Kingdom Territories:

Something Dungeons & Dragons gets right about its worldbuilding is that most of its iconic monsters are both capable of speech and willing to argue about incredibly stupid shit – just A+ understanding of the medium there – which makes it doubly perplexing that the game goes out of its way to specify that skeletons can't talk. Skeletons are, like, the classic monster to engage in ill-advised banter with, and it's preemptively taken off the table. What the fuck.

Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew

Old version. I'll redo it later.

Modern Monsters Moodboards part 2;

Name: Shepherd Wellermen.

Species: Angel.

Modern Job: Kroger worker.

Significant other: None.

Physical age: 22 years old.

Name: Douglas Graves.

Species: Skeleton.

Modern Job: Smoke Shop Cashier.

Significant other: Unknown girl.

Physical age: 19 years old.

Name: Lucius Ryder.

Species: Incubus.

Modern Job: Chef and Ametuar Flim Director.

Significant other: Desdemona Grimm.

Physical age: 21 years old.

Name: Desdemona Grimm.

Species: Goddess.

Modern Job: Artist and Mortician.

Significant other: Lucius Ryder.

Physical age: 21 years old.

Name: Morana Crimson.

Species: Demon.

Modern Job: Mortician.

Significant other: None.

Physical age: 18 years old.

Name: Finn Finley.

Species: Merman.

Modern Job: Musician and Baker.

Significant other: None.

Physical age: 19 years old.

Name: Clover Boggs.

Species: Fairy.

Modern Job: Teacher.

Significant other: None.

Physical age: 22 years old.

🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧟🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧟🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧟🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧟🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧟🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧟

Requested by my good friend, @crimsonstar2096 .

Part 1.

Staff I made for my Modern Monsters character, Morana Crimson;

🍀 21 Plot Twist Ideas 🍀

Stuck on your WIP? Unsure of how a scene should go? Feel as though your story is lacking substance? Enduring with the frustrations of writer’s block?

Why not try throwing in a plot twist?

A messenger brings bad news

Something important is stolen

Someone vanishes without a trace

An important item is damaged

Protagonist recognizes a face in the crowd

Someone seems to intentionally fail

Protagonist finds an item thought lost

A charitable act has a harmful result

A cruel act has a beneficial outcome

Someone unexpectedly returns the favour

A raging storm moves across town

A gift makes a character the target of a murderer

A fallen enemy makes one last attack

Only one character in danger can be saved

An enemy saves the life of Protagonist’s friend

A will from a long-lost relative appears

A secret rival seeks to replace Protagonist

A thief makes Protagonist their next target

An obscure law suddenly becomes important

Strangers mistake Protagonist for a fugitive

A tool breaks when needed most

I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.

Monster Memes;

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".