I’ve been living with the effects of complex trauma for a long time, but for many years, I didn’t know what it was. Off and on throughout my life, I’ve struggled with what I thought was anxiety and depression. Or rather, In addition to being traumatized, I was anxious and depressed.
Regardless of the difference, no condition should ever be minimized. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, it’s important and urgent to find the right support for you. No one gets a prize for “worst” depression, anxiety, trauma or any other combination of terrible things to deal with, and no one should suffer alone. With that in mind, there is a difference between what someone who has Complex PTSD feels and what someone with generalized anxiety or mild to moderate depression feels.
For someone dealing with complex trauma, the anxiety they feel does not come from some mysterious unknown source or obsessing about what could happen. For many, the anxiety they feel is not rational. General anxiety can often be calmed with grounding techniques and reminders of what is real and true. Mindfulness techniques can help. Even when they feel disconnected, anxious people can often acknowledge they are loved and supported by others.
For those who have experienced trauma, anxiety comes from an automatic physiological response to what has actually, already happened. The brain and body have already lived through “worst case scenario” situations, know what it feels like and are hell-bent on never going back there again. The fight/flight/ freeze response goes into overdrive. It’s like living with a fire alarm that goes off at random intervals 24 hours a day. It is extremely difficult for the rational brain to be convinced “that won’t happen,” because it already knows that it has happened, and it was horrific.
Those living with generalized anxiety often live in fear of the future. Those with complex trauma fear the future becauseof the past.
The remedy for both anxiety and trauma is to pull one’s awareness back into the present. For a traumatized person who has experienced abuse, there are a variety of factors that make this difficult. First and foremost, a traumatized person must be living in a situation which is 100 percent safe before they can even begin to process the tsunami of anger, grief and despair that has been locked inside of them, causing their hypervigilance and other anxious symptoms. That usually means no one who abused them or enabled abuse in the past can be allowed to take up space in their life. It also means eliminating any other people who mirror the same abusive or enabling patterns.
Unfortunately for many, creating a 100 percent abuser-free environment is not possible, even for those who set up good boundaries and are wary of the signs. That means that being present in the moment for a complex trauma survivor is not fail-proof, especially in a stressful event. They can be triggered into an emotional flashback by anything in their present environment.
It is possible (and likely) that someone suffering from the effects of complex trauma is also feeling anxious and depressed, but there is a difference to the root cause. Many effective strategies that treat anxiety and depression don’t work for trauma survivors. Meditation and mindfulness techniques that make one more aware of their environment sometimes can produce an opposite effect on a trauma survivor. Trauma survivors often don’t need more awareness. They need to feel safe and secure in spite of what their awareness is telling them.
At the first sign of anxiety or depression, traumatized people will spiral into toxic shame. Depending on the wounding messages they received from their abusers, they will not only feel the effects of anxiety and depression, but also a deep shame for being “defective” or “not good enough.” Many survivors were emotionally and/or physically abandoned, and have a deep rooted knowledge of the fact that they were insufficiently loved. They live with a constant reminder that their brains and bodies were deprived of a basic human right. Even present-day situations where they are receiving love from a safe person can trigger the awareness and subsequent grief of knowing how unloved they were by comparison.
Anxiety and depression are considered commonplace, but I suspect many of those who consider themselves anxious or depressed are actually experiencing the fallout of trauma. Most therapists are not well trained to handle trauma, especially the complex kind that stems from prolonged exposure to abuse. Unless they are specially certified, they might have had a few hours in graduate school on Cluster B personality disorders, and even fewer hours on helping their survivors. Many survivors of complex trauma are often misdiagnosed as having borderline personality disorder (BPD) or bipolar disorder. Anyone who has sought treatment for generalized anxiety or depression owes themselves a deeper look at whether trauma plays a role.
(I’m certain I’ve seen posts like these, but I cant find them, and I recently got into CR after wanting to for about a year, so this is my perspective. Yea it’s wordy, but CR is hundreds of hours long, compared to that I’m being brief)
So you want to get into Critical Role but are probably very daunted by the on average 4hour episode length and over 100 episodes of season 1, and nearly 30 episodes of season 2
You just don’t have that kind of time! You can’t possibly sit and watch over 430 hours of other people playing DnD and expect to catch up to the current fans in any reasonable amount of time. Maybe you dont like audio or visual media!
That’s OK! There are things to help you. In order from slowest to fastest at getting you caught up to everyone else
1) Listen to the podcast! Do you like podcasts? You probably like The Adventure Zone and that’s why you want to watch CR. Lucky you! CR is now available as a podcast wherever podcasts are found, or just google “critical role podcast”. This is the perfect way to experience CR if you are able to listen to things at your day job or while you study, and have long periods of time where your ears are not needed!
2) Don’t start with Episode 1. Some of the first episodes are very difficult to deal with. Though there is a running joke that comes up A LOT, and an important ally made, from the first adventure. It’s just hard to follow. I’d start with episode 16, that’s where it starts to get interesting much quicker. (pair this with listening to the podcast for faster results)
3) Read episode summaries, and start where you get interested (pair this with listening to the podcast for faster results) Critical Recap is an official thing for season 2, and it’s very good, use that (be warned, the first recap is for the first 10 episodes, but after that it’s for each episode!) To be honest I dont recommend this for season 2 since as of now, season 2 is only 26 episodes (if you are reading this in the far future when season 2 is getting lengthy then I do recommend it). I dont know where to get good summaries for season 1, I’ll add a link when I do
4) Start with The Second Season You don’t need to know anything about the first season! Ok there is ONE thing that carried over, dont worry it’s not a spoiler so here it is: Taliesin Jaffe’s character in Season 1 was a gunslinger who invented guns (guns not previously existing). Taliesin is teased and blames himself for unleashing this dangerous technology upon the world of Exandria, especially since his character tried to keep it from spreading. (pair this with listening to the podcast for faster results, meaning, listen to the podcast but start with season 2) (using Critical Recap will be The Fastest way to catch up on season 2, but again, i dont recommend it unless you are reading this in 2019)
5) Transcripts https://crtranscript.tumblr.com/transcriptshas pretty much every episode, which is fucking incredible, the dedication of the fandom to making the show accessible to everyone!
* If you read summaries/transcripts and listen to the podcast and find moments you just HAVE TO WATCH because you have to see the actor’s faces: GO TO THE YOUTUBE VERSION OF THE EPISODE AND LOOK AT THE COMMENTS. I have yet to find an episode that doesn’t have a table of contents/time stamps of important/funny moments, and if the moment isnt there you will probably notice one close to the moment you desire. In addition the timing on the podcast isn’t much different from podcast compared to the video, except after the break, which the podcast doesn’t include (so adjust about +15 minutes for post-break events)
A personal recommendation is to start with season 2 to catch up to where everyone else is currently and then go back to season 1, since you need something to do between Thursdays. (I didn’t do that, but I also have a job where I can listen to podcasts for 8 hours which made season 1 way more manageable to start with)
I do not recommend reading summaries if you start with season 2, since it’s much shorter right now (July 16th 2018) and the characters are INSTANTLY delightful and intriguing (because the characters in season 1 were from the home game, they aren’t made with an audience in mind, and the adventuring party already being close, the characters dont have to press each other for backstory, everyone is more comfortable with each other, it’s way easier to get into season 2 first).
Sorry this is so long, go forth and watch/listen to/read some amazing DnD 5e adventures
No matter the writing season, it can be difficult to find ways to keep your writing fresh and moving forward. Today, writer Charli Mills shares a recipe to help writers create big projects in small, bite-sized pieces:
One old mountain man asked another, “How do you eat an entire grizzly?”
The second man replies: “One bite at a time, Pard!”
Growing up in the shadow of silver mines on the eastern slope of the Sierras, I had plenty of time as a kid to poke around history and contemplate a dream to write historical fiction. Voices of mountain men like Kit Carson filled my imagination. Names on tilting marble tombstones emerged as characters.
Fast forward many decades later and I’m still poking a pen at times past. Novels, especially ones brewed in the filters of history, take a considerable time commitment. I’ve learned what the mountain man adage means—place one scene down after another, one chapter after another, one draft revision after another.
My super advanced mapmaking technique – a handful of dice makes the map nice
interesting method
My question is do the die affect topography any or just set the borders?
I imagine it’s up to the person making the map. But maybe the more dice in a single spot, the more mountainous or forested the area. Maybe choose a few dice to be deemed cities, and some dice for ruins.
Maybe let the dice choose, like a nat 20 would be the world capital, and 10’s would be mountains or something like that.
1-5: Plains and fields
6-8: Forests
9-11: Mountains
12-14: Tundras and snow covered lands
15-17: Farms and towns
18-19: Larger cities
20: Capitals and castles
what would happing if all the dice landed on a 20?
then you have a very busy continent
not all of those are d20s though, so you’d have to come up with another method for the other ones
Adjusted for all dice you might have
D20
1-5: Plains and fields
6-8: Forests
9-11: Mountains
12-14: Tundras and snow covered lands
15-17: Farms and towns
18-19: Larger cities
20: Capitals and castles
D12
1-3: Plains and fields
4-6: Forests
7-8: Mountains
9-10: Tundras and snow covered lands
11: Farms and towns
12: Larger cities
D10
1-3: Plains and fields
4-6: Forests
7-8: Mountains
9: Tundras and snow covered lands
10: Farms and towns
D8
1-4: Plains and fields
5-6: Forests
7: Mountains
8: Tundras and snow covered lands
D6
1-3: Plains and fields
4: Forests
5-6: Mountains
D4
1-2: Plains and fields
3: Forests
4: Mountains
Holy shit. Definitely using this.
I swore at how simple this motherfucking thing is. You’re all bastards and i love you.
BomBARDed is a great DnD podcast-episodes are 1 hour long. It’s lighthearted and not so plot heavy-the premise is that all party members are Bards (multiclassing). Episodes also include an original song written for an event in the podcast!
so I’m trying to collate all the links for who’s on which platforms
and I thought I’d set up a (tentative) opt in contact sheet?
so if you wanna, here’s a google spreadsheet you can go add your username/contact for various plaforms to! and find mine, in progress (spoiler: I’m basically curlicuecal everywhere)
please only add (and edit) your own info
link under the cut cuz I might switch to moderation later
I’ve seen a few interesting posts about Dungeons and Dragons alignments that all share two interesting commonalities:
1) They think the two-axis system of Law vs Chaos and Good vs Evil is too restrictive for people who like to roleplay. 2) They try to redeem the two-axis system by redefining Law and Chaos in ways that make sense to them personally.
Good and Evil aren’t usually a topic of debate on these posts – it’s easy enough to play a character as generally doing the right thing or as being a total bastard. Discussion on acts of more debatable morality (e.g. torturing a villain for vital information, killing an innocent person by accident, sacrificing one for the good of all) tends to veer towards whether the action itself qualifies as good or evil, and not whether good and evil themselves need to be redefined. Conversely, I’ve seen Law and Chaos rewritten as Community vs Individuality, Tradition vs Cultural Mutability, Authority vs Anarchy – all interesting ideas that tend to reflect more on the person writing them than the actual purpose of the Law vs Chaos axis.
I’m not saying these people are wrong, but that these players (as well as the fine folks who wrote the 5e Handbooks) are placing too much significance on the purpose or intention of Law vs Chaos. The historical secret is that Law vs Chaos alignment never had any deep meaning behind it – or, at least, it never had any meaning deeper than the Pittsburgh Penguins versus the Vancouver Canucks.
I’ll explain how, but it requires a bit of a history lesson. The idea of Lawful and Chaotic alignments – as well as a number of other cornerstones of Dungeons and Dragons – came from a different game: a miniature wargame called Chainmail. It’s time for a deep dive.
So, it IS though. @curriebelle explains how the alignments functioned in Chainmail, but not where those concepts came from, which was *almost certainly* the Eternal Champion stories. That’s why Chaotic Neutral is explained as an alignment of pure randomness – because in Moorcock, Law and Chaos weren’t human concepts, but rather unknowable cosmic forces. Most of Moorcock’s heroes are on the side of Law, not because Law is better (in fact, in the Corum books, the gods of Law are pretty explicitly shown to also be assholes), but because the predictablity and stability of Law isn’t as dangerous for human life. On the flip side, Jerry Cornelius is a hero of Chaos in a world gone too far over to Law, and is imho the quintessential depiction of what Chaotic Neutral *is* (seriously, just read the wiki entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Cornelius)
Thing is, Gygax’s understanding of Moorcock’s ideas is… limited, at best, and he reduces it to a boring and kinda racist Nature & Tribal Barbarism (chaos) vs Civilization (Law) nonsense. That’s why Gygax’s Elves are Lawful; they represent Proper Western Civilization. You CAN get that feeling from Moorcock, IF you’d only read his Dorian Hawkmoon & Elric stuff (which tbh was all that was out at the time! Moorcock was a new, hip, edgy dude on the scene in 1971, upending the more traditional notions of fantasy with Weird Shit). But it’s basically the postmodernist problem of continued interpretation and reinterpretation: Gygax’s model was already a simplified version of Moorcock’s, in turn misinterpreted by other people.
*deep breath* Also, @curriebelle ’s take on the Xaosciects in Planescape: Torment is unfair and doesn’t examine the entire situation. Planescape the pre-existing campaign setting was literally designed to examine D&D alignment and take it to its furthest, most absurdist conclusions. To go whole hog and ask, “if we take two axis alignment completely seriously and use it as the cosmological underpinnings of a universe, how does that look..?” It goes back to the Moorcockian ideas of these versions of Law and Chaos being *very much beyond petty mortal understanding*, and asks what does a universe where that is true look like? Which is how we get Absolute Law represented by dice-shaped robots, and Absolute Chaos by giant parasitic carnivorous rainbow frogs. The Xaosciects represent what happens when mortals try to understand absolute chaos and to live under its’ precepts: *it’s not meant for us.* Similarly, the Mercykillers represent what happens when we try to adhere to absolute law with no concern for silly mortal stuff. Planescape at its best is D&D interrogating its own alignment system; at the time of publication, 20 years worth of players and GMs wrestling with it and trying for their own interpretations. And, notably, Planescape’s titular planes actually have seventeen gradients/interpretations of the alignment system, ranging from law-as-just-blind-rules to law-as-civilization to chaos-as-madness to chaos-as-a-state-of-nature. Planescape offers no absolute answers, but at its best is a neat interrogation of all this nonsense.
This is a great addition! I’ll admit, I hadn’t heard of Moorcock before this, so it’s neat to learn about.
I think you’re close when you say it’s a problem of reinterpretation (although I wouldn’t agree it’s postmodern – to get postmodernism you either have to use the reference in an ironic way or juxtapose it with something else. This is just someone misunderstanding what they’re referencing). Gygax used Moorcock’s morality for Chainmail and oversimplified, and then because he oversimplified it, he misused it in D&D.
If Law and Chaos are “not meant for mortals” as you put it, but are meant to be more nebulous overarching godly concepts beyond our understanding, then I think you’ve made my main point better than I did: that Law and Chaos are pretty poor concepts to guide mere mortals in their roleplaying! They’re philosophical discussions beyond the scope of the table – depending on the table. It doesn’t help that Gygax defines the terms so sloppily. D&D IS a separate entity from Moorcock and even from Chainmail. He can’t expect all players to have read the work he’s clumsily referencing, and Gygax’s own definitions are truly, truly garbage. If he’d understood his own nine-category morality then Planescape wouldn’t need seventeen categories to explore it properly, you see?
Planescape does seem to be the exception to the rule, though – I’m glad there’s some self-awareness of the awkwardness of the D&D moral system – but I find some of Planescape’s “explorations” more interesting than others. The association of chaos with gender non-conformity is an interesting one, which I think deserves a lot more prodding. Associating gender fluidity with chaos implicitly associates rigid gender roles with law. That’s an essay right there.
On the other hand I find the definition of Chaos as “gibbering madness because We Cannot Understand Chaos’s True Nature” to be tedious. “What is chaos?” “Well, if you know, you’ll go mad.” Okay, well, then what is there to discuss? That’s why I’m not so hot on the Xaosciects. Nonsense is the end of the conversation.
Today’s aesthetic: keeping the same tab open in your browser for three solid weeks because you’re definitely going to get around to reading and/or acting on whatever’s in it any minute now.
tumblhoard-paladinkit 