cosy fiction takes readers to a very different landscape: the fantasy city of Thune. Here we meet Viv, an orc swordswoman and mercenary who has become weary of a life of violence and is captivated by an obsessive new vision: the possibility of starting a coffee shop. Her first hurdle, of course, is that no-one even knows what coffee is, but that is the least of her problems… her old life insists on trying to find a way to squeeze back in and drag her back to battle.

Like coffee, Legends and Lattes is similarly thawing but with a little more intensity of energy and a slightly sharper edge. Baldree creates a sense of community that is perhaps the book’s greatest asset, and both Viv and the reader form deep and enthusiastic connections with the novel’s diverse cast of characters: the hob Cal, the succubus Tandri, Thimble the baker, Pendry the bard and Amity the dire-cat. Watching Viv’s coffee-house gradually develop its menu, popularity and personality is a joy to behold. Quite simply, it allows for the reader to inhabit the part of living in a fantasy world that is lost to so many distant quests for forgotten treasures: community. If in most fantasy novels the reader finds a band of companion warriors, in Legends & Lattes they find friends: the kind that will sit with you quietly by the fire in an armchair, talking about nothing, with a freshly-baked cinnamon scroll to share between you. It is a story about friendship, love, and also about the fact that often in life it is the simplest of dreams that bring us the most satisfaction.

I love cosy fiction. As I explore the genre more, cosy books remind me, fundamentally, that it is okay for a story to just make us happy. We do not owe it to ourselves or anyone else that our literature is always an instrument and metaphor for struggle, personal improvement or academic deconstruction. What books can do—just as importantly—is give us a haven of respite from a chaotic world. A book can alleviate a small moment of human suffering. A book can heal a wound that you can’t see.

Many of us go to a cup of tea or coffee for a brief retreat and a touch of warmth in our bones.

If that’s the direction that fiction is heading in, pour me another.