so i’m currently working at a law firm and the other day one of the attorneys was talking to me and he mentioned that he’s “not very confrontational” and i was like you are?? a lawyer???
and he said “yeah but in court there are rules. i can argue with some shmuck in a suit in front of a judge no problem, but when i leave the courthouse and go home i’m not gonna argue with my wife about dinner. there are no rules in our kitchen. i would die.”
D&D adventure concept: it turns out that the Fairy Queen doesn’t actually do anything with the sparkles-in-your-eyes and memories-of-a-summer’s-day and other sundry intangibles and abstractions she’s been scamming mortals out of for the last few centuries.
Whatever she had planned for them didn’t pan out, but she never ordered her minions to stop collecting them; by the time it became clear that the project was a no-go, expectations had already been set, and when you’re the Queen of the Fairies you can’t very well admit to having a bad idea.
She’s just been discretely dumping them down a disused well for hundreds of years, and the resulting effluvium of spoiled virtue and rotten whimsy has begun to contaminate the drinking water of a human village downstream – which is where the player characters come in.
White hat hackers are such an interesting profession. A job like that couldn’t exist before computers. Imagine hiring someone to try and break into your house and then tell you how he did it
Of course there fucking was
It Takes A Thief, it was called. You’ve got two former burglars breaking into properties (with the owners’ permission, of course) to show them what they’ve been doing wrong in regards to their security, and then help them out with security systems and all that, and then try to break in AGAIN to make sure they were using their security systems and locks and whatnot properly.
aw shucks! I guess I’ve not thought about it too deeply- because it’s how I behave with people I know well! just allow characters to be physically comfortable around each other or not even acknowledge the fact that someone is draped across them, like ‘oh this happens all the time’, or rather than walking around someone just moving someone out of the way by swinging them around gently or lifting an arm to walk under it, character A is talking to character B about something completely unrelated to the fact that they exchange a hug at the same time, not even changing their facial expressions to reflect the fact- or, character A lifting up character B so they can get something on a high shelf that they were struggling to reach, which is much cuter and funnier than character A getting the object down for them. it’s all just grounded in the sort of goofy stuff you see and experience with close friends? I got a lot of that when I lived in a student house when going to university; it housed 4 people but we basically had 8-10 people who were there constantly and the front room was often a hotpotch of tired nerds in their early twenties attempting to sit or lie on any available surface which basically included the other tired nerds in the room. they were good nerds. it was nice. we played a lot of video games.
TL:DR I guess draw things that feel cosy and make it clear that the crossing of personal boundaries is 100% not a big deal to either party
There are initially four different ways to use the Bestow Curse spell in D&D 5e. Those are as follows:
Disadvantage on ability checks and saves for one ability score
Disadvantage on attacks against you
WIS save or do nothing during a given round
+1d8 necrotic damage when you damage them
The spell normally lasts for a minute, but if cast with a 9th level slot, it lasts until dispelled, which is worth noting because the best curses last until dispelled. if cast with a 4th level slot, it lasts for 10 minutes. A 5th level slot is 8 hours. A 7th level slot is 24 hours. These all have their uses for creative players, but the best part of the spell by far is the encouragement to invent your own curses, which many players and DMs have taken as a challenge for their own creativity. So while it is certainly not new, it’s my turn to take a crack at it!
Unique Curses
* – A curse marked with an asterisk is a 9th-level only curse due to its powerful detriment or long-lasting nature. But who is to stop you from enchanting an innocuous item with such a curse?
Hair Growth/Loss: You are cursed to grow hair at a rapid rate for the duration of the curse or else lose all of your hair (it grows back after the curse ends).
Mute/Deaf/Blind: You are rendered either mute, deaf, or blind for the duration of the curse.
Forbidden Speech: You are cursed to never speak about a certain subject, topic, or word for the duration of the curse.
*Rapid Aging/Deaging: You are cursed to either age by one year each day, or to grow one year younger each day. After you reach your final day, you die.
*Phylactery: Your fate becomes tied to a creature or object. If the creature or object is slain/destroyed, you die as well.
Ugliness: You are cursed with horrible deformity for the duration of the curse. You have -5 on Persuasion checks and Deception checks for the duration and are easily noticed and shunned by most humanoids of any race.
image source: Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn
Possessed Limb: One of your limbs (usually an arm) acts on its own for the duration of the curse, usually attempting to harm its host, harm others, or sow chaos.
Petrified Limb: One of your limbs becomes petrified and is unable to be used for the duration of the curse. It could turn into any solid mineral like stone, iron, glass, salt, or gold. Any damage it takes is retained once the curse is lifted.
Funny Looking: For the duration of the curse, anyone who you attempt to communicate with bursts into uncontrollable laughter. This does not prevent hostile creatures from attacking you, but prevents them from speaking.
Lichsight: For the duration of the curse, you can see the spirits of the dead. Whether real or illusory, you cannot communicate with them and you must make a WIS saving throw each round or become frightened and run in a random direction or cower in place (50%/50%).
Butterfingers: Each round while the curse is active, you must make a DEX saving throw. On a failed save, you drop whatever you are holding and cannot pick up or hold anything for the rest of the round.
Forgetful: You have a tendency to forget things. During the curse, whenever new information is revealed to your character, you have a 50% chance to not be able to remember it, even after the curse has ended.
*Lady of Shalott: You are doomed to die if you ever lay eyes directly upon another being, and must therefore look at the world through a mirror and avoid direct sight of others. The difficulty of maneuvering a hand mirror or the necessity to close your eyes effectively makes you blinded while in combat, imposing disadvantage on attack rolls.
Stingy: During the curse, you must make a WIS saving throw whenever you intend to part with money. On a failed save, you opt not to spend your money on it. You cannot make another such save for the same purchase, even from a different seller.
Empty Coinpurse: You are compelled to buy things until all of your wealth has disappeared. You will even go so far as to barter your own goods once out of money. Whenever you find something for sale, you must make a WIS saving throw. On a failed save, you will do anything you can to attempt to purchase it or trade for it. Only if the seller refuses three times will you give up.
*Baleful Polymorph: You are transformed into a small creature or tiny animated object for the duration of the curse. You retain the ability to speak using a disembodied voice emanating from the creature or object, usually paired with animation like a moving mouth (if a creature) or a mouth-shaped part (if an object; like a book opening and closing its covers and such). You can move with a move speed of 10 ft. per round if an object.
image source: Star vs. the Forces of Evil
Talking Tumor: You grow a tumor-like second head that can speak that embarrasses, berates, or otherwise annoys and inconveniences you. It has +6 for Persuasion, Deception, and Intimidation checks, helping it be a complete jerk.
Evil Aura: Plants within 15 ft. of you wilt and turn brown or gray and animals within 60 ft. feel afraid or threatened by you for the duration of the curse.
Bad Taste: Eating food or drinking water causes you to become poisoned for 1d6 hours, or for the duration of the curse.
Bad Luck: Whenever you have advantage for the duration of the curse, you instead have disadvantage.
*Prophecy: You become destined to die under certain circumstances. Whenever it is possible for those circumstances to be met, you must make a relevant saving throw (falling boulder? DEX save. Poisoned apple? CON save. etc.) or begin dying. The victim cannot be threatened by the curse more than once every 2d4 hours. The curse will take increasingly convoluted measures to try and make the prophecy come true the longer the curse lasts.
*Guardian: The victim is polymorphed into a hostile creature of CR 6 or less. The victim is given some sort of command like guarding a location or spreading suffering, and will continue to do so until the curse is lifted or they are slain. They revert to their regular form if they are slain. The victim cannot communicate and is hostile to all creatures. The creature becomes immune to the charmed condition.
image source: Sleeping Beauty by Henry Meynell Rheam
Slumber: You fall into a deep slumber and cannot be awoken until the curse is lifted.
Eternal Rest: If slain while under the curse, you cannot be resurrected by any means even after the curse fades.
Phantasm: You believe that you have been polymorphed into a small creature (like a toad or chicken) and act as such for the duration of the curse.
Unquenchable Thirst/Hunger: You feel eternally hungry and thirsty. You must make a WIS saving throw whenever you encounter food or drink, no matter how dangerous or questionable it might be (swamp water, obviously poisoned food, moldy bread, etc.). On a failed save, you consume it.
*Obedience: Whenever someone you can understand issues a verbal command to you while you are cursed, you are compelled to obey. You may attempt a WIS saving throw to resist a given command for one minute.
Hold your tongue! (Ella Enchanted)
Magical Immunity: You become immune to nonharmful spells for the duration of the curse. Spells cast by enemies or damaging spells still affect you, but healing spells and buffs do not.
Unhealing Wound: A wound you have will never heal. Your maximum hit points are reduced by 2d4+the caster’s spellcasting modifier. This curse cannot reduce a creature’s health to 0 in this way.
*Wandering: While under the effects of the curse, you are compelled to wander. Each day at dawn, you must leave and never return to the same city/town or 2.5 mile radius (if in the wilderness).
*Deadly Descendants: All of your descendants are cursed to kill their birth parents, whether intentionally or not.
*Lonliness: You are cursed to die alone. Anyone you become romantically close to or close friends eventually leaves or dies or meets a horrible fate.
*Gargoyle: You are petrified during the daytime and return to normal at night for the duration of the curse.
Voyager: You cannot set foot on dry land for the duration of the curse, taking 1d6 psychic damage each round that you do.
Removing Curses
Yes, there’s always a Wish spell or a Remove Curse spell, but I often believe that if any cleric can remove a curse it undercuts the drama of the punishing spell. Instead, use an alternative way to remove the curse. Most of it depends on how the curse was placed and the reasoning behind it. For instance, if you refuse to give a gypsy shelter from the cold in your luxurious castle, you might get transformed into a beast until someone falls in love with you. Here are some ways that one could feasibly break a curse (if the situation allows).
Give back an item that was stolen from the caster
Complete a quest or mission for the caster
Kill the caster
Pass the curse onto someone else (through some deliberate means like a handshake or kiss or losing a wager)
Seek out a powerful extraplanar being
Seek out special magical ingredients for a cure
Find a loophole in the wording of the curse (either through tricky wording or by finding a liminal loophole. “No man of woman born” could exclude a man born by C-section. “Neither day nor night” could exclude twilight)
Change your alignment (an evil or chaotic character learns to be good or lawful.)
Change your ideal or traits after learning some sort of lesson
Overcome one of your flaws.
Let the curse run its course instead of fighting it.
Find true love/True love’s kiss etc.
Prove your worth to the caster
Atone for past sins
Selflessly risk your life for someone else
Convert a creature to worshiping the caster’s deity
Avenge the caster
image source: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Feel free to use this list and add to it your own ideas for curses! There are so many possibilities that it’s never out of the question to find a new curse that uses arbitrary magical rules to drive the plot of a story. I guess that makes curses the sitcoms of the fantasy world.
But what if half your ocs are softys and not made for fighting?
dating sim
this post changed the game
Hey btw if you don’t know how to program, you should check out [novelty], which is a free Visual Novel creation software. Absolutely no programming required, and it’s super easy to use, I played with it some when I was a teen but the only reason I didn’t do much with it is cuz I made my story complicated and had like 5000 different branching routes that kept spawning new routes and made myself confused LMAO
But yeah, it’s a WYSIWYG with a really straight-forward GUI, if I remember correctly.
It even comes with some free backgrounds and characters and stuff, and this is what it looks like:
Did I mention it’s super duper free? It hasn’t been updated since 2010, but it has basically all you’d need to make a simple visual novel.
Just make sure your DirectX runtime is updated, cuz it can act buggy if it’s outdated, but this program is so old that I doubt it’d even be an issue lol
the All Around: speaks, reads, and writes both languages pretty well
the Conversational: one language is stronger than the other; can speak the other language a lot better than they read/write it (a lot of kids of immigrants are this type)
the High Schooler: understands what’s being said to them in the other language, can’t really speak it
don’t have your characters randomly drop words from their other language mid-sentence around people who don’t speak it lol
languages are a mindset thing. like personally if i’m around english-speakers, i’m speaking english and i don’t really switch to my other language (which is portuguese)
so like if you’re writing a bilingual character who speaks spanish and have them say something like “hey chad let’s go to the biblioteca” to an english speaker i’ll probably spend 5 minutes laughing and then close your story lmao
exception: the character is speaking in their weaker language and forgot a word (”where are the…? uh… llaves…. keys! keys, where are they?”)
otherwise really the only time your character should be randomly switching languages mid-sentence is if they’re talking to another bilingual
like i don’t speak spanish but i’ve legit never heard a spanish speaker say “ay dios mio” to gringos lmao
conversations between two bilingual people can take a few different forms:
Pick One: they pick one language and kinda stick with it for the whole conversation (a conversation i might have with my portuguese-speaking mom: ”you okay?” “yeah, i’m good. how’re you?” “i’m fine, but your dad-”)
Back-and-Forth: someone says something in one language, the other person replies in the other (”tudo bem?” “yeah, i’m good. how’re you?” “tou bem, mas o seu pai-”)
Combo: they speak a combo of the two languages, a popular example being spanglish, though basically every bilingual has their own combo language (”tudo bem?” “sim, tou bem. how’re you?” “i’m fine, mas o seu pai-”)
when in doubt: just ask a bilingual to look at your stuff and tell you if anything sounds weird
combo languages can look different depending on the bilingual
me and my cousin (native english speakers) speaking our portuguese/english combo sounds a lot different than my mom and my godmother (native portguese speakers) doing the same thing
the kids of immigrants usually come up with their own unique way of saying things that are different than native speakers
if you’re writing a bilingual family the older kids’ll probably be more bilingual than the younger ones
also, to clarify: bilingual characters might say words in another language on purpose in front of non-speakers
either to fuck with them or just ‘cause the word captures what they’re feeling more (i use “caralho” a lot)– basically the point is that accidental switching is relatively uncommon
i know earlier i said that people will forget words if they’re speaking their weaker language but tbh i do it with my stronger language too so really it works both ways
filler words are weirdly universal
so like while bilingual people don’t usually switch languages around people who aren’t bilingual we’ll throw filler words in
“ele me olhou e, like, eu juro que eu quase deu um soco nele-”
a lot of languages borrow words from english so it’s not too weird to have a random english word in an otherwise non-english conversation (my aunt @ my mom: “lilian você viu meu post no Facebook?”)
also sounds in general are just kind of a language transcending thing
you wanna find out what someone’s first language was?? break one of their bones lol
legit me when i cracked my rib: “AIIIIIII JESUS CHRIST TAKE ME TO THE HOSPITAL”
so if your character gets hurt they might make a sound of pain associated with their native language but will probably still speak in the language of the people they’re surrounded by. probably. it depends on just how much pain they’re in
if two people start speaking another language in public there’s a 40% chance they’re talking shit and a 60% chance they’re having a conversation like: “where’s the bathroom” “i don’t know, ask the waitress she’s right here” “i can’t just ask-”
this is the most accurate bi/multilingual reference post on here y’all should take notes 👀
Today in the modern world we take freezers, and the frozen results of freezers for granted. But in ancient times, cold drinks, frozen desserts, and chilled tropical cocktails were a luxury unknown to most people. However the idea of artificially freezing goods is nothing new. As far back as 400 BC, the ancient Persians built special freezers called yakhchals. Yakhchals were large buildings used for storage of ice and foodstuffs during the hot Persian summers. Typically they were around 60 feet tall, and had a large subterranean storage space dug out from under it. The Yakhchal itself was made from a special type of mud clay called sarooj which was composed of clay, sand, lime, goat hair, egg whites, and ash mixed in a special proportion which made it extremely resistant to heat transfer. In other words the inside stayed cool, while heat from the outside was prevented from entering the building because of the thick insulated walls. This combined with the subterranean storage ensured that whatever goods were stored in the pit stayed cool, as temperatures below ground level are usually around the 60 to 65 degree Fahrenheit range. However, these designs were not what made a yakhchal a freezer. There was one other brilliant design feature which ensured that the yakhchal would stay frosty all year long.
At the top of the dome was a small hole, or series of small holes called windcatchers. Typically windcatchers were pointed in the direction of the prevailing winds. Due to its conical shape there was always a negative pressure gradient inside the yakhchal. According to Bernoulli’s Law air flow at a high pressure will always move toward areas of low pressure. Thus air from the outside was constantly flowing through the yakhchal. In addition, according to Venturi’s Principal, whenever air flows through a small hole, the smaller the hole, the greater the speed of the flow. The small hole, or series of holes of the yakhchal ensured that air passed into it at great flows. What resulted was a great amount of outside air entering into the yakhchal at high speeds. While the air itself wasn’t cool, the flows at which it was being entrained into the yakhchal created temperatures that were below freezing. Typically the windcatchers were cut in such a way that the incoming jet of air would be directed onto the storage pit.
The ancient Persians primarily used their yakhchals for storing ice and foodstuffs. During the summer, Persian nobles often enjoyed a frozen treat called faloodeh (pictured above), which is made from thin noodles with syrup made from sugar and rose water, then flavored with lemon, lime, fruits, almond, pistachio, and other flavorings. Due to the Persian’s freezing technology, faloodeh (which is still popular today) goes down in history as one of the first frozen desserts. The practice of building and using yakhchals continued up to the 20th century, when they were eventually replaced with modern freezers and refrigerators.
If you’ve logged in to Tumblr in the last few days, you will have seen the GDPR warning, telling you Tumblr is part of the Oath family of sites, and requiring you to opt-in to their privacy settings.
You may not have realised that, in contravention of the GDPR rules which ban default opt-ins, if you don’t go into the ‘more options’ button and opt out of each individual sharing partner, Tumblr will share your data with a whole huge list of other companies. Like, 300 of them.
If you’ve already opted in to the Oath privacy stuff, you need to go to your Settings page:
Click the Privacy button on the right:
Then, click the little button next to ‘Cookie Consent’ to revoke it.
After confirming you want to revoke consent, you will immediately be taken to that big privacy opt-in page again. From that point we follow the steps @the-mad-duchess described – first click ‘Manage Options’:
Then, click the blue ‘Manage’ button, and expand the two lists. You’ll see five kinds of data sharing, and like 300 different companies:
The first five you can click manually more easily than using javascript. That might be enough to opt out of any data sharing – but I want to be sure. So, let’s make sure we disable every single enabled partner as well.
However, clicking on 300 little buttons to opt out of is an absurd demand. There is, thankfully, a shortcut, using your browser’s developer tools.
What you want to do is open the web console. In Firefox, you do it like this: click the little menu in top right, then go down to where it says Web Developer:
Then, click the Web Console option:
This will open up the web console in the bottom of the screen. It will have a bunch of messages in it that you can ignore:
As shown, what we want to do is copy and paste some JavaScript code into this, then hit ‘enter’, which will make the browser simulate a mouseclick on every single one of these little buttons and thereby turn them all off. The code is this:
var rows = document.getElementsByClassName("vendor-options")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {rows[i].lastChild.firstChild.click();}
If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, let me briefly explain what this is doing. The first line finds the part of the page with all the buttons in it – specifically, the rows in the table of vendors, which is identified by the “vendor-options”. The second line goes through each of them one by one, and for each row of the table, goes inside and finds the button, and simulates a click on it.
If it works correctly, you will abruptly scroll to the bottom of the page and all those little buttons will slide to the ‘greyed out’ position. Now you can go ahead and click Done, click the OK button, and carry on using Tumblr, trusting that if they keep their word, they won’t share your data with those 300 companies.
I’m gonna chat with the New XKit devs to see if this can be added (they may already be working on it). But I hope this saves you some time.
Note also – this is not actually compliant with the new GDPR laws. The rule is that you have to explicitly opt in to letting companies use your data, you can’t have a list of default opt-ins behind a button like this. At some point, somebody will hopefully sue Yahoo/Oath and establish that in court. In the meantime, let’s keep our data to ourselves.
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