manx mythology: fenodyree

fenodyree is a hairy supernatural creature, a sort of sprite or fairy, often carrying out chores to help humans performing arduous tasks such as transporting great blocks of stone, or clipping meadow grass with stupendous speed. for his talent in the grass-cutting skill, he has earned the nickname yn foldyr gastey or "the nimble mower."

how many tattoos do u hv? what are they? what do they mean? gimme a tattoo tour i wanna knoooow

Hi Charlie ^V^

It'll be a very short tattoo tour (I say knowing full well I'll take forever explaining everything about those dang doodles on my skin :'D xD). Here it is :3

I have two tattoos :3 this picture show them pretty nicely :D

The first tattoo I got is the one on my shoulder (I got it back in March):

It's Flapjack from the Owl House holding a brush in his mouth - a concept I commissioned my good friend @isi-daddy to draw last November ^V^

So the story about this one is both complicated and simple: My grandmother passed away last year around October 17, two days after the season 3 premiere Thanks to Them premiered. I am not sure if you have watched this series and/or don't mind spoilers but let's just say that this red cardinal made an impact on me that was only solitified when my grandmother passed. My mind begun to link her and Flapjack so she kind of got a spirit bird with her to the afterlife. And so I decided that I wanted Flapjack as my first tattoo :'D later I learned that there's an american folklore saying that if you see a red cardinal (the species Flapjack is) when you've lost somebody it is your loved one visiting you - and so I accidentally now have my grandmother with me all the time in form of a cardinal on my arm :'D the brush ... it's a silly story I have of my grandmother accidentally hitting out a tooth from my mouth with a hairbrush when she tried to help me brush my hair when I was younger x'D

My second and to date most recent tattoo is from October ^V^ It's on my left lower arm:

It's the old nurse run Ansuz which is said to be Odin's rune and the rune for wisdom, inspiration, language, communication, mental stability and music amongst other things (all meanings here)

I have wanted this tattoo for a while (12 years) and it has quite a lot of meaning not only what I've aleady mentioned. It also refer to my heritage as a nordic person, my love for mythology and the possibly most nerdy meaning of them all ... it's an old 'A' so to me it also symbolizes my autism, asexuality and aromanticsm x'D

I chose the font so it would sort of resemble the font that käärijä, the finnish rapper I'm obsessed with, uses for his logo:

This is because I got the tattoo only two days after seeing Käärijä live in the same city (Berlin) :3

So yeah I don't have a lot of tattoos but I make up for it in meaning x'D

I have lots of ideas however the three most clear ideas being the post-op chest tattoo (x), the concept of the three birds (x), and the paidaton riehuja 'whatever' shirt-flag (x) :3

RPG Campaign Setting Thoughts - The Actual, You Know, Setting

Continuing along from here and here, I suppose I should take a moment and get my head out of the clouds with all this structure of the planes and metaphysics malarkey and put down a few words about, you know, the actual world people are going to be going on adventures in... but I don’t wanna!

I’m actually kinda serious with that. I’m still not sure to what degree this whole thing is something I’m really going to sit down and do something with vs. a total pipe dream vs. just some general thoughts on what changes I’d push towards if in a relevant position at a big company and all, but one really big issue I’d want to seriously address if I end up actually publishing anything here is the fact that everything about fantasy RPGs is entirely too white, and unfortunately, I myself am also entirely too white.

As previously mentioned, I 100% want to have orcs coded really heavily as colonialist European types as a major setting antagonist, to push back against decades of appallingly racist coding, and by extension I’d like to have humans who are visually and culturally representative of, you know, the rest of humanity. Some having to deal with orcs raiding and planting their flags everywhere, others totally not dealing with that and having their own much more interesting things going on. Get away from the stock imagery of castles and knights in a barely repainted England, get some cool stuff inspired the rest of the world in there as some basic imagery and all.

And... yeah I’m just not really qualified to do that. More importantly though, I know a ton of people who ARE, and they’re all super cool, and don’t get enough chances to do this sort of world-building. I don’t want to make my ignorant stab at a setting heavily informed by Indian history and folklore when I know someone who’s both an experienced game developer and a Hindu Pandit. I don’t want to play around with fantasy-Jerusalem when thinking about that is basically the life’s work of one of my favorite people in the world. I could keep going with this. I have a lot of really amazing contacts I would absolutely love to just give blank checks to to collaborate on a campaign setting full of all their personal passions and drawing on their heavy historical and cultural knowledge bases.

But... I’m also unemployed, barely able to keep a roof over my head, and fully aware how generally doomed any sort of project like this is and I doubt most of the people I’d be inclined to tap would want to commit to something like this even if I could pay them what they’re worth. Really, I’m the worst person to try to put together some sort of cool overqualified world-building all-stars team and make a setting together, and if someone else wants to take the initiative on that I am all for it, but, if they are nobody’s telling me. So... for now I’d just kinda like to keep the details really sketchy about specific nations and all that and stay focused on my weird non-culturally specific fantasy weirdness. Keep the real meat and potatos stuff in the dark until I get committed enough to kickstart a book and try to sign on cool writer friends as stretch goals or something.

Races for instance! I think I’ve mentioned before how much I just don’t like them, and I’m used to not really caing about them having done a lot of Pathfinder writing, but like Pathfinder, I kinda want to keep all this as backwards compatible with Pathfinder and 3.X as I can, which means I don’t want to drop them entirely, and I already have orcs. So... OK.What can I do with everything else that’s not just borrowing some real-world culture?

First off, we have dwarves. I.... really don’t particularly have any strong feelings about dwarves. The one big problem coming in the unfortunateness of “dwarf” referring to, among other things, the fantasy race, something a bit different in Norse mythology, and actual human beings with a rare condition that leads to a lot of discrimination. I’ve yet to meet anyone who actually has a vocal problem with that, so, please give me feedback there if you have any. Otherwise... I think dwarves kinda fall under “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Dwarves are exactly the same in every game that has dwarves. Nobody’s had cause to put a new spin on them, which over the years has made them into this really big fantasy touchstone. Something to be said for that stability.

Next up we have elves... and OK, here’s my spin. Elves actually mature and age at the same rate as humans, BUT, every 30-70 years or so, they... basically have a Doctor Who regeneration. Big metamorphising event, they end up with a radically altered appearance, possibly some significant changes to their personality, possibly some memory loss. We keep the staple of elves being functionally immortal, and the sort of physical mutability present through the whole history of fantasy RPGs to one degree or another, but we get a nice out for the whole Immortal Blues issue you usually get with elves, where they outlive everyone they meet. If you’re a teenage elf, you can go hang out with a bunch of teenage humans, grow up together, have a lot of adventures, and then when everyone else is getting old and dying and it’s just depressing, you do your whole elven ritual of renewal thing, and tada. You’re young again, maybe a redhead this time out, maybe a different gender even. All that kinda fades from immediacy, like your old life is just a story you’ve heard a lot, and you’re free to go make new connections with new peers. I think there’s a lot to that as a foundation for cultural stuff, and an interesting setup for telling stories. Needs to be a proper racial power of course, with some restriction on how often it can be done, but hey. This also keeps them from becoming stuffy traditionalists with ancient cities. On a long enough timescale they’re kind of all nomadic drifters.

Half-Elves, which again, are their own race here, probably get a weakened version of that. Maybe they change a little less when they try that renewal ritual. Maybe it doesn’t always work, or it’s really unpredictable. Definitely they have a cap on how often they can do it, so you still have the long-lived but mortal thing going.

Half-Orcs... I need to think about some. The whole “they’re their own race” thing gets all the gross rape crap sweeped nicely away, but they still have to resemble orcs enough to face discrimination to a degree, since, that’s what you have half-orcs for. I might break my rule about no real world cultural models and have them largely stand in for vikings? There’s enough similarity to how I’m doing orcs for confusion’s sake (nautical raiders and explorers and all), an association with violence and generally being all big and tough, but pretty clear We’re Not With Them vibes?

Halflings, I am sticking with my earlier pitch about essentially being humans just created at a different scale. Honestly I’ve always kinda resented D&D even having them, because I mean, everything else has some basis in someone’s folklore, but halflings are just a race swiped directly out of a book series that was super popular at the time, then forced to change the name for copyright reasons. And they clearly just exist to make Bilbo expies, with the stealth bonuses and all. I would totally give them the boot if I could get away with it, but, yeah, tiny humans essentially.

That still leaves gnomes, where I’m still stymied. Again, I really love Pathfinder’s take on them to death, and kinda just want to keep that.

I think that’s a decent spread of new ideas and old ideas that won’t clash with properly varied human culture, right? Next update I’m probably going back to gods and magic. Have some very very nerdy thoughts about the spread of religion based on bored wizards working out astral projection to flesh out.

As always, feedback on any of this is appreciated.