I drew a shitty teeth tutorial™ for my friend but I figured someone else might find it useful so here ya go!! also im not an expert so theres that but ya enjoy :>
Because I’ve seen one too many articles about stupid millennials who DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT DETERGENT IS and so I’d like to help everyone I can avoid all that price-gouged, extraneous nonsense. So here’s everything you need to get your clothes all clean and nicely scented without spending an arm and a leg.
Whether you’re writing for a video game or a tabletop game, the secret to effective lore is cow tools.
Back in 1982, Gary Larson drew the following panel for the newspaper comic The Far Side:
According to Larson, it was simply meant to be a faintly surreal joke about how cows would be bad at making tools; it intends no deeper commentary. However, in the decades since, it’s become by far the comic’s most asked-about panel. People want to know why cows are making tools, what aspect of society it’s commenting on, and most critically, they want to know what the tools are for. The one on the right kind of resembles a carpenter’s saw, which leads folks to believe that the other three must have some obvious function too, if only they could puzzle it out.
But they don’t. They’re just random shapes, and the comic as a whole was never intended to actually mean anything.
I’ve become convinced that that’s the real secret to effective worldbuilding in gaming media. Certainly, the “core” of the setting should make sense, but all the peripheral stuff surrounding it? Just throw in a bunch of incomprehensible bullshit seasoned with the occasional bit that almost makes sense, and people will seize on those bits and ratonalise all the rest of it for you – and what they come up with is generally going to be way more interesting than whatever your original plan was, if indeed you had one at all.
Then, once they’ve figured it all out, just nod sagely, congratulate their cleverness, and keep your damn mouth shut.
Some golden advice for writers who think they must come up with it all.
I actually get asked to see a lot of portfolio’s while I’m at cons. And while I LOVE looking at other people’s art and offering critiques if they ask, it’s sort of cringe-y to be handed a messy stack of papers or something. Nice portfolio’s look so much more professional!
putting this up, since my website project for university is finished and I don’t have to put it on the web anymore.
a very, very basic image guide on how your portfolio should be presented or appear, whether you’re in fine arts, graphic design or illustration, illustrated by yours truly
please do NOT remove the commentary while reblogging, do not reupload anywhere else.
Lots of DMs struggle with this, and for good reason.
Dungeons are the most mechanically straightforward aspect of the game besides combat, and the immediate shape and contents of them is more pressing to players than the atmosphere.
But, there are some simple ways to make your dungeons more atmospheric. Here’s my proposed solutions, both a long thinky one and a fast random one:
I think that dungeons should thought about as ‘once functional spaces’. Every place in the world has a purpose for which it was built, even if it’s a weirdo crazy one. Dungeon rooms should almost always be more than just treasure, traps, and monsters.
For example, temples have cloisters, treasuries, storage rooms, waiting rooms, choirs, sanctuaries, apse, washing rooms, etc. Each of these rooms has specific objects and furniture inside them, as well as different acoustics. They get decorated with frescoes and murals or hanging art or sculptures. They’re cultural places. Think about them as physical spaces that people would use.
Now imagine something happened in them, long ago. Why is this place a ‘dungeon’ and not still used? What event caused it to be abandoned? A battle? Plague? Was the place cursed? Come up with that and you can seed the rooms with small historical details: evidence of fights, skeletal remains, treasures hidden so they could be reclaimed later (but never were).
Now add the effects of time and nature. Fabric rots, metal rusts, stone erodes and crumbles. Plants and roots push stone tiles aside, and water seeps in and floods deep places. The passage of ages scours away history and purpose. Now, your once functional rooms don’t appear so functional, but their purpose can still be intuited.
Now add some new tenants. Monsters are always the first to reclaim abandoned civilized spaces: goblins make shantytowns out of old human ruins, beasts make warrens in sepulchral tombs, small dragons and basilisks favour places with statuaries and abandoned treasures. No matter the space or its original purpose, monsters move in and call it home. Sometimes multiple species of monsters…and then they fight or argue over sharing space.
So now your dungeon has a vivid look and feel. The important bit now is to think about how that imagined space sounds and smells.
With every room and hallway, imagine how its history smells. Is it acrid or pungent? Smokey or mouldy? Does it smell surprisingly pleasant? If so, that’s often a worrisome sign, because it means something sentient might already be there.
Audio can clue players into a space faster than any other description. Wind whistling indicates access to the surface…or a much deeper cave. Dripping denotes water (you hope). Creaking could mean doors…or ghosts. Large spaces echo, and sounds warp and distort the further away they are. There’s even different kinds of silence. There’s an empty, lonely silence that comes with long dead spaces, or the claustrophobic close silence of small spaces.
Appeal to your players senses besides sight. Describe what rooms smell, sound, and even taste or feel like. This is a surefire way to make your dungeon rooms stand out. For example:
“You enter a 20 by 20 foot square room. It’s a stuffy old parlour. Pushing the door open you immediately smell something caustic and sour, but you don’t see an immediate source. All the furniture is rotted, but some of it looks smashed. You can hear the faintest scraping of something against the wall in the adjacent room”.
If that seems like a lot to write, try something like this: Reveal each bullet point as the players inquire about them, or when they make Perception checks:
Parlour, 20 ft square room.
The room feels uncomfortably thick and stuffy.
All the furniture is rotted out. Some of it is smashed. Evidence of a fight.
Smells caustic and sour. The smell comes from under a tattered rug. It’s beholder puke. 50gp if collected and sold to the right buyer.
Scraping sounds from the cloaker in the next room.
So maybe you already have a pretty basic dungeon and you need to make each room (or block of rooms) less boring. Here’s my handy set of sense tables:
Random Room Sensations:
For each room you want to enhance, roll four dice (a d12, a d10, a d8, and a d6). Your rolls will determine what’s up with this room. Every time you roll a result, cross it out and replace it with a new one you come up with.
Smells (1d12):
Sickly sweet, like rotting fruit or wilting flowers.
Musty, like old people and expired cologne.
Tangy, like body odour and grime.
Dusty, the choking scent of age and ghosts.
Foul, like waste and death; something unholy.
Crisp, like freshly cut grass or unchecked plant life.
Soggy, the lingering smell of still water and flooding.
Pungent, like rot and decay.
Spicy, like herbs and dried ingredients, aged.
Electric, a faint aroma of ozone and metals.
Earthy, like fresh dirt and clay, mixed in with the copper of blood.
Roll again twice, both smells clash together.
Sounds (1d10):
Claustrophobic silence.
Deep, echoing silence.
Low moaning or groaning.
Creaking of wood in the distance.
Faint, maddeningly indistinct whispering.
Faint, maddeningly indistinct whispering in a language you don’t know.
Metal scraping against metal, rhythmically.
Dripping of some kind of liquid onto stone.
Dripping of some kind of liquid into more liquid.
Roll again twice, both sounds are present.
Touch Sensations (1d8):
Dryness on the skin, chapped lips and dry eyes.
Cold dampness, water beads on metal items.
Humidity, clothes become hot and heavy, metal feels colder.
Dry heat, throats become parched, skin itches.
Pressure change, ears pop and noises distort.
Static tingling, hair stands up on end, goosebumps.
Unholy chill, shivers, goosebumps, a sense of unease.
The feeling of being watched, an uncomfortable presence.
Kinds of Darkness, if applicable (1d6):
Grey, distant darkness that yields to lantern light.
Cloying, smothering darkness that seems to draw close to you.
Eerie still darkness that feels like it holds endless monsters.
Calm, still darkness that invites restfulness.
Flickering, shifting darkness where the room seems to be moving.
Impenetrable darkness that makes darkvision endowed races feel at uneasy.
I hope all this helps make your dungeons a little less boring. The dungeon tables in the back of the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide from @dndwizards is also helpful in this regard.
Saving for later
There’s a special method of Dungeon design that makes them very fun as well. Basically this method makes the Dungeon fun for ANY player, be it story focused, loot focused, or whatever else you got.
The way it works is it breaks down all of Dungeon crawling into four elements: lore, traps, treasure, & encounters.
This idea states that every room of your dungeon should have 3 of these four. That way every player has something to do.
Example:
You enter a simple rectangular chamber. The cold air washes over your skin sending goosebumps down your spine, no less than the sight of the eerie statue of a woman in the center of the room does. Her lifeless eyes stare down at a brazier in her hands, inside of which is a shining pile of gold. As you slowly approach to get a closer you look, you also spy two things. First, several crates in the back of the room, stacked in the corner. Second, the sound of scratching on stone, near yet muffled. What will you do?
In this example I have three elements present that the players don’t know but get a hint of.
I have treasure clearly in display for those who like loot.
The scratching sound implies combat. The fighters are ready and on edge waiting for something to jump them.
The smart players know that the statue isn’t gonna give away the gold for free. Especially after I called it “eerie.” So those who love a good puzzle or trap are now gonna go nuts looking for a trap on that statue.
As for what the trap is, it matters little. The gold could be covering a pressure plate and when removed it would open secret doors behind which would stand some horrid beast. To find it PCs would need some sort of a Investigation check or what not. The point is this situation provides 3 of 4 elements and entertains 3 out of 4 types of players.
And if you’re wondering what was up with the crates, those contain some minor loot. A potion or two, some gold. That’s for the players to not feel cheated out completely of their reward. Or you can make them mimics. PCs love mimics.
Can I give completely unsolicited advice to fantasy writers that I wish someone had given me when I was into fantasy writing? The cliche “write what you know” is bad advice if taken literally, it’s how we get books about depressed middle-aged creative writing professors who contemplate having an affair. But generally speaking it can be helpful. Tolkien wrote a medieval fantasy because he was the world’s foremost expert on medieval English literature. His book about Beowulf is still considered academically significant. He gave every race detailed languages because he was also a linguist. He wrote about giant battles because he was traumatized by his time in World War I and wrote during World War II. You don’t have to do any of this because that isn’t you. You are allowed to write a whole fantasy epic without a single battle (or you can make battle scenes modern urban melees because clashes of great armies aren’t a thing anymore.) If, say, you’re really into fashion, feel free to describe in painstaking detail every outfit that elves wear for all possible occasions. I promise you it’s no weirder than describing the dialects of tree people. What I’m saying is, you’re not Tolkien and that’s a very good thing because your voice is needed more. Let your freak flag fly and make the world that comes from you specifically.
“
If, say, you’re really into fashion, feel free to describe in painstaking detail every outfit that elves wear for all possible occasions. I promise you it’s no weirder than describing the dialects of tree people.
“
thank you, also, this gives me a great idea for a fantasy story centred around textiles
Write what you love. Write what fascinates you. Write what you obsess over. Write what you have come to know. And write what gives you an excuse to do more research.
Writing is great you go from great descriptions of people and places to ‘what’s the word? You know people stealing??? *10 hours later* KIDNAPPING!!! THE WORD’S KIDNAPPING!!!!
I was always taught to write ‘ELEPHANT’ when you were missing a word like this*, to keep up the flow of writing and just ignore it / dismiss it from memory. You’ll always forget words as a writer (or character names, or place names), and rather than rifle through a dictionary or a bunch of documents or your own mind, you just write ‘ELEPHANT’ and keep going.
Because here’s the thing, when it comes time to fixing up the chapter, you just search for ‘ELEPHANT’ and provided you aren’t actually writing about elephants, you’ll find every single instance and be much more clear-headed and able to find the words you’re looking for.
Plus it’s actually really cute to see a bunch of elephants in your chapter. e.e Just standing there, waiting for attention later, lol.
(But also yes the original sentiment it’s so true, like the most obvious words fucking vanishing all the time like what is writing).
*This technique will definitely be too frustrating/distracting for some people, for sure. YMMV. I just liked it.
I think this could be helpful and I like to encourage writers.
Aw, I like this. I usually just use square brackets, but I like the idea of elephants roaming about, reminding me to come back to certain bits. 🙂
Science side of Tumblr: how can dragons breathe fire?
There are three variants of dragons. One of them possesses a gland that produces a liquid, which spontaneously combusts when coming into contact with oxygen. Some phosphorus compounds could do that for example.
The second one possesses two glands instead, which produce so-called hypergolic propellants, fluids that ignite when they come into contact with one another.
The third kind stores the methane bacteria in their stomach produce, and expells it when breathing fire. In their mouth there’s a piezoelectric crystal, which is a substance that produces a spark when placed under mechanical stress and could thus serve to ignite the methane gas.
Time's Vengeance 