#samsaran
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Fungal Pilgrim (Druid Archetype)
(art by Eugene Horyachkin on Artstation)
Ah, fungus, an often misunderstood and strangely wondrous and fascinating form of life. They can grow miles across underground with their mycelia network, yet most individuals assume that the reproductive bits that sprout up from the ground are the main body of the organism and not a fractionally small part of a bigger whole we never see.
Indeed, there is much about fungus that even in this day and age we do not know. There’s plenty of evidence that many fungi are at least somewhat aware of their environment, and many mycelia networks appear to be functionally immortal.
It’s no surprise then, that in a fantasy setting there would be those that view fungi as the ultimate life form, and seek to become more fungus-like.
As their name suggests, these fungal pilgrims are on a quest, though not one to any specific location, but they have a destination in mind: apotheosis into a fungal being. Some might be devotees of fungal deities good or evil, some may see it as a form of immortality, and some may simply think of fungus as a superior form of life. Either way, it’s not surprising that a class that has themes of transformation and becoming one with nature would have an archetype like this. However, this archetype replaces the wild shape that we are used to with a different, more permanent form of transformation.
The abilities of this archetype vary slightly based on whether they choose a bond with a companion or a domain.
If they choose domain, it must be the plant domain. Additionally, they can infuse fungal power into their summonings a few times per day. Whenever they summon a single creature, they also summon a second creature from the next highest summon list made of fungal matter, which has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
Alternatively, if they choose to take a companion, their companion slowly is infected by the transformation that these pilgrims seek, becoming a fungal creature that slowly gains the special abilities and attacks associated with such creatures like toxic blood or clouds of poisonous spores. The most powerful of these companions can even create fungal spawn from the bodies of slain foes, though these only last a few days before rotting away.
Close to the zenith of their power, these druids also transform into true fungal creatures, gaining the advantages therein.
Interested in a character other than a sorcerer or oracle that has a sort of late-game apotheosis? This archetype may be for you. The archetype makes major improvements to either summoning or the animal companion at the cost of wild shape, so either way you’ll likely want to take a more supportive role, though you yourself and your companion will prove especially tough in your own right as well.
This archetype can either be weird but otherwise just another way to seek perfection, or it might be insidious and horrifying. After all, is the character transforming into a fungus or being overwritten and replaced, and is there a difference. Also you can have a lot of fun describing their abilities, such as secondary summons tearing their way out of giant puffballs that spontaneously grow during the casting, or the foul, rotting form of your fungal companion.
The battle for the world of Makis is lost, the heroes are dead, and the planet (and all others in the same material plane) is being stripped of it’s resources and luxuries by a multiversal tyrant for their unchecked hedonism. However, hope remains in an unlikely place, for the Enclaves Below, where reclusive druids become one with the world’s mycelia network, ready for one last counterattack.
Recently, samsarans have come up missing from their communities, accompanied by a growing sense of dread among their kin. Those that suspect kidnapping are correct, for a cabal of fungal druids have been overtaken by a mutant fungal network that seeks to find a way to achieve immortality beyond even it’s perpetual existence, seeing the perpetually reincarnating souls of these beings as a possible answer.
The Millenium War left more scars on the land than just muddy battlefields and wastelands, for many weapons technological and magical were developed and deployed during that era. Now, one of those weapons, a living fungal disease, seeks to perpetuate the war, infesting fleshcrafted warbeasts and animated tanks for form an army of monsters. What’s more, some druids have begun worshipping the fungal mass, inviting it into their bodies.
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I wanted to give Kirsikka a new hairstyle!
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Helena my dear how I love you so 🖤
#oc#starfinder#samsaran#evolutionist class#my art#artists on tumblr#digital art#oc art#helena freyja
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BEING BUDDHIST
A friend of mine has traveled and taught English in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos for the last twenty years. These countries are culturally Buddhist the way Britain is culturally Christian and Turkey is culturally Muslim. This friend is a practicing Buddhist with a Secular outlook. He meditates and lives the compassionate life.
He just wrote a telling observation. He said that the common people, the villagers, no longer connect with Buddhism but connect more with the fellowship they find in Christian churches. The missionaries there provide actual material assistance to the people.
He said the people themselves know nothing of the dharma, I too have found this to be the case among many Asian cultural Buddhists. They often revere the Buddha and have an image in their home but aside from some miracle stories they know very little. Giving to the monks is mostly a way to gain merit for a better birth in the future.
Being Buddhist is not something you are "born into". It is a thing you "do". First, one learns the 𝘥𝘩𝘢𝘮𝘮𝘢/𝘥𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘢. The word means "Truth". A lot of teachings may seem complicated at first. Not to worry. A lot of it is repetitive. You learn the essence first and then practice it.
This includes our ethical code. In Buddhism, we say a thing is "skillful" or "unskillful" rather than "good" or "bad" because we are all aiming at improving ourselves as we strive toward 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘩𝘪, awakening, nirvana. In Buddhism, we are competing with our personal best. So "being Buddhist" is being compassionate, kind, and keeping the precepts. It is meditating and following the Buddha's dying words "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness! (to attain Bodhi for yourselves)
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Set of Commissions Ive done for Various ttrpgs
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The first rendering of my PCs. We're all still getting to know them, so designs here are subject to evolve as the game goes on. From left to right we have: Tilton, the samsaran arcanist; Kendall, the elf skald; and Tyrovar, the human rogue and alchemist. May the dice have mercy on their souls
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lil guy i definetly didnt almost drown last session (an hour ago) <3
he's a druid except we're not playing dnd we're playing pathfinder and pathfinder druids are not nearly as tanky as dnd druids </3
#he does have a mammoth tho so thats fun#the mammoth's name is smorth#courtesy of night helping me mid-session to come up with a name for smorth#anyway dies#pathfinder#pathfinder 1e#druid#digital art#pf1e#character art#Yule#<-character tag for later use#oh yeah btw he's a samsaran arctic druid if anyone was wondering#lvl 1 and utterly pathetic <3#does swear a lot more than you'd expect. though he does it in sylvan so that the rest of the party doesnt understand
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card declined at therapy so they told me all my love is just fleeting obsession and i cant truly be relied on when the rubber really meets the road
card declined at therapy they tell me good intention isnt enough, it always fades, erodes
card declined at therapy they say i'll never rise above my station, my cluttered apartment a 1:1 reflection of all i'll ever be
card declined at therapy they said the burden of my mother's psychic imprint will be something i'll never stop having to hold at bay. that it will inexorably subsume me like the rising tide.
card declined at therapy they said i lost my way, that my head's pulled under samsaran waters
card declined at therapy, they said that the occasional buzzing i feel in my teeth means i'm damned to Hell
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Note
Who do you pray to? Are you a pantheist like Samsaran?
Ultimately, prayer is contact with reality.
Prayer is about opening up. Psychologically, emotionally, attentively.
When we engage in prayer, we are emptying our hearts and minds. Then we make our hearts and minds available to receive.
It is Vulnerable. But also Venerable.
Knowing that we live in ignorance, prayer is a practice in which we touch the reality and allow reality to touch us. That reality may be called truth, divinity, awareness, or whatever.
Sometimes we ask for help when we pray. Healing, blessing, overcoming an obstacle, peace, whatever.
Sometimes we ask for guidance.
Sometimes we seek to share. Sharing our grief, our joy, our confusion. Through prayer, we may feel supported, celebrated, and re-oriented.
We may pray to buddhas, bodhisattvas, deities, gurus, or various spirits. Or we may pray to the indescribable reality from which no one and nothing is separate.
I do it all.
What I will say is that if done correctly, which means to say with the right balance of heart sincerity and openness of attention, it doesn’t matter to whom you pray. You will receive.
Above all, it is the listening for the answer and the willingness to accept it that will help you to recognize it when it arrives.
Much love.
LY
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Julian Nozomi
Too Many Doors (Sigil) Campaign
Samsaran Battle Master Fighter & Glory Paladin
Current Level: 12
Age: 70s (equivalent to early 30s is my guess)
Height: 5'4"
Pronouns: he/him
Character Song: New Constellations - Ryn Weaver
Julian is a former solider and now also a former bodyguard to a former factol. A member of the Godsmen, he's always trying his best. He lost his leg during his solider days when he was evacuating people from a building but did not get himself out in time. He's very lucky to be alive. In fact, that's a reoccurring theme! This lad has died twice in the campaign, go figure. He believes in always striving to be better, and wants the same for his friends regardless of their respective factions. He's just also not very bright.
Last Updated 7/13/2023
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Filidh (Bard Archetype)
In all of humanity, is there any greater role to play than being a preserver of knowledge? And when I say knowledge, I don’t just mean scientific or historic knowledge, but also our stories, our art, our creativity. Preserving those things for as long as possible in direct defiance of the notion that we are unimportant in the full scope of the universe.
It’s for that reason I say the bard class deserves more respect than it gets in some circles of the fandom. Sure, make your jokes, but bards and a thousand other traveling minstrels, storytellers, poets, and the like a hundred different names and cultures preserved knowledge before the invention of writing, and continued to do so even after the creation of the printing press. The bards you play in games are the embodiment of that tradition, and they even create stories of their own, and your own. And hey, if some of them are a more lurid nature, so be it. Such tales are equally valuable.
I say all this because today’s archetype is the filidh, which were the Irish equivalent of a bard, being elite scholars and poet that went about memorizing and performing the oral traditions of Ireland before Christianity came, and it was they who worked with the Christian monks to convert most of those stories into writing, though the monks rewrote them to make mortal kings out of old gods and other such alterations, as they tend to do. (Curiously though, the spelling “filidh” is actually Scottish Gaelic, whereas in old Irish it would be “fili”)
However, the filidh of Pathfinder focus on another aspect of the tradition, that is not well-known. You see, the words from which Filidh are derived seem to be ones related to sight. So it is believed that filidh were associated with trances and seeing the future.
The result is a variety of bard that uses their connections to other living beings to help guide them to their futures and possibly change their fates. In addition, with the filidh’s real-life connections to the druids of Ireland, they also gain a few elements of the druidic ways as well.
Indeed, these bards do not wear metal armor or heavier gear, but can use armor modified by the magic of the ironwood spell in the same way a druid can. What’s more, their magic is more akin to the divine than the arcane, removing the risk of arcane spell failure, but requiring them to have a holy symbol or an instrument on hand to focus their magic.
With uncanny secrets, these bards can expend spellcasting magic to regain energy for their performances, which they often need as many of the effects they would use them for are quite time-consuming.
Filidh’s get many new performances, starting with one that gives enhanced cognition to allies, allowing them to see danger coming and potentially avoid it.
With ten minutes of performing (though only requiring a fraction of energy), they can also create a powerful divination effect that allows listeners to potentially gain answers about upcoming events, seeing them as flashes of insight and visions.
Another such performance lets listeners hear the voices of plants and animals, conversing with them.
A particularly powerful performance lets them bind the life forces of allies so that one can absorb some of the harm their allies receive. What’s more, the filidh can switch which allies are benefiting from the bond whenever they like as long as they maintain the performance, letting others share the load when some become too drained to continue providing useful aid.
The most powerful among them are able to bless allies with a song that offers true foresight, making them impossible to ambush in addition to enhancing their awareness of incoming harm and how to avoid it.
This archetype is a combination of a more defensive bard, mixed with a bit of druidic flavor, which can be quite useful if you’d rather keep your allies safe than bolster their attack power. Also, while it may not come up in most games, the ability to use bardic performance to cast foresight can actually be very powerful as long as your GM is liberal with how they interpret that spell’s “insight into how best to protect yourself.” (Depending on the GM, it might be a very good ability or actively worse than the first performance the archetype grants). Another strength of the archetype is the ability to convert spells into more rounds of bardic performance. Now, obviously you should probably invest in Extra Performance at least once, but being able to perform longer when spells might not help can be useful not just on the battlefield, but can actually be used in non-combat encounters to ensure that allies can actually hold converstations with animals and plants you allow them to talk to with your performance.
Though it’s not really mentioned, I imagine that these bards in particular are concerned with both the future and the past. Not only do they seek to preserve the tales that came before, but also provide a touch of destiny and precognition to help others make tales of their own that inspire wonder in generations to come. In this way, you could say that filidhs are guardians of the legacy of whole civilizations.
To those who are sensitive to it, there is a place in the Misty Moors where fate has become snarled. Seeking to undo this cause, a filidh hires the party to accompany her there. What they find there is a cult dedicated to a dark god of pain and control, led by a limbless horror they call the Joyful Thing.
To the samsarans, the past and the future are ever-present things, their past lives lingering in their minds and hearts while the question of what they will become lingers in their minds. It’s no surprise then that the tradition of the filidh would come to them, and they can teach it to those that are interested.
Though he does not know yet why, Likas the filidh feels called, seeking out the heroes to accompany them on their latest quest. Perhaps his powers will be of aid, or perhaps he merely must be there to record the events that will transpire.
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Dakari, my Samsaran spiritualist (involutionist archetype) for our current Pathfinder 1E homebrew campaign. They have been having a rough go of it. The brighter blue areas are freshly regrown.
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Asexual Pride!!!
Here are my canonically ace characters across my own story as well as a bunch of DnD and TTRPG characters! There may be more, for some I just never thought too hard about it. In general: Assume ace until proven otherwise.
So we’ve got:
Asu, Viera/humanoid Harengon, Mastermind Rogue in 5e
Sajuna, Human, Astral Self Monk in 5e
Eternal, Tiefling, Enchantment Wizard in 5e (+ Finite the Pseudodragon)
Blythe, Human from my own story
Vigari, Human from my own story
Ihrethy, Human from my own story
Kalea, Half-Elf, Open Hand Monk in 5e
Kirsikka, Samsaran, Solarian in Starfinder
Akiko, Kitsune, Bard in Pathfinder 2e
Lilalia (in the front), Zek in Esper Genesis
Patience (in the back), Tiefling Genie Warlock in 5e (+ Lathander the familiar)
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People think it's funny that I do this full art set for my chars, but it honestly does get me in the right headspace to vibe with the char. I put on the char playlist, work on the assets, and the char just comes together. Because, first night playing this gal I was excited to play her yes, but I wasn't really feeling her. Start working on art, throw a random song that I haven't listened to in years but randomly thought "hey maybe this'll suit her" into the playlist and BAM! It all suddenly clicked. The process works for me lol.
So Suicide Squad kinda had a TPK (no Jass isn't dead, she ran off into the jungle to go savage; I didn't wanna be the only player not to use tehir backup, plus turns out this made eth story more streamline, because full new party easier to write than "all new but the one guy with the old story") so new party was suddenly poofed onto the mysterious island through various divine interventions. So, we're not a god squad and not a suicide squad...still calling it that.
Thus, this is Theta Blu a Samsaran Magus, originally augmented during the Azlanti Empire to be a living war machine. A solider that when they fall in battle will respawn where you want them to, uh yeah that's a great idea. Thus the name is actually more the designation of which life she's on; turns out she's on her 8th life (and that I don't know my Greek alphabet, I thought theta was 5th ^^; but 8th is better). There were several centuries between her last lives, since she respawned in what are now Azlanti ruins, and no one's really around those to upkeep these days; some adventures let her out the last time, and that didn't go too well for them...her bangs keep lightening as she respawns because reasons.
Anywhos, she's blue, that's the main joke with her. She uses whip swords to channel negative energy and life sucking spells through. Should be fun!
Oh right, playlist!
Riot by Three Days Grace
Cry Little Sister by G Tom Mac
Vampire by People in Planes
O Death Remix by Jen Titus
Blue by Eiffel 65
The Hammer's Coming Down by Nickleback
Come With Me Now by Kongos
Wheel in the Sky cover by Sara Loera
Here also have barbie meme;
#my art#digital art#pathfinderstuff#dnd stuff#my ocs#was sabretooth now omega red; table has bets on who's next lol#i also think i failed to vibe at first cause i just reused gamma red's art for her and didn't do anything new#her name was lithia azurnez
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big dick is back in town
Carmine - Samsaran Witch belongs to @miasmacaron
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a samsaran gunslinger whose catchphrase is "reincarnation?!" but said in the same cadence as "what in tarnation?!"
follow me for more pathfinder character builds
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