chickadee_sun

Recently someone on twitter brought up some D&D flavortext describing orcs and pointed out how it mirrored real-world racism while being presented as true in the setting. This sparked some interesting discussion about the history of TTRPGs and racism and various ways it's been handled. Of course the usual you're-not-allowed-to-talk-about-things crowd came in and tried to smother all discussion, but oh well.

Anyway, if folks are in a mood for talking about TTRPG races, Morathor is looking for feedback on his homebrew Pathfinder setting, including how it handles fantasy races. This Ascana setting has mostly no distinction between playable races and monster races, with a few exceptions for extremely powerful beings like dragons or supernatural ones like demons. Most cultures have multiple races among them, and most races can be found in multiple cultures. Cultures have good and bad aspects and reasons to fight each other sometimes, but it's a lighthearted humorous setting and none of them are simply evil. OK, there is an evil empire across the sea. But mostly players will encounter refugees who fled the evil empire to the Ascana peninsula.

The general Ascana information here is incomplete and can be rambly.

There's a separate document with race templates--the mechanics needed to create character in various races. It's also incomplete. The character creation rules are a bit complicated, but for good reason. Morathor is going for balancing races with each other, allowing flexibility within each race so individuals can be mechanically varied, and making each race flavorfully and mechanically distinct. It's tricky to balance these three goals against each other! He's also going against human-as-default and trying to give them a distinct feel. The closest to sourcebook humans in his setting is Hybrids--characters like half-elves who get characteristics from multiple parent races.

All this was created way before the the blowup on twitter. People have been talking about these issues and suggesting improvements for a long time. And yeah, the need for playgroups to improve not-great racial stuff has also been part of the conversation. Should it really be random players' jobs instead of a giant company's? Well, that's outside the scope of this post.

I'm part of a playtest game in this setting and it's a lot of fun. But feedback from more people than a few playtesters would be appreciated!

(Cool, I remembered the link tags without looking them up!)

When I'm awake I'm not awake and when I'm asleep I'm not asleep.

Jeez, this Pathfinder adventure is really kicking our party's ass. Are we just playing really poorly? We analyze our decisions after every session and while we've made some mistakes, for most of our choices we had strong reasons to think they were good ideas. But we end up with plans so fragile one or two bad rolls destroy us, and no matter how much effort we put into learning things, coordinating with allies, and planning tactics, there are always important details we didn't know about or consider.

Me: so this party leader is a Paladin with the Everyone's Friend trait and +8 on Diplomacy, who tries to negotiate with enemies when possible.

My GM: lol, this character flies into a violent rage upon hearing the Paladin's language, which she doesn't understand. Roll for initiative.

Once again Morathor has generously agreed to let me recolor and post one of his very old drawings.

This one is from all the way back in 2006. I picked it because I thought it had a lot of potential that didn't come through. Like a lot of beginner artists, Morathor had a hard time making characters not look stiff and awkward. So he rolled with it, illustrating a scene where the characters are kind of stiff and awkward. 2006 Morathor also put a lot of love into blocking out the shading. Which he then portrayed so faintly as to be almost invisible, with the idea that this would subtly make the picture look less flat without drawing attention to itself.


I'm still calling my version a recolor even though I made non-color changes here and there.
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US readers, have you filed your taxes yet? (I think most countries do them for you, so only addressing Americans.)

Today I went for a walk and washed laundry and put away clean laundry and made dinner!

I guess my first post here will be trying out the image hosting. Not what I expected but ok.

My brother Morathor has generously granted me permission to use some of his old artwork as an exercise and to post my recolor online.

First, here is Morathor's original version. It's called Katrina, Shrouded in Shadows and it's from way back in 2006. He's obviously improved a lot since then!



And here is my recolor. I did change a few details other than color choices, but mostly just that.



Anyway, this was fun to do. The drawing, I mean. Turns out putting pictures on Dreamwidth is kind of a pain in the ass. Oh well, I'm usually more text-oriented anyway.

So apparently it only shows thumnails in my post and you have to click them to see the full image?