Posta di Finestra (The Window Guard) — from Fiore dei Liberi’s treatise by VeiArts

It has begun

Fanfic idea: Development notes version (again)

(Cause my brain is smooth)

I watched all of the first season of My Dress Up Darling this past week and I had Visions™

Please imagine with me:

Setting: high school, all the girls are like 16-17.

Mira - rich girl but her parents refuse to pay for anything they don’t approve of. This includes clothes, so Mira works as an amateur model to pay for materials so she can sew her own clothes out of spite. She’s very good and has sketchbooks full of designs.

Zoey - lower middle class kid who loves cosplay. Doesn’t know how to sew but did make her own turtle costume for Halloween with paper mache that one time. Besties with Rumi.

Rumi - also rich girl but doesn’t know how to ask for things. Knows the very basics of sewing cause her adoptive mom Celine emphasizes independence. Besties with Zoey and finds the little adventures they go on to explore aquariums and anime/cosplay things fun.

Plot Synopsis: One day Mira’s sewing machine shits itself and she refuses to ask her parents for a new one, because she’d rather die than owe them anything.

Instead she goes to a local community centre on her bus line that advertised having a sewing room available.

When she arrives, she finds two girls have absolutely wrecked the machine (okay not absolutely but it still insults her on a professional level). They’ve bent the needle, tangled all the string and lost the bobbin, etc.

Before she knows it, Mira’s talking a mile a minute about how they need to do this and that to not let it happen again as she fixes it with all the replacement bits available.

One she’s done, she realizes what she’s done, she flushes super hard in embarrassment, goes “well, bye” and basically runs away.

From Rumi and Zoeys perspective, a super hot girl just came in, solved all their problems while being absolutely gorgeous and then just leaves… along with leaving her bag behind that’s filled with some fabric and a sketch book.

Rest under the cut

Hungry!

Oh you're writing a gay smut fic with a fantasy setting? Don't forget to give one of your characters a

It’s not that mysterious though.

Anyone carrying a bladed weapon carried oil. (More on that in a sec) Oil is what you use to clean and condition steel, especially, since water will rust it.

Many people in the Middle Ages used scented oils for their skin and hair from noblemen to lowly serfs.

Oil was incredibly abundant and quite cheap. The TYPE of oil however does matter in this.

Sheep oil (rendered from their fat) was very common and used for all manner of things from making soap to treating skin conditions. Rendered sheep fat has a very light texture and is a decent carrier oil without too pungent of a scent. Unfortunately it did rancid fast so it was common to add lots of herbs to it to help preserve it, especially rosemary, borage, marjoram and citron peels. This is how it became a common “perfume” oil used to scent hair skin or clothes. Nearly anyone would have had this handy somewhere.

Rendered pork oil was very common too and was most popular as a cooking oil.

Vegetable oil made from walnuts, almonds and flax seed was by far the most common non-animal oil. Nearly anybody had a bottle of almond or walnut oil in their pantry or on their person. These were by far the most popular oils used for conditioning steel, with walnut oil preferred because its tannins also gave armor a patina that kept it better. Only the absurdly wealthy ever wore polished armor. Everyone else blackened it to make it keep better. Walnut oil is good at doing that.

Walnut oil also works well as a lubricant. People back then DID use sexual lube by the way. No prostitute would be caught dead without it. Their favorite types were walnut and olive oil, though almond oil might be used in a pinch. They also used watered down acacia gum in southern Europe, which was sticky but slick and easy to re-wet.

Olive oil though was THE oil in Europe. It was expensive, comparatively, but obviously people considered it well worth its cost because it was found everywhere south of the Seine and frequently seen in even minor lordly houses or knights quarters much farther north. Considering quite a few people of the time thought it had aphrodisiac qualities when applied as certain way (likely because raw olive oil has a warming effect) I think you can imagine the most common reason it was sought after by men in particular.

Olive oil was also used in medicine and just about any church had some floating around somewhere because it’s conveniently good at treating minor infections and is wonderful for toothaches.

So the mysterious vial of oil isn’t at all mysterious and even if he were carrying it around with the sole intention of using it for sex, that wouldn’t actually be that strange either.

everything so scary & forever .

All the girls contriubute with the lyrics but Zoey is the main lyricist so when Rumi shyly comes up and says that she was written a song by herself they are all super excited. And when they see the lyrics to Golden ....holy shit everything clicks. The reason why Rumi is so reserves, why she never wants to join them at the bath.,...she is gay and this song is her getting ready to come out.

It takes a lot of restraint for both of them especially for Zoey to keep their shit together because all they want to do is hug Rumi and tell her how much they love her and accept her but they know that she needs to come out in her own time so they do hug her and tell her how much they love her but they make it about the song

So Mira and Zoey try to show "subtly' show how accepting they are. Huntrix has always supported LGBTQ causes so they decide instead to just start binging a LOT of sapphic movies and series. But the effect is not what they expected. Instead of being comfoted Rumi is freaking out more and more everydya and when Mira and Zoey suggest to invite Celine to diner Rumi absolutely freaks out and full on runs away

Meanwhile Rumi is ecstatic that the girls love Golden. She really hopes yhat this will be finally what brings the Golden Honmoon and allows her to finally be free of her demon blood. And then.....Zoey and Rumi start compimenting her a lot. Which is not unusual but the compliments are differnt. They keep talking about how she is their family, how Celine would be proud of her and then...the movies start. At first she think it's just coincidence but the more movies and series they put the more Rumi recognises them. Those are Celine's movies, the one that she has been watching all the time during her childhood. It's not hard to put two and two together.

All the weird compliments about how she is their family and how much Celine will always love her, Celine's personal movie collection, the way Zoey and Mira used to stare at Celine during their trianing......oh god Mira and Zoey are dating Celine. The thought makes Rumi sick to her stomach. She wants them all to be happy but she can't handle the idea. It's too much for her and when they suggest diner with Celine Rumi just snaps. She can handle facing a army of demons by herself but she can't face the ida of Zoey and Mira becoming her step moms so she runs away

And much later on when the desperate girl bring Celine in to look for Rumi...well Celine is about to have the biggest headache of her life when she has to explain to her daughter who is going to an active breakdown that no she is not about to get new step moms

Interesting that 'takes slaves because they think labour is demeaning' is a pretty good description of classical Sparta, yet I don't think anyone has made a gnoll phalanx.

in your life you should own at least 1 big coat

First art of 2026 ✨

Huntr/x posting a 'workout with me' video, but they forget they are demon hunters so they post the wildest workout routine known to man, and they start seeing comments and posts like

"travel to the er with me after attempting huntr/x's work out video"

"i survived huntr/x workout video (barely). here's my story"

"i swear i saw rumi guiding me to the light after my huntr/x workout attempt"

"how many times do i need to throw up before i stop?"

does anyone have any good fantasy book recs (standalone or series idc) that aren't acotar or tog or any other mainstream romantasy series that keep being pushed onto my feed T-T

-cracks knuckles-

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Alternate history/fantasy; two magicians attempt to restore the practice of magic to England.

Game Pile: Eat God

I fancied writing a Jim Henson style song opening, a poem about down in the swamp where the people come from goo, but it turns out those are super hard and there’s a lot to talk about in this excellent mid-sized Tabletop RPG.

Something of a warning, though; I don’t have a full, complete copy of Eat God. What I have is the Early Access version for the kickstarter. You can check out this version here. This is not a consideration of the game as a product for purchase nor as a game used in play, but rather about the ideas the system gives me and the reasons it gives me to play it.

Eat God is a game, by David Propoketz. It’s a game that comes with a minimally defined setting but a very distinct, important vibe, where players take on the role of The Folk. The Folk are the weird little creatures that exist as a byproduct of the world, not as its agents. They’re Goblins, they’re Kobolds, they’re Imps, but they’re also things like Minicons and Gnomes. The Folk are not the owners of the world; the dominant structures are against the Folk, and in a lot of ways, the Folk exist because the rest of the world needs them to exist. You are the dungeon trash, ennobled by knowing the secrets of the world, and you are together on the grand quest to Eat God.

The game positions ‘Eating God’ as an ambiguous idea, where it could be something like an economic revolution or an emotional recognition or it could be just, like, actually finding and eating God. It creates an episodic story structure, where players show up in some circumstances, try to solve a problem that they’ve identified, and there are consequences that, depending on the genre, are either hilarious or terrible, or, given the tone of the game, both! Then at some point all these little errors and little problems build up to the point where the Calamity happens and the campaign becomes about this boss monster encounter, whether narrative or like some elaborate trap.

That’s the setup; you play a weird little muppet in a gaggle of other weird little muppets, and you go out on your way to find the problems in the world around you. It uses a dicepool system, and at this point I would normally give you a quick run through of that, but I don’t want to this time, because Eat God‘s mechanical system is pleasantly sophisticated.

Eat God uses for its resolution system a dice pool system that uses a set of twelve-sided dice (d12s), a pair of six-sided dice (d6s), and a deck of playing cards (for non-redundant randomisation). Then there’s a set of print-and-play cards for character customisation and building, and also players have a character sheet. There’s a Gamemaster, and the play numbers seem to scale from three to seven.

The main way you make checks in the game, is you find out how bad the die roll can go which gives you a sort of threshold number. Then you find out how many die you can roll, add those together, chuck the dice, and see what the highest number you get that lands underneath a specific stat of yours.

This is where you’re probably expecting me to complain right.

I think that’s what I do.

Maybe I’m overly anxious about complaining about indie TTRPGs.

See, this level of components and detail is the stuff I would normally see for a board game, and I would also, normally, hold this complexity as a mark against the game. Conventionally speaking, this kind of stuffness is useful for holding onto a lot of meaningful information that players need to coherently maintain in order to understand the fictional game state. A great example of this is playing Dungeons & Dragons with miniatures, which are one, yes, useful for drawing people into the physical space, but also, are cool little things that make it easier to stop thinking about how far away you are not from one person but from two people. The material stuff of the game keeps track of that.

For the typical indie TTRPG, this level of information preservation is just not necessary, because, and I mean this as gently as I can, most indie TTRPGs have very little in the way of meaningful mechanics. Eat God doesn’t need miniatures, it’s not built like that, but instead, the mechanical system here is made to maintain sophisticated game information.

Character building is done with a card system, which is done to ensure that, unless players actively choose it, that player characters are by default going to be completely distinct from one another, both mechanically and aesthetically. The die roll system is built around the d12 for a few obviously extrapolated reasons, like how it’s a die that doubles a d6 (meaning the d6 can be used for ‘easier’ versions of the check) but it also has a wide variance which is also a reasonably handleable number to estimate. And the game has a system called Calamity, where every time you roll die and your numbers go too high, not just too high for you to use them, but too high for the check, then you build up Calamity. Calamity is a thing the gamemaster can spend on the spot to bully your character, or they can opt not to and the points go straight to the Calamity Clock.

And yes, Clocks! If you’re seeing something of the shape of Blades in the Dark in Eat God I think that’s reasonable, but I also don’t think that you need to know how to play Blades in the Dark to play this. They’re also different enough and use similar terms (like Stress) that you might bring mistaken assumptions on. Fortunately, the system of Eat God is extremely thoroughly written with a clear technical overview and robust glossary.

The Calamity Clock feels like (but doesn’t have to be) the ‘campaign ending event’ clock. The Calamity Clock builds up every time you accrue Calamity that the gamemaster doesn’t use, which means that as you start trying more and more difficult things and fail more and more often, as you do bigger and cooler and fancier things (where you get to roll lots more dice!) then the clock inexorably ticks upwards. This gives the game a natural tension, and the clock striking midnight means that it’s time for the gamemaster to bring up a big new event to draw a narrative line under things.

There’s some great advice too about the nature of the clock, where it isn’t just that when the clock strikes, a bad event happens but it needs to be a bad event the players can engage with and can expect to understand and affect. If it’s a plague outbreak, the plague has to be a thing the characters can do something about or help address, if it’s a political assassination, there’s got to be something in the aftermath of that assassinations that brings the story to a peak and you need to get involved to do it.

Eat God is a thoroughly written, technically robust, aesthetically delightful game by a developer I think has a fantastic sense of game design, and particularly in making sure that that design follows through on the type of narrative the game is meant to express. The form of Eat God‘s campaigns seem to be about giving you a setting and a hook for your weird little monster critters, and then suggestions for the Calamity you’re building to. It looks excellent.

I don’t think I’ll ever run or play it.

This may surprise you as I am a fan of horrible monsters and muppets and goblins. I brought the game to my local goblin expert (the goblin that lives in my house), and after my arm was done being chewed on, I was told that the premise of a goblin in a group of goblins is not interesting. Rather, the point of a goblin is to be in contrast to the players, not to be the form of all players.

The fact is, when everyone is goblin mode, then nobody is.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

Not a terribly surprising conclusion. In spite of its Looney Tunes inspirations, Eat God isn’t really aimed at the sort of player who just wants to go Goblin Mode; it’s aimed at the sort of player who enjoys taking absurd premises far more seriously than they warrant and interrogating the implications of Goblin Mode. (And also very slightly at players with TF kinks, but that’s neither here nor there.) It’s a game that wants you to be a jet-powered telepathic crab; it’s also a game that wants you to tell us how your jet-powered telepathic crab feels about labour rights and state violence. As a text it’s very aware that this is a ridiculous thing to be asking, but asking it with a straight face is part of the bit.

Anti-labour rights, anti-state violence.

booking her an appointment with a hydraulic press

(ID in alt text)