Lizardfolk: I made this inspired by Base Stats in Wizardy , specifically its space fantasy trilogy

(Their mental stats for even those related to observation/trap detection were bad that compared to the other Hunter gatherers societies in the setting that it strained credibility)

And think the idea of making Lizardfolk a species that had an advanced civilization that went into hibernation/time displacement to escape, and awaken into the generic fantasy world is a good way to get rid of the "jungle savage" thing while making it clear why people think they are simple brutes and allow some great Golden Age Scifi fun.

Not everyone survived the hibernation/timewarp, some of them have minor brain damage from the process (I'm thinking of people I knew online who had trouble with some tasks after an accident, and used hobbies like toy diorama photography to help get brains stimulated ), your cities are dust and rust, and your career options are mostly in shambles with people only valuing your strength

Think how frustrated you'd be if you woke into the future, all the plants and animals are different, and your career options are generally working for a mad sorceror or something as hired muscle

*orgre and lizardman guarding a door* Lizardman: I used to be a computer scientist...but look at me now... Ogre: still don't know what that is.

Many would be pissed off and ready to throw down, your strength is your biggest asset now.

You people for a time eat mostly meat because they can't tell which plants are poisonous, adding to the "bloodthirsty" stereotype.

If I made a game guide around playing them, I'd include a short Golden Age sci-fi story about a human waking up in a world of lizard people and having trouble fitting in until he snaps. It ends with his death and a lizard person poignantly going "but would many of us have done better in his position?"

I made a little game! You play as a demon trying to live a peaceful life in your lair but a rude businessman wants to turn your cave into condominiums, so he hires members of the adventurer’s guild to try and oust you.

You can play free in browser here

I made the sprites and composed the music and @gbsketch did all the programming and ui.

Ten inessential worldbuilding features for local communities in your fantasy RPG:

A grievance or conflict of interest with a neighbouring community which the community's members feel much more strongly about than the issue's magnitude really warrants

A substance or commodity important to everyday life with no local source, and the complicated and inconvenient arrangement the community has made to obtain it from outside sources

A local practice or custom whose original motivation has been rendered obsolete by changing circumstances, and which is now carried forward out of tradition

Something that's technically illegal, but everyone does it on the sly anyway, with enforcement of its illegality being reserved for people the community's leaders want to mess with for unrelated reasons

An obscure piece of trivia or local history which the community's members regard as obvious and widely known, to the extent of treating outsiders with contempt for revealing their ignorance of it

Some undertaking or realm of achievement in which the community isn't particularly exceptional, but which the community's members believe they're the best around at as a point of civic pride

A mostly harmless thing that nobody talks about because its existence or some facet of its historical context is regarded as an embarrassment to the community

A particular prank that's become traditional to play on visitors to the community, and which occasionally gets taken further than is strictly appropriate

A specific area of the setting's history where what the community's members insist really happened is wildly at odds with the accepted version of events

A genuinely dangerous circumstance that everyone treats with casual disregard because it's always been there, and only a damn fool would actually get hurt by it anyway

The further along his courtship with Peasley progresses, the more and more Luigi is loved and celebrated within the Beanbean Kingdom. He’s already highly regarded, if not as highly as his brother — he’s still a hero at the end of the day, and even if he hasn’t made a career of it, he took direct part in eliminating a national threat. But in the beginning, he’s still, well, the other Mario brother, the one that tagged along and doesn’t have much more to his name outside of that single adventure.

But there’s something about him that starts catching people’s attention. The Beanish royal family is deeply beloved, but the Queen is noble to the point of stoicism while the Crown Prince is flashy and flamboyant and larger than life, making them feel almost unreachable. Then along comes a man who’s as closely affiliated with the royals as one can be, a war hero and the unspoken-but-understood future Prince Consort, and he’s… just some guy.

He stutters a lot, he has a hard time maintaining eye contact, he tends to look at his feet when he walks. He always gets the same order at Starbeans yet seems gratefully surprised each time he walks in and the baristas have it ready for him. He reads all of the plaques in parks and at museums and monuments with keen interest; he always stops to admire the flowers and oohs and ahhs at crops growing in farmers’ fields; when children who don’t yet understand his status seize him by the wrists and implore him to play, he does so joyfully. He’s not a people person, per say, but he’s still a people’s person — he doesn’t sit back and adopt a dignified facade and float high on his elevated social status and the luxuries it entails. He makes no attempt to hide his imperfections, and he’s genuinely invested in the Beanish people, their culture, and their everyday lives.

Being so down-to-earth makes him easily approachable, which has an unintended but fortuitous side-effect: he becomes a direct link between the once inaccessible royal family and the general populace. He listens to average people’s stories and recounts them to his lover, who in turn becomes more sensitive and attuned to the needs and wants and hopes of his people, a shift that soon rubs off on his mother as well and begins seeping into both written policy and the way they interact with those beneath them. Luigi is considered in short order to be one of the best political influences the kingdom has seen in years.

And he doesn’t even mean to have any influence! He just likes learning about people and the things that drive them because he’s so curious and compassionate! He’s got no political know-how and he can’t even pretend to think more highly of himself than those around him; he’s the least princely future prince out there, and that’s precisely why he’s so loved.

What are DnD and Pathfinder if not medieval fantasy? Just curious, I've been (perhaps wrongly) calling them that for ages 😅

The classic Fantasy Tabletop RPG setting is similar to medieval fantasy, sure, but much Weirder. With the capital W intentional. D&D owes as much to the Weird Fiction of the early 20th century as it does to Tolkien, if not more. You won't find a crashed spaceship, multiple species of mind controlling alien horrors or a general vibe of adventuring as a thing to do to make a quick buck or die trying in Middle-Earth, Narnia or Westeros, but you will in the Hyborian Age, Newhon, or Zothique.

This is also why Final Fantasy, which started as a D&D ripoff, added airships and robots pretty early on and they fit right in no problem. That kitchen sink attitude towards fantasy, science fiction and horror tropes is very Weird Fiction, and is a hallmark of D&D and especially Pathfinder to this day.

as much as I hate the shadow cursed lands, act II is just. incredible. awe. the best part of the game, both in the terms of writing, level design, quests and character progression, music, everything. beautiful

Is there any part of being small that Glen enjoys?

who wouldn't right?

[Nefarious wakes up in the morning, sun shining through the window he swore he closed last night. He's draped over Select and promptly decides to go back to sleep.]

[They realize with a start that they and Sel had not gone to sleep in the same room last night. How the hell did they get here???]

(@nefarious-exclam )

[Select is still deeply asleep]

need to think about something taffy and coco can do during the timeskip because i am now thinking it would be awesome if all mochis guild members joined an (at least partially) antagonistic purpose after she left and the timeskip begins with a bunch of missions trying to get them back

here's the art i did for the quirkier earthbound inspired tournament a few weeks ago!!

couldn't be happier about the results (❁´◡`❁)

Kokichi's kokiching, part 1 out of 2.

I'm not even gonna post this one into DDDA's main tags, since it's a very silly, very indulgent thing, that only people who've played V3 might appreciate; not everything here is outright funny, AND I coudn't help myself with cheesy editing, like adding sprites here and there (the voice acting just begged for this imo), so there's that, too. :P

But honestly though, Ouma was such a joy to have around XD. I wasn't counting on accuracy when it comes to reflecting his character, even with the few personality-tweaking options that the game provides, but to my surprise... many times it wasn't so bad! And definitely was very fun - he was such a fierce, dramatic, snarky little menace... as he should be. <3

He also had a strange vendetta against carts, dunno why tbh, definitely did not learn it from Gonta. He'd ignore boxes and crates for the most part, destroyed barrels only when I desperately needed one (granted, 8 out 10 times I used them to perform barrel glitch, so fair, I guess, but he did made me stuck inside a Dusk Moon Tower's chest room with no liftstones to teleport myself out of it, leaving reloading my save as the only option...it's like he KNEW)... but carts? None shall remain.

Introducing...

SMASH BROS LAWL QUASAR!

(find out who everyone is in tags)

Also tell me your thoughts!

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

you know that fantasy setting trope with the giant, muscular, extrovert and loud mercenary who laughs with their whole heart as they wrap a huge arm around the neck of the timid, blushing, flustered and quiet mage to reassure them on a doubt they just had?

imagine the reverse.

a tiny mercenary nearly jumping on the back of an immense mage to circle their neck with their arm laughing and ruffling their hair. i need reversed trope on brotherhood. that MUST exist somewhere right

Character Trope Rolling Table

Want to make one of your NPCs...tropey? Little odd, but we get it.