oh no. oh fuck new oc idea
I want one.
prof-vermouthea
thought that said angels, which is objectively cooler
This post went from cyberpunk dystopia to fantasy revolution real quick
Holy shit take a look at some of the other things on that page that people have made. If the face bedazzling, the specific clothing patterns, the projector that gives you multifaces (like that one keanu reeves movie), or the other crazy masks aren’t a sign of a growing cyberpunk distopia era I don’t know what is.
I wish we didn’t have to live in any dystopian future but I would rather us slowly grow into a cyberpunk one rather than the shitty one we currently have…
Fighting corporate control with art. Fuck yeah.
8 Character Creation Tips (for DnD or just writing in general)
1. Have a goal
While it may sound like I’m stating the obvious here, your character needs to have something they want to accomplish. Maybe they want to be the best at something, see a place, fall in love, conquer the world, or something else. Whatever it is, they need to have something that they desire beyond all other things. Ideally, give them more than one goal. Make them have to sacrifice one to achieve the other, to add extra drama
2. Have a reputation
Maybe they’re the best artist in their class or they’re great at juggling. Perhaps they slipped on the stairs in front of their whole village. Either way, give something for the locals to remember about them. That way it can give you a starting point for the interactions with other characters
3. Have a friend
Whether a friend, a coworker, a sibling, an army buddy, or someone they saved, have someone close to your character whom they’re close to and wish well. Yeah, angsty “I have no friends” characters can be fun, but in small doses; eventually the reader gets fed up with them. At the very least the character needs someone to talk to or bounce ideas off of
4. Have a home
It may be a neighborhood they grew up in, their parents’ house, or a room they’ve been renting in a tavern. Hell, it could even be a person if you so choose. Everyone needs to feel secure at one time or another
5. Have a signature item
Now, recognize that this may not work for EVERY character, but it’s up to you to decide what will fit and what won’t. In many cases, it can work. A signature item is something that is recognizably YOUR CHARACTER’S, be it a weapon, a scarf, a toy, or a piece of jewelry. It’s something that makes them feel like themself
6. Have a problem
This should be something other than the problem addressed in the main plot line. Maybe a member of their family is sick, they are broke, or they’re failing their classes. This helps make your character seem more realistic because NO ONE has one problem at a time
7. Have a secret
This can affect the plot or not; either way, it helps make your character more well rounded. Maybe your character can’t read, left their crewmates to die when a kracken attacked their ship, or made their long lost sister run away. If you choose to have it affect the plot in any way, this secret should embarrass your character, make it so that other characters don’t trust your character, or somehow endanger them and the people they’re close to if found out
8. Have a reason to be brave and to fight
Maybe it’s because your character wants to be like their hero, maybe it’s so they can repay a debt (like if someone saved their life previously), maybe it’s for their child, but your character needs to have a reason to occasionally face their fears
Have fun!!!
homesteadhorner
I understand that this is meant to be simple, but GOSH DANG, is it so helpful! This came at the perfect time for me, as I am in the process of creating characters both in the realm of fictional writing and tabletop roleplaying. I’ve been seriously struggling with one of my characters for a long time now and always felt something was missing. Only now do I realize - I had all of these, except for a secret! Well, I gave him a secret to keep, but not one that would make him fearful, embarrassed, or ashamed! And what point is there in a secret without a price attached to it’s exposure? There was no cost, no blow to his own worth or self-esteem or ego, to keeping that secret from his friends and allies. Now I know I need to sit down with my DM and work out where to interweave a potential secret into the plot.
Thank you for this, OP! May it genuinely help all of my followers as it has helped me.
DO YOU IDENTIFY AS QUEER OR LGBT+? DO YOU PLAY OR WATCH D&D?
Then please take a minute to help me with my final essay and fill out this quick poll!
please also reblog this if you can so it can reach more people!
I’ve posted two of these before, but here are all 3 warforged commissions for @hinkledinkle together in one post! <3
The top two are heavily inspired and referenced from designs by Alan Blackwell by request.
twitch / commissions / art tag
on the topic of humans being the intergalactic “hold my beer” species: imagine an alien stepping onto a human starship and seeing a space roomba™ with a knife duct taped onto it, just wandering around the ship
it doesn’t have any special intelligence. it’s just a normal space roomba. there are other space roombas on the ship and they don’t have knives. it’s just this one. knife space roomba has full clearance to every room in the ship. occasionally crew members will be talking and then suddenly swear and clutch their ankle. knife space roomba putters off, leaving them to their mild stab wounds.
“what is the point?” asks the alien as another crew member casually steps over the knife-wielding robot. “is it to test your speed and agility?”
“no it doesn’t really go that fast,” replies the captain.
“does it teach you to stay ever-vigilant?”
“I mean I guess so but that’s more of a side effect.”
“does it weed out the weak? does it protect you from invaders? do repeated stabbings let your species heal more quickly in the future?”
“it doesn’t stab very hard, it gets us more than it gets our enemies, and no, but that sounds cool — someone write that down.”
“but then what is its purpose?”
“I don’t know,” the captain says, leaning down to give the space roomba an affectionate pat. “it just seemed cool”
this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard but I thought about it for five seconds and realized that if I were, say, a random communications officer onboard this ship and someone taped a knife to a roomba it would take maybe three weeks before even I was inordinately fond of Stabby. I would be proud of Stabby when I met up with my other spacefleet friends for space coffee, I would tell them about the time Stabby got the second mate in the ankle five seconds before the fleet admiral beamed on board and she swore in seven different languages in front of high command.
also by the fourth day Stabby would be in the ship’s log, he’d have little painted-on insignia, people would salute him as he went by, and someone would hook up a twitter account to tweet maniacal laughter and/or a truly terrible knock-knock joke every time he managed to nick someone.
somethingninga
Omg so the ting I typed up might actually happen this is gold
I am suddenly astonished that Stabby isn’t Farscape canon. 1812 was weird enough.
Stabby’s little charging dock would start accruing cuddly toys and commemorative holo-vids of Stabby’s greatest stabs. Its insignia would start off at a fairly low rank, but soon, without anyone every discussing it, everyone would know that Stabby got to take the rank of the highest ranking crew member it stabbed. The ceremony for Flag Admiral Stabby was beautiful. The captain gave a speech.
why am i proud of stabby this is irrational
bisected8
INCIDENT LOG: 46-7-2 Action #45437: Desc: Covert enemy boarding attempt
Details: Six (6) members of a Mercenary/Pirate crew of little renown attempted to infiltrate ship in order to steal equipment and/or personnel.
Prior to being detained they had remained undetected for eight (8) hours and accumulated several high value materials (see attached log), and incapacitated and restrained several crewmen (see attached log) in dock #3, with the intention of using a life boat to exfiltrate.
Just prior to their would-be escape, the boarding party encountered the ship’s mascot. A cleaning unit which had been modified by crew members to mount a traditional Terran melee weapon, as well as an officer’s insignia (having been jokingly given a commission by the Captain the night before). Curious, one picked it up, before realising the mounted weapon had a nickel finish (highly toxic to their species) on the handle, and dropped it in a panic.
As the unit’s anti-impact sensors had been disabled, it immediately tried to right itself on landing. This caused it to flip over and slash the third knee of the boarder who dropped it, prompting the rest of the boarders to flee. In doing so, they tripped over a waste container, causing the unit to “chase” them, as it collected the trail of dust they left.
The security crew were alerted to the boarding party’s presence by an entry on “Sargent Stabby’s Hit List” - an account on an intership microblogging site which automatically logs any injuries caused by the cleaning unit in question - and quickly intercepted them.
Casualties: Four (4) crewmen treated for minor lacerations sustained after detaining boarding party, one (1) captured crewman treated for negative reaction to sedatives used by captors.
Belligerent status: Two (2) members of the enemy boarding party remain in stable condition in sickbay. Three (3) remaining surrendered peacefully and remain in the brig. One (1) refuses to leave the safety of a storage cupboard he went to ground in.
Recommendations/Actions:
- All captured guards to undergo debriefing and possible disciplinary action for breaches of security protocol.
- Remind all crew members to report missing colleagues immediately.
- Retain a guard outside cleaning storage room 87 until the final boarder can be coaxed out and properly detained.
- Cleaning unit D4.87 AKA “Sargent Stabby” has been promoted to Quartermaster, and is now considered the superior officer of all autonomous drones on the ship. All Class #1 drones have been programmed to salute their superior with their effector, should it enter the room while they’re active.
Ok but what about that final bit - all the other space roombas respectfully standing to the side and saluting when Quatermaster Stabby comes past?
Quartermaster Stabby goes on to have many more adventures and many more promotions.
Quartermaster Stabby becomes a famous icon of the human race, proof that humans can and often are unintentionally terrifying, but maybe there actually IS something to their strange attachments to inanimate objects…?
Aliens are now convinced that humans have some weird psychic/aura powers or something. “Object Tamers” they call us. Humans are so amused that they adopt the term for themselves. They love it. They start printing it on bracelets and T-shirts. Aliens can’t tell if this is a joke or a confession.
Through a disturbing number of coincidences like the above, aliens begin to fear Quartermaster Stabby and are legitimately unsure if it has intelligence or not. It doesn’t help that humans refuse to break the joke to explain it to them.
Alien scientists try to explain the strange phenomenon that is Quartermaster Stabby. They cannot. Humans are delighted.
Quartermaster Stabby is eventually promoted to a position of authority over all autonomous drones in the entire human empire. It also escaped the ship once and managed to become the mayor of a small alien city. That city has since begun using the fact as a tourist attraction, and the episode has brought to human attention the fact that Mayor Stabby technically fulfills all of the criteria necessary to become a president or council member. (Minus the sentience.)
Humans are now trying to vote Mayor Stabby into office, using the aliens’ inability to determine its sentience level to their advantage.
They are successful. Counselor Stabby is most universally beloved representative of the human race. (Among humans, anyway. The aliens have mixed reactions, ranging from amusement, to fear, to outrage.)
Counselor Stabby goes on to somehow reveal a corrupt plot among several other counsel members and essentially averts a huge political catastrophe, all because one of the spies dropped her earring and Counselor Stabby ate it. The earring was bugged. Good call, Counselor Stabby.
Every time Counselor Stabby breaks down and has to be repaired, trillions of humans flood its social media accounts with ‘get well’ messages, and many flowers and gifts are sent to the repair bay or to its charging station.
Counselor Stabby has somehow blundered its way into receiving all of the highest honors that can be bestowed by human society. It helps run an empire. It saves lives. It cleans donut crumbs off of the floor without being asked.
All without a single sentient thought.
Counselor Stabby becomes legend.
The humans have started a campaign to use Counselor Stabby as a model to create better bots.
“Why does a human’s consideration for a ‘better bot’ mean more knives, sir?” the young ambassador said, staring at the contraption in front of him.
“ we are unsure of their purpose, we have many reports of these creations protecting their home ships. “ The advisor said also staring at the contraptions many spinning blades.
The residing human walked into the room squealing, quite to loud for the ambassador’s taste, at the contraption.
“ Aren’t you just a spinning bundle of death! “ The human cried out happily? (The ambassador was still unsure of humans deployment of emotions.) The delivery droid, with knife blades above its propellors, bobbed up and down before depositing it’s ‘gift’ (as the human called it) and leaving through the bot-hatch with a frightening scream accompanying it.
Thes humans, they were, well, humans. The ambassador would need to read more on their culture to even remotely understand them.
**STABBY**
stabby-the-roomba
*buzzes happily*
Good Ole Stabby
Stabby: Origins
Guys so I made stabby a son, Pokey, want me to post a picture?
omg I’ve been on vacation for a week and just saw this! I wanna see the picture!
Smol but deadly
It’s terrible. I’m in love. Thank you for your great service to all of humanity.
STABBY THE SPACE ROOMBA RIDES AGAIN
This is an illustration I did for the August 2014 issue of Popular Science Magazine. The assignment was to show a scifi take on human aging in the future. I wanted to do something relatively positive, so I drew a lady whose life has been been prolonged through cybernetic enhancements and augmentation, so she gets to spend time with her great-great-great-great grandchildren.
Thanks to AD Michelle Mruk!
this is beautiful
So I keep wanting to reblog Cyborg Matriarch here, but I keep losing track of her.
She’s not getting away this time.
pumpernickelandcoal
I really want a sci-fi story to go with this.
I want the story behind this amazing picture
Concept: a spacefaring fantasy setting where the traditional “ship’s artificial intelligence” role is filled by synthetic hearth-gods that interface with the ship’s systems via miniaturised clockwork shrines. The tropes of ship-as-community and crew-as-found-family that pervade post-2000 spacefaring SF have direct and measurable presence in the setting, as cultivating a stronger sense of family and community results in a stronger ship’s god.
(While this practice confers considerable benefits, it also imposes a practical upper limit on the size of a ship and crew; if the ship or crew is too large, rather than a synthetic hearth-god you get a synthetic city-father, which is generally considered undesirable for non-military applications on account of the fact that those critters are scary as hell.)
Warhammer 40k orks are just a shitpost. Reading up on the lore of them is a true test because they’re so absurd you cant tel the dufference between theory and actual canon.
Shit i’ve read.
-every one possesses a form of psychic willpower that affects reality.
-technically could not be killed, but a human taunting them described how he would kill them so they became killable.
-they believe the color red increases speed so it does, including their enemies ships.
-they believe the color yellow makes explosions more powerful, so it does.
- they believe the color purple is stealthy so anything purple that they see is now invisible.
-they have windows on their spaceships to do drive-by’s because they dont know theres no air to breathe in space.
-their guns dont actually have any proper functioning parts. But since they believe its a gun, its now a gun.
-an out of ammo imperium squad once used empty guns to kill orks by shouting “bang” and since the orks didnt know they were empty it still killed them.
And now my personal favorite.
-while the emperor is believed to be kept alive by continuous sacrifices of his own techpriests. It is believed that the only reason the emperor is still alive is because the orks believe he is alive.
I cant tell what is true and what is made up because it all reads like that.
Orks are the one faction that makes the Warhammer 40000 setting appealing to me.
trilllizard666
WAUUUUUUUUUUGH
-Orks have a gun that fires goblins THROUGH HELL to strike their enemies “Supa fast” (a feat which is deemed impossible by all other factions)
-Orks have very few actual organs and are like 90% fungus
-Like most actual fungus, Orks reproduce with spores that are constantly being spewed from their bodies
-Ork psychers(”magic users”) are so volitile that they will sometimes just explode, sometimes taking half the army with them. This can be prevented by giving the psycher a stick wrapped in copper wire
-Orks decided to weaponize this by cutting off the psycher’s limbs, strapping him down to a cart, throwing him into the middle of the battlefield, then taking away the stick and running away.
-Due to the lack of any real organs, and reproduction with spores, orks lack any form of genetalia. However, Ork painboys(doctors) will sometimes graft fingers or lumps of skin to an ork patient that look like penises just for shits and giggles. This is typically done without patient consent and may result in the doctor’s dismemberment.
-Ork ships tend to have massive amounts of thrusters and rockets on them, all wired up to a single massive red button for the captain to smash
-In any sane universe, 9/10 ork vehicles would explode after turning on the ignition
-Orks are actually one of the oldest races in the galaxy, and were created by god-lizards to fight against giant, metal, sun-eating vampire gods and their robot skeleton slaves
-Orks are the equivalent to the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy grail, being able to be completely dismembered and continuing to fight (and still being a fairly sizable threat)
-If an Ork can find his dismembered limb and staple it back into place, he will be able to reuse that limb.
-The orks once were capable of building AN ENTIRE PLANET completely out of scrap metal.
-A prominent ork strategy is to swarm millions of orks onto an asteroid or moon, then slam them into the planet’s surface, effectively acting as makeshift landing crafts
-In old lore, the way that orks communicated across massive battlestations and walkers was that certain orks were capable of yelling SUPA SUPA LOUD instead of having an actual communication system
A little bit more on orks:
- Painboyz (as well as ork technicians, called Mekboyz) have an in-born knowledge of their given craft. Mekboyz pop up out of the ground with a basic knowledge of constructing simple machines and likewise Painboyz are born with a pretty good idea of which fleshy bits go where inside an ork.
- ork youths (or yoofs) often become frustrated with older orks always telling them they can do whatever they want, so they join up with the Stormboyz, where they perform such rebellious acts as saluting and respecting authorities, marching and performing drills in near-perfect synchronization, and strapping unstable rocket-engines to their backs to hurl themselves at the enemy.
- the ork gods are Gork and Mork, one of which is Brutal (but Kunnin’) and the other is Kunnin’ (but Brutal). The orks usually can’t all agree on which is which but general consensus is that Mork is the god of clobbering someone when they’re not looking, and Gork is the god of clobbering someone when they are looking.
- orks are naturally bald, but still sport impressive topknots and mohawks thanks to organisms called hair squigs. These small parasitic orkoids possess coats of disproportionately long, thick hair and will instinctively clamp down on whatever fleshy surface they are pressed against (usually an ork’s scalp) and never let go. There is a larger variety known as a beard squig, which, predicably, is typically attached to the chin.
- one time an ork was accidentally sent back in time and used the opportunity to kill his past self so he could have a spare of his favorite gun.
To add a lil something more to this:
-Orks have a form of currency called Teef, where they take the teeth off their fallen ork comrades to barter with. The bigger the teef, the more it’s worth, and ork teef decays pretty rapidly, keeping any ork economy based around the teef completely in a stable environment. When an ork is in need of some teef and there isn’t any lying around, he’ll punch himself in the mouth to knock out his own (they grow back), or better yet, another ork who ain’t expecting a sucker punch.
Their technology only works because they don’t know enough about engineering to know that it shouldn’t work.
transhumanist-viking
For those wondering what’s true and what’s not…this is all canon and real
haiku-robot
The God Emperor of Mankind is still alive because the Orks collectively believe that he’s too badass to die.
The Eldar believe that the Emperor is the only thing holding back the Chaos Gods from taking over/corrupting/destroying the entire galaxy (this is why they haven’t made any real attempt to wipe out humanity). Which means that, by extension, the Orks are holding back the full force of the Gods of Chaos just because they think this old pink dude is pretty cool.
I can’t wait for the ork codex to come out I wanna make an army out of dollar store Tonka trucks
Can you even imagine being the poor alien sod responsible for auditing an earthling spaceship’s spending allowance? Like:
“I see, and why do you require many tubes of white plant flavoured paste?”
“Oh well, if we don’t rub that on our teeth twice daily the bacteria living in my mouth will begin to devour me teeth.”
“…Noted.”
“I have also noticed several large shipments of specific medications, and a variety of individually packaged absorbent material - however injury records do not show sufficient numbers to justify these recurrent deliveries.”
“Ah, yeah, it’s not really an injury per say. As part of our natural reproductive cycle approximately half the population will shed the lining of one of their internal organs and expel it.”
“…that is the most horrifying thing that I have ever heard.”
“Yeah.”
“Does such a process not hurt?”
“That’l be what the medication’s for. Pain killers for the cramps, birth control to stop the process.”
“…and your reasoning behind the fully functional, high-tech entertainment system?”
“Okay, that we could probably do without. But in our defence that was actually insisted on as a standard feature of all fleet-ships expected to encounter Terrans. Admiral Plo’Kaght insisted on it. Something about bored humans and a an illegal betting ring featuring a cleaning robot with a knife strapped to it going up against a human with a mop?”
“…I believe I should speak with my superiors.”
batzendrick
I love how Stabby the Roomba has become such a consistent in-joke among these sorts of blogs.
Galactic hero stabby the roomba: his legend continues