Lets talk about how bronies are best artists

So today I want to talk about ponies.

Oh screw you, it’s my blog. Besides no one reads this thing, I might as well be writing in a diary I keep in a lockbox.

Anyway, I am a brony. Broney. Bronie. Apparently I am not a very good one because I don’t know how its spelled. So besides My Little Pony being a pretty good kids show, and I do have a 6 year old daughter so what’s YOUR excuse(?) the fan community around it is just mind boggling. Forget trekkies, they can go die in a fire compared to the stuff I have seen out of teh brony community.

It started with artwork for me. I’d save it on my phone, no big deal. Then I decided it would be fun to use cartoon pictures for the contacts on said phone, and an image search for “teal kitty cat” came up with a teal pegasus[D1]  pony which was pretty much a dead ringer for my wife, with her Crayola colored hair and general eclecticism. That search doesn’t yield that result anymore so whatever. As far as my phone is concerned I married a pony. It doesn’t help that one, while under the influence of alchohol and cough medicine, my wife once said “fuck your little Rainbow Dash” while we were, in fact, fucking. So I got to come inside Rainbow Dash, eat your heart out cloppers.

I’m off topic. Started collecting fan art, etc, didn’t go anywhere else for a long time. Then I read Fallout: Equestria and holy shit. Or as that fic so succulently put “Luna fill my cunt with moonrocks and call it home!” After that I started pursuing fimfiction.net which until then I was convinced was just filled with pony smut (that’s half true), and I don’t remember what my second fic after FO:Eq was but the next distinct one was Hard Reset, part one of the Time Loop Trilogy

Let me make this clear. The author, Eakin, wrote a trilogy of novellas which are better then half of the shit I had downloaded off Scribed. He did it for free, for fun. If you take the plot and strip away the pony bits he should be making a goddamm million dollars off this story. And pretty much every damn day I download another story, have my phone read it to me in sultry computerized synthesis while I kill bugs, and I am floored at the talent in this community.

An apprentice wizardess and her dragonling companion try out a magic spell that should let them view alternate timelines, but it literally blows up in her face. “Well that didn’t work” the dragon says, so to clear her headache she and the young drake go out for some sandwitches only to realize body-snatching bug monsters just invaded in force. On noes! Of course she will save the day right!?

No. She gets murdered by bugs. Brutally muderered. Then wakes up with a  spell blowing up in her face. “Well that didn’t work” Was it just a dream? They head out for some air. Bug monsters! Fights vallently, tries to warn the guards! Did she waste her premonition? Then throat ripped out by nasty things which are probably going to eat her.

“Well that didn’t work” This wizard, barely level six by D&D standards, is in a fixed time loop where every time she dies, she starts over about two hours before the invasion. Now the quest is clear, unwravel the puzzle of foiling this takeover with her unlimited retries. All she can take with her from loop to loop is information.

Hundreds of loops, near madness at the impossibility of the quest, a temporary unhinging of morals as she realizes there are literally no consequences to her actions, so why not loot and stuff her face with donuts for a few loops? And it makes for a safe way to come out of the closet to her parents (who already found her stash of girly magazines when she moved out to wizard college, so they are pretty nonplused. As her mother says “I just want some grandkids, and you know they are doing some interesting things with magical contraception these days. And double the wombs means double the grandbabies!”), so that’s a plus. Eventually though, she will have to solve the problem or be stuck in the loop forever, because not even death is a release from this little slice of hell.

Doesn’t that sound fucking awesome? And that’s just the first book! And it’s a FANFICTION! Arg I am so mad…

Then, THEN you go watch some youtube videos. Epic Wub Time, Friendship is Witchcraft, Flufflepuff, holy shit people WHY AREN’T YOU MAKING ALL THE MONEY. Sigh. Anyway tonight I dove down one of the last rabbit holes, music.

I don’t like the songs that are just too on the nose, if you know what I mean. I get it, we’re singing about pretty pastel ponies, don’t rub it into my ears like you’re doing classical opera. Little tact, people. Regardless of that I wasn’t disappointed by the disparaging split between good music and shit. Hint: I liked most of it. Aside from a lot of original songs, sung by both men and women which is weird if you’ve ever gotten into a fandom because it’s mostly just remixes of existing stuff, and there are a lot of those. Jesus that was a clunky sentence. Well I am not editing it, ha.

So two videos here, one of the original and one the remix. When I think remix I think, you know, glowstick music. And I like glowstick music, and there is plenty, but see what this asshole did. Here is the original from the cartoon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQKaAlMNvm8

Credit where credit is due, for a show with a  20 minute run time and aimed at kids under 10 they put some effort into their musical numbers. But now check out this asshole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s99Y8-eTtOQ&index=27&list=PLgT_ieoigYwoGaFyjlJuOOt4-tyiucGSL

Don’t you get it? The bronies, they are just… just so good. Good at all the stuff I want to be good at. For no money. I want to make money writing. These guys churn out a billion words a month that consistently impress me. Sigh. All I can hope is that the bronies are just the first wave of a new world order, where everyone just makes stuff because its fun and everyone else gets it for free, and the economy collapses without the influx of consumer dollars to hold up the mammoth skeleton that is capitalism.

I’m not bitter, really.

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 [D1]

New Campaign Primer

Hi ho. I'm Sean, this is my OSRD&D thing. Actually assuming I actually make posts it'll mostly just be me codifying my new D&D campaign, of the same name of this blog. So new players will be directed to this post, and I'll leave it public so I can be INTERNET FAMOUS!!!!!111!!!

My game is set in the established setting Eberron. You may have heard of it. If not, this is the Eberron Wiki
So if you want to brush up on the setting go ahead, but be warned I am running the thing basically off of what I remember from my first Eberron campaign years ago, and I make no apologies for misspellings or incorrect facts. This is my campaign after all so I figure published setting or not doing it off the top of my head is the best way to make it my own.

Anyway, on to important information. The game system is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is easy to acquire in pdf form around the internets if you are inclined. Please keep in mind I am not running Lamentations totally straight, because I am not a sadistic bastard. Also I am anticipating my players coming from newer iterations of D&D and being used to being more heroic. That said, Eberron also assumes heroic PCs even moreso then stock 3E did.

So lets go over the keywords here so you know what to expect. Next post will get into actual mechanics changes and new content. Eberron is discribed as pulp fantasy, gritty magepunk. I have no problems with any of that, but lets analyze what those mean. Or at least what I think they mean.

Pulp fantasy is simply fantasy stories that often feature heroes and settings which don't spend a lot of time trying to justify why they are what they are. Conan and Lord of the Rings both count to my knowledge, and D&D came out of the huge succcess of the genere in the whenever D&D was made. Late 70s I think. I am a bad nerd...

Grit is hardwired into Lamentations. We have run one game and the most notatble thing about it is that, after shipwrecking on a small island the party had, after their first near fatal attempt at dungeoneering, split up to hunt for food and the party bard was drained dry by a stirge. The party has, as of yet, not recovered her body or are techncially aware she is dead. So yeah, grit. Like I said I am going to tone it down a bit.

Magepunk, is that even a thing? Ok so steampunk is well known, and insofar as I haven't researched it I am assuming that the whole 'punk' genera started with cyberpunk and the novel Neuromancer, which is a fun read. I think Blade Runner falls into this space too. Anyway, punk settings imply over saturation of some kind of technology. It widens the gap between the upper and lower class astronomically, with the 'haves' basically running things how they see fit and the 'have nots' trying to scrape up or scam whatever they can. In the case of Eberron magic is both commonplace and about as exciting as having a computer. In other words, no one cares. People are more likely to be impressed by someone skilled in swordplay then the guy who can conjure magic missiles all day.

The campaign itself will initially be set in Sarlona, hence the name of the campaign (The Dreaming Dark are the Sarlona secret police). All the races of Eberron will be playable, though I am partially sticking to Lamentations race-as-class precedent because even though it is a little clunky it is also a really effective tool to get you into the mindset of playing something that isn't human. Classes run basically as written, with numerous sub-classes to fill in the traditional D&D roster as well as whatever I think is cool. One caveat is MUs can cast spells off the cleric list. Clerics and Bards are my two least favorite classes, because they just clash with your usual group of adventurers, so I am still fiddling with ways to make them more palatable (Bard is already a done deal however)

As for obvious rules hacks of Lamentations, I am changing both Skills and Saves to more contemporary systems. Saves will follow 5e in that each Ability is also a saving score. You make con saves or str saves or whatever. Skills will follow a system that I don't have the link to, but will be more similar to newer editions with a skill rank adding a bonus to your attribute modifier vs a DC set by me. Easy DC is 15, with a sliding scale probably looking like 17, 20, 25, 30. This assumes for normal skill checks a flat d20 roll succeeds 25% of the time, players will succeed closer to 33% of the time, and someone with relevant training will succeed at least 50%. Some things I will be trying to avoid making players roll for are Perception, Diplomacy and Knowledge. These are things I would like to be up to player skill vs character optimization, we will see how it goes.

Ok wow this got a lot longer then I was planning on. Next time we get into races, classes, psionics, dragonmarks and some actual rulescraft. I would also like to address engineering versus artifice, and there was something else... Well if it was important I'll remember later maybe.