So My Takeaway So Far From Watching More Dimension 20 Is That People Dont Talk About Zac And Lou Enough,

So my takeaway so far from watching more Dimension 20 is that people don’t talk about Zac and Lou enough, and Emily’s a way more savvy player than her fandom reputation would point to.

Dimension 20 fandom stuff leaked through to me through osmosis, and I don't think I ever saw anything about Zac and Lou (well, Lou pre-EXU: Calamity tbh) and y'all, they're both so good? Zac in particular is probably my favorite player at the D20 table. He's a master of the stealth one-liner, and his characters are always unexpected yet somehow perfect for the setting. I would love to see him let loose on a slightly more serious setting, I think he would kill it. And I've talked about Lou a lot before and how much I love his energy but he really helps the D20 table come alive and he's one of the most focused and savvy role-play experts in the group.

With Emily, the fandom narrative around her created imo a TOTALLY incorrect impression of what her playstyle would be. She’s way more tactical than people give her credit for, and tbh it’s frustrating to see her really solid storytelling instincts reduced to “she ruined Brennan’s plans!” or "chaos player!" Brennan lamenting her savvy gameplay moves seems to be mostly him being hyperbolic. In reality Emily's very good at seeing the big picture and helping make a great story. Having now seen her masterfully adapt to very different settings and tones between ACoFaF and USC, I think people don't appreciate how much she's paying attention and settling in to the story presented and really helping it thrive.

audio is from the animation by Jester’s Sketchbook

If you want to know who was on the British throne when a ghost died

Submitted for the approval of the Tumblr Review Board, I call this fever dream:

This idea's been percolating in my head since the end of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity--the desire to see Aabria, Matt, and Brennan playing together with not one of them as the Dungeon Master. And the idea pretty much got stuck there for a while.

And then Dropout TV's Adventuring Academy came back and I learned about Connie Chang, and I saw that they had unbelievable chemistry with Brennan, and it made me want to see them play together in a game too.

Murph came into this dream cast because he has such a different energy over at Naddpod that... it made me wonder how he'll play in a group where everyone's a DM.

Last but not the least, Jasmine Bhullar. I don't actually know how to explain why I want her in my dream cast. There's just something about her energy, her vibe, that tells me she's going to make this cast come together in a way that's totally unexpected.

I'm not going to say what my dream campaign would be like for these fine folks. I'm sure whatever I think of will not be as good as what they can come up with.

What I do want to share though is my choice for Dungeon Master... and it's the tandem of Zac Oyama and Lou Wilson. Initially, my idea was that there would be a rotating set of DMs, with Emily Axford, Amy Vorpahl, and Deborah Ann Woll joining these fine men. But it might just end up too chaotic. So, instead, I'm just going to manifest this duo who can pull themselves back when it becomes too chaotic, but would also nurture the chaos when it does arrive.

And so I hand this dream to you, Tumblr Review Board, for your feedback, your guidance, and your verdict. Is this a dream worth manifesting?

Legit hoping Dimension 20's next sidequest is "The Green Hunter," as written by Airry Pearry.

I’d love to see like, a weird episodic sitcom/fanfic where Wei wuxian is brought back from the dead and Mo Xuanyu is his little apprentice and just watsons all his sherlock shit. And when people first meet the two of them they are like, “Mo Xuanyu is the normal one” and then they get to know them and realise “Mo Xuanyu is just as clinically insane as the Yiling Laozu, did he just torture that man for three days and three nights with a singing radish?”

The Yiling Laozu’s Lost Spells, A.K.A. The Weird Ones

A Collection by Mo Xuanyu

aka another crack au

Edit: Now with a part 2!

When the Yiling Laozu died his work was divided up by its use

The Lans took anything deemed undemonic, like Spirit Lures and Demonic Compasses

The Jins snuck out anything dangerous under the lie they’d destroy it

And the rest of it…it got scattered everywhere to every lowdown village and wanna be demonic cultivator.

At first, no one thought this would be a problem. It’s not like anything dangerous is out there, and not just anyone can culitvate

But they forgot two very important things: 1) no one needs to be a culivator to use demonic cultivation and 2) people will find a way to use anything

Soon the culivation world is overrun by really, really weird cases that their cultivators just can’t keep up with

And when I say weird, I do mean weird here’s a look at some of the cases:

Case 1) Giant rabbits the size of houses have been spotted in a mountain near a sheparding villiage eating all their feilds. They asked Hanguang-jun for help. Hanguang-jun went up but he did not come back down. It is suspected the giant bunnies ate him

Case 2) the dancing radishes. Every night on the full moon radishes come to life in a villiage and dance on their beds. Its not hurting anyone, but its really freaking them out

Case 3) dog begone spells. A whole villiage has lost all its dogs and no one knows why. Some of them were really expensive spirit puppies, including one jin guangyao was planning to purchase for his nephew

Case 4) the case of the running radishes. Radishes are leaving their beds a d running away as fast as thry can. Every time someone gets close they keep moving farther away

Case 5) flowers flying to lan clan ribbons and sticking. Every flower, even ones on stems. The lans are walking around covered in flowers and it is becoming a Problem.

Case 6) radishes that look like potatoes. Again? What is with this guy and radishes? This spell would have been harmless if it hadn’t been in a villiage with two rival families of radishes and potatoes. The potato family is accusing the radish family of sabatoge and the radish family is accusing the potato family of stealing their crop

Case 7) Lotus soup possession talisman. If u stick this talisman on someone, they will make lotus and pork rib soup. Always. Again and again. They can’t stop. Everything they make is soup. They’re crying.

Case 8) the peacock tail talisman. Every jin who comes into contact with this talisman will get a peacock tail. They can’t get rid of them. This is a problem.

Case 9) grass butterflies come to life. Again, not harmful, but very annoying. All children love it. All adult toy sellers do not. Their wares keep flying away. Please someone save their buisnesses

Case 10) hug jiang cheng. You must hug jiang cheng. You can’t help it. You can’t stop. If u don’t give him one hug a day you will die. Jiang cheng is furious. Fix this now.

Case 11) give Hanguang-jun compliments. Not hard, no one would notice if it wasn’t stuck to Su She. He hates it. He’s sueing for emotional damages. You better fix this quick!

And these are just the first ones! In times like this, people look to the Chief Cultivator. But the Chief cultivator is off flirting with women, so like all things, this falls to jin guangyao to solve.

So Jin guangyao decides he needs to get those documents back, and who better to send to handle the weird cases no one wants to touch than his weird half brother who’s so fasinated by demonic cultivation?

Thus Mo Xuanyu finds himself with his dream job: chasing down the yiling Laozu’s lost works! What more could he want?

The first case is easy. He goes up and finds Hanguang-jun asleep cuddled in a pile of giant rabbits. All he has to do is find out where the talisman is and remove them. The hard part is getting Hanguang-jun to stop looking like he just killed his wife. Mo xuanyu didn’t know Hanguang-jun had puppy eyes. Since when did he have puppy eyes? Eventually to make him feel better he helps him take all the rabbits to cloud recesses. And at another puppy dog eyed, gloomy look like he’s denied him his long lost lover, Mo Xuanyu gives him the talisman too. Jin Guangyao’s not happy, but really, what was Mo Xuanyu supposed to do? Not make that handsome man smile again?

The second case is a lot harder. Nothing Mo Xuanyu does gets the radishes to stop singing. No spells, not talismans, nothing. The only thing left is to dig them all up and throw them deep into the woods where no one will have to listen. Mo Xuanyu’s ears are still bleeding from their reedy songs

The third case is where Mo Xuanyu feels a bit of hope in Yiling laozu’s work really paying off. Lots of his bullies at the jin sect have dogs. If he can make them vanish, he’ll be safe! Unfortunately this spell makes all dogs leave, or none at all. And even when he finds a way to undo it, he can’t afford to copy it out because jin guangyao took one of the pups to give to jin ling, and if mo xuanyu makes the grumpy jin ling’s beloved new puppy go away, he’ll be kicked out of Koi Tower and feel bad besides

The radishes are back, but they run now. They aren’t even violent, u can’t use them for anything! They just run! It takes mo xuanyu months to catch one and track it back to its home. The radishes have built a radish villige in the forest. Radish farmers radish shop keepers and radish children. Mo xuanyu feels like he’s stepped into a children’s book. Then he hears the familiar reedy songs and it becomes a nightmare. The running radishes found the singing ones. They interbred. Now they have musical theatre radishes. Mo Xuanyu booked it out of there as fast as he can. Fuck the Yiling Laozu. Mo Xuanyu isn’t messing with that

When the flowers stick to the lan, Mo Xuanyu gives up all previous respect for the yiling laozu. He was clearly an idiot. Or a cutsleeve. Mo Xuanyu hopes he’s a cutsleeve. It would be nice to have someone like him to look up too. At least he got to see Hanguang-jun again. He was very nice and showed Mo Xuanyu the back of cloud recesses, where some very familiar rabbits were very happy to greet him.

By case six mo Xuanyu takes back every positive thought he’d ever had about the yiling laozu. He’s not just an idiot, he’s The Idiot. And the potato family and radish family are just as idiotic as he is. Why is he overseeing a trial over radishes turned potatoes? Why is everyone so invested in his investigation? What is wrong with everyone here? (It was the radish family’s son. He was trying to grow potatoes to impress the potato families daughter. They get married and invite Mo Xuanyu to the wedding)

Case seven brings Mo’s respect for the yiling laozu back. The lotus soup spell is terrifying. They can’t stop making soup, or crying. It takes everything he has to stop it, and it isn’t working. He only figures out how to fix it when he says “thank you shijie” on reflex as his infected shijie shoved some soup in his arms. That made her stop. It has to be those words exactly though. This is easy if its a girl. Not so easy when its a 60 year old elderly man.

Case 8 Mo Xuanyu loves his peacock tail. Its proof he’s a jin, and oh so stylish. He’s gonna paint his face to match. But the rest of the jin sect hate it, so he reluctantly figures out how to get rid of it. All it takes is a humble apology, which is way harder to get jins to do than it should be. The last to lose it is jun ling, not because he can’t apologize, but because he likes his tail too, since his Jiujiu told him it made him look “just like his father”. Mo Xuanyu only gets him to get rid of it by promising to sneak the talisman to him in his rooms. They can enjoy their tails together in privacy.

Case 9. Nothing Mo Xuanyu can do about those grass butterflies. He chases them around with a net anyways. Then he gives up and tells the salesmen to start selling grass butterflies in cages instead. As he leaves all the little kids in the villiage trail after him and ask if it was really the yiling laozu who did this, and does Mo Xuanyu work for him, and can he teach them? Mo Xuanyu doesn’t have the heart to tell them that the yiling laozu’s magic isn’t usally all butterflies and rainbows.

Case 10 is terrifying. Who hugs jiang cheng? How do u survive it? Fortunately by this time Mo Xuanyu has a bit of a reputation. People know he deals with “the weird stuff” so jiang cheng doesn’t kill him on sight. It still takes forever to undo the spell. Jiang cheng isn’t any help. He acts so mad, but he’s totally hugging everyone infected back just as fiercely as they hug him. Eventually they find out its another password based release. The password is “good job didi” jiang cheng storms away furiously to break things with his whip. Mo xuanyu swears he heard loud sobbing too, but he’s not saying anything.

Case 11. The yiling laozu was definitely a cutsleeve. There’s no way someone makes a talisman to compliment Hanguang-jun without romantic intent. Mo Xuanyu is privately thrilled to know this, and see what a cutsleeve can do. He is less thrilled to have to work with su she. At least the way to break the spell is funny. Seeing su she stutteringly shout how hanguang-jun is better than him in everyway and then storm out in fury made his year.

The more Mo Xuanyu works on these weird cases, the more he feels like he’s learning about the true nature of the yiling laozu. Unfortunately, most of these cases do not result in easy solutions for the jin, and Mo’s position is just as perilous as before. Worse really, since as his reputation for handling weird borderline demonic stuff, people begin to wonder how, and look to jin sect to see who trained him.

So yeah, Mo Xuanyu gets framed for incest and kicked out of jin tower. He’d always been working with the weird, how far of a stretch would it be to say he’d go mad?

Mo Xuanyu is devistated, all his contacts, all the goodwill he’d earned from other sects and villiages, all gone when that rumor gets out. He can’t bear to face them and see the disgust on their faces

So he decides to turn to the only person who’s weird enough to not judge him

The one person he has enough blackmail on to ensure it.

The yiling laozu

It takes a while, but Mo Xuanyu is very familiar with how the yiling laozu alters talismans and spells at this point, and after three years and a very handy outline from Nie Huasang, he finds a way to bring back the yiling laozu

Without dying

Staring at his hero, his idol, and the biggest pain in his ass, mo xuanyu’s mind is racing. He has so many questions. Which should he ask first? Did u ever tell hanguang-jun u loved him? How’d u handle everyone turning on u? Did u really invent demonic cultivation all on your own?

But in the end the one that slips out is: Why do u have so many spells about radishes?

Wei ying blushes “i had a lot if radishes okay?!!! They were on my mind a lot!”

“That’s an understatement!” Mo xuanyu counters. “Do u have any idea how bad radishes sing? They invented muscial theatre! Theatre!”

“Really? Can I see?!!!” Wei yings eyes light up, and Mo xuanyu realizes he’s made a terrible mistake. The only thing worse than a mad scientists spells is a mad scientist’s curiousity. He’s going to have to follow this guy around the whole of the cultivation world to try and prevent him from making things even weirder!

Ah well, at least he’s not lonely anymore.

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