Sunday 11 December 2011

Tradional Fantasy Archtypes , bratz dolls, BEHOLDER

Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF It's funny how kids toys out of context can be a more cutting social critique than 99% of conceptional art made for that purpose..



That's surprise and smiling, respectively,  apparently...

Anyway so, like here's my most likely doomed attempt to put a spin/rethink/reboot/blahblah on the traditional classes of d&d, a land that has been trod very thoroughly by numerous minds both cunning and banal alike, yet onto this barren land, go I
PALADIN:
so like prayer wheels?
and this idea of automating religious ritual? So there's like scared words to be said but a human voice will falter or stumble or worse, misspeak them, so having a mechanical wheels ever turning the names of the divine into the wind is better right? And if you were a holy warrior striving for purity and truth you would drill you skull open and attach a prayer wheel on the back of it? And as you get holier you need more powerfully prayer wheels, which start looking like water wheels but all esoteric and what not and you have sluices and stuff like a cyborg with water wheels pumping holy water and you get more and like a... thing with spinny religous shit, like anime rpg go-to of making angels and light based enemy 
turn wheels turn! we got healing to do!

and I'm explaining this really badly, but just jam that with some Tibet prayer wheel with a Saracen warrior and some trepanning and this

...um, what are those things sticking out of your hips?



cut out the flesh! the flesh is weak! stop trying to see nipples!
This guy! But Tibetan!
Nothing holier than floating orbs
TIBETAN!!!!!
... kinda noise and that's a paladin for a better tomorrow. Or a poorly thought out gimmickNEXT CLERIC/PRIEST:
Now I know the idea of priests sucking power directly from the god in a parasitical way has been thrown around and damned if I can remember where. SO soz if it was you.
But lets back story it a tad and add some colour. So the god's they had a big rumble is god sky land and struggled but it was a draw and all fell exhausted to the earth, crushing the land beneath their sheer bigitude. And when the faithfully saw the forms of their faith made real and huge before them, they lost their shit something chronic! Faith cannot coexist with evidence! Piety turned to outrage! Outrage turned to hate! Hate turned to feasting! For the priests took to their gods and drove spikes into their bones and chains through their muscle and built there temples atop them, and took knives and each cut a new holy symbol OF MEAT which they then ate, but god-flesh is slow to digest and so each priest has this SWEET POWER LUMP to draw the god power from, in their belly, and with every spell the god weakens. Mwahaha. And when you can cast a new level of spells you go back to the temple and cut another hunk of flesh, and so the most powerful of the priests becoming CORPULENT and shit, maybe grow bits of god on them? Like spears coming out of their back for a war god? MEAT.
Yeah the priests have nothing but contempt for their gods, and maybe some sects hold fast to the tenets of the religion in a "well we are even better at this that the guy we used to think was cool" or flip out and do the exact opposite. Maybe these differing sects still get along despite having exact opposite views? OR only a special god eating day (the-feasting-on-liars day?) Or they keep stealing the temple from each other.
Anyway the should be called GODEATERS, or LORDS OF MEAT or DEIPHORES


Fighters:
Fighters is a generic broad term, and maybe therein lies a SECRET HISTORY and okay I'll give the caps key a rest, yes fighters know how to use all weapons and all armour because they have used every damn weapon, as a fighter will reincarnate endlessly as warrior after soldier after gladiator after thug. To die and to realize they are to live only to kill and die and this is all getting WORLD OF DARKNESS DOES D&D but yeah, and that's why you get harder to kill as you go up levels, you start remembering all your past lives and becomed imbued with the force of hating to die.

I did not like World of Darkness'es trait of going hey You are some much more bad ass than joe public and here's some cool powers, oh no wait, every time you use them there's a chance a policeman grows from your chin and its a baby killing police man, and you can only live in Wales because there's these dudes that have far cooler powers than you and no limitations and they hand your ass to you all the damn time and they hate you so so much. And its your fault the world sucks.

THIEVES/ROGUES
That man is a thief , ah no mam you are mistaken , he is a rogue, oh okay then I will have sex with him and you too yeah medieval sex party gonna get horrible diseases
Okay so what makes a thief more than a just  guy who nicks your shit?
Well a true Thief is someone who wakes up to find everything they know is stolen, like the past was rewritten around them or they shifted into a dimension exactly like the one they knew but this one never had them, or maybe some crazy mind wipe, in any case, you are now no one.
So its hard for people to remember or even notice you. People also seem to overlook that fact you a person who's very job description implys betrayal.
And you think, hey, why not steal everything? You had everything taken from you , so turn about is fair play. As you get more powerful you can become near invisible and stop existing for moments to bypass threats and get real good at ...climbing walls... because.. gravity.. starts not noticing you..yeah

WIZARD/magicuser/mage etc
Ah man this one has been done and done and done some more.
But here go, Spells are like quantum butterflys that rewrite reality with a flap of theirs and spells are like strange co-incidences  except no that's mage: the Ascension and a total fun kill, so less like butterflys and more like humming birds, that are hard to look at but if you do its like they are made of folded space like a origami bird, and except instead of paper folded its like someone took a photo of everything but now with a fireball and the bird is folded from that. When the bird unfolds it keeps unfolding until the photo covers up the previous scene and it becomes real so now there's a fireball in front of you.
Where does one keep spells? In a bird cage of course. One that you bolt to your head, and at night, when you sleep , you leave the cage door open and all the birds fly back BECAUSE THEY LOVE YOU SO MUCH. When you go up levels you have to get a bigger cage, until it's like those big wigs the french had from an era I can't be bothered looking up round now.

Ranger:

ah man, I'm hungry I'm gonna make this quick, Okay Skippy the kangaroo? Lassie?
The scene where the animal goes up to people and makes its noises, and the people go "timmy in the well? I will follow you now!". Is that not some Charm Person happening there or what? Basically, Rangers, you play the animal companion, and you are secretly calling the shots, and start with a henchman who takes the blame/credit for everything, and later you cast animal spells through him like a wand, as you hollow him out and fill him with yourself. And everyone is like wow Strider Strong Bow is so in touch with nature, and Strider Strongbow's soul weeps alone in the dark of his mind.
Never open your mind to nature.  Nature does not share.

BEHOLDER

I made Zak a beholder and sending it to him and he sends me Vornheim and here is picture of beholder, so the lesson here is you tell Scrap Princess if you want something, she MAKE IT REAL
if you give her stuff.

5 comments:

  1. those bratz dolls are freakin scary. my friend has one...too much botox!

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  2. My wife and I already have a character in our Department Y series of novels (in the works) who is a holy warrior resurrected, animated and maintained by countless prayer wheels spinning at a combined rate of roughly 1667 revolutions a second.

    We came at it from the other end than you; one of our characters when facing the potential death of a deity claimed "We can rebuild [him]; we have the theology!"

    Of course we call the character the Six Million Mantra Man.

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  3. So, instead of Steampunk... Mandalapunk?

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  4. @PlanetNiles
    I like it, the prayer wheels are incorporated into their body right?
    @Ronson
    Works for me

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  5. This is so incredibly awesome. Especially how you nailed the World of Darkness in that second paragraph!

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