#i am once again thinking about exu calamity | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

12pt-times-new-roman · 2 years

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I am so ready for EXU: Calamity.

Like others have pointed out, I absolutely love that this is an adventure for which we know the ending, but we don't know the ending. We know what's going to happen, we know that nothing anyone can do will ever stop it — but we don't know what they will do. Matt and Brennan have created a story where tragedy and loss is inevitable, where the ending has already happened and the history has already been written, but they've done it in such a way that never robs the players of their agency.

Because the truth is, we don't know what happened. We don't know what will happen. The Calamity didn't just destroy 2/3rds of Exandria's population, it didn't just destroy every magocracy of the Age of Arcanum, it didn't just devastate the world — in a way, the Calamity destroyed itself. It destroyed its own history, and most of the history that came before it. We know that it happened, we know some of the things that occurred — but all that we know exists on the order of gods.

Vespin Chloras released the Betrayer Gods because he wanted to ascend like the Raven Queen. (Dire Children chase the Matron's wake.) The Betrayer Gods, upon seeing the world, no longer sought to destroy but to dominate. (Festering wounds from schisms long-since passed.) They formed a stronghold at Ghor Dranas, decimated Xhorhas, and launched an attack on Vasselheim. That attack forced the Prime Deities to descend and fight the Betrayer Gods. The Apotheon was given gifts of the gods and nearly defeated Gruumsh, Torog was banished (probably by Sehanine), Tharizdun was locked away by Ioun and Pelor, and the Betrayer Gods were imprisoned once more. The Prime Deities left Exandria and built the Divine Gate so nothing like the Calamity would ever happen again. (The wheel will always spin, its gilded fulcrum rotting from within.)

So the history is written, the time has gone by, but the stories haven't been told. Things end in tragedy and destruction and inevitable loss. The march of time will carry on, the march of time will stop for no one's hands, the march of time will inevitably and invariably push forward. That history happens, has happened, will happen. It's gone by. It's done.

But that's the thing about tragedies.

In my eyes, a really, truly good tragedy is a story where it seems like there are a thousand, thousand times where a character could've made a different choice, a thousand chances for things to end up better, a thousand opportunities to avoid what's coming next — but where it simultaneously feels like nothing could have ever avoided the inevitable end. A good tragedy comes when we know that the characters could have made a different choice, could have done something different, could have changed course, but we also know that those characters never would have. And that's what we know now: this tragedy will happen, because these characters may once have had a chance to stop it, but they were blinded by their comfort and arrogance until it was too late. They could have had a chance at stopping Chloras, but they never would have.

(Honestly? I think that these characters are the people who could've stopped Chloras from releasing the Betrayer Gods, but didn't. I think the city they're on either housed the temple he used, or floated above it. I think that we're going to get to see Brennan play possibly the greatest mortal villain in all of Exandrian history, and I really, really hope that this is the series where we finally get to see a full party of 20th-level characters.)

I can't find it anymore but there's a post floating around about Shakespeare's tragedies — about how if you put Othello in Hamlet's plot he'd have killed Claudius immediately, and if you put Hamlet in Othello's plot he'd out-think Iago. But it's because the characters are who they are that these inevitable tragedies are allowed to happen. Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, had a saying that went something like this: character is destiny. I think this is what they meant.

We know how it ends, but we'll watch it anyway. Because really, we don't know how it ends. We know how people think it ends, we know how the gods told people it ends, and yeah, that might be the truth. But there's a world of difference between world history on the order of gods, and the tale of a group of would-be heroes who never really had a chance but tried anyway. (Especially when those gods are known to lie.)

#critical role #critical role meta #exandria unlimited #exu #exu: calamity #exu calamity #note watches c3 #at first I thought one of them might play Halas but iirc he was born during the calamity but this takes place right before it #someone else said that Sam might play the Aeormaton that FCG once was and whoever you are I love you #that would be so fucking cool #but we know for a fact that Leylas Kryn lived through the Calamity #and I do have to wonder #what if all (or some of) the characters they play are consecuted #and we eventually find out who they are in the present day?#or what if someone plays one of the Somnovem? someone from Aeor? that mage trapped in the bubble in the amphitheater??#there are so many possibilities #I apologize in advance for the state of my dash whenever things about this drop

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cultivatedmemes · 2 years

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Exandria Unlimited: Calamity a collection of my favourite sentences from ExU The Calamity. Part 1/??? feel free to change gender specific words, pronouns, whatever you like to make it fit your muse better!

❝ Of course I’m safe-- you would never let anything happen to me. ❞

❝ Dad. You know I won’t look like this when you get home. ❞

❝ I fear that I am too late. There are secrets they did not tell you. ❞

❝ Could you do me the favor of explaining what your husband looked like in life? ❞

❝ I know, I know this is a memory, but I haven’t seen him in so long. I just want to see his face. ❞

❝ All of the light, all of the fire, is but a shadow in the face of the dawn. ❞

❝ Just ask yourself, [Name]: whom did we betray? ❞

❝ If you look down and see the stars, what will you see if you look up? ❞

❝ It’s 1979 and discos never gonna die! ❞

❝ Say that we’ve moved on, and really so should he. ❞

❝ I’m. Feeling. Great. And don’t... care about small-talk-- what do you need? ❞

❝ They’ll move or don’t. Had a couple don’t's in the past. ❞

❝ Is there an important thing? Er- pleasantries. I am excited. You are excited. It’s gonna be fine. Is there anything else? ❞

❝ [Name]... you know, if we don’t have this relationship we don’t have to force it. ❞

❝ It’s kinda hard to shoehorn the niceties in at the end, you know what I mean? Sorta like an asterisk in the text that goes to the footnote of ‘how are you doing’. ❞

❝ Ok, everything you say worries me. ❞

❝ It seems to me that someone is ignoring someone else’s messages. ❞

❝ What fucking hairstyle check do you need from me? You look beautiful. What do you need?! ❞

❝ I’m just saying we’re going to be mingling with the same folks, if we can’t even talk amongst ourselves then it’s going to be very awkward for us. It’s going to be awkward for me quite frankly-- ❞

❝ Are you making your social status my problem right now? ❞

❝ You have my unadulterated attention right now. ❞ / ❝ Well that would be the first time that’s ever happened. ❞

❝ Wait, before you go, I don’t want to leave it like this. ❞

❝ We were ok once, and maybe we can be again. Just for a moment. And then you can go back to hating me. ❞

❝ I don’t... I don’t hate you. ❞

❝ We are not a consortium of wizards, I cannot produce something from nothing! ❞

❝ [Name] this is not a problem worth dealing with!❞

❝ I said I owed them a boon, thinking that in a time of need I might come to their rescue, and they said ‘are you free on this date for the parade?’ ❞

❝ It’s a boon! Don’t pay him, it’s a boon! ❞

❝ Tough conversations are not the thing I’m most frightened of. ❞

❝ If this doesn’t seem to be important, 30 seconds in I’ll need a call. Ok? ❞

❝ I do not know to whom you spoke who felt so comfortable embracing rumor as if it were fact, but this is not the case and you have come to the wrong person. ❞

❝ You are in a different movie than the rest of us. ❞

❝ We live in an age where we now know we can write our own destiny. ❞

❝ Perhaps she tires of being a medium fish. ❞ / ❝ Well I’m not sure what good it does to be a large fish in a puddle. ❞

❝ Does divinity and the ascension thereupon cause you some disdain, [Title/Name]? ❞

❝ Can you destroy? ❞

❝ Just arm candy? She threatened to expire the help! ❞

❝ Put me where you will, in darkness I will gather my shadows to me. ❞

❝ Someone talked when they should have kept their mouths shut. ❞

❝ I fear you make your home in a pit of vipers. ❞

❝ You will never reach the Wildmother’s embrace in time. ❞

#critical role sentence starters #dnd rp sentences #fantasy sentence starters #rp memes #rp prompts #rp starters #Ask memes #rp meme #ask meme

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annakie · 2 years

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I started planning my homebrew D&D campaign world in approximately 2003. The world was built on the fact that there was a “cataclysmic event” that split a continent in two. This is the map I mspainted way back then.

The basic premise was that all of civilization lived now on the western continent and that nobody had been to the eastern continent in a long time, for Reasons, and the map was just an extrapolation of what the other half could look like based on what it once looked like.

I started DMing this campaign in D&D3.5 though we didn’t make it past like level 5. I tried to resurrect it a time or two but it never came to be. But in my mind, and in like a notepad document, I kept adding little ideas and turning the world over and over in my mind.

More below the cut on D&D, creativity, and experiencing other people’s version of a similar vision to yours.

Eventually, that idea morphed into making the left continent the only part of the world remaining, for other reasons I’m not getting into right now to protect my story and campaign. So I ended up with this map, which I made in about 2017 when I started actually DMing this campaign in 5e. Some friends at work wanted to play D&D so I started DMing them during our lunch hour.

I made a new world map, which I also posted about.

What remained though, was that the Cataclysm still happened.

We played the D&D game for almost a year at lunch at work, and then that company got bought out and everyone left and the game fell apart.

Two and a third years later, Covid hit and no one had anything to do anymore so we restarted the campaign online, which I talked about amongst other things in this long rambly post. It’s still going strong! We play every Sunday night for two hours and the players are level 13 now! I love it, they love it, it’s so much fun.

The above was just to say that I’ve had this world and this idea in my head for many years. Sometimes, someone else has a very similar idea completely independent of your idea. Sometimes that person’s idea is a lot bigger than yours, and that’s totally cool.

I’d heard about Critical Role when it started getting popular, but I didn’t start actually watching it until 2018, it was a big distraction for me in the time period right after the in-person portion of that campaign ended. It got me through a big 5e withdrawl. Really my main obsession with CR was like, from right when everyone left when that job fell apart and I was looking for a new one, until... not long before Covid. I still watch it and love it, but I’m not like, rewatching it again like ever.

I thought it was pretty funny that I had the Cataclysm in my game world and Exandria had the Calamity. The circumstances of both things in our separate worlds are vastly different.

But there are Reasons that the Cataclysm happened in mine, and it had always been my plan that at a certain point in the campaign that my players would roll up high-level characters and we’d take a side-quest with them into the Reasons that the Cataclysm happened. That point in the campaign hasn’t happened yet.

Annnnd now, hilariously, we have Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. It is like, very much similar so far (and I only made it maybe halfway into last night’s episode) to how I’d always envisioned the Cataclysm Sub-Game to look. In the very off chance any of my players ever see this I don’t what to post details, but watching EXU last night was like, a little brain-melting for me. It’s already VERY GOOD.

But I don’t know if I want to keep watching it for now, literally because my heart kept sinking thinking “Oh no, oh NO. This is so close to my ideas for the Cataclysm!” And I want to stress here -- I am in no way saying one has anything to do with the other. They’re very independent ideas and I had no idea who Matt Mercer was when I came up with my game world and obviously he has no clue who I am. Creativity just happens like that sometimes. Similar ideas exist all the time.

But now I’m faced with wondering if... I want to watch EXU at all? At least until I run that similar arc for my players in Arvola’s Cataclysm?

One of my players watches (or watched? I don’t know if he still does) Critical Role. I should ask him if he still watches. I may ask him to pause watching it til we’re done. Even if that’s like, a year from now, which it might be.

I don’t want EXU to influence the vision that I’ve had for the Cataclysm for like, ten years. I want to see it, badly. But should I watch it and always wonder if mine was good enough if any of my players see both and compare?

I think what’s really making me feel this way is that for about 5 years I played in a D&D4e campaign and grew to really love my character. She was a very religious rogue, dedicated to her goddess, with a strong personality. I loved her so much that I wrote basically a full-length novel of her backstory, and then had started revising it and was wondering if I could publish it.

And then, not long into the revision, book three of a popular fantasy book series that I LOVED came out and introduced a character... who was almost a clone of my character, down to major details of her backstory and physical description. I was gutted. I never finished that book and I loved the previous two in the series so much. And obviously the author of those books didn’t know me, or my character. His creations were his own and mine are mine and were never published outside of my friends and campaign. Every time I open that document I was working on, and I’ve tried many times in like the last decade, I think about that, and it kind of blew the love of my project out.

I know it’s probably a personal issue for me. But writing that book about my character and DMing this campaign are literally the two most ambitious creative projects I’ve ever worked on. And it’s a bit gutting to feel like this is happening again. If I ever wanted to do something awesome with this campaign world and bring it out of my head and the D&D table I run it on, instant comparisons with Exandria would likely happen because of these events.

I know I need to get over it. And I love CR and really want to watch EXU. I just also want to keep feeling like Arvola’s Cataclysm is clearly mine, even if just in my head, if that makes sense.

#personal post tag thingy #annakie's dnd stuff

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dent-de-leon · 2 years

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This article on Calamity that talks about EXU as a way to revisit characters and explore branching story arcs,,, the joke about how if they tease something too much they’ll accidentally commit to it 👀👀

Hi I am once again thinking about Taliesin joking that the Nein should come visit Kingsley in Darktow—

#I’m not saying darktow exu #but #hear me out #dARKTOW EXU WHERE THE NEIN REUNITE WITH KING MOLLY AND ALL DO SOME PIRACY—

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mell0bee · 3 years

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the official mell0bee campaign 3 predictions/wishlist (let’s be real here mostly wishlist)

that one post abt gay ppl talking abt the next critrole campaign like its the superbowl is correct

also i wrote the majority of these in may but never posted it

SAM RIEGEL PLAYS A CLERIC. this is not a prediction this is a THREAT.

i made a whole powerpoint about this i think u guys already understand why lol

specifically i think knowledge domain would be so cool for sam (and also i love knowledge domain so i am biased)

ashley johnson plays a bard (or at least SOMEONE plays a bard)

someone plays a full paladin not just multiclass (marisha!!! laura!!!)

someone plays an artificer (travis!!)

someone plays a fighter (personally rooting for eldritch knight they’re so cool)

oh man i only got 2 more classes left huh i may as well throw my hat in the ring, i think druid/sorcerer and rogue/monk??? idk who would play what tho.

ok obviously this is not gonna be the lineup and idk if this party is balanced but FOR SURE i think they’re gonna be more healy after only having one healer at the start of C2 shbfnfj

SOMEONE PLAY A WARFORGED/AEORMATON pls i wanna see it

someone should play a changeling it would be funny

i’m not sure of guidelines in LA but i really hope the setup is the group is back at the table again but it’s still prerecorded (live closed captioned and prerecorded talks machina, my beloved)

idk what the seating chart will be. i sure hope it is chaos. (i saw a post a while back that was like the Ideal Seating Chart pairing everyone with people they haven’t sat next to before + for the Peak Chaos the but i forget it F)

i really hope laura and sam get to sit near each other again though

set in a new continent, i think vasselheim would be very cool but honestly anywhere we go i will not complain

i think a bunch of agnostics on the God Continent would be a cool contrast to C2 where half the party worshipped illegal gods

yknow i was gonna say they start at level 3+? maybe? i am not sure if that’s matt’s style but they could wanna do something different than c2

i thought that there wasn’t going to be as much of a timeskip compared to VM to MN but honestly with exu there might be? say like 8-10 yrs after exu takes place or something, so uh a While after the MN

i would say they might play pre-calamity too but that just seems like a worldbuilding mess for matt so maybe not

someone better play a pair of siblings. it will make me very happy.

someone plays the opposite gender (i think maybe liam)

someone other than sam (alongside sam?) plays a tiny character (pls guys it’s so fun)

also laura’s character continues to be underneath 5’5, small character or nah (but yes pls play a small character that would make me so happy)

as for ppl who i want to have backstories together: travis and sam, liam and marisha, so then tal and laura or laura and ashley

laura and sam would also be good

(yes i am saying travis and sam should play the siblings)

also ashley and liam would be very good too

marisha has a high charisma modifier!!!

sam is tiny again (i think it would be funny). also definitively does not have any children. no kids. not for sam. someone else can have a kid.

LET LAURA GO FERAL. I WANNA SEE HER HIT THINGS AND JUST BE UNHINGED.

both of liam’s PC’s parents are ALIVE AND WELL AND GOOD PARENTS. also a hit die higher than a d6 and a positive CON modifier dear lord liam you know the most times KO’d on critrolestats is not a competition right

opposite of liam. i want travis to try a glass canon for once. also if he is not an artificer i want him to be a full spellcaster it would be so good!!

honestly all i want from ashley is for her to be there the whole campaign, no work taking her away from it (and maybe playing a more outgoing character! if she feels comfortable!!)

and idek what to expect from talesin at this point i am sure his character will bring out some sort of morality crisis in me tho (they always do and i love him for it)

also tangential, and idk if it will happen but someone playing an aroace character or just generally an aspec character would make me an aroace very happy :>

i feel like getting some form of queer characters is a given and obviously i want that and any form of rep but aspec rep is so rare and cad is! so good!

also let liam and sam romance each other 2k21

#critical role #campaign 3 #critical role campaign 3 #bells hells #bee watches c3 #long post #bee post

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