#rain world scavenger core
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Love, Unsaid
Joe x Nicky Drabble. Canon typical violence, Character death (Nicky starts off dead but he’s fine), they hug it out, that’s it, that’s the fic
It’s slow going, removing the sword from Nicolo’s gut.
King Arthur probably had an easier time removing the sword from the stone. Between the constant rain lashing down on them and the constant blood swelling fresh at the wound, the mud that was once this forsaken battlefield anchoring Yusuf where he stands, it is no easy task. He’d snapped the arrows that had landed in Nicolo’s shoulders, the heads have already been expelled by his immortality. When Nicolo revives they’re going to have to reconsider which cause they lend their swords to, coin or no coin.
Still, it is nice to fight together, rather than fighting each other. It had been getting old, in a way they apparently don’t anymore. They are not quite friends, not yet. They shake hands if they part, clasp each other’s shoulders. Nicolo is showing himself to be a kind soul, at his core, repentant and eager to learn.
This fucking sword.
Yusuf coughs with exertion, throwing his aching hands in the air. They are the only fighters left, only the scavengers, human and bird alike now picking their way through the available lootings.
His hands slip on the smoothed prongs of the handguard, wet with rain and water and blood and sweat before Yusuf swears, bends his knees and yanks.
There is a chorus of sounds, a squelching, wrenching crunch before the sword glides free and Yusuf tilts backwards, falling on his arse in the mud. All those minstrals and bards glorifying battles want murdered in a way that sticks. Flinging the weapon aside, he claws his way back over to Nicolo. Those singular eyes are still more reticent of seaglass rather than seafoam.
“Nicolo. Nicolo” Yusuf calls gently, shaking the other man’s shoulder.
“Nicolo”
There’s no movement. Not even a twitch to his little finger.
He glances down at the wound, washed clean by the rain. It’s healing. It must be healing.
Larger wounds take longer they know this. The weapon had obstructed his healing that’s all.
He’s not dead. Nicolo di Genova, the eternal thorn in his side, the handsome bastard who is his only constant in this world is not dead. He’s not allowed to be. He’s not going to be killed permanently by some jumped up rat-faced shit from England after everything Yusuf tried all those years ago.
Yusuf puts a hand on Nicolo’s cheek, still warm despite the icy sheen of water soaking them through.
“Nico”
There’s a wet gasp that’s halfway between death rattle and coming air that always accompanies when they are dragged from death to life and Nicolo bolts upright. He gasps several times, sucking in great lungfuls of air greedily.
“You’re alright, You’re alright, it’s over. I’m here. We’re here” Yusuf finds himself repeating, rubbing Nicolo’s back of all things. Nicolo coughs once more, before twisting violently away, still grasping Yusuf’s wrist hard before he vomits.
Yusuf’s already reaching for the waterskin at his own hip as Nicolo spits the last of the bile out. “I’m sorry,” Nicolo rasps, the words coming slow. “Arrows were poisoned”
That English fucker.
No wonder the healing had taken so long. Nicolo’s system had been fighting off two things at once.
“It’s not your fault, my friend” Yusuf says before he can stop himself. Nicolo obviously hears him because he stares open mouthed at Yusuf for a moment, before wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He nods once, a sharp bob of the head as if he can’t quite believe it. Then before Yusuf can stop him, Nicolo stumbles upright, staggering to his feet like a drunkard. He rubs the rain from his face and stands before Yusuf, trembling slightly.
“How – how bad was it?”
They’re healing has quickened over the years, but worse deaths take longer.
“Bad” Yusuf says. They both need food and warmth. What’s done is done.
Nicolo hums, voice still worn. He’s still trembling too, probably cold. His eyes are big and wide and he’s never looked so young to Yusuf as he does now, except maybe when they’d come back to life that first time around, when everything was new and strange and yet still the same.
If it was anyone else, anyone from Yusuf’s old life, he’d probably have hugged them before now. He’s a tactile soul, always reaching out. But they’ve never hugged before.
“Do you – do you want?”
Nicolo barely looks at Yusuf’s half open arms before he falls into them, arms coming to wrap around Yusuf’s middle. Yusuf jumps when he feels a cold nose bury into his neck.
“Thank you Yusuf” he murmurs quietly after a moment, without letting go.
*
It’s so nice to be held, after years of hacking away across the continents, of lying and running and never getting close except out of necessity to sleep, or shoot or bandage.
Nicolo feels the moment all the tension goes out of Yusuf’s shoulders, so that he sags against Nicolo’s shoulders. He can’t help it, he smiles into the other man’s shoulder. This beautiful man who has opened his arms again and again to Nicolo, literally now, despite everything.
It’s so quiet, after a battle. During, you can’t hear yourself think, let alone hear what’s going on – it all melts into one incomprehensible din. Arrows and shields clanging, swords clashing, people screaming. After death has swept the field, it’s deafening in another way altogether.
They’re still holding each other.
In the back of his mind, Nicolo is vaguely away that maybe this hug has gone on a little…long than may be polite. He has taken so much, he should pull back, lest such a blessing not be offered again.
But when he goes to disentangle himself, Yusuf merely shifts his weight to his other leg and Nicolo feels his fingers dig into the mail of his shirt. Of its own volition, Nicolo’s hand comes up to cup the back of Yusuf’s head.
Well. Maybe they both need it.
*
“Andromache!”
Nile watches as Andy gets literally swept – more like scooped – off her feet into a massive hug by Joe. It’s the first time they’ve been separated as a team, the first time Nile’s seen a reunion after a long period of time. The first time she’s seen Andy all but giggle as she’s swayed gently from side to side, feet dangling as Joe hugs her.
Then its Nicky’s turn and its different but no less tender, the way he cups the back of Andy’s head, big arms coming round to wrap around her. They hold each other just as long, just as warmly.
And then the couple’s eyes fall on Nile. They’ve given each other their hands before, clasped each other’s shoulders, hell even had a thumb war on that really fucking long flight to Tripoli.
Nicky looks at Nile for a long moment and then, almost conversationally, opens his arms the tiniest fraction, intent clear. She can take it or leave it and either way is absolutely fine.
God, Nile’s missed hugs. And Nicky and Joe? They give the best fucking hugs. Just…being lightly squeezed, so much that her aching shoulders finally seem to release, in a way that there’s no limit.
What was it Nicky had said?
We’re not meant to be alone.
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An Analysis of the Character of Artificer
Due to the design of Rain World as a survival simulator of a little creature in an ecosystem, the capacity for exploring complex narratives of the player characters within the game is comparatively limited. Even still, Artificer's campaign presents a clear and explicit storyline, both directly and indirectly through the way the world is shaped by their actions. In one way or another, Artificer's campaign presents Arti as someone who has committed mass slaughter and genocide of the scavenger population on Pebbles' facility grounds without driving home the implications of their actions until the very end of the campaign, allowing ever more carnage and destruction that only feeds into the themes of their story. In this post I'll be going into why I think it can be easy to overlook these themes, as well as how the mechanics of the game and some aspects of the code further assist the story being told in Arti's campaign.
*Note: There was previously a paragraph about NPC Arti's, but it has since been removed.
Preface
Throughout this post, I will be using they/them pronouns for Artificer. This isn't a reflection of my headcanons on them, but rather just a way to analyze them as a character within their story with fewer biases, I guess. I don't really care what pronouns you prefer for Arti, this is solely just based on my default of they/them pronouns for any and all slugcats.
Aside from that, this post primarily discusses the chieftain scavenger ending, wherein Arti reaches the throne room in Metropolis and kills the chieftain scavenger. The alternative ascension ending is acknowledged, but will not be examined in depth.
On top of that, whenever I make any comparisons between Arti and another slugcat, I will be using Survivor's stats and general gameplay as my default unless explicitly stated otherwise. The term 'slugcat' will be used in lieu of an actual name except when Arti is concerned.
Rain World's Design
Rain World is, at its core, a survival simulator. The player is given the bare minimum of tools needed to survive, and then is dumped into the game and left to figure everything out on their own. What's edible, what's friendly, what isn't, all of that is left for the player to stumble around, fail, and discover. Iggy is there to help sometimes, but by and large, the player is on their own.
One thing players will quickly realize is that enemies are eager to hunt them down and eat them. The first introduction many players have to enemies is likely either a green lizard, a tanky, resilient behemoth, or a pink lizard, which is nimble enough to chase the player up poles. At the same time, it's not hard to recognize that even though enemies will kill the player, they are all doing it to get a meal, something that the player is also trying to do. It's nothing personal, unlike how enemies will immediately attack the player for the sole reason of them being the player in many other games. It's simply a matter of survival.
In this manner, Rain World presents a dichotomy of player versus enemy. Either the player escapes the clutches of an enemy and survives, or the enemy kills the player and gets a meal to fill its belly. Ideally, the player would never run into any enemies at all—some cycles may prove to have such fortune—but most of the time, the player will be forced to deal with enemies and have to figure out how to escape dangerous situations created by these enemies. There's a variety of ways with which to do this; using spears to dispatch enemies is a quick and clean option if the player is experienced enough, but in a lot of cases, simply running will suffice.
There's not much of a focus on fighting enemies, however. Rather, the focus is on surviving them, and the enemy does not need to die for the player to survive. On top of that, there's little to no narrative weight applied to the survival of the player, or lack thereof. The world moves on regardless of if the player lives or dies, whether they sleep with a full belly or with hunger pangs wracking their body. The basic gameplay loop is both simple and complex: Survive, or don't. How that is achieved is up to the player.
Naturally, players want to survive. They want to live to explore and experience the game and any story that may be present. With whatever means are necessary, players will fight to survive, in a way that very much embodies what the slugcat they're playing as may feel too. The slugcat may, on the surface, be a blank state, but through the players' actions, they come to life in how they choose to survive.
The Design of Artificer's Campaign
Then we have Artificer. The first action performed by them in their campaign is to eat a scavenger's corpse, in a room littered with several other scavenger corpses. The implication is clearly that they killed all of them, a fact further confirmed by the immediate aggression of the scavengers to the left of Arti's spawn. It shouldn't take long for the player to notice that every scavenger they come across instantly becomes aggressive, a feature that is unique to Arti's campaign.
Regardless of how the player may feel about scavengers prior to playing Arti's campaign, if they want to survive, they are forced to kill scavengers. After all, the scavengers show them no mercy, so why should the player show restraint? And so begins a trail of bloodshed, one that follows both the player and Arti as the campaign progresses. Death is common, normalized, and quickly swept aside; it's all for the sake of survival, anyways. If it wasn't the scavengers, then it would be the player, and no one wants that.
By framing it as a matter of survival, the game itself sets up a framework for desensitization to all the murder that is occurring. The player's actions are always immediately justifiable with the notion of survival: Rather the scavenger than me. Body counts of ten, twenty, even up to fifty can happen due to scavengers actively seeking the player out to kill them, and if the player wants to live, the scavengers all must die. It's exceedingly easy to see the number of deaths tallied at the end of the cycle and rationalize it with the idea that it was necessary for survival. And for Arti's campaign, that's not untrue. In positioning the campaign as player versus scavengers, either the player kills the scavengers and lives, or the scavengers kill the player.
However, this ignores the fact that the scavengers are also doing this as a means of survival. They, too, are simply trying to survive. They are not killing Arti—or the player, who is acting as Arti—for the sake of bloodshed. They are doing it out of necessity.
Rain World Creature AI and Scavenger AI
One of the things Rain World is most lauded for is its creature AI. Creatures are, in many ways, not created to be enemies, but rather to fill in a niche in a much bigger ecosystem. What the player encounters in any given cycle is often random. The lizard that killed the player in their last cycle may have wandered off someplace new this cycle, allowing the player to progress further. What creatures do is also managed by this AI, which can sometimes lead to unpredictable behavior.
Scavengers are the creatures whose behavior is most often cited as unpredictable, in part due to having the most AI complexity out of any other creature present in Rain World. They operate on a level similar to that of the player, and also think similarly to the player in many aspects. Sometimes, scavengers may kill players for the crime of simply existing too close to them, or because they approached a scavenger when its back was turned and their presence startled them, or for some other arguably asinine reason that the player may find unfair. However, scavengers do not have a way of determining whether a slugcat is friend or foe until the slugcat is in their vicinity, much in the same way that players do not know whether a new creature is dangerous or not when they first encounter it until they interact with it. "Better safe than sorry" is a philosophy that almost all players will have used at one point or another, wherein they will kill a creature for simply existing because they were scared. Scavengers are no different.
Scavengers are also one of six different creatures with a reputation system in Rain World, and one of four with reputation systems that the player can meaningfully influence (the other three being lizards, squidcadas, and jetfish). Of these four, scavengers are the only creature the game ever teaches players to befriend. If following Iggy, the players are instructed to take a pearl and trade it with scavengers at the lower Garbage Wastes scavenger toll, and from there it is not a far leap to think that other scavengers may also like to receive pearls as gifts. They will also accept many other things as gifts, such as vulture masks, karma flowers, even spears, all of which increases the player's reputation among scavengers by some amount. It is easy, almost expected, for players to raise their reputation with scavengers, and many players opt to do this for the sake of simplicity. By going to a toll and paying it twice across two different cycles, the player's reputation will be sufficiently high enough that scavengers in a given region will never be a threat to them.
Conversely, in most cases, the player has to actively choose to anger and harm scavengers to decrease their scavenger reputation. The player has to go out of their way to steal items from scavengers, cross tolls without paying, or kill scavengers to draw their ire. Aggression in response to that is natural; the player has demonstrated that they are either untrustworthy, dangerous, or both, and scavengers are primarily concerned with their own survival. The act of scavengers killing the player is less personal than it is that they simply want their kind to be safe. The world does not revolve around the player. The world does not need to worship the choices the player makes. If they choose to harm creatures, they will face the consequences of their actions, and it just so happens that scavengers are often the most capable of handing out these consequences.
The reputation system for all creatures with reputation runs on a scale of +100, maximum possible reputation, to -100, minimum possible reputation. At 0, the player's reputation is neutral. Scavengers are uncertain around the player, and may react differently depending on their personality traits. Below 0, scavengers are more likely to be afraid of the player and attack them. Below -75, scavengers begin to send kill squads after the player, which always know where the player is and will automatically pathfind to them. In virtually any case, it is impossible for the player to reach -75 reputation or lower with scavengers without actively choosing to kill them, and by that point, the automatic aggression of scavengers is warranted. If the player has shown no mercy to the scavengers, the scavengers have no reason to show mercy to the player either.
Artificer's Reputation
Artificer's starting reputation for all creatures is lowered, and as the player progresses through their campaign, it is likely that these values will only continue to lower. Killing any creature lowers an All Reputation value, which decreases reputation across the board; due to Arti's carnivorous diet, bloodshed is virtually inevitable.
Scavengers are uniquely exempt from All Rep changes, running entirely on their own reputation system, and for Arti in particular, scavenger reputation is locked to -100. It is impossible for Arti to raise their scavenger rep (without the use of mods), which forces the player to fight any scavenger they come across. The fact that their scavenger reputation is locked to the lowest possible value is also indicative of their past interactions with scavengers. Whether the player likes it or not, Arti has been killing scavengers for far longer than the game shows, enough that nothing they will ever do will atone for the deaths they've caused. There is no peaceful way forward between Arti and the scavengers. Any interaction they have must be marked in blood.
The only thing the player can do regarding scavengers is kill them. If they want to survive, there must be death. The player, as Arti, can only perpetuate the violence that has already been wrought, because the scavengers will not stop fighting for the survival of their own kind, and by the nature of Rain World as a video game, the player also cannot stop fighting. If the player is willing to see the campaign through to the end, there is only one way forward.
A Story Painted in Blood
Of course, if you've ever played Arti's campaign (or watched someone else play it), you know the reason behind Arti's hatred for scavengers. Two pups, dead by their heads. An understandable resentment rose from this; no one wants to grieve the loss of a loved one, let alone a parent grieving the loss of their children. Perhaps there was some initial notion of revenge in Arti's actions, fueled by those early moments of grief, because grief changes people. Grief is ugly, raw, and complex, and can twist even the most well meaning people into the most horrible versions of themselves. Desperation to avenge the deaths of their children could have led to the idea that killing the scavengers would atone for their loss. Or, in the throes of grief, Arti lashed out and grievously injured a scavenger, drawing the anger of the other scavengers at one of their kind being harmed, which started a cycle of violence between Arti and the scavengers. All sorts of theories and conclusions about the initial reason behind this bloodshed can be drawn from the loss of Arti's pups, but none of them would have any concrete basis.
What we do know is that none of that bloodshed changed anything. No death of a scavenger could ever bring Arti's pups back, and clearly it did not soothe their grief either. Everything that we are shown that Arti has done in the past has done nothing but fuel the situation that we see in their campaign: Endless violence, driven by the need to survive, which only further perpetuates the violence. It's a never ending cycle of blood and death that neither Arti nor the scavengers can break out of, because none of them are willing to be the first to stand down.
The survival aspect, too, intertwines with whatever notion Arti may have had of revenge. We are shown in no uncertain terms that their goal is to exterminate the entire scavenger population, and loosely implied beside that is that the deaths of their pups caused this. But genocide is not retribution; killing every scavenger they come across does not avenge their pups, because their pups are dead and no longer have a say in what they wish could be done. Everything that Arti does now is driven only by their own desire to keep pushing the cycle of violence forward. Is it revenge or survival if every scavenger Arti comes across must be killed before they are killed first? And this uncertainty only further fuels the flame. Every scavenger, every enemy that Arti comes across must die, because if it doesn't, then Arti will die (and their pups will have died in vain). With every push for survival that Arti makes, every enemy they strike down, they only make more enemies, endlessly perpetuating the violence that they attract.
The player only contributes to this. Choosing to survive means choosing to murder. To live is to survive at the detriment of everything in your way. And on top of that, many players choose to push it even further, hunting for the sake of hunting, killing for the sake of killing. Rain World is a video game in the end, but every death that the player causes is still, always, a death within the context of this world. Where even is the line between killing for the sake of survival and murder for the sake of murder when playing as Arti? And, if the line exists, does it mean anything? The violence only continues onward, no matter the answer.
Even if the player chooses to reject this way of life, hunting down the echoes and going to the Void Sea to ascend, Arti is at best one level of karma short of karma 10. The player, if committed to pacifism, has to wait for a viable scavenger corpse, or they must kill a scavenger themself to successfully bypass the guardians and enter the lower caverns of the Depths. This also does not erase however long Arti has chosen to wage war on the scavenger population, because once again, there is never any chance for Arti to increase their scavenger reputation. It has all gone too far, and Arti cannot change what has been done. Some things simply cannot be forgiven.
Cognitive Dissonance and Player Theory
Despite all of this, it is still easy for players not to register the impacts of what they're doing until potentially the very end of Arti's campaign, where a slideshow of Arti killing every scavenger in sight as they flee in terror is shown. The impact of any karma the player may have gained all being confiscated, once again and permanently locking Arti's karma at 1, as well as the post-game artwork that shows them covered in blood, are potentially the first instances of the player realizing how much death and destruction they've caused. It takes being slapped in the face with a visual representation of the trail of death they've left behind for many players to think about Arti's story as something not of triumph, but horror.
Obviously, one of the reasons behind this is the fact that Rain World is a video game. The player is simply carrying out a story, merely doing things because they're told to, directly or indirectly. Killing things is just part of the game, after all. Analysis of the game's events is done only by a subset of fans of a piece of media, in particular this sort of deep dive into what the actions of the player character mean within their universe. To a lot of people, this is just a game, and that's fine.
Building on that reason, however, is that Rain World is exceedingly good at dulling the impact of the death within the game. Every kill is simply just a number on the screen. Three lizards dead is just three lizards dead, and maybe a good meal from one of them. Twenty scavengers killed is just twenty scavengers. These are all pixels on a screen, little blips of light that don't mean anything the moment you turn your computer off. Killing something in Rain World is just a triumph of the player over the enemy, nothing more, nothing less. The player is simply surviving.
Taking a step closer to the world crafted inside the game, however, causes things get more sinister. Twenty deaths—parents, siblings, children, friends, other loved ones, even acquaintances—is an unimaginable number to most people. Losing everyone that you've ever known and loved and cared for, just in the snap of a finger, is not a scenario that most people would ever want to think about, and one that, hopefully, only a subset of people will ever experience. This is not something that anyone should ever experience.
But this is the reality of life for the scavengers in Arti's campaign. At any given moment, Arti could swoop in and slaughter a scavenger's entire family. There is no certainty of whether someone will live or die, whether they will still be there next cycle, because Arti could have killed them for the sole reason of them being a scavenger. An entire culture, a budding civilization, even, leveled at the hands of one singular slugcat. That is genocide. It's no wonder that the scavengers kill Arti on sight, and that there isn't a way for Arti to ever increase their scavenger reputation. When they've destroyed that many families, killed that many friends, children, parents, grandparents, partners, what have you, a change of heart on their part means nothing. It won't ever bring those who have been killed back.
It's easy to overlook, isn't it? What does 100 dead scavengers mean to you? And what does 100 dead scavengers mean to a scavenger? The player's actions hold no weight in the real world, obviously, but that doesn't change the impact of what it means within the context of the game. And yet, it's so simple to justify. You're just surviving, aren't you? It's kill or be killed. Rather 100 dead scavengers than me.
That is the mastery of Artificer's campaign. The story and its themes tie so well into the game's mechanics and the way that players think that many do not question it until the end. For the brief moments of playing Artificer, you adopt their mindset, without even really trying to. And that makes everything that you do—and that Arti does—much easier to ignore, and just makes it that much more horrifying. And that is a good story.
#rain world#downpour#artificer#genocide#meta analysis#wonder how many people knew about the rep thing before this
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Rain World - Fan Region Concepts
made some art (mostly for future colour picking needs) and information graphics for two region concepts related to my ocs- Abandoned Junkyard and Ground Level Defence! (yes defence is spelled wrong in the picture lol)
more info on the regions and creatures under keep reading
ABANDONED JUNKYARD
The landscape surrounding Eleven Rivers is a twisted and confusing tangle of pipes and buildings intended for moving water drawn from underground glaciermelt. The bodies of long dead organisms called Demolishers litter the landscape, the blades and metal that falls from their bodies attracting scavengers and rustflies.
Armored Lizard
A lizard modified by Eleven Rivers to bear plate metal on their backs. This slows them and keeps them from climbing, but protects them from the lashes of the Battleseers and spit from the Rustflies.
Battleseer
Overseers purposed by Eleven Rivers for combat and aggression in order to keep others away from Rivers' structure. They patrol the junkyard and lash out at most creatures they see, whipping and shocking with their arms. When destroyed, their eyes drop. These are volatile in nature and explode when thrown.
Rustfly
Distant relatives to squidcadas and possibly jetfish as well- they feed off of metal and melt it down with a boiling hot core in their bodies. They spit this molten metal to mark their territory and fight away predators, and their feeding and territory marking keep the Junkyard warmer than it otherwise would be. They are very susceptible to rain and are fearful of water.
Scavenger
Function as normal. There is a merchant and quite a few clusters of scavs underground and in the buildings, but no toll.
Demolisher Corpses
Although none of the Demolishers are free of damage or in proper living condition- some still react to stimuli and snap their jaws.
ELEVEN RIVERS- GROUND LEVEL DEFENCE
The land beneath Eleven Rivers is a quickly receding glacier with valleys of water tearing through it. Water drawn from the glacier is used to keep Eleven Rivers and the rest of his group alive. The ice is slick and creatures slide quickly along it, so living things cling to the sparse structures still around. Eleven Rivers has created multiple organisms to keep others away, making the journey to his Artery Network and inner structure quite perilous.
Miros King
Miros Birds constructed with King Vulture DNA by Eleven Rivers. They have a propelled jump and harpoons, and are blinded by flashes like regular Miros Birds. They run about the ice flats snapping up anything they can catch, and can be susceptible to falling through the ice to the frigid depths below.
Lurker Spider
Spiders purposed by Eleven Rivers to withstand incredible cold and have little need for oxygen. They cling to the bottom of the ice under the water and wait for creatures to pass them to ambush. They cannot hold their breaths forever and can be antsy, so they can often be seen changing position or choosing new breaks in the ice to defend.
Centipede
Function as normal. Often the unfortunate victim of the Miros Kings.
Lizards (Not pictured above)
Two red lizards roam the floes, and a colony of orange lizards live near the gate to Eleven Rivers' Artery Network.
#rain world#rain world downpour#rain world oc#rw headcanon#druid draw#oc posting#these are really fun to do and ill almost def do more. i still need to draw tundra flats the central temple and bastion of warmth
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It is a fact that that the Adventure scug is a blowhard and a coward.
I love drawing snooty characters their expressions are so fun!!!! Anyway here's Fact Core!
Fact was purposed for assistance in taking note of changes in the exterior environments, internal logs, and diagnostic check responses. He can often found bickering with Rick over the pettiest of topics. They gladly state any facts they learn to Space Core. Their rep with scavengers is neutral as they barely interact despite his job.
And with that, my main character line up for the Portal/Rain World AU is completed! Full line up under the cut!!!!!
This has been a really fun AU to work on! I have some more ideas for future drawings and concepts though, mainly this universe's version of turrets! I'm thinking of mechanically modified dropwigs >:3
#aperture rain au#rain world#rain world au#portal#portal 2#portal au#slugcat oc#slugcat#fact core#spook skull art
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i always thought artificer was irredeemable - even with everything from this world being able to come back from the dead it still attempted genocide of the scavengers. and sure, i'm not saying that others can't like arti (in fact i do like them and their story) or write a redemption arc, they can have their fun that way. but i don't want to be guilted into thinking otherwise
I don't like to terms like 'irredeemable' on animals, even more sentient/intelligent (and fake) ones. Artificer is absolutely expressing unchecked hostility, but ultimately its still in the form of a creature reacting to its own trauma with aggression and, as a more intelligent being, with spite. Slugcats (and scavengers) are at their core not meant to be stand-ins for humans, and I think that there is a tendency for fandom (and humans with other 'smart animals') to correlate intelligence/sentience with at least somewhat of an obligation to conform to human morals. As a biologist who's a fan of wasps, I know how much people tend to project a need for human reasoning and morals onto creatures who literally could not comprehend it nor would want to. Hell, on an individual basis, even humans disagree on where things like that do and don't apply.
Do I think Artificer is good? Hell no, I said myself that I think they're something so violently consumed by their own grief and anger that on a literally spiritual level they have damaged themselves beyond reasonable repair. I think you need to be pretty uniquely fucked up and far gone to achieve that in such a level that it's literally scarred your own karma. I guess I think they are irredeemable in that sense, but mostly on a more meta level referring to their actual ability to recover vs. a moral one. The narrative of the story certainly condemns their actions pretty heavily in what is, effectively, a form of divine punishment- a complete and total inability to find peace in the form of proper ascension no matter what they do now. I feel that even if they threw away their grievances and just lived with Five Pebbles forever they would be unhappy and restless, just stuck with a permanent stain they wish they could ignore because it was an itch they scratched entirely through violence.
But in that same sense I don't think the scavengers are uniquely, humanly evil for killing a slugpup for stealing just because they are also an intelligent creature with the capacity for culture and understanding. I believe the scavengers fully understood they were attacking the equivalent of a slugcat child, and they did not care. That did not matter to them, because they are just naturally very selfish unless they have reason to believe youre on their side already, and even then they aren't above violence due to personal grievance. They killed Artificer's pup because it violated a rule it couldn't have known was a rule, and its unfair that it died for it, but I don't think it makes the scavengers evil for it in the same way I don't fault a lion for attacking the weak or young of a herd, or a bee for stinging.
I mean hell, even the scavengers themselves do it- They attack anything they perceive as threats, and will send squads to eliminate ones they think are particularly significant, even going out of their way to track them down. Sure, this is the a result of the creature already harming them- but Artificer was harmed. They were originally fleeing in their dreams. You could say it's different because Scavengers only target the one, but they already have a natural hostility to some slugcats and slugcats are generally independent (although its worth noting that slugpups pay for their parents' crimes by sharing reputation)- scavengers are not. They're all animals, they do what they perceive to be in their best interests, even if they perceive their best interest to be going out of their way to fight. The Ancients are the closest we have to a society with established morals in Rain World, and their favorite pastime was advanced genetic modification and disrupting ecosystems. It seems a little silly (to me) to be hung up on if any of these things are 'good' in that sense.
#i typed an awful lot here im sorry anon#but yeah as much as i think slugcats are intelligent i think slugcats are also beasts with largely the moral compass of one give or take#and their capacity for harm is defined solely by if the slugcat itself is bothered by the concept of harming rather than an understanding#that doing harm to things is bad#like slugpups with high sympathy dont like to eat bugs and wont kill them and i think thats about as much as you get from them#they understand that they can kill and that things die when killed and may choose not to do so out of sympathy for life#but not because they think actually killing it would be wrong#long post#tldr; artificer has major problems and i do think she sucks (positive) but i also dont thing shes like... morally bankrupt. I dont think#anything here has any morals at all except for the iterators#and even then five pebbled kills you for being annoying#but also this is getting into like philosophy above my level#either way whatever its fine artificer will be reborn as a vulture grub
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hello rain world tumblr. in my rain world fic, Taking the High Road, i accidentally created a conlang for scavengers. whoopsie.
that is not what im here to discuss, however. see, as a story about a slugcat and a scavenger traveling together, it was inevitable that the slugcat would start trying to learn 'scavengese.'
so i decided "scavs are basically humans so they can make all the sounds humans can, but scugs are like. cats. so they probably cant make all the sounds. how do i do that."
after about 20 seconds of consideration, i decided to try pronouncing my scavengese words without using my tongue, and just writing the sound that i made. it was quick, it was easy, and hey, it definitely wouldn't come up much (lie).
an innocent comment on my fic asking "hey how do you decide what scugs can and cant say" has sent my into a shower thought-fueled speculative biology session to retroactively justify my decisions. so, i'm gonna put that here, because someone will probably find it as interesting as me. anyway.
(tl;dr, click here for some speculative biology on how slugcat language works)
so, let us start with the basis for scug language, which is two facts: one, scugs are, at their core, moist cats which have evolved to the point of developing culture and language, and two, they go "wawawa." why do they go wawawa? because the entire community agreed on it and also I Said So. so how do we build a language around this?
so as we all know, cat language isn't language as we understand it. cats don't use words, they use stuff like purring and hissing and non-verbal cues. so, if cats suddenly constructed their own society like it was a Thing To Do, their language would probably involve those same things. so basically, natural slugcat language involves mostly non-verbal cues and sounds that humans cant make.
so now we come to the second part: why does rivulet go "wawawa" when they "talk" with moon?
well, my theory is that scugs have very immobile tongues and no teeth. bear with me here.
slugs, yknow, the base of slugcats other than cats, dont have tongues. they have a thing called a radula, which as far as i can tell, is basically a tonguelike thing covered in very small teeth. now, correct me if im wrong, but you probably wouldnt want a spiky meat sack flailing around your mouth, like we do with tongues.
also, look at scugs diet. theyre herbivores and insectivores, most of them being unable to eat meat (i imagine centipede flesh is quite soft once you get past the exoskeleton). the only scugs that can eat meat are hunter, artificer, gourmand, and spearmaster. three of these are genetically modified, hunter being specifically created to be a powerful warrior, spearmaster being... spearmaster, and artificer being the only scug with claws and also being able to Spontaneously Explode For Mobility.
gourmand is a special case, being yknow, a gourmand. they can eat meat from lizards and such, however it gives only half the pips of other meat eaters. this says to me that their system isnt built to handle meat, and they can only eat specific parts of these creatures. this is probably true of all slugcats, its just that gourmand has experience is what parts can and cant be eaten, them being the gourmand.
anyway my point here is, slugcats cant eat hard foods. think about what they eat. blue fruit is a bug chrysalis and therefore full of goo, bubble fruit seem to be made of some kind of gel, popcorn is popcorn, slime mold is slime, ect. ect. in the case of gooieducks, scugs have to rip off the hard casing in order to eat them. scugs are made to eat soft foods and liquids. so, they probably dont have teeth. or, if they do, they are affixed to their tongue, and previously discussed.
so why am i discussing scug diets in this post about scug language? well you see, dear reader, if scugs dont have lips, how do they hold their food in their mouth? their lips. and what is the main part of your mouth you use to go "wawawa?" thats right, your lips. scug lips are probably the most easy to use mouthpart they have
so, imagine youre ruffles. moon has been talking to you in her weird ancients language to you, which seems to consist entirely of mouth sounds (no throat sounds or non-verbal cues at all! how strange!) you love moon very much and want to make her happy, so you try to mimick her language. you arent used to using your mouth to speak very much, so what do you do? you just start making a sound and flapping your lips. and what sound does that make?
"wawawa."
and THAT, dear friends, is why scugs go wawawa.
#rain world#speculative biology#speculative worldbuilding#slugcat#slugcats#slugcat biology#i spent far too long on this#but its just so fascinating an idea!#also this theory still lets scugs groom their pups with their tongues like cats#cus their tongues are all spiky#makes for a good comb if youre careful
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Dumb Headcanon thoughts PART 2. This time it’s the Slugcat Edition... Along with a few bonus things because goodness.
This time we’re starting off a bit more hot. Mostly because I actually have a lot of additional things to say in general regarding this one simple fact. It is canon. Pebbles refers to you multiple times throughout different campaigns as a rodent. And sure you could take that as him looking at the slugcat and been a bit of a SatAM Robotnik about it... but I more like to take it as a statement of fact because it can lead to so much fun theorizing... thus my top sheet.
Side note, seriously, go look up what animals are in the rodent family, there’s some WILD revelations of it. Anyway... point the first... Beaver Inspiration... this also explains Slugcat buoyancy... their fur traps air for insulation in the water... Thus they naturally kind of go UP-- On the other hand, they regularly need to groom that oil through for this layer to do its job properly...
WITNESS... MY CREATURE DESIGN.
Dsbvjhbfsjhbfjhds, no but seriously, I have a lot of thoughts regarding this. I also really love the way the fandom has come to the conclusion that Slugcats are descended from a simple pipe cleaning organism. I agree honestly, their diets are just too funky to not be from something like that... also the edible moulds throughout the game.
On top of that, I think that said organism was also a “template” one. Aka, lab rats. It would explain why the iterators seem to tend towards Slugcats more than anything else...
Oh side note. I have another personal reasoning for giving Scugs white blood aside it just been funky. But because of how Rain World canonically doesn’t have a full divide between plants and animals... I got inspired specifically by milkweed plants, and some... things people believe about them.
Basically there’s an old, old rumour about it having healing properties. Also that squish fact... it’s based again on real world information. This is directly inspired by how rats can squeeze into gaps(also raccoons but they’re not rodents). Also just some fun to explain pipe travel... this is how shortcuts work tbh.
Anycase, yeah... More of the biology and developments thing. I do think the iterators did some encouraging of the development. Not entirely their fault though. Not at all. Again, there’s a lot of environmental pressure. Different creatures responded to it differently... for the lantern mice it became a matter of getting up high and then... well... yeah. They didn’t find much pressure from then on.
For the slugcats though, they ended up in the further wilds. In the ruins, and nomadic.
At some point I’ll come back on Scavengers. But not anytime soon. For now, here’s my slugcats are sentient propaganda... Which I fully believe is because of how they function in community and seem to be nomadic. I mean sheesh, Gourmand’s whole implied campaign. The iterators using them as messengers, or even with slightly more complex tasks... Or majorly more complex tasks...
Pebbles just expecting Rivulet to somehow know and understand retrieving his Rarefaction cell... To deliver it to Moon... also on Moon’s side... Iggy’s whole... thing, which I’m certain is the overseer’s decision alone, but just pleading for the slugcats to go bring neurons now! Yeah. Go Iggy, if they were a slugcat or other creature they would so choose violence. Love that little overseer.
SURPRISE. YOU FELL INTO MY TRAP CARD. This isn’t just a post talking about Slugcats but I also wanted to talk about the Cycle. In which case, yes I am a dirty heathen who thinks that the respawn is real. But before you stone me for that, I do have some in game evidence. As well arguments for why it doesn’t work on everything. Beyond just mechanics...
I think that there’s a few necessary ingredients for it to work. And the core to them is ties to your identity and sense of self, attachments to form and body. Which solidifies as you grow up, different people and creatures at different ages(although most creatures aren’t that attached I don’t think... why you can lose tamed lizors and tamed slups who haven’t found that connection yet). ALSO YES, I do think that a human randomly in Rain World would just... reincarnate... the greater cycle it is...
Mostly because to have a sense of yourself and place you also need to be more aware of the world. A place not just in your body but the world around you... I have more comments but those can wait for when I get around to doing a proper talk of what it means to ascend and break the cycle...
From Dust to Dust and Ashes to Ashes all that’s left of you is others memories, nonexistence just returning to once cosmic dust.
Final last point bonus. Just some Spearmaster thoughts really. I love to imagine Spearmaster is just one really messed up creechur because Suns literally doesn’t understand as much as they think they do. Amazingly designed, but really horror creature in action.
#Rain World#Slugcats#THybrid Art#THybrid Iterates#headcanons#I WILL FIGHT YOU SCUGS ARE RODENTS#And also very much sentient#Early early culture but still sentient#Same level as Scavs#Also sorry I'm a respawn believer
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AYYY MACARENA
MY RAINWORLD OCS(one is based off a friend's oc tho)
ITERATORS:
Triple Core System | TCS (Nickname: Cor3)
Iridescent Ravaged World | IRW (Nickname: Iris)
SLUGCAT/S:
The Radiant (nicknames: Little demon, pest, little baby boy, lil baby man, round, a wawa, a lil weewaa)
Facts about thems under the cut
Triple Core System:
Is a serious guy, but he can be silly at times... Just with usually an amused or nonchalant face
He is so CLINGY
Im not lying if Iris wants to go somewhere he gotta go too
But alas, he has to stay to manage their cans...
He is AroAce
Absolutely loves his scugger son
Deranged but looks soo normal
Iterator that focuses on making mechanical stuff
An older generation model like Looks to the Moon
Iridescent Ravaged World:
Is so deranged and silly
Theyre not even TRYING to be normal
Will dissect you and put you back flawlessly out of curiosity
Is also Clingy but not tot he extent Cor3 is
AlloRomantic & AlloSexual
but uses the label of AroAce
Absolutely loves his scugger son
Iterator that focuses on making purposed organisms
He modified the rot to be helpful but lost half his face instead
Same gen model as Five Pebbles
The Radiant:
A Slugcat made from scratch by both IRW and TCS
It took those two so many goddamned attempts to make Radiant that when this baby lived for more than 1 cycle they cried in happiness
His alternate Title is "Our Magnum Opus"
Is specifically modified and added on to be able to easily survive any harsh enviroments
Very efficient messenger bc this lik guy can just float and raze his way into an iterator's can
this baby scug can work as a power core for a whole iterator can
in fact, in sacrificing all the extra food pips they can make a new energy cell taht only lasts for 3 cycles
Already has a mark of communication and can reply back with text to speech
Hates 5P bc they almost ripped the pearl out him when they arrived after Spearmaster just left
Already glows, and knows how to detach an iterator from their arm.
Extras!!!
IRW and TCS were built very very close together. The bridge is short for a superstructure.
Due to them making purposed organisms to repair wnd defend their cans, No creatures like scavengers and vultures dare to be in proximity to the cans.
Instead of using water, they use purposed organisms that generate liquid and gas nitrogen to cool down their cans. this slowed down the initial rot bc it kept freezing
Superconductive magnets are frequently used to transport things around inside their cans due to liquid nitrogen being abundant
dont fall into the pools tho
youll freeze
Radiant is a very smart boiyo and if you give them tools theyll dismantle an iterator cans basic areas in atleast 10 cycles
Their local group is the "Factory Initiative" as they were given tasks other than finding a solution
Everyone else in the local group is dead
except 1
if you count someone barely concious alive that is
Also, the liquid nitrogen is very effective if done right, but its rlly hard to transport them arohnd... so they were only ever used in the factory Initiative group because they can easily transport and produce more across eachother.
The only iterators in that group that still used water cooling were the ones with farms to manage. and they discharged rain more frequently to decrease the danger to the plants and such theyre growing
so basically for those iterators, its a near constant on the clock making sure the rain they discharged wasnt lethal
anyways shsmsn
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what about some spicy thenamesh zombie AU around a campfire?
Gil blinked as a familiar weight collided with his shoulder. They'd been doing this a lot, lately. They didn't talk about it, certainly didn't bring it up once the sun was up. But Thena had made somewhat of a habit of falling asleep against him. And he had happily made a habit of pulling her closer and cuddling against her through the night.
He looked down, mostly catching the blond top of her head from his current angle. They'd been walking for who knew how long. They were both bone tired, taking turns dozing off and then jumping awake in alarm.
That was most of why he'd suggested stopping and resting properly; because he knew the second she sat down that she would be asleep.
It was cute when she tried to act like she could stay awake forever and then curl up next to him within five minutes.
Not that he could afford to be thinking those things.
But of course she was cute. Thena was surprisingly cute, the more he got to know her and see all the little parts of her she liked to think were hidden away.
She had a cute laugh--kind of light and bubbly, compared to how serious she was. Her smile showed off all her teeth, but it suited her. She liked sweets, that much was obvious. And as much as anyone in the current world would trade just about anything for a single piece of chocolate, he always tried extra hard to find something for her when they were scavenging.
The way her eyes lit up was always worth it.
He knew how pathetic he sounded. He didn't think he could help it, though. It wasn't possible to be ignorant to the fact that Thena was very, very beautiful--like stupidly beautiful. A little bit painful, really.
He tried not to--he really, really tried. But sometimes he would notice sway of her hips when she was walking with more purpose than usual. When they found a change of clothes and how she actually seemed most at home in a light dress (the mobility wasn't a problem for her or her deadliness). When he made something she really liked and she would let out this quiet little moan, almost like a purr.
Gil shifted on the log bench, technically just an old tree that was already falling and he'd helped get down to the ground. Thena was light against his shoulder, and he could smell the scent of rain from earlier on her.
"Gil," she sighed in her sleep, gripping his shirt in her fists to keep him from escaping with her precious source of warmth.
Gil blushed. He shifted again. This was getting dangerous.
He didn't like it, okay?--thinking of her...like this. He didn't like feeling like a skittish teenager, worried about how he was going to react to the smallest thing. Obviously they had more important things to worry about on a daily basis, so he was just...backed up. That was it. It was making his head cloudy, that was all.
What didn't help was that every little thing Thena did drove him closer to the point of insanity.
It had rained earlier. They hadn't exactly tried to avoid it. Thena ran her fingers through her hair, essentially taking it as a free shower. The water had plastered her clothes to her body, fabric clinging to skin with a desperation Gil was starting to feel in his core.
He'd caught a glimpse of her bra through her shirt and it had ruined him.
Gil let out a strained sigh. He felt himself twitch. He tried to think of other things. He thought about recipes, thing he would likely never make again, and things that he still could. It was silly, and he would never admit it, but he always savoured the chance the go through grocery stores or independent little places. Because then he could make her a new food he thought she would like, and he would get to see that smile she had that he knew was just for him-
Thena stirred as she felt his arm wrap around her waist. She was the light sleeper of the two of them. Her face pinched, "Gil."
What hearing his name out of her lips did to him.
"Gil!"
He startled as she shot up to stand--tried to. She ended up pushing him backwards off the log. But he was still holding her, and she fell with him. His arm curled in reflexively. She landed on his chest.
Gil blinked, his back on the ground. Thena looked down at him, orienting herself after waking in such a state. Her hair was still just a little damp at the ends, and fuller and fluffier than normal. She was back lit by the glow of the fire. She was so beautiful.
Thena stared down at him, settling back on her haunches when she realised there was no imminent danger. She was straddling him, seated in his lap. "Are you okay?"
"Are you?" he asked back, immediately and reflexively. His hands were on her arms. Her hands were on his chest. She wiggled and he went bright red to the tips of his ears. "Thena-"
"I'm fine, you're the one who fell," she frowned, looking over to see if she had somehow hurt him. She tilted her head this way and this.
Every little movement made Gil shiver. "Thena-"
"Gil, are you okay?" her brows knitted with worry, seeing the colour in his face. She raised one hand off his chest to test if he'd developed a fever.
Gil caught her hand. It was all over. "Sweetheart, you gotta get off."
"What are you-" Thena rocked back again, only now feeling what exactly had him so flustered. She blinked a few times. "Gil-"
"Sorry, sorry," he grumbled, looking away and feeling utterly humiliated as his cock poked against the curve of her ass. "I told you-!"
Thena didn't get up. She pressed against it, slowly and gently, as if testing something.
"Thena," he groaned. What was she doing to him? She did it again. Did she think this was funny? He gritted his teeth, moving his hands to grip her hips into being still, "Thena!"
A gasp. Just a simple little gasp. A perfectly natural reaction. He looked up at her, trying not to breathe so hard. She was breathing a little harder too, though. And now that he was looking at her, it seemed that she was also a little flushed.
This was way too dangerous.
Having her close was doing things to his brain. Seeing her blush was making him want to do...things. He had to get out of this situation.
Thena pushed back some hair and leaned forward, kissing him. She sighed as soon as their lips met, melting against him. He moaned against her, his fingers coming up to run through that hair of hers.
"Thena," he groaned, sounding truly in agonising pain. "Baby, I can't...this...we..."
What was he even saying?
Thena pulled away, looking at him splayed beneath her. She had that predatory look in her eye that was both beautiful and so fucking sexy. Her pupils were blown wide, making that special green of her eyes look darker. "You don't want this?"
He had never wanted anything more. "Do you?"
It was enough of an answer for her. She leaned forward, kissing him again, pressing herself closer this time. His hands went from her hair down her back. He pinched the clasp of her bra, trying to remind himself that he couldn't rip and tear it off of her, as much as he wanted to.
Thena wiggled against him again, teasing him relentlessly. She ground her hips against his. She liked having him at her mercy.
Gil panted as she pulled away, pulling off her bra and her shirt over her head. They were rushed, almost frantic about it, four hands fumbling to get zippers down and out of the way. Thena pulled him out, her hand soft and warm against him as he hit the open air. "Holy fuck."
Thena bit her lip, hovering above him. "Length isn't always exaggerated, hm?"
He blushed again.
Thena moaned as she sank down on him without delay. She took him into her easily, more than wet enough. She started at her own pace, moving his hands for him. One came up to her breast, the other went to her hip again.
He held her gently, caught between watching her in all her glory and squeezing his eyes shut at the ecstasy of it. He matched her pace, following her lead. "Thena."
"Harder." She moved against him more urgently, digging her nails into his shoulder. He squeezed just a little more and she whimpered, "fuck me."
Oh shit. Gil felt more than he thought. Something between his brain and his body snapped. He gripped her hips, pulling her down against him more sharply than he ever would have before.
"Gil!" she gasped as he started to thrust up against her. "Yes!"
"Fuck, Thena," he moaned, desperate to her his name again in that voice of hers. She rolled her hips in a change of pace. He took advantage to reach up to her breasts, kneading roughly and scraping his thumbs against her nipples.
"Gil," she moaned again, speeding faster towards the edge. "That's it, harder, more."
He would give her anything.
Gil grunted as he moved, pulling them both to the climax they desperately needed. He was close. He moved a hand between her legs, clumsy and fumbling. But it seemed to work as Thena's hips bucked against his touch. "Shit, you gotta come with me."
Thena let out a moan, her head rolling to the side as her hands scraped down the front of his body. "Fuck!"
Gil saw white as she clamped down around him, her orgasm washing over him from her. He let out some kind of sound as he came literal seconds after, shooting into her with all the release of months of built up tension.
Thena collapsed onto him, panting for breath, nestled into his neck and purring after her release. Gil mumbled as he tried to regain his senses. His hands trailed over her bare back at first before firmly pressing his palms to her skin. She got cold easily, as much as she didn't want to admit it.
Thena wiggled against him again, this time to slither up and kiss him.
He kissed her back for all he was worth. He stared at her, looking at him with stars in her eyes, a blissful smile on her face. He pushed some hair back, "Thena, I-"
"That was-"
They both stopped short. She laughed first, then him, and once they started they couldn't stop. She shook against him, trembling from the laughter, from the sex, from their position. He held her tight, feeling lighter than he could ever remember feeling.
He looked at her again, grinning, "you were saying?"
"You go first."
"I'm not going first," he shook his head. He would just say something stupid. Like tell her he loved her.
"Fine," she laughed, tracing her finger over his chest. Her eyes dropped down and a smile curved on her lips just so. "That was...I...it was nice."
There was something very reassuring about the idea of her being as flustered as he was. He wrapped an arm around her waist and did his best to sit up, at least partially. He raised a brow at her, "just nice?--that's all I get?"
To his delight, she blushed just enough for him to see even in the dark. "Well, what exactly were you looking for?"
He shook his head, kissing her again. She responded freely, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. His chest stung ever so faintly from her nails dragging over him, but he would happily wear the scratch marks with pride. Maybe he would even give her a little bit of a hard time over them.
What exactly were you looking for?
Her: he had been looking for her.
#You saw the ask#don't read this at work#I love that someone liked the zombie au#there's something so feverish about it#the adrenaline of it all#but it's still Thena and Gil#it's still sweet#poor Gil#having ungentlemanly thoughts#while I firmly believe#Thena has been watching him and those muscles#wanting him to throw her against the wall and#well you know the rest#Thenamesh Zombie AU#Thenamesh 18+
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@dwellerinroots videogame exchange list for you! A handful of my favorite open world/open world adjacent games.
Hollow Knight - 2D metroidvania platformer. Metroidvanias are like, basically open world games, right? right? It’s still centered on exploration, so I’m gonna say it counts. Anyway, Hollow Knight is a very special game in that it is one of two games where, partway through, I stopped and thought, “I did not pay nearly enough for this game.” You play as a strange little bug creature known only as the knight or the little ghost, and explore the ruins of a forgotten underground city that long fell to a mysterious disease. Very little lore is directly given to you, and not much of that given to you makes sense until much later, but the game is an excellent example, and should be a role model, of “show, don’t tell” and environmental storytelling. Beautiful art, haunting soundtrack, compelling characters, a huge map to explore, tons of secrets to find, a lore rich story, and a fast and tight combat system. It does have a reputation for being very difficult, both for combat and platforming, but less “this is a poorly designed game” and more it just has a steep learning curve. Well worth the challenge, though; the game will rip out your heart in the best way possible. I cried about at least two of the endings.
Subnautica - probably one of the crown jewels of open world exploration, tbh. Your ship crashes on an aquatic planet, and you have to survive, find out what crashed your ship, and build a rocket to escape. The world is beautifully alien, vibrantly alive, and the entire thing being underwater lends map design a unique sense of verticality that most normal-landscape open world games don’t have. There are, iirc, two timed events that happen, but otherwise you are free to ignore everything plot-related and explore as you please. I’d recommend playing in a dark room with good headphones for the full atmospheric effect. *(Due note though that Subnautica is... a little broken in some places. Reviews say it’s partially a horror game, but the scariest thing that happened to me was when one of the giant fish that wants to eat you pulled a Bethesda on me and clipped straight through a mountain to come get me. It’s a bit unpolished in areas, some mechanics don’t work quite as well as they were intended, and I suspect some areas might’ve been a victim of scope creep. There’s apparently been an update recently that supposedly fixed a lot of these, but based on my experience, it doesn’t quite feel like a complete game, and I’d definitely wait for it to go on sale before buying.)
Dying Light - This one is a bit more populated and quest heavy, but it has neat maps and fun gameplay. There’s been an outbreak of a zombie virus, and you’re a secret agent dropped into the quarantine zone to find some research on a cure. You must work with the survivors set up in the quarantined city both to accomplish your goal, and just to stay alive. The core gameplay is parkouring across the city to escape the zombie hordes, some of which are just as good at climbing as you are. Said parkour mechanics are very fast and fluid, and running around the city, chased by zombies, on a quest, or just for fun, is downright exhilarating. I did have some stuttering issues I couldn’t quite figure out how to fix, which is... a little bit of a problem when the gameplay is all about how fast and smooth you can move, but otherwise a great experience.
Rain World - ‘nother metroidvania platformer. I actually didn’t get too far in this one on account of the controls being a bit more -heh- sluggish, but that’s more of a personal preference thing than an actual problem with gameplay. You play as a little creature known as a slugcat. Separated from your family and stuck within the decaying corpse of an ancient machine, you must scavenge food to fill your belly, avoid other creatures that very much want to fill their bellies with you, and seek shelter at the end of each cycle to avoid drowning in each night’s torrential downpours. Very large map, wonderfully designed environments, and an achingly melancholic feel to the entire thing. I know there’s some pretty deep lore from watching a friend who was far better at the game play it, but if my own experiences are anything to go by, you are entirely able to scurry around and do your own thing for hours without paying the slightest bit of attention to lore.
Noita - This one’s a roguelike, but I feel like it deserves an honorable mention as an open world game, just for how dang big it is, both in actual map size, and in how much content there is crammed into that map. It’s apparently very heavily based in Finnish folklore, but it doesn’t really tell you any of that, it just kinda goes “Here’s how you move, here’s how you shoot, ok have fun!! :)” and then just throws you into the game. Its combat system centers about building your own magic wands with different spells on them, and combining spells in different ways can have wildly different results.For as deep as the wand mechanics are, though, the real selling point is the world simulation: every individual pixel is simulated, and everything interacts with everything else. You can burn things, break things, crumble things, shatter things, melt things, freeze things, and probably do a whole lot of other things I don’t even know about. Expect to die a lot, and expect to accidentally kill yourself a lot.
#pikspeak#bideogaem rambling :)#hope at least one of these catches your attention!#def let me know if u pick one up and what u think of it#may or may not add on to this list later with more- albeit unrelated- games#some of these descriptions got a little longer than anticipated haha#love talking about my favorite games :)
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Hi! I hope you're having a great day! I was wondering, what are your all-time favorite episodes from Amphibia and TOH, respectively? Thanks!
I've been doing good. I don't really have a particular favorite so I'll just put them in order.
For Amphibia my favorite episodes would have to be Anne or Beast/Best Fronds, Hop Luck/ Stakeout, The Domino Effect/Taking Charge, Anne Theft Auto, Girl Time, Dating Season/Anne Vs. Wild, Toad Tax/Prison Break, Grubhog Day, Civil Wart, Trip to the Archives, Snow Day/Cracking Mrs Croaker, Family Fishing Trip/Bizarre Bazaar, Cursed, The Big Bugball Game, Anne of the Year, Reunion, Handy Anne/Fort in the Road, Anne Hunter, Quarrelers Pass/Toadcatcher, Swamp and Sensibility/ Wax Museum, Marcy at the Gates, Scavenger Hunt, Hopping Mall, The Sleepover to End All Sleepovers/A Day at the Aquarium, After the Rain, The First Temple, New Wartwood, Maddie and Marcy, The Second Temple/Barrel's Warhammer, The Third Temple, The Dinner/Battle of the Bands, True Colors, The New Normal, Hop Til You Drop/Turning Point, Fight at the Museum/Temple Frogs, Fixing Frobo/Anne-sterminator, Sprig's Birthday, Olivia and Yunan, Froggy Little Christmas, Escape to Amphibia, The Core and the King, Fight or Flight, The Beginning of the End, All In, and The Hardest Thing.
For The Owl House my favorite episodes would have to be A Lying Witch and a Warden, Witches before Wizards, I Was A Teenage Abomination, The Intruder, Convention, Hooty's Moving Hastle, The First Day, Understanding Willow, Enchanted Grom Fright, Agony of a Witch, Young Blood Old Souls, Separate Tides, Escape Explusion, Echos of the Past, Keeping Up A-fear-ences, Through the Looking Glass Ruins, Hunting Palismen, Eda's Requiem, Knock Knock Knockin' On Hooty's Door, Eclipses Lake, Yesterday's Lie, Foilies at Coven Day Parade, Elsewhere and Elsewhen, Any Sport in a Storm, Reaching Out, Them's the Breaks Kid, Hollow Mind, Edge of the World, Labyrinth Runners, O Titan Where Art Thou, Clouds on the Horizon, King's Tide.
Sorry. I know that these are long list. I just love these shows and both of their lighthearted, funny, action packed, and angst episodes.
#i pretty much included all of the owl house season 2 episodes#it was that good#i love both of these shows so much that i can't narrow down my favorites in top 10s#amphibia#the owl house#asks#my asks
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A summary and analysis of my thoughts on Rain World: Downpour
Since I've beat the game pretty thoroughly now, I can actually do this. The short version:
Campaign whose gameplay I enjoyed the most: Artificer, by a long shot
Campaign whose lore I think fits into the preexisting world best: Gourmand
Most interesting story concepts: Saint
Heaviest hitting story: Three way tie between Rivulet, Saint, and Artificer, all for different reasons. Honorable mention to Spearmaster
Cool specbio possibilities: Spearmaster
I definitely enjoyed Downpour as a whole, both as a DLC and for the additional lore it provides even if some things may not be objectively canon; some things have more wiggle room than others, but considering Downpour is essentially Videocult endorsed, I'm willing to put stock into certain aspects. The new mechanics were fun to learn and mess around with, the stories were overall very interesting, and I had a lot of fun losing my god damn mind over these slugs. There are some major issues I have with Downpour though, one of the most major being how some campaigns diverge explicitly from the core theme of the vanilla game. I appreciate what Downpour added, but this is definitely not going to be all cheers and praise.
The rest of this will be going under a cut cause it's gonna be long.
This will be split into sections for easier reading and for easier writing for my poor sleep deprived brain. Saint's campaign broke me, yall. I've been operating on 5 hours of sleep all day.
Raw gameplay enjoyment
This one definitely goes to Arti. Her movement is practically unmatched; while Riv goes really fast and Saint lets you climb a lot of surfaces, Arti's bomb jumping combined with her permanent spear pulling ability makes her able to traverse almost anything. This is the first time I've ever dared traverse the Underhang, one of my favorite areas, without bringing a grapple worm with me. It was honestly amazing.
Her whole campaign is also just really, really fun for me. I like fighting things, but being forced to learn how to fight scavengers was honestly a delight. This is the most fun I've ever had repeatedly dying in a game, and it was for a multitude of reasons too, be it a stupid platforming death (happened a lot while I was learning how to use her bomb jump), getting overwhelmed by enemies, or just cackling at some wild lucky hit by a scav. And even beyond scavengers, fighting other things that would normally make me shriek and run away as other characters just became... average, really. I took down my first king vulture in Arti's campaign, and all it really took was an explosive spear (and the KV wedging itself into the wall, but shh).
Mechanically she's just... fun. She's so fun. And! You have basically no consequence for dying anyway! You have food EVERYWHERE and it's extremely easy to kill things to eat, explosives thrown at point blank range do little more than stun you, and aggression is encouraged. So even if you fuck up and die 200 times (literally my count was 200+ in 27 cycles LMAO) there's like... zero bearing on your progress in the game. And I really like that. It was still brutal, don't get me wrong. I think around three quarters of those 200 deaths, probably more, were from scavengers. But part of Rain World's original difficulty was that losing karma would lock you out of traversing regions eventually, and Arti kind of... removes that restriction. I will say it's really fucking annoying to have to look for karma 5 scavengers if you're trying to pass a karma 5 gate, but I really only had to do that twice and that was because I wanted to explore. It's kind of just... natural, I guess, for the structure of her campaign. I'm not good enough at combat to really do it cleanly myself, but I imagine people who are even more confident in their ability to go full on warpath mode with scavengers had less of an issue with this.
Gourmand quite easily takes second place after Arti, with almost as much combat ability as her if you use their abilities right and the added benefit of being able to make like half the game's items if you have the right things. Their food requirement was kind of daunting at first, but I was almost always able to eat up to full food, and it really wasn't that much of a challenge. Mechanically, too, their body slam move is really fucking funny, and I will forever be sad they patched out the tendency of Gourmand launching enemies across the map when rolling into them. Shoutout to that one white lizard on the wall that I landed on and totally crushed the spine of without me even seeing it, because I was trying to go fast and was not expecting an enemy one screen down. The exhaustion mechanic didn't bother me too much and honestly made me more confident with the starving mechanic, which I'm grateful for; that was probably the only reason why I even tried to starve on Arti when I had to shelter because of the rain. And overall, Gourmand's campaign was pretty chill, a nice middle ground of difficulty between Survivor and Hunter. It was a good stepping stone after finishing my Hunter run.
Least favorite mechanically was Saint. It got really irritating really fast to not be able to throw spears, and not even to kill things. I can stun things with rocks, sure, but that doesn't help me if I'm in a narrow space (which Saint has a lot of) and the place I want to go to doesn't have alternate paths (which Saint has a lot of). It got so, so fucking tiring to have to wait for enemies to fucking move, especially with the ridiculous abundance of spiders and spitter spiders everywhere I went. This campaign was the one I used dev tools the most on because I genuinely just got sick of waiting, because not only did that mean I wouldn't get anywhere when exploring, I would also waste time that would otherwise be spent eating food—which is also harder to get because Saint is strictly vegetarian!—or finding a shelter so I didn't freeze to death. You can only get spawn camped so many times before you get annoyed and all. Except instead of spawn camping you get the same fucking enemies camping the same fucking pipes forever. Good luck trying to get anywhere if you don't have karma 10. My god. The tongue was fun, but again, it does Not help if you're in a cramped space.
Spearmaster and Riv were... eh. Average. Fun in that I enjoyed them, average in that they didn't invoke any particular feelings in me. Definitely irritating that they introduced Spearmaster's dual spear wielding gimmick and then. Took it away from you. Lmao. What the hell honestly. But I had fun with all the campaigns overall.
Vanilla Lore Compliance
Gourmand takes this one easily. I like it because it's one of the most removed from the iterators' stories, similar to Survivor and Monk's campaigns. While that's a little sad, I'll admit, it fits a lot better with the core theme of the game. You're not the protagonist. You're a slugcat, trying to survive in this hostile world that was never designed for your existence. You can stumble your way into the lives of beings truly godlike in comparison to you, but you're not even a speck of dust in the grander scheme of things. You're nothing.
But you are you, and Gourmand embodies that very well. Literally too fat to give a shit, good for them. Their whole journey is just to eat well and sleep well and that translates so well to both gameplay and lore, and it's lovely. Lore wise, I also really like that ascending Gourmand gets you almost nothing, and doesn't even count as a proper game clear, because Gourmand is so so removed from anything to do with the ancients as a whole, which is actually something i had a bit of an issue with even in the vanilla lore. Who gives a shit about ascending? You're a slugcat, god dammit. The only things you think about are food, shelter, and danger. And maybe shiny pearls. What does the cycle matter to you? You're just trying to survive. So I really like Gourmand's true, Outer Expanse ending, especially the story implications of the ending cutscenes if you also finish their food quest. You're just exploring this new land, looking for food and safe places to rest in, because you're a slugcat with a family. What more could you want as a slugcat?
Arti is also fairly lore compliant, mostly because she. Uh. Has like no bearing on the lore lmfao. Her story is the most isolated from those of the iterators; she would have done what she did regardless of Pebbles' input. (Gourmand too, but that's not relevant here.) But her story also doesn't really tie back into the original theme of the game, so I can't really comment much on her campaign in terms of lore compliance. Still loved it though! Really liked the reasoning behind letting Pebbles read pearls for you.
Riv and Saint are terrible in terms of lore compliance, and it's a big issue I have with both their campaigns. I'm sure everyone's thought along these lines already, but both of them go directly against the core theme of the vanilla game, which again, is that you are not the protagonist. Riv is probably worse than Saint in this regard, because the events of her campaign require her direct input to occur, while Saint, you can argue they're just an observer of the world in the distant future. But they're both really really bad on this. I still enjoyed the story, but seriously? You're going to tell me someone purposed a slugcat to intentionally go inside an interator to retrieve possibly the most dangerous item in this world to date? And apparently, according to dev notes, Riv wasn't created by an iterator. Which makes no sense and I've elected to ignore that piece of information considering Riv spawns in with the mark of communication and a pearl with schematics of the inner workings of iterator cans. This is peak protagonist behavior. It's nice to get character development on Pebbles, but this really is just... bad. Lol. For canon lore. I really don't take anything Riv does in her campaign as objective fact.
Spearmaster is kinda just there. Not implausible by any means, given Hunter's campaign, though there's some timeline inconsistencies with Moon's collapse if you look through the vanilla pearls and compare the years. It's not that big of an issue though.
Story Concept Execution
As much as I have issues with Saint's campaign, I have to give this one to them. From start to finish it's just shock after shock, blow after blow after blow of oh god, the world's so different. Every change was at least interesting, even if I don't approve of some of them; I liked piecing together that the rain cycle doesn't exist anymore, and rather it's now based on whether you're freezing or not. The little details in how the world has changed are really charming too, especially in how lots of things are now fluffy because it's bitterly cold. Though Riv, Spearmaster and Arti have marked world changes, none are quite as striking as those found in Saint's campaign. It's truly like exploring a new world, except you can still see the old one in it, and it's a strange, somewhat bittersweet, somewhat melancholy feeling to go through the various areas, especially when Saint's campaign naturally takes you through most of the regions. The Undergrowth as a whole, where it used to be Drainage System, really hammers it home I think. You're witnessing the world reclaim itself from what the ancients did to it, for better or for worse, and though it's sad to see the old world go, it's kind of a relief to see it start to push back.
The layout of the world on a more meta sense is also really, really cool. I loved the detail of the old Underhang-Five Pebbles The Region gate now being the link between Silent Construct and Frigid Coast. I loved seeing, despite how horrifying it is story wise, how Pebbles' can has decayed and changed after all these years, and how life has reclaimed his arrays and chambers. I also really really loved the fact that each area has been renamed to reflect its current state; going through Sky Islands (Windswept Spires) to Farm Arrays (Desolate Fields) to Outskirts (Suburban something, I missed the second word) and beyond... it's very haunting in a way I thoroughly enjoyed. It felt a lot like picking through shattered pieces of glass and trying to piece them back together into a coherent shape again, while also knowing that it's never going to be what it once was.
Additionally, I absolutely adored the monologue changes of the already existing echoes, just mentally comparing the differences between what they say in Saint's time and what they say to the other slugcats. And the new echoes too! I keep thinking about the Undergrowth echo, how they mention they never wanted to ascend. It hits you so so hard with how the old world the ancients built is nothing but rubble and ice now. How they, too, were just people, trying so hard to do what they thought would bring them peace, and some of them not finding it even after what they thought would be an eternal rest. It just adds to the overall melancholy feeling of Saint's version of the world.
I don't think I have a clear second place or last place campaign for this category. They all held up on story execution in their own right, but none stood out quite as starkly as Saint's campaign did. They did well to force you to play Spearmaster and Rivulet first before Saint would be unlocked; without the context of both Spearmaster's pre-collapse time and Riv's post-collapse, heavily Rot infested time, Saint's story wouldn't have hit as hard.
Story Impact
It's really hard for me to pick one definitive favorite for this category because all the Downpour cats have such good stories for such different reasons, but Arti, Riv and Saint's campaigns definitely gripped me really, really hard. Spearmaster's did too, but a little less so, and not for Spearmaster himself; I was in it for Moon.
Arti held my interest from the start. It's no secret I'm an avid tragedy and horror enjoyer, and Arti's whole campaign is painted in the blood of her pups. Besides just being mechanically fun, I found myself constantly on the edge for more of her story, always wanting to find out more about what happened to her, what happened to her pups, what happened to make her hate scavengers so much she committed to killing them all. Though the final execution of her actual story felt a little flat, I still really loved the ideas behind her story, and she was the first one to make me destroy my sleep schedule to try and finish her campaign. The whole concept of a mother's rage extending so far that it locks her out of a true release is so so sad and I love it. I love her rage, I love her grief, I love her ceaseless violence that only perpetuates the cycle further, I love how hard it hits when you kill the Chief Scav and how little you get out of that. Her story is an exercise in futility and yet you will root for her. It's gutting and it's beautiful. I also know most of what happens in her other ending, and that just drives it home even more, I think. That her love and her grief is so strong that it prevents her from obtaining a true rest, forever separated from her pups after fighting for them for so long. It's heartbreaking and yet it fits so well. Very fitting for Rain World's overall melancholy world.
Riv and Saint both went for my throat with Pebbles' state, but in different ways. With Riv you get to see the horror of how much the Rot has overtaken his can. It was a fun and horrifying moment to enter via the wall and drop down, and then get stunned by the fall to finally realize that wait, the zero gravity is broken. And then seeing the proto daddies at the end and then encrusted over the pipe that would normally lead to GSB, and also the gaping hole in the side of his chamber and him just sitting on the floor, dejected. He sounds so defeated from the start, so frustrated but in a way that's more just tired than angry, or angry at himself rather than at the world. How desperate do you have to be as something so powerful, wielding so much knowledge, to ask some random critter that flopped into your chamber to save your long time friend (whose state you yourself caused)? And to ask them to go deep into your systems and remove the power source keeping you alive, no less? It drives home the passage of time between Monk's campaign and Riv's, and really nicely shows how Pebbles has changed as a person, even if it took everything literally falling to pieces around him to finally get there. I really get it, though, the fear of yourself and your actions and knowing you objectively messed up, but being too afraid and ashamed to ask for help. It's very brave of him to even ask Riv to do what he did, when he spends the last six campaigns telling slugcats to fuck off in no uncertain terms because he's so certain he has to fix this on his own. And the post game too, when you go back to his chamber and he just looks sad and finally agrees that he doesn't have to do this alone? Gut wrenching. They really went for everyone's hearts with Riv.
Which is just driven further home in Saint's campaign, when you find him sitting out in the snow in the remains of his can, his chamber not even a chamber anymore, and with barely enough of himself together to greet Saint when they stumble into him. He has only his music pearl left, and even that is distorted by time, and if you take it to Moon she pleads you to bring it back to him because it's all he has left. Any of his former bite is gone, replaced only by stuttering curiosity and confusion, and he even thanks you for keeping him company if you return enough times. You spend so long seeing him as this unreachable, untouchable presence that gives you some directions in an aloof way and maybe helps you out a bit, just to see him in this state of ruin, barely alive. I've never had a more visceral reaction to seeing him than I did in Saint's campaign, nor have I ever been more determined to find him. Like, stepping into what used to be Shaded Citadel, finding the Husk and realizing Pebbles collapsed because of course he did, he tells you that when you play as Riv, realizing why it's not shaded anymore, and seeing the state of his can... it's heartbreaking. The fact that there's so little of him left is heartbreaking.
And then on top of that, you get to actively choose to end his misery. To grant him the one thing he spent literally his whole life toiling for. And to me, it felt cruel, almost. It didn't even feel like mercy. And you can choose to do the same thing to Moon, too. It's all framed in such desolate but clear terms: the old world is dying, and a new one is emerging. Is it better to leave Moon there and allow her to slowly decay? But is ascending her a good option either? Is Pebbles truly more at peace like this? And it just makes me think about how both iterators may have felt watching Saint start glowing and flying, and then suddenly their souls are wrenched out of their bodies. And then after you reach the end of Rubicon, if you ascended either one or both of them, you can find them at the end, talking to you and telling you, perhaps a bit vaguely, that none of this is real. That none of what you did has lasting impact, that Pebbles is likely still out there in the snow, that Moon is still going to slowly decay like he did, that Saint, despite it all, is still trying to do this over and over and over again, because that is what an echo does. I haven't cried this hard at a game in a really long time, and I immediately started sobbing when I poked my head into the chamber and saw both of them there, the way they looked when in their prime, just to be told that my actions meant nothing in the end. It was absolutely devastating, but that really just cements how powerful Saint's story is. And here I realize that probably means Saint has the most powerful story impact, but it's truly hard to compare to Arti's and Riv's because the impact is different for all of them.
Then you have Spearmaster, where you get to explore Moon before she collapsed. I sobbed when I got to Neural Terminus and saw Moon's gorgeous blue and pink interior with Reflection of the Moon playing, just mourning all that she lost, all that Pebbles took from her, and despite it all, somehow, she's still kind and patient. Getting to see her as powerful as we will ever see her, while also knowing how much she loses and that this is not even close to what she would have been like in her prime, was just so so gutting. We're never going to know what Moon was like before it all happened, but this comes close to it, and it hurts. In a sense, it's a nice juxtaposition to what Riv and Saint show of her and Pebbles, and also just draws on an objective fact. Before and after the events of the vanilla game, Pebbles and Moon were or will be different. We only get to see glimpses of it.
Gourmand really doesn't have any stock here. Their ending is sweet, for sure, I cried twice at their ending, but the impact of knowing how Moon and Pebbles change and also the impacts of Arti's grief and rage really stuck with me more.
Uh, a section just for Spearmaster?
As you may have been able to tell from the analysis and summary above, I kind of didn't really think much of Spearmaster's campaign. I personally did not find it too hard (though I had experience dragging around two pups before that, so I was used to only having one active hand by then), but it's just frustrating to be introduced to a cool mechanic and then have it removed from you if you give a shit about the story. I do, however, thoroughly enjoy the concept of them as a purposed being. Why do they have no mouth? Why are they able to secrete spears? How and why do they have to eat from these spears? Why did Suns choose to create this creature? Wouldn't it have been easier to just take an existing slugcat and modify it like Sig did? So many questions. Their biology is funky and I enjoy it.
That's sort of it, though. While I did like Spearmaster's campaign overall, it really doesn't hold up to any of the other campaigns. Which is a bit disappointing, but oh well.
Downpour Overall
The concepts and stories introduced here were absolutely stunning, and I had a blast playing through all the campaigns, even if I did employ the use of dev tools a fair bit in certain campaigns (mostly Saint and a bit in Riv tbh), and I also turned on 'keep key items on passage' to speed things up. I do have a little bit of an issue with how certain parts of some campaigns cough Spearmaster and Saint cough felt very much like you'd need your karma to be high to be able to effectively traverse the map, while also really limiting your options for actually gaining karma, but maybe that's a bit of a problem on my end for not being a good enough gamer lmao. I dunno. I just don't enjoy karma grinding on something so story focused. On Survivor and Monk it's whatever, but I know the world and the story by now. I really hated having to just eat and sleep just so I could move on in the story, and eventually I just resorted to spawning food in with Beastmaster here and there so I could actually fucking save my progress. But overall? It was so so fun.
I am a little miffed that some of the campaigns directly go against how the vanilla game was structured, but I'm also delighted that we pretty much have dev approval for character development of characters like Pebbles and Moon, and to some extent Sig(!) and Suns. I personally work with the iterators a lot with stories, so I'm just piling up all of this information and shoving my face into it. I'm so happy about this asdkfgkklsdkl and generally, I think I'm just going to take the different timelines you can see with the various campaigns as snapshots of different moments in time. Do I honestly believe Riv could have achieved what she did? Do I genuinely believe Saint could or should have helped either iterator ascend? No, not really. Spearmaster I could believe more, but he's really a footnote in the broader story, an observer to this world that he really has no say in. I think that would capture the nature of Rain World better. You may not be the main character, but you can still view this world through the lens of something that exists in it.
Difficulty wise, it was okay for me personally, and mostly the dev tooling and assists were to help with me getting irritated more than objective difficulty I'd say? Like, I definitely could have done it legit, but it would take about three times as long and I just wanted to explore, for fuck's sake, and I wanted the rest of the story. Saint and Spearmaster were definitely harder in some respects, and Arti is a difficulty Cliff for some people, but it wasn't so bad that I couldn't enjoy the game, especially with remix options now.
Remix is definitely something I really really love though. For the longest time, I could not securely recommend Rain World to people because of the glaring accessibility issues it had. It still has some, but it's a great deal improved from what it used to be, and I'm very glad about that. Rain World's never going to be an easy game, but it's a really great one that deserves to be enjoyed by more people, and Remix is a great option for those who need more help along the way.
Some of the new creature concepts are really neat, honestly. I loved caramel lizards, these goofy little red x green lizard mixes with six (six!!!) legs, and also tiny cute pretty strawberry lizards. The Miros Vultures, as much as I fucking loathed having to deal with them, are so so cool conceptually. I just wish they didn't chase you across rooms :/ and, while terrifying, MLL was cool. I like the progression of the Rot. It's just cool details overall.
Would I recommend Downpour to people? Absolutely, but definitely play the base game first. Downpour is, as other people have put it, sort of its own game that shares mechanics and certain aspects of lore with Rain World. It was a mod originally, after all. But I think the MSC team deserves the money for the sheer amount of work they've put into this. It was an experience that was well worth the price and more.
#rain world#downpour#downpour spoilers#EXTENSIVE spoilers yall don't read if you haven't finished all the campaigns#now i haven't played inv's campaign but uh#i'm just going to pretend that's not a thing. lmao.#also i shit you not this miros vulture hunted me ACROSS ROOMS. TWICE.#it was so fucking annoying#like what do you mean you can TELL which room i'm in fuck you
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Apocalypse Journals (Prologue)
-The scenario for a writing practice I am starting to encourage myself to continue a passion I never began-
On a certain day in July of the year 2187 the world on planet Earth was abandoned by humanity. Through the years of gradual loss of our habitation, it was by the decision of several major world leaders; the Holy American Empire, the Russian Union, the Chinese Empire, the Great Nations of Britain, that humanity would abscond of this planet, this earth, and resettle to a brighter and more possible future on cultivated planet Gaia. The humans could no longer stand their smog coated skies or their inflated salt oceans, and set off in a hundred thousand interplanetary rockets towards the replacement planet, cultivated for several dozen years by the richest men in America and Europe to create a planet they could collectively own and inhabit in their own rights. Ninety percent of the population of Earth left the planet behind and moved towards their first new world, leaving behind only empty homes, the brick and wooden shells of nations and territories once dominated. They left behind their belongings, their history, and their pollution. They left behind their dregs, their windswept dried out farms, their empty factories to brace against the weather until the wind and rain cracked and shattered the windows and turned the rusting steel monsters into ghosts. They left it behind, and declared the planet uninhabitable- the first official galactic exclusion zone.
But humanity did not leave the planet alone. There were humans left behind, roughly nine hundred million across the globe, of which scattered with the fall of civilization and left behind their homes in seeking new territory, a future, a society that might be regained, or reformed. Some turned to the wild, assuming of themselves an ability to thrive as did their great ancestors, thousands of years before. Others clung to what they knew, squatting in the prefabricated cities they lived in before, and became Scavengers of the old world. As humans do, many struck out in their religions.
And nature returned, slowly, creeping in little ways through the radiation and toxins that then seeped to the planet’s core. Animals began to appear once more, species on the brink of eradication were able to return to some semblance of glory, and small mammals crawled over wood and brick.
Though not all could have been the same. Forests were no longer green and brown, but reds and greys, composed of sick and petrified trees. Marshes had become deserts, the coastal cities long since turned into memories. Rain could save your life, or corrode your skin, and no man walked without filtration systems or geiger counters.
Nature may have been seeking to reclaim the earth, the planet seeking to heal, but scars do not fade so easily.
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the worlds I: hell
I use the word hell as short hand for my worlds, its not the actual biblical hell. In universe hell and its inhabitants are not celestial or religious figures, rather humans saw aliens on earth and it got adapted into various myths and religions. Again in universe this kind of stuck as a naming system but there is an understanding that when people art talking about their home world they are not talking about the biblical hell.
the only habitable zone on the planet, to its residents knowledge, is the network of caves deep beneath the planet's surface which is currently inaccessible my any means. they could be kilometers underground with no way to know if the space above them is even safe.
Because of this there is no way to know where their planet is in the universe and very little possibility for space travel outside the wormholes within the cave system. the residents have noticed a slight discrepancy in time between earth and their home, a tiny and minuscule deviation between the two, it could be the wormholes, they could orbit a black hole, either way its unlikely that their world has a star.
the caves are geothermically heated by the planets core, the magma in great seas of molten rock. This is where life began on this planet, with temperatures hot enough to support the development of silicon based life. most of the caves where people actually live are quite large, having high ceilings and being overall expansive. most of the caves are made from igneous rock. water does surprisingly exist in hell, most of it being trapped as permafrost or in glaciers. generally it doesn't rain in hell ( have no idea what a scientific explanation would be fore this just that like aesthetically that's what's going on
hells atmosphere is dense and polluted, all the exposed volcanic activity means the atmosphere is rich in carbon monoxide, and while there is enough oxygen there to support human life, CO presence makes the atmosphere toxic. the pressure is also greater than that of earth, the difference is great enough that without specialized adaptations going though a wormhole would cause injury or death.
the lack of a star means there are no seasons or day-night cycle. with the inhabited enviroment also being underground this leads to a very stable ecosystem that doesn't have to worry about most mass extinction events coming from space. in the case of volcanic eruptions, most organisms have already adapted to volcanic activity and again lack of sunlight thus volcanic winters also have little effect. hell has had far less mass extinctions than earth, some species lineages are very very long.
i take a lot of inspiration from the deep see when writing hell, because it is also an enviroment that lacks sunlight. as one might expect there are no plants, there are still many autotrophs that feed off chemicals, especially methane, and thermotrophs which utilize thermal energy (this does not exist irl unlike chemotrophs). There are also very few mega-fauna, the only large animals being the sentient demons (will be discussed later), and maybe a few species analogous to things like foxes or hyaenas, scavenging is a good survival strategy here.
hell is neither completely frozen over or completely boiling, temperature varies based on distance to the aforementioned seas of magma, there are areas that 100% are frozen and others where liquid water couldn't even try to exist. most inhabited areas lean on the cold side at around 10 degrees, to still have access to water but to be close enough to glaciers to supply it. hotter temperatures can be tolerated but up until recently building large cities near coasts was impossible.
#worldbuilding#world building#writing#write#wirteblr#scifi#sci-fi#sci fi#sci fi books#planets#outerspace#writer on tumblr#original fiction#world lore#scifi worldbuilding#‟no under no circumstance will i shut up about the silly little silicon based life forms i made and their silly little planet‟#‟it may be uninhabitable to most but its home okay guys‟
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MANAFLARE
The concept for my DnD 5e Homebrew settig inspired by the Fallout series:
War. War never changes.
The end of the world occurred pretty much as we had predicted. Too many people, not enough space or resources to go around. The details are trivial and pointless, the reasons, as always, purely human ones.
The world was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing, a magical spark struck by mortal hands, quickly raged out of control. Spears of arcane fire rained from the skies. Continents were swallowed in flames and fell beneath the boiling oceans. Life was almost extinguished, their spirits becoming part of the background radiation that blanketed the earth.
A quiet darkness fell across the planet, lasting many years. Few survived the devastation. Some had been fortunate enough to reach safety, taking shelter in great underground dungeons. When the great darkness passed, these dungeons opened, and their inhabitants emerged to begin their lives again.
To summarize what makes Fallout such a special experience is impossible. The tone shifted immensely over the course of the series. The feeling of Fallout 1 & 2, 3 & New Vegas, and 4 & 76 is completely different. While it all takes place in the same setting, the change of location, game play and overall feeling leaves a different taste in your mouth for every instance. So how would one begin to try to base your setting on something as changing as the Fallout Series?
The first thing I decided on was to pick a game that would stand as the baseline. If there ever was confusion on how to handle, I would see how that game in the series had done it and go from there. That game is Fallout 2, my favourite entry in the series when it comes to the atmosphere.
Secondly, I picked the core driving forces behind that atmosphere. These are, in no particular order:
Radiation, the result of a War between two forces that destroyed the world, and that left the survivors mutated or poisoned. Radiation in Manaflare is left over magical taint, a result of the spells that were dropped to end all wars. Such arcane might that burns down the entire world of course warps the very fabric of magic itself.
The Vaults, in the setting of Manaflare called “Hoards”, some of which work as advertised, while others are the testing grounds for social experiments. The Hoards were built by an as of yet unnamed force and serve as the origin for player characters.
Technology in the form of Brainbots, Power Armor, Plasma Rifles and the like has gone beyond all ethics in the world of Fallout, and the same is achieved by an almost all-encompassing understanding of magic in the world of Manaflare. Where Fallout has generators, Laser rifles, and robotics, Manaflare has powerful fey strapped into ancient contraptions that sap them of their energies to power arcane machinery, Crystals loaded into devices that fling lightning, and magic energies bend in a way as to form rudimentary intelligence following long obsolete commands.
Guns and the scavenging for ammo, among other resources, is a great part of what gives Fallout its distinct feel. To emulate this, Manaflare will implement the optional handguns from the players handbook, the Artificer class, and a lot of homebrew, an example of which can be found further below.
The Multiple Factions, the nations that fought in the Great War, Manaflare equivalents of VaulTec, The Brotherhood of Steel, the FEV, and a whole lot of other things are still things that are to be determined. I hope you stay tuned for more.
Homebrew:
Shotgun: Does 1d4 x the number of pellets pierce damage. The number of pellets is determined by the ammunition used, as is the range. For every 5ft of distance between the attacker and the target, one pellet is subtracted from the damage calculator.
Attacks of Opportunity: An enemy running in sight of a group of gun-wielding goblins would, as for the core rules of 5e DnD, not be fired upon by this group. To further implement the feeling of Fallout, in this case the exchange of shots in the 3D-titles, all ranged weapons enable their user to use their reaction to make an attack of opportunity against enemies walking through the radius of their regular range. Firing at a moving target is far more difficult than firing at a moving one, so all ranged attacks of opportunity are made with disadvantage.
Ideas in need of fleshing out and further consideration:
Hoards, powered by Dragons, Angels, and other magical creatures bound into generators. This could be the source of the Dungeons’ Warlocks, Paladins, Clerics, or Sorcerers.
No communication with Patrons, Manaflare being the world the gods, the devils and even the demons abandoned.
V.A.T.S. being implemented SOMEHOW, that’s very important
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Lightning - Negan (smut)
Request by anon: hey lovely! do you think you could do a really shy reader having sex with Negan?
Enjoy my loves. xxx
Summary: Negan distracts the reader from the raging thunderstorm outside.
Warnings: smut, 18+
She visibly gulped, hands trembling as she unzipped his leather jacket, lips ghosting over his. Her heart was pounding against her ribcage, mind overthinking every move of his, “Negan”, her timid voice made him smile, forest green eyes meeting hers, hands interlacing themselves with her trembling ones, “it’s alright, I got you”.
Both had been chasing one another for months, (y/n) had joined the Sanctuary a while ago, feeling more at home and welcomed than she had for years. Instantly he had captured her attention, the shy girl would mostly keep to herself, keeping herself busy with getting lost in fictional worlds, nose buried in books she had scavenged, only putting them aside as she’d have to work her shift in the kitchen.
At first he had barely noticed her, not feeling her longing glances on him, but as she had stumbled into him on a sunny afternoon Negan had instantly felt his insides burning, aching to touch her, to bury his throbbing length in her tightness. But even though his first instinct had told him to push her against the nearest wall and fuck her into oblivion, he wanted to get to know her, to slowly pull the shy girl out of her comofort zone.
By now, months after their first encounter, she was placed on the sofa in his quarters, barely dressed, drowning in his piercing green eyes. Negan was everywhere, his scent engulfed her, his hands wandering up and down her naked skin, lips caressing her jaw, he had lured her into his trap and there was no escaping. The room was pitch black, no light to illuminate their features, something she was rather fond of, hiding the skin she was oh so uncertain of from his eyes, not having to worry about disappointing him with the body she found herself worrying over.
But it seemed as if the savior had some other plans, he rose from the sofa, rolling his shoulders as he strode across the room, hands toying with the light switch. A soft, warm toned light burned down on them, Negan could clearly see her flushed cheeks, the nervous biting marks on her lips and those marks he had sucked into her flesh.
The sound of thunder roaring through the night made her flinch, senses working on overdrive, triggering a fight or flight reaction, she always had been terrified of thunderstorms. “(Y/n)”, he rasped out her name, not taking his eyes off her trembling frame, teeth tugging on his leather gloves, shrugging off the heavy jacket, “do you trust me?”. No words left her lips, besides a gasp as another thunder echoed through the night, followed by a flash of lightning.
Rain was pouring down from the dark night sky, clashing against the windows, distracting her from the tall and dangerous man that had invited her into his quarters what felt like hours ago. “You don’t need to be scared doll”, he couldn’t stop his smirk from spreading, “I’m sure we’ll find a way to distract you”. Negan hoisted her up, pressing her against his broad chest, arms protectively slung around her middle, “I’m sorry”, she felt pathetic, scared of a thunderstorm like a child, hiding away from the loud noises, finding shelter in the embrace of a man she wasn’t quite sure she could trust.
Negan was like a safe haven, protecting her from the clashing waves of rain, like a boat that would barely live through a storm, drowning as a few drops of water would fall from the sky, but he wouldn’t let her fall apart, oh no he wouldn’t. She’d chase the sunlight, bathing in it’s warmth, running away from shadows and the gruel tales they’d tell, she wasn’t one to find comfort in nature's loud sounds.
“I need to know that you trust me doll”, he wasn’t quite sure how far he could take it with her, Negan had never felt that mesmerized by a shy girl like her before, he wasn’t one to take care of other people, wasn’t one to go slow and loving, but for her he would. “I do”, (y/n)’s eyes fluttered close, trying to focus herself on Negan, all of Negan, every breath that spilled from his parted lips, every soft touch of his, drowning out the sounds of the roaring thunder.
His deep voice was like a serenade, it sung to her heart, cosying her along, giving her a reason to trust him, to give her all to him, like she had wanted for a long time, since the first moment she had looked into his entrancing eyes. “Good”, finally his lips met hers, electricity began to hit her, taking up every vessel in her body, alighting a fire deep inside of her. Negan's beard scratched against her skin, stubbles leaving burn marks behind as he kissed along her jaw, large hand cupping her core, smirking at the heat that radiated off her, clashing against his palm.
“Is this okay?”, he mumbled against her skin, finding his way back to her lips, he had to kiss her again, Negan was already hooked on her taste, never wanting to break their lips apart. She merely nodded her head yes, trying to let loose, giving into his touch, (y/n) choked out a strangled moan, hand finding his wrist, squeezing his slightly tanned skin. Negan had found some time in the last few days of July to let his skin get a bit darker, marked by the sun.
His fingertips danced along the outlines of her panties, thumb pressed against her clit, teasing the bundle of nerves through the soaked through fabric of her panties. Sure she had been touched like this before, praying that the boys would get it over and done with, never truly finding anything about the situation alluring, but with Negan it was different, completely different. He awoke emotions deep inside of her, slowly breaking her out of her shell, nothing there to hide away from his hungry eyes.
“I’m here, relax doll”, he mused, finally pushing her panties aside, cold skin touching her burning one, dragging his fingers through her folds, spreading her arousal on her clit. “Fuck, I want to taste you doll, want to dip my tongue into you, to properly explore your pretty pussy”, the words made her arch her back, sobs wrecked through her, panting out heavy breaths as Negan kissed her collarbones, hot tongue leaving a trail.
For a moment Negan withdrew his fingers, helping (y/n) out of her shirt, “ah”, he clicked his tongue, she had tried to cover up her chest, eyes focused on his chin, she didn’t want to see the disappointment in his eyes as he’d take in the sight of her body. “You’re fucking beautiful doll, don’t you hide yourself away from me”, his voice dripped with sincerety, praying that she’d finally get it, the need and desire he felt for her.
(Y/n) bit her lip, letting go of her boobs, visibly gulping, his gaze burned through her skin, goosebumps littered her body, overwhelmed by the different sensations. “Good girl”, Negan pressed his tongue flat against her nipples, toying with the hardening nubs as he slowly entered her heat with two long, calloused fingers of his. Her walls invited him in, slowly adjusting, swallowing most of his fingers, “oh god”, for a moment she felt ashamed to pant out those words, to let Negan explore her body like this, but his touch felt too good, distracting her from her overthinking.
Lightning danced on the sky, throwing a dark shadow onto his handsome features, looking more dangerous than ever, green, tantalizing eyes wandering over her frame, taking in every inch of her skin. “Doll”, he ripped her out of her thoughts, catching her uncertain gaze, “you can always tell me to stop”, Negan murmured, pulling his fingers out of her clenching heat, bringing them up to her swollen lips. Almost automatically she wrapped her lips around his fingers, cleaning them, tasting herself on his skin, “even though I sure as hell hope you won’t”, his raspy chuckle made her smile, she wouldn’t find the strength to tell him no.
Negan undid his trousers, he didn’t want to scare her off, moving rather slow, his length throbbed against his boxers, (y/n) tugged on his shirt, hands roaming across his naked chest, combing through the salt and pepper hairs, tracing the outlines of his tattoos. “You’re beautiful”, the words spilled from her lips before she could stop herself, “sorry”, (y/n) withdrew her hands, furrowing her eyebrows together. Wordlessly he captured her lips with his, pulling her onto his lap, “thank you doll”, he rolled his hips against hers, holding her still with his large hands placed on her sides.
(Y/n)s head rolled back, lips parted, it felt good to have him pressed against her folds, deliciously rubbing against the spots he had explored with his hands earlier on, she wanted more, needed all of him. “Please Negan”, she stuttered the words, he was still grinding against her, could feel his precum soak through the dark fabric of his boxers, the words that left her coaxed a relieved sigh out of him, he didn’t want to wait much longer, he had to have her.
She felt like she was drunk, body working against her mind, not thinking about any ‘what if’s’, the things that could go wrong, she was aching for his touch, drowning in the storm called Negan and the clashing waves of lust he brought upon her.
He took it slow with her, shoving her back onto his mattress, tugging down her last piece of clothing, his boxers followed her panties to the floor. By now both were completely naked, hot chests pressed against each other, “are you sure doll?”, god, he prayed to the gods above that she’d say ‘yes’, Negan wasn’t quite sure, if he’d find the strength to stop himself.
“Yes”, a tiny whimper left her lips, trying to swallow down the uncertainty that crawled up her body, pupils dilated as her eyes fell down to his member, he was big, bigger than anybody she had ever been with. Negan grasped one of the foil packages he’d keep hidden in his bedside drawer, rolling it down his shaft, “I’ll be gentle, I promise”. It took her a few moments to adjust, nodding her head yes as the burning sensation was getting too much, she needed to move, needed him to fully stretch her with every thrust of his.
The thunderstorm was long forgotten, somehow she found comfort in the noise of the raindrops pattering against the windows, drowning out the sounds that crawled up her throat, ripping out of her.
Negan was set on a slow pace, more painful than anything he had ever endured, he nuzzled his face against the crook of her neck, biting into the spot where her shoulders met her neck, distracting himself from the need to ferociously thrust into her heat. He gritted his teeth, panting against her skin, “doll”, the raspy moan that followed the word made (y/n) clench her walls, hands tangled in his hair, tugging on his roots, “faster Negan, please”.
Instantly he began to build up his pace, lifting his head off her skin, lips bruising hers, tongues fighting for victory as his skin slapped against hers. (Y/n) slowly found herself getting lost in his touch, the knot in her lower abdomen got tighter, she’d have to let go any moment now, screaming his name as his tip gazed at her sweet spot.
The pressure was getting too much for her, “I’m so close”, she sobbed, tightening her grip on his roots, as if she needed something to hold onto, submerged by the raging storm that carried his name.
The clenching of her walls urged him on, thumb adding pressure to her clit, pushing her right over the edge, orgasm raging through her, stuttering out his name over and over again. “Fucking hell doll”, he gave it a few more thrusts, getting lost in her beauty, face displaying the pleasure that soared through her.
His pace faltered, length twitching inside of her, releasing himself into the condom, collapsing right on top of her. Another thunder roared through the night, pulling them out of their trances, eyes finding one another, a smile tugged on her lips, she felt protected and safe in his arms, something she had been searching for a long time.
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