I kept dropping my bookmarks on the bus as a kid, so I started just memorizing my page number when I put the book down. That was 30 years ago, and now I no longer even notice myself doing that. I simply pick up a book and know where I left off.

The one exception is cookbooks. Those get sticky tabs.

Don’t just let it be terrible, LEAN INTO it being terrible, because no one’s going to see it.

I only bring this up because someone mentioned just this week that this trick is useful, but I *still* 30 years in, when stumped, write this on the top of the page.

I have been plotting how exactly that could work since the prologue, and I am absolutely here for it.

I am content to just let them play and not write any fic for it, especially not when we're still just getting to know these characters, but damn. The possibility is tantalizing.

I know it was too soon, but I was still on the edge of my seat wondering if we were about to get the Hal/Bolaire Venom arc of my dreams.

I have worked out mechanics for this! They would be amazing and hilarious having to partner up like that. Taliesin said it could happen and he's into it. Game ON!

My housemate is watching Campaign 4 with their friend back in the US, and is waaay behind. To avoid spoilers, they wear noise cancelling headphones while I'm watching.

Housemate: How's Critical Role going?

Me: Without spoilers... Two of the players are physically hiding under the table right now.

I may not know exactly what Brennan is cooking, but holy shit the ingredients are fucking TERRIFYING.

I foresee bardic magic amplified through the everyday magic of an attentive audience all deciding to Believe for the duration of the play, and the overlapping rituals of theater and blood. And now they have put the magic nullifying swords to end a god right there in the theater, too. AND two masks.

Because the sundered houses are all human houses, so far as I can tell. And Dol-Makjar was not, originally, a city that belonged to them. And now these outsiders are trying to run it with an authoritarian magic fist, and all the people who were there originally are expected to bow to their will.

This has been my running theory from the moment they read the letter.

Because why not PAINT THE WALLS of the PROFANED SACRIFICIAL THEATER to the god of WAR with MAGIC BLOOD?! And then do a play about the ongoing fight for rebellion against oppressors and orcish independence in a STOLEN orcish city?

Within that master category of "Works of Words," are a great many subcategories, and because all of this categorization is made up there's overlap between them. Roleplaying games tap into many different subcategories within that master category, but they live or die by the words they're made of.

Anyways. My point is that deep down literature is just any art created through words. Lots and lots of literature was never actually intended to be "literary" in the sense of being something people might analyze and study as art, but it's still literature because it's still a creative work of words.

Certainly roleplaying games operate within their own literary conventions and unique creation methods, which make them distinct from novels or novellas or short stories or plays or television or movies or any similar fictional storytelling mediums. But there's still significant overlap.

But hey, once upon a time, and honestly really not that long ago in the grand scheme of literary history, novels were new and, well, novel. Now people tend to think of them as the defining medium in literature, they'd probably be the first thing someone imagined if asked to picture a literary work.

The real issue that might make some people uncomfortable with calling it literature is just that as a storytelling medium and especially as an art form, structured roleplaying is relatively new. It isn't a tried and true format that people have been studying and critiquing for thousands of years.

If the issue is that a literary work must be published to be considered part of the body of literature (a rough take, in my opinion, but one that I have seen argued), well. Campaign Four is *certainly* being published. Not every DnD game is, but this one? For sure.

If being written down is truly required, then merely making a transcript would instantly make DnD into literature. Plenty of authors wrote by dictation, after all.

If being a crafted work of words is required, the DM is crafting it in real time, and probably has written notes as part of that, too.

Technically, literature is a term for written works. DnD is usually played out loud,* so in its raw form, I don't think it necessarily qualifies as literature per se. But that's a shallow interpretation that doesn't look hard enough at the whole.

* Text-based gameplay also happens

By the time Campaign 4 is done, it is absolutely going to be sufficient grounds for an incredible thesis in the field of literature. Probably more than one.

Of course, first you'd have to sufficiently defend the idea that DnD can be literature. I think it can.

I really like the notes for the teenaged pregnancy scandal peacock romance in that AU. It's all very sweet and fumbling, but Jiang Yanli is a quiet badass in it even as she is also having to very rapidly discover that about herself.

More to the point, I know when they STOPPED doing the things. Because I didn't just plot a stack of amatonormative happily ever afters, I plotted the currents leading to character development.

You don't understand... I have a giant timeline for this AU. I know who did what with whom and when for a span of like 30-odd years.

Hm. Do I want to pick up the world for my Nie Huaisang/Lan Jingyi modern with highly limited and specific multiverse magic AU and write some of the other ships in it?

Is this the Yi City A-Qing?

Because I think she should rock Lan Jingyi's world.

YOU MUST TAKE YOUR MEDICATIONS TO HAVE STRENGTH TO GRIND YOUR ENEMIES' BONES TO DUST.

there are altogether too many quotable paragraphs in this must-read article but i think i can restrain myself to just this one

It's sortof of like the writers decided that cosmic truth works exactly the same way local laws do. The nature of the truth applies only within the cultural border, and can simply be different in a different jurisdiction. They have heaven/hell, while we have reincarnation, etc.

The drama I am watching has such a peculiarity of cosmology to it... As though the nature of the universe is fixed but nevertheless culturally specific? It's vaguely omnitheist except for how only the local version is THE way things work in that locality, but that's also true for EVERY locale.

Watched the ORV movie with my bro who hasn't read it. For him, the movie was just meh.

For me, it was a betrayal. Because this is a book which could become an excellent long tv series, but absolutely not a movie. They tried to include cool book stuff but skipped everything that gave it meaning.

Once again thinking about how the Witcher books are, and I kid you not, an epic dark fantasy saga… about how a woman’s right to reproductive choice is sacred and only villains try to take it away

And now you know why it's been a dozen years since I last had them. XD