Doodle dump from the past few months!

[Image: seven doodles of various D&D characters, most of them mine.

1) Solace, a drow bard with fluffy hair that covers his face, sat on the ground and wearing a conical dunce hat. He is surrounded by various arrows all pointing to him with the label “this guy!” 2) An edit of the fuck go back meme. The first drawing is of Mitchell, a drow wizard, and @leidensygdom’s Urion, a drow-genasi bard. A finger presses a button on the keyboard labelled “awww baby”. The next drawing is of Solace and the Onirist (also LS’s). The finger presses the button again, now labelled “fuck go back”. 3) Freefall, @jupitisms’ tiefling blood hunter, in a tight embrace by a wide-eyed Effie (a changeling fighter in guise as a tiefling), both teetering over the edge of a cliff and both being ultimately held back from falling by Daphne, @nightfirexd’s tiefling ranger. 4) Mitchell and Effie’s floating heads, with a lit torch being passed from the former to the latter. There is text around them that says “Spiritual successor / long white hair & autism voice”. This is true. 5) A drawing of three drow tethered together with a rope in marching order: @bardcharms’ ranger Dax at the front of the line on the right, @eve-stirwin’s rogue Quiche in the middle, and my warlock Cato bringing up the rear. Above them is the text “keep all arms and legs inside of the party at all times!” 6) Alva, a tiny person with very long hair, looks up in absolute awe and adoration (heart-eyes and all) at the Empress, a much, much taller, vague and elegant figure. (Alva has since begun referring to her as her girlfriend, though hasn’t mentioned anything about it to the Empress herself.) 7) A short comic in grayscale. @jupitisms​’ Nimbus, a tiefling druid with curly hair and branches sprouting from her horns, holds up Opportunity (a wood elf wearing a magpie-skull mask, with bad vibes emanating off him in black scribbles) like a cat, with a pleading face, saying “babe please can we keep him”. Providence, her girlfriend and his nemesis, stands imposingly with glowing eyes and the moon behind her, and answers (in distorted, glowing capital letters) “he is a scourge on benevolence”. Nimbus’ eyes grow wider and sadder, and she adds desperately, “…and a baby”. 8) Heaven Le Scourge, a tiefling, lying on a bed and talking animatedly into a rotary phone in much the manner of a stereotypical teenage girl in an 80s movie. She has rollers in her hair and there’s a magazine lying open next to her. (Though not shown, she’s on call with @leidensygdom’s Solaralith, discussing their diabolical acts of cruelty and plans for world domination together.) 9) An addendum to the one above, showing Crocus (Heaven’s bodyguard, a drow-tiefling blood hunter) t-posing in a dress, with text above indicating that she has been “dressed up to play poison tea party”.

End ID.]

Above the Floating Mountain Release!

Hey y'all! I've been playing the lovely pastoral fantasy rpg Wanderhome lately and I've just published a space-themed expansion for it on my itch.io!

Check it out if you like tiny planets, moonbeam bridges, and moths in space!

https://evestirwin.itch.io/above-the-floating-mountain-a-wanderhome-space-addon

New Blog Title & Questant Release

Hey all! The blog formerly known as probablymadrpgideas here. It's been a while since I've been super active here - let alone actively probablymad-ifying any rpg ideas posts - but I still would love to have a place to talk about RPG stuff more often so I've decided to do a bit of a redesign. From here on out I'll be going by thaumaturgekitchen, courtesy of this spooky space chef drawing I had lying around from Astro-Gastronomy. With any luck I'll have more fun stuff to share here soon.

In the meantime, I have a new little one-page game I'm excited about up on itch.io as of today - Questant!

Long story short, everybody's a hero on a quest to do cool shit and maybe become a god. Everybody's also a land where that cool shit happens, creating and narrating the world where another player's character adventures. You've heard of GMless games? Try GMFUL!

You can find Questant on my itch.io page, along with my first game Astro-Gastronomy. Keep an eye out for another couple of projects I have in development at the moment, and if you happen to play any of my games let me know how it went!

If you find yourself in times of trouble, ask yourself, ‘what would Gandalf do’, and remember, ‘beat a man unconscious with a big stick’ is a valid answer

When I find myself in times of trouble, Gandalf Greyhame comes to me, Wailing on those assholes, With a tree (with a tree)

🎃 Spooky aquatic life 🎃

[ Patreon / twitter / insta / shop ]

by Laure S

A coastal spring of magical healing water that a group of hunters-of-Artemis-esque lesbian merfolk visit after battle to wash away their wounds and afflictions.

When bottled as a makeshift healing potion, the spring water has the item name: gay mergirl bathwater

Garden people (done for an exhibition at my school, Gobelins) If you are interested in a commission of a character of any kind, with this many details, or even more, just DM me :) The price will probably be around 20 to 30 euros depending of the character.

@eve-stirwin ‘s dnd character , Jade

More Pokemon in Hollow Knight style, this time all the moths! 

Frosmoth is one of my favorite Galar pokemon, but out of these designs I like Venomoth the most. Apparently Volcarona has a different design every time I draw them, though I think I may settle for one closer to the one below.

And this reply made mine! 💜

Hell yeah!! Time to transcender some gender!

Testing different brushes ~

Inktober or… Sharktober? - Week 2

This week, I decided to illustrate some races of the Squaluan civilization, they are all concepts of my story, except the last little ghost shark. He is a character I created recently, I think I will create a comic to reveal its history.

16 - A Mokarran shaman and his mount, they are descendants of the hammer shark.

15 - A family of Galeechas merchants, they are descendants of the zebra shark.

14 - An Alopian wanderer, they are descendants of the Thresher shark.

13 - A Leucan Chef, they are descendants of the bull shark.

12 - A Glauca fisherman, they are descendants from the blue shark.

11 - A Galleon vassal, they are descendants of the tiger shark.

10 - Requiem lost his fins, but he does not remember what happened.  Since then, he has been searching for them.

Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.

Okay, but like… While I love this, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse!

What if it’s not that humans were cultural imperialists, but rather that “human” is a social construct? Humans are the “default”, the “youngest race”, and often have the most visible genetic diversity. And although only a few races bother to have a name for part-human hybrids, mixed-race romances are attested to in plenty of stories. 

So what if “human” is the word for the product of millennia of introgressive hybridization? What if “human” is the word for a genetic “mutt”, someone who’s a smidgen of most races, interbreeding for so long that they’ve become something new?

Or what if Common is taught as a religious language, like Hebrew and Arabic are in our world, and humans just happen to come from the same area where the prophet-bookwriter came from, so they speak the language natively?

Or what if humans are the language-nerds of the universe, the only race that goes around inventing dozens of new languages just for fun? So when there’s a new spell or invention, or when you need to translate a concept, you turn to the nearest human and go “hey, come up with a word for this.”

(This also explains why some spells have great names, and some are damned ridiculous. Like Mr. Tenured Elf Professor is going to do research to double-check his TA’s spell names?)

(”Smith, give me a name for this spell.” “Fuck, I don’t know, it’s fire that’s sorta like an arrow, right? Call it a fire arrow?”)

(Also: WAY too many things end up being dick jokes.)

x x x x - x x x x

~Requested by @eve-stirwin~

Something I think about sometimes from Discworld

So in The Truth, William de Worde is this cool protagonist guy, writing all the news, kickstarting the newspaper industry, exposing sinister plots, meeting new friends and loved ones.

But then, when he shows up again in another book as a cameo, Pratchett does something kind of neat that I feel like I don’t see very often. The protagonists of that book (I forget which it was - maybe Monstrous Regiment or Making Money?) see him and describe him as a silly, stuffy, self-important kind of man.

Granted, Discworld’s ability to do something like this has to do with its structure and how it tells a lot of different stories with a lot of different viewpoint characters. But I’d like to see this done more often because at times it’s really meant a lot to me.

In short, it’s the idea that the world isn’t divided into cool, magnetic, universally-likeable people who everyone wants to be around and awkward downers and disappointments who nobody does. You can be the hero of one person’s story and the mildly-unlikeable background character of another’s. And that’s really important - especially for someone with a big, hot pile of social anxiety and internalized self-loathing over trans and autistic stuff.

My mom said to tell you she really likes this.

Aw, thanks! I’m glad!