Alright! Let's Actually Talk About This Waterfall Thing. It Is An Amazing Showcase Of Many Things That

I bought my first 2 bras today 😎😎 all by myself!!!! Ive only tried one on so far but I like it so much!!! I'm sure this enjoyment will end at some point. All my femme friends say they haven't worn bras like their entire adult lives. So I'm sure they won't spark joy forever. But for now they do!

Hello! I've been batting around an idea for a warlock of the undead whose patron is an eldritch Far Realm entity, but haven't been able to find much in the way of official lore for the plane. I would love to hear your take on the subject, if you had any ideas for the landscape and inhabitants and such!

Planescape: The Far Dead Realm(s)

So for those not in the know, the far realm is the d&d cosmology's designated corner for lovecraftian shenanigans, being the default origin of most aberrations as well as anything particularly "madness" related or stuff too weird to fit into the morality based system of planes.

I'm not a big fan of the far ream ( insert joke about me being too weird to fit into the morality based system of planes) because it makes the entry level cosmic-horror fan mistake of conflating tentacles with the unfathomable and paints things beyond human perception as innately hostile and entropic.

To me, the astral sea is the place where all that far-realm weirdness should live, being that its the place where thoughts become physical heedless of any physical constraint. There’d naturally be alien environments that were hostile to life native to the material plane, either in that they were unsuited to conventional biology, or operated on a different set of physics/math/coherence to more traditional reality. That said, it does serve our storymaking to have a bad place from whence things can come from/be banished to, so for that end I'll let you in on my own version of the unknowable plane: The Dead Realms

TLDR: The dead realms are a cosmic junk heap, myriad realities that have become unstable or suffered through an irreparable apocalypse and have inturn scoured or abandoned of mortal life and the gods that oversee them. Seeking to avoid further disruption of the cosmos, the great entities which govern the astral sea quarantine the dead realms in their own fold of space. Cross contamination renders the plane into a simmering cauldron of chaotic energies, as civilization plagues and reality storms crash against eachother with the tomb-prions of world eating gods as backdrop. Any breach of the realms’ containment could lead to potential doom, as anything that can survive the end of multiple worlds is likely more than capable of ending a few on its own.

Ironically, the reason that the asker can’t find lore about the far realm is that its on purpose, and that’s sorta the problem: The far realm was written to be intentionally vague, hearkening to unseen and unknowable horrors of the lovecraft mythos.  The problem with that is that as part of the greater dnd multiverse ( atleast the default one) the far realm is a place you theoretically CAN go, and given that some of the game’s biggest baddies originate there, meaning that there needs to be more about the plane than a simple gesture at it being gross and full of tentacles.

Compare the thematic weight of a party visiting the far and dead realm(s): The former is weird, surely, but other than horrifying chaos, the far realm doesn’t really say anything. On the contrary, both heroes and their players can understand the dead realms as a forewarning of what happens if they fail in their cosmic level responsibilities, and see echoes of their own desperate struggles among the ruins.

Geography:  The process of transposing multiple worlds into a single plane is not a gentle one, even more so when many of those worlds do not share an underlying model of reality. The cracked remnants of planetary bodies float together like asteroid clusters, while flat-earth geographies impose themselves on space at awkward angles like planes of glass, or weave through it like ribbons of a shredded map. Remnant kingdoms are scorched as newly arrived worlds bring their stars with them, and blighted seas spill from one celestial body to the next like wine spilled across a table from a tipped glass.

Its junk drawer architecture, a dumpster into which broken worlds are heaved with no care for their condition or where they might come to rest, slowly ruining eachother like kitchen scraps heaped upon old clothes layered over discarded furniture

Inhabitants: Despite their name the dead realms are not empty, besides the monstrous scavengers Vast wastelands conceal remnant holdouts and the decaying lairs of senile god kings. Only those great authorities of the cosmos decide when a realm is beyond saving, and those left behind on it are considered forfeit to save the greater cosmos from the horrors they endure. That said, there are other entities that live in the maelstrom, and they are far more threat to a wandering party that’ve become stranded in the forbidden realm:

Kaotori*: Once a group of arcane explorers who sought salvage and secrets from the oldest reaches of the dead realms, they were lost in the depths where time itself had begun to rot. They trickled back one by one, transmuted into resin soaked horrors and scattered across the centuries both before and after they left. Stripped of all but a few scraps of their previous identities, the remnants of their former lives knaw at them like the ache of a rotten tooth, which the Kaotori are desperate to extract. Turning their wicked power to the task, each Kaotori combs the cosmos for any trace of its former life, looking to extinguish the source of these memories that it might finally know some twisted form of peace.

Eldrazi*:Like beetles skittering over and through a fallen log until it is mulch, the aberrant broods known as the Eldrazi toil endlessly to return the material of dead worlds back into raw stuff of creation, dismantling matter, magic, and creature alike until all they touch is cosmic dust. Mostly harmless if left at a distance, Eldrazi do not distinguish intruders into their domain from unprocessed worldstuff and their domain extends ever forward so long as their is material to reclaim.

Ancient automata: The engines of forgotten ages still stir on many abandoned worlds, whether they be crystaline consiousness of superhuman intellect or the derlict mechanisms of a single tinkerer

Feral Celestials: while many angels are content to wander from task to task, there are those so dedicated to their divinely ordained mission that they choose to go “down with the ship” when the time comes to ring in the apocalypse. After their particular endtimes have come and gone, these entities slowly begin to waste away, being reduced over time to becoming avatars of strange faiths, or hunting through the wilderness little better than beasts. 

Outergods: Whether  they reign over a destroyed worlds, were imprisoned within one,  or maybe  just like the vibe, the dead realms are full of outergods, which make up the only pantheon for those desperate souls stranded in the expanse. Kronos the cannibal god reigns over lands of dust and ruin, Cezil’Tek holds entire worlds in still and silent loneliness, While Shub-Nuggurath and her brood flourish in toxic swamps and fleshy jungles, just to name a few

* You can find 3rd party stats for these creatures online,

Adventure Hooks:

After falling trough an unstable portal or getting lost fucking around with teleportation, the party find themselves stranded in the dead realms, specifically in a barren desert landscape with a half-buried city built into some wind-scarred cliffs their only landmark. Far off in the distance, amid an alien sky, they can see a massive purple-green cloud approaching, which is in fact a rogue ocean displaced from its original bed that will come crashing down on their desert world in a matter of days. With time running short and an entire city’s worth of secrets to distract them, the party must comb through the ruins for a means of returning home lest they drown along with the desert world.

Following scraps of planear lore and desperate to protect their home from an otherworldy threat, a party of spelljammers must slip past the watch of the celestial authority to salvage pieces of a planetary warding system. This system allowed another world to stave off the threat in the past, but didn't’ stop its original architects from falling prey to the whiles of an outer god and leading their world to doom from within. Now situated among the junk drifts of the dead realms, this fallen world is slowly being eaten away by eldrazi as the last zealots of the outergod look for cruel and desperate ways to stem the tide.

Monstrous aberrations comb the countryside, attacking villages, searching for something, pushing the party into cooperation with a goodnatured  wizard who was exiled from the circle of mages for his curiosity about forbidden magic.  During a moment of heroic sacrifice, the wizard inadvertantly opens a rift to the dead realms and ends up falling through, becoming lost in time and space and eventully transformed into a kaotri... the very same kaotri that has spent centuries combing through the multiverse looking for this particular kingdom. Warped irrevocably and wracked by the pangs of a now recursive present, this Kaotri now seeks to wipe its once home off the map, and just use that recently opened dead-realm portal to do it.

Art

Uhh exCUse me??

Your adventures are awesome, just getting that out of the way. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about spelljammer, due to rewatching treasure planet most likely, and I’m curious how you would handle it

Drafting an Adventure: Setting Sail in the Astral Sea 

Forgive the break from my usual format for this prompt, but as it deals with past versions of d&d and how I implement some of these ideas in my game, I figured I needed to change up my authorial voice for this one.

For those who might not know, Spelljammer is d&d’s answer to starwars style planetary adventuring, and is both its own setting as well as an “addon” to other campaigns involving a magical means by which adventurers could fly out from their homeworld into an version of space modelled on archaic views of the universe as a way of explaining why their wooden spaceship didn’t have to worry about things like gravity or vacuum pressure. 

I was never into Spelljammer myself, as it was primarily a 2nd edition thing and i started playing the game with 3/3.5. While the idea of fantasy spaceships was always intriguing, I felt that Spelljammer itself was a bit silly, with its space hamsters, British hippo gun fetishists, and reliance on “ D&D trope, BUT IN SPACE” to prop up much of its material. 

That said, we can all agree Treasure Planet, and the idea of fantasy space pirates is SICK AS SHIT, so I’d be doing a disservice to myself and the campaigns I run if I didn’t have that sort of thing running in the background. 

So lets talk first about how I run the astral sea, as I use that as my backdrop for such adventures:

The Astral Sea is an expanse of starry void, filled with glittering mists and nebulae and aurora, as well as the occasional field of crystalline coral.  It is the raw canvas of creation upon which the gods ( and other great powers) paint their myriad creations. This morphic quality is also utilized by powerful arcanists to create their own worldlets and mind-palaces, making their dreams into physical domains of impossible wonder. When these arcanists die or otherwise move on, these realms endure, slowly drifting together into ruinous archipelagos that provide habitat for astral denizens.

There is no such thing as distance in the astral plane, more of a notional geography of one landmark in relation to another. Part of the reason this great expanse is referred to as a "sea" is that navigation in such a realm requires either the following of particular " currents" that follow predictable routes through the expanse, or by the charting the relative position of various landmarks in relation to one's desired destination. One could also make use of the vast network of portals to get about, trace the boughs of the cosmic trees, or take a walk on the infinite staircase.

Its bad to be out in the astral sea for too long, as that primordial chaos can either unweave one's being or make some unwanted "Creative additions". This necessitates an astral ship for a long journey, or sheltering in a crystalline reef or other structure.

The Shallows of the astral sea reside in the realms of mortal dreams, and the phantasms of imagination and flotsam of fantasy spill over into the starry expanse.

Running Astral Adventures:

Since the Astral plane is by definition so far removed from the "grounded" state of traditional fantasy adventuring, I like to think of it as a sort of secret/background/bonus lore that's never touched on in most games, until the party starts having dealings with high level wizards and the like. A wonderous thing they get to discover when they cross over the threshold from practical heroics into the realm of the fantastical. That threshold is likely an unintentional one, as an unknown portal or teleportation mishap sends the party hurtling into the unknown, only for them to have to struggle through a strange world and find their way back to reality.

The construction, reclamation, or chartering of an astral ship is then a later benchmark where the party has taken control over their destiny, allowing them to travel between the realms by their own agency.

Adventure Hooks:

The diaspora of innumerable dead worlds spread out through the astral cosmos, survivors of realities that collapsed under their own weight or the mismanagement of their gods. These Starry pilgrims can find new homes among the reefs, or travel from world to world as astral nomads. Such an existence is a hard one, and it's not unusual for some of these peoples to turn to interdimensional raiding and piracy as a means of survival. Often the loot of these raids ends up in the markets of Leng, where the treasure of a thousand worlds flows through wicked hands of that world's miasmic masters.

In the most twisted and surreal expanses of the dreamscape, the Quori hold sway, formless tyrants incapable of creation themselves and so desperate to claim the minds of mortals to give shape and order to their nightmare realm.

The ruins of civilizations beyond count float in the astral sea, just waiting to be explored. Expeditions to these dream palaces can be great undertakings, but can provide campaigns without frequent dungeon crawls a chance to get their delve on without having to leave an important central location of a campaign.

Art 1

Art 2

I've had to boymode a few times in public lately. Fucking hate it. I've felt so safe being myself in my home town for the last few months but now if I wanna go outside in Toronto I need to boymode if want to feel even kind of safe. It makes me feel so gross and angry. Even putting on my tall boots and my trans pin make people look at me weird here. I fucking hate it.

Thousand Sons Tactical Squad

Noise Marines - Plan C

I did what I didn't want to do. A valiant servant of the chaos gods sacrificed a critical part of his armour kit to give me something that looks a bit like a speaker for the muzzle of the sonic blaster.

I don't think he minds.

The end result looks just like I hoped. The skull and jaw placement will need some finesse to ensure the grille's not hidden, but I'm surprisingly happy. Also meant some pinning to line it up properly and I'm a sucker for pinning, just a tad more than I'm a sucker for magnets.

Rock and stone to the bone.

by Damir Šnajder

I had a really poor depressing moment the other day. I was in such a poor state that for the first time in my life I decided, while sober, that I need to get drunk and high to deal with what I was feeling. My friends passed me while I was on the way to get some drinks at the convenience store. They saw me, for the first time in a really long time, dressed like a boy. And a really gross, depressed, visibly distraught boy.

It was kind of humiliating for me. I put so much effort into my appearance for them, but I didn't have the energy to do it that day and they just happened to see me at the lowest I have been in a very long time. It feels so embarassing. I'm gonna see them tomorrow. I just fuckin know I'm gonna spend at least an hour and a half stressing about my look for the event we're going to. I feel so humiliated.