Make sure the system you use matches the kind of players you have, for an optimal experience
Admin Note: This is part of the ongoing series called “D&D isn’t the only TTRPG if you don’t want fantasy play another goddamn game!”
I already reblogged this once but this is important:
Like I run a D&D blog. I understand that D&D is the most well-known and popular RPG in the world. But a lot of the time I see people going like “Hey I want to run a D&D campaign and throw out all the D&Disms and here’s all the notes I have for running a campaign about courtly romance and chivalry in a historical setting” and I’m just like STOP YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN THIS USING D&D
There’s a sort of a mistaken assumption that because D&D is the biggest game on the market and that it’s fantasy that it should be the go-to fantasy game but look it’s not D&D isn’t a generic fantasy game it’s a very specific kind of fantasy all of its own, one that steals liberally from swords & sorcery and high fantasy and adds fucking extradimensional cube robots for good measure
So next time you’re thinking about a fantasy campaign in a decidedly non-D&Dish setting consider instead of jamming the square peg that is D&D into a round hole trying to find a system that actually supports what you’re trying to do
And this is not to say that you shouldn’t play D&D: D&D is hella fun. But there’s a lot of genres and styles that D&D does a piss-poor job of doing, and because of that it’s so good we’ve got other games
*cracks knuckles*
All right then. I’ve been meaning to dust off my own D&D sideblog for a while, so here we go with providing some examples. I’m limiting this specifically to other types of fantasy outside of the standard high fantasy and sword & sorcery millieu.
Courtly Romance and Chivalry
There are a number of options for this, and they range from standard secondary world fantasy to more historical and mythological settings. My list here shouldn’t be treated as fully extensive.
Blue Rose – based on the romantic fantasy subgenre, specifically as seen in the works of Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. A lot of courtly drama and intrigue and swashbuckling, based in a fictional world.
Pendragon – naturally based off of Arthurian mythology, and having a lot of stuff given over to the court of Camelot and the chivalric adventures of the various knights. The same company also has a kickstarter for a spin-off called Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne that might be worth checking out.
Historical Fantasy
This one’s a bit more prominent as historical settings serve as an inspiration for a variety of fantasy worlds and games, and this of course invariably extends to settings that actually use historical settings with a degree of fantasy elements thrown in. Note that I’m going to emphasise Europe here simply due to greater familiarity with games in that millieu, and as a European myself I’m ill-equipped to judge how accurate or respectful games using other settings actually are.
Because of this, feel free to add other examples in reblogs
Chivalry & Sorcery – one of the early tabletop games inspired by D&D, taking a more pseudo-historical approach.
It’s based on 12th century France and strives for a degree of historical accuracy and medieval politics.
World of Darkness, Dark Ages (including Vampire and Mage) – while the World of Darkness has earned some negative attention lately (and for good reason), the dark ages RPGs are still an old favourite of mine. Also worth checking out is Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, set during the Renaissance. The Mage stuff has a really cool open-ended magic system worth checking out.
Ars Magica – this exists along very similar lines to the dark age material above, based around mages and magic-users in a ‘Mythic Europe’ setting. It also has a really cool open-ended magic system, and one of my personal favourites.
Awwww shit heck yes I might want to add to this list but this is a really good starting point
Alright alright alright back at it again with Hurricane info since Florence is gonna be bearing down on the Carolinas in a few days
Know your local shelters, just in case! IF YOU HAVE PETS BE AWARE OF THE ONES THAT ACCEPT PETS! Unfortunately not all of them do
Beware of price gouging! Especially on gas!
BE PREPARED FOR GAS STATIONS TO RUN OUT OF GAS!
SOMETHING TO ADD:
DO NOT ASSUME YOU’LL BE ABLE TO GET THINGS VIA PRIME RIGHT BEFORE THE STORM
I could not stress this more. It was a HUGE issue last year! Amazon can and WILL run out of things in their warehouses- INCLUDING FANS, BATTERIES, AND PORTABLE CHARGERS. And shipping will be delayed due to the storm! If there’s anything AT ALL you need from amazon via Prime order it ASAP. 3rd party sellers were gouging the shit out of stuff like fans just before Irma last year on amazon so if you want stuff and don’t want to pay and arm and a leg for it, GET IT NOW
Don’t bother with buying things like flour and eggs and milk! Don’t buy perishables! If you lose power they will do nothing for you!
Fill gallon freezer bags with water, seal them tightly with duct tape, and freeze them before the storm! If you lose power you’ll be able to toss them in your fridge to keep it cooler longer! You’ll also have extra emergency water if you need it
If you ain’t got eleven dollars, talk to your local and they should be able to work something out.
You can join the IWW even if you’re unemployed, and even if your labor is exploited in prison.
When they say one big union for everyone, they really mean it
Subminimum dues for the Wobs are six bucks
Seriously, join the fucking IWW. Message your local on Facebook if you don’t know who to turn to. They’d love to have you and they’ll meet with you in person to talk about it and sign you up if you want. It can and will only lead to good things for you.
For real guys, I can’t recommend this enough. Join your local union.
I worked at a union job years ago. Best job I ever had. Fair pay–they’d negotiated us danger pay from minimum wage; full benefits (Canadian so we had health care anyways but they covered most of our prescriptions, and glasses, and dental work); got paid holidays starting at two weeks when you started (I think the first year was just the two weeks off, but after that it was paid, and increased regularly with seniority); regular pay bumps to keep up with inflation; sick days; PLUS when management were dicks they’d sort them out.
Like this one time, I had a machine that was cleaning some extremely dirty grain (our wheat was full of peas, which we didn’t handle, so our machines just dumped it as oversized garbage along with pieces of stalks etc), and had this really heavy sack (because it was a regular burlap sack but now it was full of fucking peas) that the peas were going into that usually would be emptied maybe twice a shift or so, and we had so many peas coming out that it was needing to be emptied like every ten minutes. And by the time you lugged this like eighty-pound bag of peas to the other side of the floor to dump, and then cleaned up the mess the machine dumped on the floor while you were doing that, it was damned near time to dump the peas again.
So it’s getting time for my lunch break (mandatory half hour, plus two coffee breaks, also mandatory), and there is no way in hell I can leave it; the peas will pile up high enough that there will be a fire risk from them rubbing against the machine.
So I call my supervisor and tell him my lunch is almost due, and he should either get someone to spell me off or else shut the machine down so I can have my break (which I desperately needed at that point, as you can imagine).
Well, they had a shitload of wheat to clean all the peas out of, and didn’t want to shut the machine down. So first he told me to let the machine just overflow and clean it up after; and when I told him that would likely start a fire with how many peas were coming out, he told me to “just take my break between emptying the sack.” Which, like, does not actually count as taking a fucking break from it.
So I called down to my union rep and told him what was up, he talked to the supervisor, and then him and the supervisor came and had a look at how many peas were coming out (so many that we were joking that the peas were contaminated with wheat), and then grabbed a couple of guys off sweeping to empty the bag while I ate.
And then put a second body on the floor to help handle all those peas because omfg.
Unions are the best. Remember that in the mid-Eighties, almost half of all jobs were unionized. It was Reagan catering to corporations that got all the workers’ rights that people quite literally had fought and died for almost a hundred years previously rolled right back.
Bring back the unions!!
What if your job is under the table? Can you still join a union?
Yes! The IWW is an explicitly anticapitalist union and recognizes *all* labor as worthy of respect and representation. They collect minimal data on individual members and prefer to collect dues in cash and in person for exactly those reasons. All you really need is a local officer to jaw at, a name (doesn’t have to be real), and eleven dollars.
I forget the number, but there’s even a sex workers’ industrial.
the greatest skill a woman can learn for herself is self reliance
to clarify … so many strong women in my life rely on men. that dependence is dangerous. ladies here are some good ref resources I’ve found helpful on my journey towards self reliance
this list is in no way comprehensive feel free to add on
a lot of ‘man things’ are a lot easier than you think they are. especially considering the fact that most of these things when buying the parts come with directions on the packaging that men usually don’t even look at (and often end up doing it wrong because they were taught by fathers who also did not look at the packaging).
like i recently had to change my car battery and freaked out cause i thought id electrocute myself but turns out new batteries come with directions and its the easiest shit in the world so long as you can lift the damn thing.
so yeah, ladies dont ever feel like a man is a necessity for life, you can do this shit on your own its easier than you think!
You can learn nearly anything from youtube; they have instructional videos for anything imaginable.
I learned to spin and make baskets there, as well as put up drywall, mud and sand it, install windows, and roof. Am currently watching pottery and flint knapping tutorials.
it’s no joke, YouTube is the self-education utopia libraries wanted way back when it was less feasible to have a big repository of video clip how-tos. however: always cross-examine like two sources to be sure you’re getting info that isn’t viral simply bc its funny how wrong it is. i fix literally everything i own using YouTube including fine electronics
Go to your nearest target. Buy a two pack of pushup bras(24$ for 2), and target’s bra inserts (12$). Then go to your nearest Walmart and buy the Vasserette Control Shapewear Panties (2.50 each), they do wonders for helping your tuck. There you go! You just saved yourself a lot of money, you can afford to buy enough to wear every day, and best of all you look fabulous. –@twidx
recs for trans women are so rare on tumblr!! spread this, people.
Please reblog this, in total it’s about $38.50 to make a huge difference for a trans woman/trans feminine person.
The links are in order from beginner to advanced. Most of this is aimed towards dancers-to-be or baby strippers, so there aren’t many complicated moves on here. Also, please note that this list is incomplete. I will be adding to the Bootywork and Lapdance sections in given time and as I find better videos/tutorials.
write about 5000 words of porn or more – 3000 or more also acceptable, but you don’t really want to go under that. don’t tab to indent, i swear to god, it fucks with amazon’s formatting so bad. don’t write any porn that’d send you to jail IRL, amazon naturally (and thank god) doesn’t accept that shit.
on the ‘bookshelf’ tab, you click ‘add new title’, fill out everything, upload a cover – you can get one free image a month (or maybe a week now, i dunno) from bigstock.com if you need some stock images of people’s abs and stuff but can’t put cash down for anything just yet – and amazon has a cover making application built right into the process too to make things easier or if you don’t know shit about photoshop or whatever.
then you upload the document itself. click save and continue. choose how much you want your title to cost – 2.99 is generally what most people price theirs at, because that’s where amazon’s 70 percent royalties starts at. enroll in kindle select if you want that 70 percent royalties to apply to the whole world, so you’re getting the same royalties no matter where you sell.
then you hit publish and wait and wait and wait and wait for amazon to actually publish the fucking thing.
then you wait 60 days after the end of the month to get your royalties! don’t know why, but that’s how amazon rolls.
and you just keep making more and more titles in the meanwhile to build up that income cuz you’re not likely to make a lot from just one title.
there’s no real ‘gatekeepers’ in kindle erotica – you just start writing and publishing and you keep doing it and building up a library. some genres/kinks/niches sell better than others, and trends come and go, but it’s really all up to you – to do the writing, the publishing, the marketing, and then more writing and publishing. you just keep at it, bit by bit. this is a market where it’s really all about quantity… the bigger your library is, the more sales you’ll start to rack up, building like a snowball. even better if you release titles on like a regular schedule. ideally you want to put up like 2 titles a week, but 1 a week is a good initial goal to shoot for.
you can also go to amazon’s author central to set up an author page to get all your titles in one place and help build a reader base/link readers and buyers in general to.
godspeed anon!
hm.
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
adding in my own hmmmmms
… I am seriously considering this. And also considering getting a proper pen name
Okay literally I’m reblogging this for the erotica how-to but also this is how Amazon self-pub works no matter what you write, like subject-wise, this is it for everything. OFC it doesn’t cover stuff like editing, cover art, marketing or pre-orders (Amazon used to have a pretty brutal pre-order deadline system, but they seem to be relaxing it after the last update? I can’t tell for absolute sure?), but in a bare-bones nutshell, yes, this is universal, and good information.
(I haven’t done Amazon Select because I like to get my stuff in with other sellers like Barnes and Noble/iBooks/Kobo – bc some people don’t buy from Amazon, and Select means you can’t sell anywhere but Amazon, in exchange for some extra promotional tools. If you want to do this, I suggest looking into the distributor ‘Draft2Digital,’ it’s a very easy all-in-one free service. Smashwords is also an indie standard, but more difficult to work with; I feel Ways about Smashwords.)
But yes, if you just want to do Amazon self-pub, this is a very good basic start.
So just a heads up for anyone who may not be familiar with taxes!
Amazon pays you as an independent contractor/self-employed, which means a couple of things. First, it means that the income you receive from Amazon will not be taxed! You’ll receive the full amount of whatever you earn from your sales, instead of the chopped up paycheck most employees are used to seeing.
This does not mean you don’t owe taxes! Sometime in January following the year you earn money from them, Amazon will send you a 1099-misc form listing the total amount of income you received in the previous year. If you use TurboTax/etc, it will walk you through how to input that, so don’t worry about that!
Here’s the stuff to note: If you makes less than $600 during the year, Amazon is not required to send you a 1099, but you are still supposed to report the income. The chance of you being audited for owing the IRS less than $100 is probably slim (it is barely worth what it costs to audit someone), but please take note and report the income as needed!
And the biggest thing!!!! Because your income is not being taxed upfront, it means you will OWE taxes come the following year!!! Self-employment tax is 15.3% (which you will notice is MUCH LOWER than what gets taken out of your employee/W2-based paycheck), so you will owe AT LEAST that the following year (more if you make TONS of money). Now if you are working as an employee, there’s a good chance that any money you owe will be cancelled out by whatever extra money the government took from your employee paycheck during the year.
BUT. If you earn a significant amount of self-employment income, or self-employment is your ONLY form of income, you will owe the government money in April!
The smartest thing to do when you earn any sort of self-employment income is to put 20% of that paycheck into a separate savings accounts. Just put it there and leave it there. If you can get a savings account with good interest, even better, but not necessary! That way when your taxes come due in April of the following year, you aren’t scrambling for money to pay them; the money will be sitting right there in your savings account!
Also, being self-employed allows you to report deductions for stuff, so you might want to look into that too, because it’ll save you money. After you pay your taxes, any money left in the account is yours to do whatever you want with!
source: I’ve been filing a 1099 as my sole source of income for about 4 years now (about to be 5)
cisphobeofficial 