Hello! — How the cast of Sonic the Hedgehog would fare in...

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prokopetz

How the cast of Sonic the Hedgehog would fare in Lord of the Rings

prokopetz

Sonic: Would find a way to safely channel the Ring’s power in spite of the metaphysical impossibility, use it to power up and fight a heretofore-unhinted-at three hundred foot MegaSauron, then fumble it into the lava of Mount Doom in a moment of tonally incongruous slapstick.

Tails: Would quickly figure out how to dispose of the Ring, but be prevented from telling anyone by a series of increasingly unlikely interruptions, including a kidnapping by a gang of baddies who intend to blackmail his companions into revealing the location of the Ring, unaware that Tails himself is carrying it.

Knuckles: Would be tempted by the Ring, but lose possession of it before being called upon to make any moral decisions, because the inability to keep hold of dangerous magical artifacts for more than ten minutes at a stretch is the literal basis of his character.

Robotnik: Would seize the Ring eagerly, but entirely misunderstand its purpose and potential, and end up using it to power, like, a giant murderous toaster or something.

Shadow: Would cross paths with the Ring early on, but rapidly become side-tracked by a journey of self-actualisation only tangentially related to the actual plot. Probably fistfights Treebeard for some inexplicable reason.

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headspace-hotel
headspace-hotel

it is kinda weird to me when trads are like "augh...this led to the downfall of Rome..." about something they perceive as bad.

Why are we suddenly on the side of the Roman Empire here. I would not go so far as to characterize past civilizations as "bad" any more than I would call them "good," but we are talking about the guys that, summoning the greatest extent of the ancients' medicinal knowledge, innovated a method to publicly execute people as slowly and painfully as possible on purpose

headspace-hotel

In my experience, history textbooks don't tend to meta-examine history by analyzing the methods we use to understand history until the college level, which is a damned shame, because the public needs to know that the "fall" of a pre-modern empire doesn't really do much of anything. Most ancient empires that are labeled as contiguous entities throughout time went through 87 violent, chaotic regime changes and claimed a bunch of territory that was full of regular people who barely noticed

history
prokopetz
prokopetz

The fact that there are only two or three social media platforms which are popularly referred to as "hellsites" is putting a serious crimp in my plan to assign a different social media site to each circle of Hell.

mothwithfakemoustache

They're all hellsites, here's my take:

Limbo: YouTube

Lust: Deviantart

Gluttony: Tiktok

Greed: Instagram

Anger: Facebook

Heresy: Tumblr

Violence: 4chan

Fraud: Twitter

Treachery: TRUTH Social

this is unreasonably legitimate
rain-sleet-snow
dr-dendritic-trees

This is my favourite bit of Jon's character arc:

Jonathan refused to be provoked. "I'm not charitable," he said coolly. "My father was. Now the results of... certain of his charities threaten this kingdom. I wish he had been more just and less kind."

...

The sentences for all should have been death - the laws on treason were strict - but Jonathan would not begin his rule with executions. He granted more pardons in the first week of his official reign than had King Roald in all of his.

I'm not being snide, I really like the arc Jon gets of showing how his sense of judgement develops. Later on we do get to see Jon screw up, of course, but overall he's a good ruler and he's a good ruler precisely because he has this incredible sense of scale and of the big picture.

This is easier for me to explain in reference to Daine and Kel, but the sense of bigness is one of my favourite things about Tamora Pierce's writing and the thing that has most influenced me, so I get sentimental about it.

rain-sleet-snow

So I absolutely love your pointing this out, and I think it touches on something about Tortall that kind of sneaks beneath the radar! I wrote a passage about Jon in a recent fic that took me by surprise:

...King Jonathan wasn’t his father or even his grandfather, Lady Yolane would face a fair legal trial before any decision was made, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Lady Yolane would be dead on Traitor's Hill before the year was out.

I really interrogated that when I went back to reread it, because I wasn't sure it was good characterisation. And then I realised I'd hit on one of Jon's big picture things: the books talk about women fighters and schools, the modernisation of Tortall's armed forces and the development of non-hostile relationships with the Bazhir as changes Jon and Thayet make... but in some ways they walk right past something that changes completely between SotL and PotS, and that's the rule of law.

Jon and Thayet are slowly moving the needle from feudal privilege to the rule of law, so slowly we don't see it happening. King Jasson was a conqueror, famous for steamrolling countries that had the misfortune to be his neighbours; that isn’t accompanied by a merciful or clement attitude to justice. King Roald was prone to inaction, and despite what that bit of SotL says about Jon granting pardons, Roald's the only king we actually see grant an effective pardon - to his treasonous nephew, who then proceeds to wreck shit around him, nearly destroying Tortall and killing hundreds if not thousands. And Roger was originally "convicted" of treason through not judicial trial but a form of trial by ordeal during which Alanna killed him. Fast forward to Jon's reign, and traitors to the Crown are tried in court and sentenced, while trials are held for other crimes and agreements are made with Immortals for the enforcement of the law against their citizens - explicitly different to the previous state of affairs, where Raoul tells us lone knights like SotL!Alanna enforced the law they felt like enforcing. We even get one massive legal set-piece, which I think is a demonstration of how much Tortall has changed as well as how much further it has to go. Joren’s trial is a massive deal, in many ways noble privilege vs the law of the land - Joren can't be brought to trial until he's off his family's lands, but the fact that he's tried for kidnapping a servant girl at all is considered an outrage by his advocate and the Stone Mountain steward is stunned by the size of the fine. Duke Turomot goes out of his way to make the fine as heavy as possible. It's meaningful that he did that, and that Jon and Thayet showed up to see it done, and especially that the crown prince showed up to sit with Kel and Neal - Prince Roald is subtler than his parents, but that would have been a huge political statement. You can bet everyone noticed. And it's also meaningful that when Kel appeals to the king for justice, it's not for his personal intervention in the specific case, it's to change the law. I think we overlook the fact that Jon and Thayet want to make the change Kel demanded in favour of assuming Jon's trying to win her confidence, but that's only one of the potential reasons Raoul gives for his complicated friend's decision. And Jon himself explicitly says to Kel that she can't challenge Joren because challenging him would be based on noble privilege, not the rule of law for all, and it's the rule of law for all that they're trying to establish. Kel acknowledges the accuracy of that.

Alanna fights repeatedly to establish Jon's feudal authority. Kel swears an oath to Jon that she won't use feudal authority to take private vengeance. That's how much Tortall has changed in just twenty years. 500 years from Squire there will be very frustrated academics wishing that, just once, dramas about the reign of King Jonathan and Queen Thayet would pay lip service to the massive changes in jurisprudence, but noooo, it's all CGI Immortals and shitty golden armour that looks like it's made of Crunchie wrappers and people duelling when that was illegal by the 470s, can the historians of this world not catch a break even once?

dr-dendritic-trees

Don't apologize for this essay its magnificent and you are so right.

I think the thing with the pardons for me, is that King Roald granted this pardon, and it was because he doesn't like fuss and trouble and Roger was a close relative, and it would be difficult and awkward and he didn't want to do such a difficult, awkward thing.

Whereas Jon grants this whole list of pardons and they're all for very specific reasons. He grants George a pardon because he has this very specific thing he needs from him, and then he grants a lot of pardons because he knows that if he starts his reign with a mass of executions he'll never live past it.

One of my favourite scenes in Squire (a long list) is the one where Raoul explains to Kel the difference between Warriors, Commanders and Heroes. And Heroes, in the Tortall books really exist to let commanders work. Like, when Nonsense goes down you need people like Alanna and Daine to defeat the evil sorcerer duke/defeat the nameless ones/distract the graveyard hag/yell at several gods. But by doing that, they make enough room for rule of law to take effect.

My favourite scene in Lioness Rampant is actually the council where Alanna is named champion, because she was already a hero when she left Corus in Hand of the Goddess... but there was all this controversy, and she was really unsettled, and she still wasn't comfortable with it (or her magic, or her gender, or her friends, or anything else) but she comes back a real established confident hero. And meanwhile, we haven't seen Raoul or Gary for a book and half and last time we saw Jon was his absolute lowest point. But Alanna walks back in as a hero, and she's greeted by these three fantastic Commander-Statesmen, who all fill in variations on the commander role, and are building rule of law, and are competent, and enthusiastic.

And Pierce is really sincere and serious about her world-building so there's no thinly veiled allegories, or snidness about the gods and immortals and etc. Its these three people (+ my beloved Duke Baird) who are trying to do exactly what you say, and instate this rule of law... but they live in a world of Gods and Monsters and Evil Sorcerers, so they need Alanna to give them the space to do it in.

And furthermore I also love (this is getting out of hand but its true), that after two superb hero characters (Alanna and Daine), we get Kel, who is a commander character... but she's much younger, so she has never known the randomness and feudalness that would have been familiar to Alanna, she's grown up under rule of law, she's used to Jon's overall level of success to the point that she can take it for granted and say "that's not good enough, we're not stopping here" which is superb.

And you're SO RIGHT about the historians.

rain-sleet-snow

All of this! And I think it makes an especially fascinating contrast with the fact that, in-universe, Jon's reign is the Reign Where All The Nonsense Happened. Immortals were a half-forgotten nightmare! Wild magic was a disrespected folk practice and a niche academic interest! Alanna was only the harbinger of Tortall taking one giant leap into what her contemporaries consider a time of myths and legends. I think it's Lord Imrah of Legann, or maybe Lady Marielle, who says that when they tell the story of these battles their grandchildren won't believe them.

And Jon and Thayet, as rulers, respond to that with revitalised infrastructure, military reform, and legal innovation.

dr-dendritic-trees

You are so right and its a detail that I love so much.

I feel like lesser politicians than Jon and Thayet could really have folded up in the face of the Immortals, and essentially given up on serious innovation because of the need to deal with them. But Jon and Thayet, in addition to their other good qualities really know how to not waste a crisis, so they sort of say, well, we have to change in the face of this, so we're going to change the way we want.

tortall
rain-sleet-snow
gostaks

tortall was really like “yeah we have a box that makes people live out their worst fears. no we have no idea why. we put teenagers in it”

star-anise

I’ll be honest, if we made people deal with their shit before giving them state authority to kill whoever they want, the world might be a better place.

qwertynerd97

Also, like, the fact that the FEAR BOX sometimes just, murders the teenagers because they weren’t fit to have state authority to kill … that’s a lot to unpack

theredkite

Eh. When you consider some of the assholes who get to be knights, you realise how much of a dick Joren really had to be to unlock that ending. Like, Vinson survived presumably because he agreed to confess what he did. He didn’t get to be a knight because the chamber found him unworthy, but it didn’t kill him.

I’m pretty sure Joren could have lived too, if he’d just… accepted whatever the fuck the chamber was trying to tell him.  Alanna and Kel both thought they were dying at some point in their ordeals, but they were both honestly doing their damn best, and the chamber spat both of them out (with free bonus visions for protagonists only).

(At least… I assume the visions are for protagonists only. But now I come to think of it knights are forbidden to speak about their Ordeal afterwards so… what if everyone gets a plot-hook vision at the end of their ordeal and nobody knows that’s normal? That’d be awesome. Headcanon accepted!)

Anyway I got sidetracked there but I always liked that Joren died of Being Such A Dick that the magic judgey room couldn’t fucking stand him. Right on, Chamber of the Ordeal. I couldn’t fucking stand him either.

Also Wyldon was right, though. If he’d been doing his job red flags would have been raised sooner. And Joren’s knight-master fucked up too - who lets an admitted unrepentant kidnapper walk into a supernatural judgement chamber? Like, who the hell still thought he was noble protector of the realm material at that point?

nonasuch

I admittedly haven’t read the books in a while, but wasn’t it a Big Deal because there were two failures in one year? Which carries the implication that everyone is okay with the fear box rejecting a teen every year or so?

Like, presumably most unfit candidates get weeded out before it’s even an issue. But I guess some kids just won’t accept they’re not fit to be a knight until the magic fear box tells them so, and that’s a shame but doesn’t reflect too badly on their teachers. But two in one year means the teachers weren’t doing their job right.

(also, yes, I am on board for the Chamber giving everyone a vision quest. sometimes the assignment is ‘hold the fate of the realm in your hands’ and sometimes it is ‘do this low-level job that you are honorable enough to not fuck up,’ because the supernatural judgement box knows what level of responsibility you can handle.)

tortall
rain-sleet-snow
enter-the-bogman

Reading through the Tortall books in publication order is funny because you start with Alanna “the village healing woman taught me all she knew” going off to become a knight, and end with Numair “world’s most powerful mage” as young Arram Draper first learning magic at the Carthaki university. Because of the 40 intervening years and five(?) different series further developing the Tortall universe, the magic system is now SO much more complex. 
Arram is learning an elementally-based, heavily theory-dependent form of magic where conceptual power is applied to physical objects or energy constructs. His teachers make him develop skills in non-magical areas like juggling, jewelry making, and gardening so eventually they can safely guide him through complicated applications of magic. In comparison, Alanna complains that Duke Roger is spending too much time on theory in order to prevent her and her peers from learning “actual magic” and becoming his rivals. And then she throws purple light at things until they explode or she passes out!
We also learn from Arram’s misadventures that most of “magic” is creating methods of applying, storing, and accessing power so the user doesn’t drain their own life force and pass out or die. Alanna uses NONE of these techniques; instead, she pulls her magic directly out of her own life force, thinks about what she wants it to do, and hopes she reaches that goal before draining herself. She even (sometimes) factors in the impact of magically draining herself of energy while attempting tasks that require both magical and physical endurance (such as when deciding how much magic to spend warming herself when making her blizzard hike to claim the Dominion Jewel.)

For one thing, this makes Alanna insanely powerful. In In the Hand of The Goddess, she breaks open Roger’s magically locked door (presumably designed by Roger himself– an immensely strong and well-trained sorcerer) by shoving her own magic into it until it MELTS. This builds an Alanna who decided magical theory was useless at age 12 because she has an immense access to magical potential energy, and who never learns the basic life-preserving models of magic usage that are taught in intro-level classes. She doesn’t have an interest in learning more sophisticated forms of magic, except in healing, which she cared about enough to learn non-magically. So when she heals, she uses magic as a guide or a supplement, rather than depending on it and then draining herself. 
Since she isn’t attempting complex magic, most of the time the limitations of drawing directly from her own life force doesn’t impact her that much. The things she does magically all have much more efficient alternatives, but they require an understanding of magical theory and ability to store energy that Alanna never learned! If she wants to do larger spells, she just keeps feeding energy into it until it breaks or she does. 

The intervening series and Numair’s story makes Alanna’s simultaneously more and less believable. It now makes sense why everyone with even a slight understanding of Alanna’s type of Gift gets angry at times and tells her she’s using magic irresponsibly. (Before, we only understood Alanna’s side of the argument: “Well, I didn’t die and it worked, so calm down.” !!!) The fact that she never actually dies and only rarely is seriously harmed through her own magic use now requires some suspension of disbelief!

rain-sleet-snow

I firmly believe that the general state of organised magical education in Tortall was so poor in Alanna’s youth that the Carthaki University spent decades leading up to the events of Emperor Mage saying among themselves, “and then there’s Tortall, only the gods know what the fuck they’re doing up there!” Some years - like the year with the crazed duke getting resurrected - this was said more loudly than other years. The year they finally got their hands on enough raw data and publications to prove that yes, King Jonathan did have the actual facts Dominion Jewel in his treasury and used it to stop an earthquake raised the roof.

After Daine’s ill-fated visit they gathered in silence and drank. 

tortall
viridiansunlight

Alternative rule to Lunar Chimerism

viridian-sun

A heretical notion: Lunars should be able to safely shapeshift with or without the Moonsilver tattoos as much as they want!

Alas, Chimerae are quite interesting antagonists!

Question: How do I stop punishing Lunars using their defining ability while keeping Chimerae in the setting?

Solution: Houserule the everloving shit out of them.

The Lunar strain of Great Curse is rooted in the internal nature of their powers. More than any other Exalt type, Chosen of the Ever-Shifting One depend on emotional connections with the world, and derive the anchors of their identities from it. Potential for Lunars to become Chimerae always existed in the taint on their fortean Exaltations. Nevertheless, it was only after their exile into Wyld, and erosion of their attachments to the world by its corrosive madness that potential could be realized.

> Lunars can gain points of Limit when an Intimacy they held to concrete people, places or things is destroyed. It doesn’t happen if it erodes naturally, but death of their loved ones, being rejected by them or betrayed by them causes them to gain Limit the first time such a thing happens in the scene. Wyld is an exception to natural erosion: scenes spent eroding an Intimacy while in the Wyld each give the Lunar a point of Limit.

> On the other hand, scenes spend on building Intimacies to real places, real people and real things (or reinforcing them) cause Lunars to connect to the world more and cause to bleed out Limit (1 point/scene). Intimacies to Wyld things do not help. Those two caveats work on both tattooed and untattooed Lunars.

> When an untattooed Lunar suffers a Limit break, they roll Willpower. Failure on the roll gives them one Permament Limit dot. That dot can be bought back with 5 experience, representing the Lunar being mindful of their mental wellbeing, or, instead by forging (or reforging) a meaningful Intimacy with beings of Creation.

> Negative effects of Permament Limit work as written, with the following exception: Even at Permament Limit 10, Chimera is not too far gone. The silver spirit of their Exaltation refuses to be caged to a mindless beast. Therefore, if someone would reach out to the Chimera (potentially someone whom Chimera known in their more stable times, but also friends and allies from former life, or even people who are similar to them), they could slowly forge an intimacy to the world that causes them to go back to full sapience. Of course, they’re still dangerous, and most likely would have to be caged or otherwise restrained, and most Lunars of Silver Pact don’t bother.

exoriaterrae

Sounds far more workable and I can see story hooks here!

viridiansunlight

That’s exactly what I wanted. Mechanics should reward player for doing something that his character should be doing, not punish them for something they generally do.

exalted homebrew
snailchimera

Friends Who Play Exalted, And Sometimes WoD

snailchimera

Snail: That’s why we don’t trust White Wolf with White Wolf properties.

Chic: Honestly, using white wolf is like buying a jar of spagetti sauce. Just use it as a base and add your own seasoning and veg and such.

Luc: Yes but in this metaphor Im also sitting there picking out every piece of eggplant thats in the base sauce

Kate: *nodnod* Buying a jar of spaghetti sauce where they instruct you to also eat jar

exalted too true world of darkness
snailchimera
probablybadrpgideas

The Scarlet Empress returns. Turns out she went on holiday. Were you not getting the postcards? Ah well. Good job no-one over-reacted too badly in the mean time, huh?

winterwombat

“Vacation!?” the Great Houses scream, “Where the hell did you go for vacation that you didn’t notice your empire falling to pieces?!”

The Empress glares at them over the top of her heart-shaped sunglasses, sipping some sort of tropical drink through a red plastic straw. “Next time,” she says, after a considered pause, “I’ll get a baby monitor.” 

She walks past them in silence, carrying her small floral-patterned luggage through the looming doors of the Imperial Palace. The assembled leaders of the great houses are silent. Three of the most powerful Dragon-Blooded in the entire Realm pass out from embarrassment. Mnemon explodes. 

exalted crack
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