my friends peer pressured invited me to a vampire game a few days ago
Chakan: The Forever Man - Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Extended Play Productions, 1992
Source: kartridges
Mad Maddy Maddison
“Eccentric Jester” © London Workman, accessed at their ArtStation here
[This is one of many iterations of my “goth clown” persona, tailored to a low level game and with more emphasis on the clown. I created her for a freeform game run by @abominationimperatrix, which we haven’t gone back to yet. I do hope to. The Harley Quinn influence is very much intentional.]
Mad Maddy Maddison CR 3 CG Humanoid (dark folk) Clad in mismatched and brightly colored jester’s motley, this tiny woman is thin, muscular and pretty. At first glance she might appear to be wearing stage makeup, but her gray skin and black lips are their natural color.
Mad Maddy Maddison has had a very complicated and strange life already in her nineteen years, and is excited to see what happens next. She was born to a clan of dark folk living in the Darklands beneath the Brazen Peaks, and the caligni callers selected for her to be a dancer, one of the dark folk who act as intermediaries between settlements. Unfortunately, that meant that her wanderlust started at a very early age, and she managed to get separated from her family. She was found and given a home, but unfortunately it was by Mater Cachinnarum, the Mother of Sneers. This wicked bogeywoman pops up in nightmares throughout eastern Garund, and tried to raise Maddy to do the same. Even though Maddy was raised by Cachinnarum for a solid decade, she held true to her overall sense of kindness and good humor, and escaped by the grace of Cayden Cailean, who has a soft spot for all orphans and runaways.
Maddy made it to the bustling city of Katapesh where she currently works at the Night Circus, an entertainment troupe in the Night Markets. At the Circus, she is a talented juggler, percussionist, clown and occasional pickpocket. Her favored instruments are the zills. Maddy has a fascination with death and the undead, having been surrounded by ghouls and skeletons in Mater Cachinnarum’s care, and she is learning how to affect them with her magical music. She’s also working on making friends, something she’s never had a lot of. Her closest friend is a flumph, who has given dire warnings about monsters in space. Maddy currently finds this concept more intriguing than scary.
Maddy stands a whole two and a half feet tall and carries a club as long as she is tall. She has a caffeine addiction, and rarely goes a day without several cups of coffee.
Planescape: The Underdark
The underdark is a useful narrative convention for d&d: a massive cavernous wilderness that can intrude into an ongoing story anywhere there’s a deep enough fissure to disgorge strange monsters as needed. It tempts groups of adventurers to explore its winding depths, and provides a home for the more horrific monsters that would wreck shop were they let loose on the surface.
it’s the mythic underworld, a place far odder and more dangerous than the party’s home realm, and in my continued attempts to reorganize the d&d multiverse into something more thematically useful for my writing, I realized that the underdark would actually be better served by being it’s own plane, rather than a fixed network of tunnels underneith the world.
Consider this:
- the Underdark being its own plane allows for all the physics breaking background magic that would allow for a near infinite carven system to support mortal life ( how do the giant mushrooms grow without anything to decay? why haven’t the oceans poured in and flooded this place yet?)
- Making the underdark a “parallel plane” in the vein of the feywild or shadowfell allows for it to have spontaneously occuring portals, which can manifest in normal dungeons/caves/old mines as you need them without needing any one site to dive miles under the surface.
- Consolidating it with the elemental plane of earth and pandemonium gives us a richly detailed realm that is still cohesive with the “endless subterranean labyrinth” concept that all three share.
Naturally this shift is going to necessitate a lot of other changes, which I’ll detail below. If you’re interested in the TLDR however: The underdark can be markedly improved by treating it as it’s own plane, much in the same way as you’d treat the feywild or shadowfell.
Grass Unicorn!
It was a good little practice painting after so long!
Couldn’t decide if I wanted a border of not, so here we go! I really like how it came out!!:D
unexpected delays on the morning commute.
