Concept: retired adventurers who, along with a local necromancer, run a "starter dungeon" for would-be adventuring parties, so they can get some experience in a relatively safe environment before heading out into the wider world.

At least, that's what ONE of their brochures says.

Their OTHER brochure is aimed at experienced adventuring parties, who want to go through something harmless and low-stakes to unwind, or just to goof off.

It's the exact same dungeon for both types of groups.

(There's also a third revenue stream of wizards and trap designers who want to test out their creations in something approximating the target environment and are willing to pay for the opportunity of adventurers going up against their creations WITHOUT the risk of then turning on the creators for "unleashing such abominations upon the world", but that's not advertised enough to warrant its own brochure.)

the thing about the mummy movies is that you really spend most of the time thinking "wow brendan fraser's character is so cool" or "man oded fehr is so mysterious and heroic" when the fact of the matter is that these two

are the absolute most batshit insane heroes in the entire franchise

these two are intellectual loner siblings with archeology backgrounds who read and speak ancient egyptian, hire a dude directly out of prison to take them to a lost city of gold, and fight mummies literally with their bare hands. twice.

no one in these movies stands a chance against the carnahans. frankly they're lethal in how willing they are to make the absolute and most undeniably deranged decisions. jonathan pickpockets a dude on fire. evy's resurrected from the dead and immediately remembers how to use sai. they're racking shotguns from a cliff in this scene and then proceed to blow away half the antagonists.

rick and ardeth should be so lucky

What, the forest-dwelling entities with imperfect human mimicry who insinuate themselves into groups of hikers? Yeah, we had one of those. Clocked it immediately, of course. Honestly it kind of fell in that so-inept-it's-kind-of-charming range. We just played along until it'd had it's fill of marshmallows and shambled back into the treeline. We might have been violating some kind of killjoy wildlife contact best practices but what the hell, can't plan around every little thing. Why, what happened to you guys

these tags are gold omg

It's a misconception that the mimics are hunting humans when they trail along at the back of hiking groups.

In fact, the creature you'll find suddenly walking beside you and acting as if they've always been there is almost certainly a juvenile, as the adults lose the ability when they reach reproductive age.

Recent studies suggest the forest mimic is less like a preying mantis (mimicry as a hunting strategy) and more like a cuckoo (mimicry as a protective strategy for their young). Adult forest mimics will leave their offspring near a group of hikers while they forage during the day, and retrieve them near trailheads in the evening. Groups of hikers provide safety from predators and allow the parents of the species the freedom to forage more widely.

For this reason, the traditional advice to never let a mimic into your vehicle is still very important, as this would separate the young mimic from its mother. If a juvenile forest mimic does follow your group to the parking lot, you can keep it entertained with trail snacks, dad jokes, and simple goofs. The mother will usually collect them shortly before sunset.

When you notice the woods around the trailhead go silent and feel a sense of nameless foreboding, find an excuse to avert your attention from the juvenile so it can sneak back into the forest to rejoin its mother, convinced it's fooled another party of unsuspecting humans.

surprisingly wholesome takes from the cryptid community here

@monstrousproductions

Man I know that elder scrolls is a stupid series and all that but I really think they did concepts like orcs and dark elves mostly correct. More correct than a lot of franchises I’ve seen anyways.

I think dnd took until like this year to properly update drow and orcs or something? Like fantasy as a whole has a hard time shaking off this idea of evil races.

The elder scrolls approach to these guys from the beginning though has been that their cultures are just really different from the other cultures around them.

Like you can hang out in orc strongholds in Skyrim and spend the whole game around dark elves in Morrowind and they’re just regular people that have kind of extreme cultural norms. Dark elves are kind of rude to you when they first meet you but like in the way certain cultures are rude to outsiders at first until they get to know them. Orcs are rough around the edges but they’re smart and have a proud culture and if you can hold your own in a fight they’ll respect you.

And you see these people can blend pretty well into other societies. They join faiths their ancestors didn’t practice, they have jobs that people of their race wouldn’t stereotypically have, they have opinions about what other people assume about them, they have their own wrong assumptions about other cultures.

There’s this understanding somewhere in these games that people are shaped by their cultures but you also can’t predict how an individual will behave based on the culture that they came from. And I like that.

Listen, I love the elder scrolls. It is deep and wide and beautiful. It is also filled with cheese though.

TES worldbuilding does something I haven't really seen any other fantasy universe do, it foregoes a clear cut and thoroughly explained cosmology in favor of actually different religious interpretations of its universe. There's a basic outline to be gleamed from the overlap between the various theologies, but there's no definitive answer to a lot of questions.

Are Masser and Secunda normal moons? Are they holes in reality through which the light of Aetherius shines? Are they the sundered corpse of the demiurge? Are they normal moons but there's a secret third moon that only comes out during a double eclipse and *that* one is Lorkhan's body? They fought a war about this.

I think the fact that utter silliness and ridiculous notions can coexist with conplex ideological flaws and layers upon layers of behavioural patterns and anomalies makes of TES something far from simply realistic or simply stupid. It is the most realistic exploration of the paradoxes of our reality without directly quoting them. A potential vast source to learn, without the consequences of learning all of this in the real world.

9 October 2024

This is a great post to promote that you can donate to Wikipedia at any time, with almost any amount of money! You can even set up a reoccurring donation, like I did.

Bilbo barely passed Old Took's record lifespan after having a supernaturally-life-extending ring for 60 years. which begs a question. what the hell did Old Took do

I have a theory that somewhere back up the line gandalf fucked a took. This sounds like complete crack but hear me out. The tooks are rumored to have “fairy blood” which in LOTR terms means either elves or maia. There is an ancestor who’s unusually tall and many of them are noted to live unusually long lives unless they meet with illness or injury, same as the numenorians did. They don’t hve extra pointy ears and elves don’t have a special interest in the line. But who DOES have a special interest in looking after tooks (and bilbo who is a took on his mother’s side/his adopted son frodo)? Gandalf. That dude is ALWAYS fussing over some silly little guy. He regularly brought the old took birthday presents.

Back in the day some bold hobbitess decided to climb that old man and ever since then gandalf has been looking after his line of tiny crazy bastards and no one will convince me otherwise.

Gandalf's attitude towards Pippin just took on a whole new layer.

what the fuck did aviators put in this music holy shit

if you figure it out let me know because OUGH it's so goooood

Come'on, man

We don't know for sure that this is what they did, but multiple people have found that if you ask ChatGPT to "make a formula to reduce the American trade deficit to 0", this is what it produces.

RESIDENT EVIL 29TH ANNIVERSARY

this kinda flopped on Instagram so I'm hoping it will receive more love on Tumblr 🥲🥹

biggest reason i make so many flop posts on here is because everything i do reeks of the desperation to make a popular tumblr post. this is deliberate, because it is what protects me from ACTUALLY making a popular tumblr post. so long as i crave it, tumblr fame will never find me. it is only when i turn away, and accept my fate of obscurity, that people will lay their eyes upon me. and it WILL be because i tripped and fell on my stupid face while i was turning

time for people to do the funniest thing ever

Do not.

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)

Reblog to give prev a fucking break holy shit y’all

products are so bad now that i have to do approximately 8 hours of research before i buy anything