“Just… what do you think you’re doing?! You know if you leave-”
“I won’t be allowed back in. Yup. I know that. I don’t care.” Izumi shrugged. “I’m out of here, Ryu. And you can’t change my mind.”
“You’ll die out there!” Ryu gestured wildly out of the Fortress. “Zombies, ghouls, vampires, werewolves?! Not to mention all the humans out there that are just as bad. Izumi, get down from there.”
“They’re going to cut me out of the family, Ryu. Once they take this key,” Izumi held up the chain on her neck and shook the key about, “They’ll never give it back. You know that. I’m not going to be a part of this system anymore. Not ever again. If you’re that concerned about my safety, then fine, come with me. But I’ll be just freaking FINE on my own! I’m not a child anymore. I’m leaving. I’m not coming back, even if they would let me in I won’t be back. Goodbye, Ryu. I love you, and I love our brothers… but this is something I’m doing for me.”
Izumi crouched, ignoring Ryu’s pleas for her to get down. And then, throwing caution to the wind, Izumi leaped.
~*~
Ahhhhh, Monster! is releasing June 25, pre-order it here! If you can’t purchase it, reblogging/sharing is really appreciated!
God I hate the concept of aliens so much. first of all every single “alien encounter” has been w a demon and they want you to go to hell. second of all if we found real ones id bash their heads in with a brick
my first ever “they only had me in the second half, not gonna lie” post
1. Beachside retirement community where the majority of the residents are kraken-worshipping cultists.
2. Little village surrounded by woods where folks hunt but they don’t eat. The thrill of the chase is all it takes to satisfy them—call it a power, or call it a curse.
3. Far northern outpost on the icy tundra. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not.
4. Ghost town built in the shadow of the Red Cathedral. It’s just a big rock formation, except when the desert sun hits it just right. The gothic arches and flying buttresses shimmer into existence, and the few remaining residents shuffle inside for a midday mass.
5. Old country hamlet where they’ve come to rely a little to heavily on the wishing well. It works, of course, but at a cost.
6. Former coal mining town where more houses than not are occupied by the ghosts of those who met their untimely end down in the mines.
7. The last little settlement on your way up to the peak of the tallest mountain in the region. Maybe it’s just that you’d have to be crazy to live all the way up here, but the locals have all kinds of stories about the unnatural creatures that lurk in the shadows. Bigfoot, werewolves, you name it.
8. Farming town where folks don’t find crop circles in their fields anymore, not since them aliens bought up their own little plot of land and settled down on it.
The Tale of Puppykicker McGee is a saga involving bad choices, bad rolls, amputation(s), cannibalism, puppy kicking, and what happens when tabletop RPG players learn that their actions have consequences. Content warning for… all of the things I just listed.
THAT SAID. First, some context.
I run a Monster of the Week game for some friends of mine, set in modern day UP Michigan. For those unfamiliar with MOTW, players work together to hunt monsters, solve mysteries, and uncover conspiracies by means of roleplay and dice rolling. The main difference between MOTW (or other games on the Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG engine) and D&D is that D&D operates on a binary success system. You roll the die and you either hit the monster or you don’t. It’s a yes or a no.
MOTW, however, has three possible outcomes for every dice roll: Success, mixed success, and failure. When a roll is successful, your action happens as intended. When you roll a failure, your action not only doesn’t work out for you, but it more often than not completely backfires in your face. If you roll to wrestle the monster and you fail, it kicks YOUR ass instead.
But the mixed success…? OOoooohoHOHOhhohoh, the mixed success is what makes me rub my little gamer hands together like an excited raccoon!! The player’s action still happens as intended, but there’s always a tradeoff. They might have to make a hard choice, or the effect isn’t as strong as they needed it to be, or maybe someone else gets caught in the crossfire. It turns a hard “no” into a “no, but” or a “yes, and” and it makes me SO excited.
So you can imagine my joy when player character Madame Irena, Local Psychic (from the Spooky playbook) got a mixed success on her magic roll to lift a 40ft wide concrete slab over her head. The spell didn’t last as long as she needed it to, and she lost her grip on the slab. I had her roll to dodge out of the way as it fell. Mixed success again. She gets most of her body out of the way, but the slab lands on her foot and just COMPLETELY obliterates it.
One thing leads to another, she gets rushed to the hospital and has her foot amputated. She’s incapacitated for days, but after a daring hospital breakout involving a wheelchair, a Siberian husky, and the world’s most put-upon medical intern, she decides she wants to use magic to grow herself a new foot. But that kind of magic in MOTW always has a cost, and it always has risks. For this particular spell, she’s gonna need to transmute herself a new foot out of something else’s flesh. But let’s put a pin in that for a second.
Let’s go on a side tangent about the Dogman. This is not Puppykicker McGee, but we ARE getting there, I promise.
So anyway. Player character Tatara (from the Wronged playbook) has been on a revenge quest to kill the Dogman, who is a human vessel possessed by an evil spirit that turns the vessel into a murderous, rage-fueled, man-eating dogmonster whenever they get overwhelmed by strong negative emotions. The Dogman can only transform back into their human form after eating freshly killed human flesh. It also turns out that the current vessel was an NPC on her monster hunting team the whole time! His name is Mark. He did not know he was the Dogman until very recently.
So Tatara, Mark, and player character Pip (from the Crooked playbook) just got back from a harrowing trip through the Backrooms and are all extremely high strung. This is very shortly after Irena went to the hospital.
One thing leads to another, the group gets into an argument, and Mark begins to get angry. Tatara, being the Dogman expert, sees the potential danger and decides to take preventative matters into her own hands. By which I mean a baseball bat to the side of Mark’s head.
Dice roll. Failure! Uh oh!!!
Mark catches the bat, turns into the Dogman, and the Dogman goes fucking berserk. Player character Art (from the Monstrous playbook) manages to restrain and contain the Dogman in somebody’s basement, but now the party has a problem: they need to turn Dogman back into Mark, but that requires feeding somebody to the Dogman. It also happens that Irena wants to use part of that somebody’s body to transmute their flesh into a new foot for herself. The party has ruled out stealing a corpse from the morgue, so in a unanimous decision that would make my freshman ethics professor shit himself, they decide to find the worst person in town and kill him.
Enter: Puppykicker McGee.
Now, anyone who’s ever run a TTRPG game knows that sometimes players will get murder in their hearts and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can play up the morality angle, you can dangle a treat over their head to guide them elsewhere, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you just have to play along and invent a guy from scratch who nobody will feel bad about feeding to the Dogman.
Puppykicker McGee hangs outside the local dive bar, harassing customers and kicking puppies. His legal name is actually Puppykicker McGee, but he picked up the puppy kicking thing separately. This is where his character complexity ends. The monster hunting party (minus Irena and Mark) jumps him in an alleyway and knocks him out in the first fully successful rolls in AGES.
But here’s the thing: They get cold feet. They decide they don’t actually want to kill him, they just want his leg.
At this point, I am NOT prepared to have this guy be a part of the continuing canon of this game. Puppykicker McGee was built to be disposable and I WILL dispose of him. I say yes, that’s fine, they can have his leg, but they have to leave the rest of him with the one person they know who will remove the leg for them, and that person is shady as fuck.
Somehow, they’re suspicious of this. This group of people who were super duper chill with homicide a few minutes ago are now a little worried of leaving Puppykicker behind with a woman who has a collection of human souls. I tell them tough nuggets, you made your decision. They say “yeah sure that’s probably fine actually” and leave with a plastic garbage bag full of Human Leg Meat.
They go back home, feed the thigh to Dogman, and use everything else below the knee to transmute Irena a new foot. Irena is still a little nervous about doing magic since the last time she did it was the whole reason she lost her foot. She’s worried that if she fails, she’s going to have to just graft the foot onto her own leg. This leads to the single greatest sentence I’ve ever heard out of context in my life:
“Hey, quick question, how big are Puppykicker McGee’s feet?”
so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god
okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
i need all the help i can get for finals
Hey so
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
So you know.
This might be the real one, y’all.
Give salary increase and wfh plz
Just completed an application for a new job - could use all the good luck
what you need to understand about recommending a show to me is that no matter how much we both know I’ll like it, I can’t watch it until the Neurodivergence Department in my brain approves it. I don’t know when that will be, and I don’t have any more control over it than you do.
if you’re ever at a vet hospital and can hear dogs/cats howling and screeching and making terrible noises from the back, please be aware that 99% of the time it is NOT because:
they are dying
they are in terrible pain
they are being tortured
It almost always IS because:
someone is taking their temperature
someone is placing an IV catheter
they’re mad about being in a kennel
other likely reasons why animals are screaming in vet clinics!
they saw another animal
no one is looking at them right now
they are happy to see this particular staff member
they’re a pug getting a nail trim
they’re a shiba inu getting literally anything done
they’re a husky
The Shiba inu may not even be getting anything done
Thought exercise. You are me, you are hungry, you want to make my world famous pancake recipe. This recipe needs four eggs. You have three eggs. Do you:
a) go to the store. yes you have a cold, but you could be in and out fast. then again you could run into someone you know. embarrassing.
b) go across the street to your grandparent’s house and ask to borrow an egg. you may or may not get a lecture about not being at church. is it worth it.
c) use two of the raw eggs and two hard-boiled eggs. surely this will work out fine
if you picked c, congratulations, you correctly picked my thought process. i have committed an affront to god and my tummy hurts so badly
actually oddly enough the pancakes tasted fine, despite all of the bits of whole egg falling out of them, which is where the affront to god kicks in
anyway if this ever happens again i’m just gonna go to the store. experiment failed, we’ll get ‘em next time
i didn’t….i didn’t even think to do that
I could’ve…used other ingredients……?
actually you know what in fairness to me i’ve been on a lot of cold medicine this week while battling a virus. from now on i’m only making sandwiches
i’m no longer on ungodly amounts of cold medicine! i wish i could tell you i have no memory of making this post, and by extension the pancakes, but unfortunately i do!
The Three Egg Solution Comment Alignment Chart:
Guess who got an ADHD diagnosis and subsequent adderall prescription directly after this
For those who want to try it, the recipe is in this addition!
And, short answers to the questions i see the most:
It was 9 pm so no my grandparents were not at church
My grandma has been shutting me out since i was (presumably but not confirmed) outed to her. She is homophobic. That’s the main reason. Felt too heavy to put in the original post
The hardboiled eggs are packaged and come in a two pack. Which is why i used two
I call them pancakes but it is closer to a crepe recipe, hence the four eggs
And, I was, I cannot fucking stress this enough, out of my GOURD
emancipationangel Asks:
imburiedincats-sendhelp Said:
