Fanfic Journal: “What Do You Hear in These Sounds,” chapter 1

Read chapter 1 here.

Fic summary

Fel’rekt Lafeen is a very good listener.

Or: how Fel’rekt joined Bregan D’aerthe, became an unlicensed therapist to some Very Sad Elf Boys, kissed a few of them, eventually became a lieutenant, and ended up slinging a gun in Waterdeep with everyone’s favorite pansexual disaster.

Introductory Notes

Listen, I know I have two unfinished longfic about sad drow boys being sad, and I haven’t forgotten them, but this story ambushed me in the dead of night. It combines a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to see together in a fic:

  • The origin story of Fel’rekt Lafeen, the trans male Bregan D’aerthe lieutenant in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. Since we are told very little about him, there’s a lot of freedom to invent him. Is that what the kids call “free real estate?” 🤣
  • More internality and introspection from Jarlaxle and his band than we see in canon. (Which is to say, any). In particular, I’ve always been interested to see how Jarlaxle would have been affected by Zak’s death, and how Bregan D’aerthe might have suffered as a result.
  • The boys of Bregan D’aerthe (and their leader) getting some well-deserved therapy. I mean, seriously, most of them probably have PTSD in some form, because #TheInherentTraumaOfMenzoberranzan
  • Sad drow boys kissing. And just generally queering the heck out of Faerûn.

And as we all know, we must write the fic we wish to see in the world. So, one transatlantic flight later, here’s chapter one.

Also, necessary disclaimers:

  • Lolthite drow are pretty awful, and we’re in a period where Jarlaxle’s alignment was listed as neutral evil. Many warnings may apply; I’ll tag them as they pop up.
  • I am not trans. I am agender, however, and I like to think I’m at least somewhat aware of trans/enby discourse, and I’ve extensively researched how to sensitively portray trans characters. But please please please let me know if I fuck it up.
  • Yes, therapy is more than just listening. No, I don’t condone unlicensed therapy IRL. But hey, this is Menzoberranzan and it’s the best they’ve got.
  • There will probably not be explicit smut, unless I somehow manage to break decades of precedent. But there will likely be some non-explicit spice.
  • I’m not going to expend too much effort staying compliant to canon. Because fuck R.A. Salvatore, that’s why. He doesn’t deserve his fans. I reject his canon and substitute my own.
  • That said, I have nothing but love for the folks who worked on Dragon Heist, like Chris Perkins or Matt Mercer, as well as Jeremy Crawford, who was the one who came out and said, “yes, Jarlaxle is pan; did the rainbow cape give it away?” I love how they’ve made Forgotten Realms queerer, and I wish RAS hadn’t missed the memo.

Content warnings for this chapter: casual mentions of slavery, fantastic racism, violence and death, mild transphobia (mostly internalized) and deadnaming.

… so about what you would expect from a closeted trans male character trying to survive an evil matriarchy. This chapter will be the worst of it; I don’t want this to be a story of trans suffering.

Just kissing. Always kissing.

End Notes

“What Do You Hear In These Sounds” is the title of a Dar Williams song about the experience of therapy. Yes, this is the second fic I’ve used a Dar Williams song title for; why do you ask? 😆

House Xalyth is a reference to Xalyth’s Company, a merchant clan that specializes in trading gems, led by a matron. It’s mentioned in the Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue sourcebook.

This time period in Bregan D’aerthe’s history — between Zak’s death and the start of The Legacy of the Drow trilogy — isn’t well developed. I’m honestly not sure who Jarlaxle’s first officers would have been then. I think Kimmuriel — though he works with Jarlaxle as early as the 1010s — didn’t fully become a lieutenant until the fall of his house in 1358. Valas and Rai-guy’s timelines are wibbly-wobbly enough to make it work, so that’s what I decided.

Was Jarlaxle always aware of the circumstances of his birth? Maybe not; just another thing I might know if I could stomach more of RAS’ deathless prose.

As a general rule, any drow words I use will come from here.

In the interest of full disclosure… I really don’t know where I’m going with this. I don’t have an outline. I don’t know how many chapters there will be. (Though it’s gonna cover a period of about 150 years). I don’t know what all pairings there will be (though I do intend to smash Fel’rekt and Jarlaxle together like two Barbie dolls). I don’t know who will find their way to the therapist’s couch. I’m going to try to make chapters semi-standalone, for that reason, because it’s quite likely you’ll be waiting a while between them.

Two years of Pathfinding, part 1: basics + my sine wave of opinions

A little over two years ago, I embarked on my journey into Pathfinder 2e — and a little less than two years ago, I wrote “Five months of Pathfinding,” detailing my experience with the system thus far.

Well, here it is, September 2023, and we recently wrapped up the Agents of Edgewatch campaign, the campaign we started back in May 2021. I retired my redeemer champion Kivran, and I’m about to embark on a new campaign with a thaumaturge named Tak. So at this point I’ve played a character from 1-20, played through an entire adventure/story arc, and built a new character of a different class.

I think it’s time for my much-more-informed opinions!

… in a multi-part format, as it turns out that I have MANY opinions. A whole-ass wavelength of them, in fact.

Some basics

As a starting point, let me share/remind you of the statistics on the party, campaign, variant rules, deaths, etc.

We were playing the level 1-20 Adventure Path (AP) “Agents of Edgewatch,” which can be glossed as “fantasy guards at a fantasy world’s fair.” It starts pretty lighthearted, but quickly descends into some dark and heavy stuff.

Our party was five people, and we had one GM (Josh). We had eight different characters over the course of the adventure, due to three character deaths.

For reference, player/character names and party composition:

  • I was playing a Taldan human champion of Iomedae named Kivran.
  • My husband Matt was playing Lucio, a Taldan human swashbuckler. Who, despite all our jokes about his absurd movement speed, was not a sylph.
  • Chloe played the leshy Shep. Originally a druid, she retrained as a summoner when the class was released in Secrets of Magic. (This will be a recurring theme).
  • Diego started by playing the kobold alchemist Jabi, but retrained as inventor when Guns and Gears came out. Jabi died at level 13, and he returned as Zokaratz, a fetchling witch from Shadow Absalom.
  • Poor Nick went through three different characters. He started as Nathraak, a Varisian human wizard. Then, when Secrets of Magic came out, he also retrained, as a magus. Nathraak bought the farm at level 10, so he created Frøya, an Ulfen human thaumaturge. Sadly, Frøya only lasted for three levels; she died in the same battle as Jabi. Nick rerolled as Cedela, a Galtan human rogue, who was with us until the end, but died a dramatic scripted death in the final battle.

As far as variant rules go, we used Free Archetype from the get-go. Later on in the adventure, we switched from the standard progression rules to Automatic Bonus Progression (for story-related reasons which I’ll get to in a later post).

“How did you like Pathfinder, Lise?”

That would depend on when you asked me! I ended on a generally positive note — as judged by my joining the new campaign! But there were many ups and downs along the way.

You can see my “new TTRPG energy” and optimism in my August 2021 post. “Okay, this is different, and crunchier than I expected,” I seem to be saying, “but there are so many possibilities! I can work with this.” I was excited to try something new, and optimistic about what lay ahead for me and my character.

“Holy shit, this is Mathfinder!”

Sometime after that I hit a low. Maybe it was trying to figure out how shields work (“okay, so I subtract the shield’s hardness from the damage taken, then the shield and I both take the remaining damage. If the shield takes more than like 15 damage, it breaks, and has to be repaired. Plus I have to take an action each turn to raise a shield. So how useful are they, really??”) Or maybe it was the language of the Glimpse of Redemption champion reaction. (“What the hell does ‘The ally gains resistance to all damage against the triggering damage equal to 2 + your level’ mean?”)

At one point in time, I made a joke like, “Nobody said there would be math.” To which player Nick said something like, “Uh, everybody said that, Lise. There’s a reason they call it Mathfinder.”

But by that point I was learning more about the world of Golarion and Kivran’s place in it. I loved my character’s complex relationship with the church of Iomedae, and her growing connection to Pharasma. I loved coming up with fun downtime activities for our characters, like “we’re going to go over to the Foreign Quarter and get some dumplings from Tian Town.” Or “oh hey, if you’re going to the Temple of Norgorber could you pick up some Mwangi coffee?”

So I guess my opinion at that point would be “I don’t need all these rules pls let me just play D&D 5E but in Golarion.”

“How do I stealth past the bunyip?”

After a while, I could calculate myself how much damage my shield mitigated, or how much resistance my champion’s reaction granted to an ally. At the very least I was comfortable doing “champion stuff.”

But the minute I left the world of champions, I got confused.

How does stealth/concealment work? I still don’t quite know. I know there are many different degrees of “seen”, eg., undetected, obscured, hidden, invisible, etc. I know there are flat d20 rolls you have to do to hit somebody at different levels, eg. a DC5 flat check to hit someone who’s obscured.

But since I basically couldn’t stealth anyway — due to a mere 25ft of movement speed plus being CLANKY CLANK in heavy armor — it rarely came up.

… until I was forced to sneak into a dockside warehouse, and suddenly was attacked by a fish.

Lemme tell you, I sure know what a bunyip is now, even if I still don’t fully understand the stealth rules.

Magic was another one that was more complicated than I expected. Prepared casters vs. spontaneous casters, PF2e’s more traditional take on Vancian magic than 5e’s, four different spell lists, devotion spells, focus spells, cantrips, heightened spells, discrete vs. continuous heightening patterns, and on and on.

Mostly I didn’t have to deal with it as a champion — except for the Lay on Hands focus spell. But my fellow party members translated it simply for me — it always healed 6 * (1/2 your level rounded up).

But then I (very briefly) retrained into cleric archetype. Suddenly I had a few divine spells, and I had to figure out spell heightening. “Cleric” was appropriate as a descriptor at this point, because it felt like I was trying to read Old Church Slavonic. This conversation cleared some things up, but I promptly forgot most of it when Book of the Dead came out and I decided the Soul Warden archetype was more along the lines of what I wanted for Kivran, and so — yup — I retrained.

Other points of confusion: the stages of poisons and diseases. Grappling (has this actually changed from the bullshit that was 3.5?) Counteract checks.

“Why am I not playing a rogue, again?”

I think another downturn for me was when we hit level 13, and we lost Jabi and Frøya in the same battle. That wasn’t the issue itself — the issue was a combination of factors that made me feel a lot weaker than the other party members.

One was that the new characters came in at level 15, while the survivors needed to wait until the end of the chapter to be leveled up two levels. (I presume the GM was like, “uh, the party just lost two characters; they need a little bit more fire power and HP to actually survive this encounter”).

At around this level, too, the damage numbers for dps classes just got absurdly high. My husband’s swashbuckler gets in an appropriate finisher and rolls well? 100+ damage. (To say nothing of his absurd move speed; Mr. “I have 75ft of movement speed plus I also have a fucking climb speed when I have Panache”). Our new rogue Cedela gets trapped in a narrow hallway with a bad guy? I shuffle over at “I’m wearing plate armor” speeds to protect her, only to watch the bad guy be wiped off the map in one of the rogue’s turns.

What also felt bad was the fact that the rogue also went in the Intimidation direction, an area I had invested in heavily for Kivran. It often felt like we were competing to see who could Demoralize an opponent first — and Cedela had the higher Perception, so it was mostly gonna be her.

I was also annoyed when I found out that she had the Scare to Death feat, the pinnacle of the Intimidation skill feat line. “How do you have that at level 15? I can’t get it until level 16,” I asked Nick one day.

“Oh, rogues get skill feats every level instead of every other level,” he answered.

It was completely irrational, but it felt like the rug (or rogue heyyyy) being pulled out from under me. I thought I understood the system, and I expected that once I understood it, I’d have the class fantasy. But it turns out the system had more surprises for me, and I didn’t have what I wanted, after all.

While the class fantasy of a redeemer champion isn’t, and shouldn’t be, doing damage, it does suck when you feel like you don’t have a chance to even get to the fight before combat ends. Everything a redeemer does well involves being within 15′ of the enemy and allies, after all. And it always sucks feeling like someone else in the party is taking over “your thing” — Intimidation/Demoralize, in this case.

“I finally feel like the tanky tank I wanted to be.”

The level wonkiness worked itself out once we were all level 15. And the rogue’s player and I got better about not stepping on each other’s toes with Intimidation — even learning the advantages of having two people who can Demoralize.

But the “class fantasy” part I had to make a conscious effort to fix. I did that by retraining — basically reallocating some of my character choices.

I can’t take all the credit, though. My party members were amazing. Hearing that I wasn’t having fun, they all threw out a bunch of suggestions for retraining, some wackier than others.

Ultimately I dropped the Edgewatch Detective archetype in favor of the Marshall archetype, focusing on Inspiring Marshall Stance (the Diplomacy option) rather than Dread Marshall Stance (the Intimidation one — I again wanted to avoid overlapping the rogue). Job done: I immediately felt like a hero. I get to pose dramatically, and it empowers all my allies. Then I can also do things like give them an extra action!

Later on I also added on the Bastion archetype, which improved my shield and shield block action, allowing me to do things like block attacks to adjacent allies.

Finally, I was the tanky tank of my dreams, and things were good.

“How can I keep track all these feats?”

Look, this game is crunchy. And like anything complex, the complexity increases exponentially, not linearly, as the system grows.

In PF2e, some of the most important puzzle pieces are feats. Each feat is a cool thing your character can do that breaks the rules in a small way and differentiates them from others. They’re comparable to feats in D&D 5e, in that way, but unlike in 5e, where they’re rare (and have to be swapped out for an ability score increase), you get a feat or multiple feats at every level in addition to your ASIs.

In fact, by the time you reach level 20 in this game, you will have +/- 32 feats of different types. With the popular Free Archetype variant rule, you’ll add on an additional 10 class and/or archetype feats.

This is vastly simplified, due to variant rules, differing class progressions, types of feats being tradable in various ways, etc — but you get the idea. You have a lot of what are essentially variant rules and special actions to keep track of.

By the time I reached level 17, I had around 40 feats, and man was the cognitive load high, especially during combat. I’d (mostly) plan what I was going to do on my turn, but when my turn came up and I said it aloud, somebody would say, “oh remember you have [other feat],” or “remember [this buff given by one of their feats],” and “probably not a good idea to use [that action] now because X.” It kind of turned into combat by committee.

There also ended up being a lot of retconning — “oh wait, I didn’t actually have my shield raised, so I couldn’t have blocked that. I should actually take full damage and my shield should take none.”

None of this felt good.

Surprisingly, combat didn’t bog down nearly as much as I expected under this weight. I’m not sure if this is due to a general systems improvement over 1e/D&D 3.5e (the latter being where I once battled a purple worm for six hours of real time), or that my fellow players were systems experts who planned out their turns ahead of time and helped others do the same. Or both!

But still… I often joked I needed a flowchart to play my character.

“… that’s the neat thing, you don’t.”

Around that time was the OGL 1.1 kerfuffle I wrote about here. This definitely made me much more invested in Pathfinder as an ecosystem, seeing how Paizo responded (sometimes with delightful cattiness) to Wizards’ poor business and ethical decisions.

It also led to me watching a lot more YouTube videos about Pathfinder, which is where I discovered The Rules Lawyer, who (imho) is the savviest and most entertaining of the YTers in this space.

In his video Let’s do the SAME COMBAT in D&D and Pathfinder 2E!, he dropped a piece of wisdom on me that has stuck with me. It has helped me feel better about making mistakes, retconning things, house ruling things on the fly, etc.

The quote (beginning at 13:30; emphasis mine):

So as you can see a number of modifiers can happen in a single roll, which can be overwhelming at first. Though in my experience it’s something people get used to. And if you’re not tracking it all and nobody’s noticing you’re still having fun.

Was I having fun? I sure was. In character, Kivran was developing a crush on Cedela, thus perpetuating the “Kivran has a type, and that type is evil women who look like they could suplex her” joke.

Out of character, I still genuinely liked the other players, who were helpful, funny, and like-minded. How did I find these amazing people on r/lfg, and how were we still getting along two years later?? It truly is a miracle.

Around this time I was also realized that this isn’t just difficult for me. Nick, perusing his character sheet at the start of his turn, once said, “Okay, let me see if I can find some bullshit that can help in this ridiculously long list of feats.” (“Oh yeah,” I remembered, “Cedela has twice as many skill feats as Kivran”). Diego, who played our witch, also had a very complicated build, and often mentioned how much anxiety he had before every turn.

Given the high level of systems knowledge these two players had — enough so that their idea of a fun time is “rebuilding PF1e classes in PF2e” and “homebrewing a variant system for crafting magic items” — I knew no one expected me to know it all and to get it right 100% of the time.

Challenge accepted

As we reached level 18 or so, I realized another thing that was different from 5e: It was still challenging.

At level 18 or 19, there was at least one battle where we were forced to retreat from a combat to avoid character death(s). In the same dungeon, we also came across a trap that, if run RAW, would have one-shot Kivran and outright killed her via the Death trait. (GM Josh ran it as “this seems incredibly overtuned to me; let’s just play it out and see what happens; no consequences”).

My general feel about challenge is: if death, and loss of your character, isn’t on the table, it’s not fun. Nothing means anything if it can’t be taken away, and, as I’ve said before, there’s no emotion that humans won’t pay to experience in the safe environment of a story. That includes loss, grief, and fear.

So to see us still struggling in a meaningful way — at the level where, in Out of the Abyss, our party was able to defeat multiple demon lords in a single battle, almost untouched — was really fucking cool.

Also, not only were the encounters challenging, they were interesting. One of my favorite fights in those high levels was when we were attacked by a living mural, which turned some of us temporarily two-dimensional. This led to Kivran being worn on the cloak of her beloved Cedela for the rest of the session — a situation which had surprisingly few downsides!

Or, as the GM said, when I asked if I could still take the Demoralize action as a 2D picture on a cloak: “Sure, because Cedela’s ass does not quit.”

The end of the road

Finally we reached level 20. I will admit, at that point, the challenge did sort of vanish. I permanently had a raised shield, I could use Glimpse of Redemption and Shield Warden on the same ally at the same time, and I could make monsters shit their pants with fear just by walking into a room. We crushed our way through the final dungeon in record time, and it seemed like nothing could stand up to us for more than a couple of combat rounds.

Given that, the final battle might have been astonishingly anti-climactic… except that the other players did everything they could to make it awesome.

Zokaratz threw out some, um, ill-advised spells that caused the room to start falling apart around us, video game boss battle-style. At one point Lucio was climbing up the wall with Zokaratz on his back to escape the collapsing floor, and Shep’s bear eidolon was scrambling to avoid falling into the ever-growing pit at the center of the room. As part of a scripted death, Cedela exploded in a fine mist of blood upon striking down the Big Bad, splattering Kivran (who was fighting beside her). It ended with us all piling into a portal to Shadow Absalom to escape the falling tower, in a “come with me if you want to live” moment.

It was easily the most epic final battle I have ever seen in a tabletop campaign. (Yes, even moreso than Out of the Abyss).

In Conclusion (for now)

That final battle was definitely a high point to end on, and that informs the positive tone of this post. But it is interesting to think that if I had stopped playing at certain points, my opinions might never have evolved to this level, and I might be telling everybody about what a bad experience I had and how I’d never play Pathfinder again.

I also think that if my group hadn’t been so ding-dang awesome, it wouldn’t have been as enjoyable. I can easily picture playing with a less experienced group, where we were all confused by the mechanics. That picture includes hours of time wasted looking up and arguing over rules, and it just isn’t pretty.

I can also picture a boring final battle, if we had all played optimally and just beat the boss until they were dead. And without the RP and character development I put into Kivran (and which the others nurtured), I wouldn’t have been as invested in the outcome.

Lucky for you, it’s been a positive experience, and I still have lots more to say about it. Next time I’ll get more detailed on how crunchy the game mechanics are, and help you to answer the question of “would I enjoy this game?”


Featured image: Party art by Iisjah Art/Natalia Komuniewska. An early iteration, since we still have Jabi and Nath!

Fanfic Journal: “A Prison Made of Chitin”, chapter 2

Read chapter 2 here

Summary

Test me, Mistress, Kzandr wanted to say. You will not find me wanting. Kzandr discovers his taste for blood, and draws the attention of one of the mistresses of Arach-Tinilith.

Introductory Notes

Content warnings for this chapter: mentions of slavery, incredibly inappropriate teacher/student relationships, power imbalance, and some non-explicit sexual content with dubious consent.

End Notes

Nithrys (briefly mentioned) is my current PC, an aberrant mind sorcerer. He won’t show up much in Chitin, but ideally he’ll get his own multi-chapter fic after I finish this one. 

“Shebali” means “non-noble drow” in the Drow fan dictionary. 

For this, and for all the Drow words that pop up, I use a combination of this Drow Dictionary PDF (which is one part the glossary from 2e’s Drow of the Underdark, one part fan-created), and Chosen of Eilistraee’s Drow Translator (which includes everything from the PDF). I tend to prefer the canon stuff to the fan-created stuff, but there’s only so much one can do with the vocabulary Ed Greenwood gave us!

House Kenafin is one of the two houses that will later merge and become House Melarn, who become major antagonists in the more recent Drizzt novels. They’re definitely the house bringing the religious fanaticism to the party! Kyrnill is actually a minor canon character, named as the matron some years later. 

Vaen’jraa’kah is another PC, a barbarian/ranger. She’ll come up a lot more when we finally get to the actual plot and not just Kzandr backstory.

Ethestra’tana is first priestess of House Vel’bol and… both an NPC and a PC. It’s weird; we’ll get to it! Aksharu, as I mentioned last time, is an NPC, second priestess of the house. 

Kzandr is like 5’2”. Perfectly average for a male drow, but I do enjoy the mental image of him looking Kyrnill directly in the boobs.

The reason I describe this chapter as dubcon is because, even though Kzandr is clearly into Kyrnill’s seduction, he’s also very much in a coercive situation (teacher vs. student, age differences, truth spells used without consent), and in a society where he’s not really free to say no. Pretty much anything involving Kyrnill and Kzandr is going to have this tag. 

Keptolo is described in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes as the consort of Lolth. He’s basically the minor god of “keeping your sugar mama happy.”

“Orthae Thalack” is fan-Drow for “holy war.” As far as I know there’s no canonical place where drow go to train as paladins, so I created one. 

As far as the mechanics go, Kzandr is an Oath of Conquest paladin. By default, that’s a lawful evil oath, as it’s very much aligned with the devils of the Nine Hells, who hate the chaotic evil demons of the Abyss where Lolth lives. But with DM Bill’s permission, I modified it to be more suitable for a chaotic evil paladin.


I missed writing this bastard. It’s funny to me how I can switch seamlessly between writing Bright Future — which I’d gloss as “a sad drow male learns about love from a manic druid dream girl who doesn’t own a hairbrush” — and this story, which is the Udadrow at their worst. (I literally got back to writing this chapter the day after posting the last chapter of Bright Future).

Anyway! I cherish your feedback, positive or constructive! And your opinion: is Kzandr going to be able to keep Kyrnill happy? What’s his next poor life choice gonna be?


Featured image by Max Muselmann on Unsplash

Fanfic journal: Bright Future, chapter “Chiana”

Read “Chiana here”

Chapter Summary

“You don’t see the spider that bites you.” Mavash and companions explore the archmage’s sanctum in Sorcere, in search of the grimoires that will allow them (eventually) to send the demon princes back to the Abyss.

They find more than they bargained for.

Chapter Front Notes

Again I apologize for my long radio silence. I blame *gestures broadly at her life*.

But this chapter is a nice n’ long one, so get a beverage, dim the lights, and strap in!

Previously on Bright Future…

With a haunting vision/nightmare of a different Jorlan fresh in her mind, Mavash joins her companions as they make their way into Menzoberranzan, their goal Gromph’s grimoires in Sorcere, to complete the ritual of the Dark Heart. At the same time, Jorlan contemplates his own secret plans, recently set into motion…

Chapter End Notes

Chiana is Drow for “betrayal.” 😈

Luckily for you, you probably won’t have to wait too long for the resolution. I have taken September as a leave of absence from work, thus I am anticipating more writing time.

Eager to hear what y’all think is going on here. (And as always, I welcome any constructive feedback).

Unrelatedly, I had a bunch of false starts on this chapter, and threw out a few hundred words of Lux/Neheedra banter that just didn’t fit. I still think it’s funny, though, so I might post it as a light interlude before the next chapter.

(I’ll leave the specific footnotes in AO3; they’re sizable, and also somewhat spoilery).

ETA: I got permission from DM Nixon to link his variation on the map I mention in the footnotes. So please enjoy this spoooooky map as you navigate your way through this scene.


Featured image: “white fountain pen,” Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

Dumb Plant Facts with Lise: the Stanky Red Trillium

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — when trilliums are in bloom! Since I can’t get out in the woods much right now, instead have some completely useless facts about red trilliums.

Red trillium (Trillium erectum), like all trilliums, is a monocot, meaning it arises from a seed with a single cotyledon or seed leaf. Most plants are dicots, which have seeds with two cotyledons, so this makes trilliums a little bit special. At least, when I was a young teenager, I thought monocots were pretty cool.

That probably says something about cool a teenager I was not.

Therefore trilliums are class Liliopsida (monocot)*, and order Liliales, both of which are fancy ways of saying, with varying degrees of freedom… “it’s kind of like a lily.” But rather than being a member of family Liliaceae, it’s a member of the bunchflower family, Melanthiaceae, which are described as — get this — “lilioid monocots.”

That is… “it’s kind of like a lily.” Boy, botanists are good at naming things.

* Botanists will argue if monocots are a class or a clade. A clade is a category distinct from a taxa, based on a system of classification that is more focused on evolutionary relationships between plants than taxonomy traditionally is. (Except taxonomy is becoming more evolutionary-focused… okay, let’s not go into the whole weird conversation I had when I asked ChatGPT to explain cladistics to me). But for the purposes of this post — where I will never mention cladistics again! — let’s go with what iNaturalist says, which is that class Liliopsida = monocots.

Also grasses are in class Liliopsida, too. LOOK I DON’T MAKE THE RULES.

Have I lost you yet? No? Oh good. Let’s get into the actual dumb plant facts. Some these are about trilliums as a genus; some are more specific to red trilliums.

  • Every aerial structure in trilliums — leaves, sepals, petals, reproductive structures — comes in multiples of threes. Hence the “tri” in the name.

    … Wait, I just realized… it’s basically “tri-lilium,” isn’t it? Botanists, you bastards.
  • As a super cool teenager (already established), I typed up the Mary Oliver poem “Trilliums” for a school assignment. (Which is technically about T. grandiflorum, the white trillium). In the process I discovered… each line is indented by three spaces. Mary Oliver, you magnificent bastard, I read your book! (Dream Work, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986)
  • T. erectum has a funky-looking six-lobed ovary with six stamens arranged around it. (See picture below). Again: multiples of three.
Closeup of red trillium, showed the male and female reproductive structures.
Closeup of red trillium’s male and female reproductive structures. Hubba hubba. Source: Wikipedia
  • This makes the red trillium monoecious, meaning it has both male and female reproductive structures on the same plant. (Hubba hubba). And since there’s only a single influorescence (a fancy way of saying “flower”), it is also a “perfect” or bisexual flower, having both pistils and stamens.

    Thank you, botanists, for acknowledging the perfection of bisexuals. I’m ready for your hot take on elf-earred disaster bisexuals; call me 🤙
  • Red trilliums, being bisexual, can self-pollinate (wait, you can’t?) However, they set seed more reliably when cross-pollinated. It’s hypothesized this is because it has a “self-incompatibility” mechanism, which a number of different plants have as an adaptation. Presumably this encourages genetic diversity?

    Considering plants can reproduce asexually, they already have a lot to answer for when it comes to genetic diversity 😂
  • Trilliums are morphologically “scapes,” meaning they produce no true leaves or stems above ground. (Think of a garlic scape… GODDAMNIT I ALREADY SAID DO NOT EAT THE TRILLIUM). The stem is just an extension of the rhizome, and the “leaves” are actual flower bracts. However, these bracts photosynthesize, and have the same internal and external structure as leaves, so for all intents and purposes… they’re leaves.

That’s all the dumb (red) trillium facts I’ve got, nature fiends. It’s breakfast time as I write this, so maybe I’ll go have a nice omelet now, with garlic and tomatoes AND DEFINITELY NOT TRILLIUMS.


Featured image: two red trilliums (Trillium erectum). Taken by Lise Fracalossi, May 1 2020, in Lane Conservation Area in Lunenburg, MA.

Fanfic Journal: Bright Future, chapter “Jindurnen”

Read “Jindurnen” here

Chapter Summary

“Even the prey thinks the spider’s web is beautiful.” Mavash and companions set out towards Menzoberranzan and Tier Breche to complete their half of the Dark Heart ritual. Jorlan contemplates faces, both hidden and revealed.

Chapter End Notes

  • When I played through this, I did not know nearly as much about Jarlaxle’s gadgets as I do now, and so did not know about his eyepatch that protects him from any sort of magical scrying or telepathy. In retrospect, I think Mavash should have noticed that he’s psychically invisible to her! At least with some prompting…
  • Um’raxel is an NPC from the drow intrigue game I play in! (And which I have begun novelizing here!) She’s a Circle of Spores druid who is aunt to many of the PCs, including mine. She experiments with drider venom and may kiiiinda be using it to turn one of her nieces (another PC) into a sort of arachnid barbarian. I couldn’t resist the chance to name drop her here.
  • I am very clearly taking liberties with spells here. Seeming is probably the only spell that would disguise this many people, and even that’s a stretch.

“Jindurnen” is “faces” in the Drow fan dictionary.

This chapter is pretty much all my invention. We glossed over the actual journey to Menzo from the Tower, with DM Nixon saying, “okay, you disguise yourself as drow or go invisible, as necessary.” So in writing this, I wanted to play with Mavash taking on a drow disguise, and its effect on Jorlan.

(“Why doesn’t she just wildshape into the shape of a spider or something?” Reasons, I assure you. At least one of which is just “because I decided it worked better narratively”).

Also, this was the part where the DM absolutely insisted there would be no slumming at noodle shops during our infiltration of Menzoberranzan. “None. None-dles,” said he. No time for that when you’re saving the world, I guess!


Featured image: Landscape shaped like a face (state 1), Wenceslaus Hollar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Fanfic journal: “A Prison Made of Chitin,” chapter 1

Oh no more drow bullshit.

Read “A Prison Made of Chitin,” chapter one, here.

Summary

Kzandr Vel’bol Veldrin is honored to serve as paladin of Lolth, and wants nothing more than to give his life in her service. But when his eldest sister Ethestra’tana is murdered, he finds the carefully-constructed fiction of his life unraveling. Will the mercy of the Spider Queen save him? (Spoiler: it will not).

Introductory Notes

This series — “The Fortunes of House Vel’bol Veldrin” — is the novelization of the ongoing drow intrigue campaign I’m playing in. While the campaign itself is homebrew, it begins in Menzoberranzan in 1325 DR, around the time Drizzt graduated from Melee-Magthere. (Canon characters may occasionally appear). We play members of the 20th house of Menzoberranzan, scheming and murdering their way up the hierarchy of the city.

(“Vel’bol Veldrin” is short for the ancient full name of the House, which basically is “what we do in the shadows” translated into Drow. Oh, we have fun…)

Drow fancier that I am, I had too many character ideas to play just one, so I decided I would play them serially, bringing each character’s arc to a good conclusion. Thus each fic in this series will be primarily the POV of one of my PCs, detailing how they experience the adventure. This work, “A Prison Made of Chitin,” is focused on Kzandr, the elderboy of the house, an Oath of Conquest paladin of Lolth, who in-game I have just managed to kill off in a narratively satisfying way. The first few chapters will be short character history vignettes about Kzandr, and then we’ll go into the adventure itself.

Because (Lolthite) Drow Are Awful ™, this is an evil campaign, and evil shit will happen in this story. In our campaign, we have safety mechanisms in place and have all opted into Some Pretty Dark Shit, though by consensus the darkest shit (torture, sexual violence) is veiled or off-screen. Of course, in this fic, any disturbing content will be tagged appropriately.

Content warnings for this chapter include: child abuse, blood sacrifice, some deep cultural misandry, slavery, and spiders.

Future CW are likely to include: murder (including of children), implied/referenced torture and mutilation, implied/referenced sexual assault, some deeply fucked up and not entirely consensual relationships (because what even is consent in an evil matriarchy??), body horror, transphobia and deadnaming, and probably a bunch of stuff I’m forgetting. I’ll tag them as they come up.

… yes, I do have another campaign novelization going right now, why do you ask? Trust me, I have not forgotten about Mavash and Jorlan and their much, much healthier relationship.

Chapter End Notes

I won’t introduce the PCs yet because you’ve only met Kzandr so far! Aksharu and Zeska are both NPCs — respectively, the second priestess and the Matron Mother.

Darthiir are surface elves.

Your comments are priceless, and constructive criticism is welcome ❤️


The featured image is art of Kzandr I commissioned from iisjah/Natalia Komuniewska

Lise opines: plant identification apps

Or: why I use iNaturalist.

I constantly see posts from my Facebook friends (and even in native plant communities) asking for recommendations on mobile apps to identify plants.

Inevitably someone will pop up with PictureThis, or Google Lens, or even Seek. But here’s why I use iNaturalist.org‘s mobile app.

Free

PictureThis is ad-supported if you don’t give them money. The premium version ranges in price from $30-$50/year, depending on plan.

The last thing I want when I’m in the woods is ads. And while I am willing to spend money for apps that are valuable to me, nothing I’ve seen has convinced me the IDs are any higher quality than what I can get for free with iNaturalist. It’s also more than I spend per year for, say, Zombies Run!, which IMHO gives a lot more content (hundreds, if not thousands, of adjustable length and intensity story-driven workouts).

Also, don’t quote me on this, but I would venture that PictureThis is taking an API and/or computer vision model that is available for free — potentially even the one collated by the California Academy of Sciences (see below) — and profiting off it.

I haven’t really played around with Google Lens, but I imagine it has the same problem as any Google product — if you’re not paying for it, then you are the product. Plus my experience with Google is that as soon as they decide they no longer want to develop a product, well, fuck you, even if it’s a product millions of people use. (Google Reader, I’m looking at you).

Scope of IDs

Look, you know me. If I could do nothing all day but touch plants, I’d be pretty happy.

But I also like spiders, and snakes, and mushrooms, and birds and mammals. I don’t call myself a real life druid for no reason; I observe any living thing that will stand still for long enough to get a picture of it.

(Also poop and dead things, too, because I’m classy like that).

On the other end of the scale, Google Lens will identify anything. But that has its limitations, too. It’s hard to get accurate predictions when your model includes every picture posted on the Google-curated internet. What happens when your plant happens to look like a snake — an example I came across recently? It’s not super helpful.

(In its defense have found it very useful for “hey I took a picture of this famous building in England and I have totally forgotten what it is, please help me, Architect Google!”)

Non-profit and mission-driven

Both Seek and iNaturalist meet the criteria above:

  • They’re truly free
  • They ID not just plants, but any form of life

But it’s more than that. Both are developed by the California Academy of Sciences, a non-profit organization with this mission:

The mission of the California Academy of Sciences is to regenerate the natural world through science, learning, and collaboration.

CalAcademy has a ton of different initiatives, but they are perhaps best known for their their computer vision algorithm tuned specifically to the natural world. That includes all kinds of life, from protists to blue whales!

Moreover, that model, like machine learning models everywhere, learns from user contribution. Those user observations are made available, for free, through the GBIF API, which is used by thousands of different organizations to conduct scientific research.

The way I look at it is: By using Seek or iNaturalist, you are contributing to the mission of regenerating the natural world.

Feels good, man.

Community science

So why choose iNaturalist over Seek? After all, the Seek app is definitely slicker of the two apps — it has gamification! By comparison, the iNat app looks clunky and buggy.

One big reason pertains to community/citizen science. When you observe something with Seek, it uses the CalAcademy CV model to identify your form of life, but it does not save that observation. You might learn from it — and certainly there’s value in that! — but you’re not helping the machine learning algorithm you know. Learn.

(For that matter, it’s debatable how much it helps you learn. I get a lot of value from going back through my old observations in iNat to remind myself where and when I observed something).

On top of that, Seek is pretty much just the CV model. Once you’ve made an ID, that’s it, you’re done. But on iNat, once you’ve made a preliminary ID, that’s where the fun begins.

See, once you’ve posted the observation, other people — real humans! — can come in and refine that ID. If you posted something that the CV could only ID to genus level, maybe some nice expert comes in and says, “hey you can tell X and Y species apart from the leaves; looks like X to me!”

When two other users confirm or refine your tentative ID to the species level, it is labeled “research grade.” Research grade observations are available in GBIF — helping science across the world! — and are used to train newer versions of the CV model.

And you are the expert! Know a lot about the trilliums of Massachusetts? Go identify trilliums! (That feature is website only currently. Alas). It’s yet another way you can use iNat to give back to citizen science.

Other nice to haves

  • Since iNat is community supported, you can use it to ID, say, birds by song. I’ve had a lot of luck recording birdsong in a voice memo, uploading it to iNat, tagging it as class Aves, and letting the birders have a go. Birders on iNat are an enthusiastic lot, and usually I’ll have an ID within minutes.
  • iNaturalist itself has an API (not the same as GBIF, I don’t think?) which allows you to write your own algorithm against iNat data. I’ve seen people use it to write nature quiz webapps; at one point in time I considered using it to answer the question of “how many taxa did I ID for the first time in 2020?”
  • As I mentioned earlier, iNat is a website first, and an app second. Maybe this is a con for you, I don’t know. But when I’m, you know, IDing trilliums of Massachusetts, it helps to see them on a big screen with a keyboard that allows me to write comments and use shortcuts.
  • Similar to what I mentioned above: Seek is video-based and real time; it does not save or import images to your photo app. iNaturalist can work on a live image, but most often I take the photos and ID them later.

Here’s a good comparison of the two apps.

Value to my life

This is unquantifiable, but in the early pandemic, iNaturalist saved my life. When I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, I went to the woods. I took pictures, and I participated in socially distanced bioblitzes, and identified hundreds of species. I didn’t stop using it after the pandemic, either. I’m now up to over a thousand observations across three countries and two continents.

(“What happens when you reach 1000 observations on iNat?” my friend Scott asked. I replied: “They send you a letter informing you that you’re legally a nerd”).

Could another app have done this? Maybe. But for me, it was iNat.


tl;dr: this is why I use iNaturalist, and donate $10/month to CalAcademy, even though I absolutely don’t need to.

Have I won you over? Go download the iNaturalist app for iOS or Android!

Meet Me In the Woods: Hepatica americana

(Look, I’ve been listening to a lot of Lord Huron lately and I couldn’t turn down the chance to make a reference)

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The snow has melted, spring ephemerals are… ephemering, and woodpeckers are gettin’ it on in the trees.

In my continuing effort to bring you more dumb plant facts, I figured I’d share some of the pictures of what I’ve been seeing in the woods in the past ~week or so.

This is round-lobed hepatica, Hepatica americana. It is a small and oft-overlooked spring ephemeral, found in the first weeks of April here in Massachusetts. For that reason, I like to call it my birthday flower, because it’s one of the few things blooming on April 6! In particular, these pictures were taken in Williamsburg, MA, on April 7th, during my annual “yurtmas” birthday trip.

The name “hepatica” — as you might guess if you’ve ever had to have a hepatic function test — refers to the liver. In some places it also has the common name of “liverwort” (not to be confused with the bryophytes of the same name) or “liverleaf.” So how did it get this name? At least according to the above Wikipedia article:

The word hepatica derives from the Greek ἡπατικός hēpatikós, from ἧπαρ hêpar ‘liver’, because its three-lobed leaf was thought to resemble the human liver.

“Hepatica” on Wikipedia, by way of the OED

*whispers* I don’t think the liver has three lobes, but what do I know.

I’d add this one to my list of “dumb common names,” but listen, the scientific name is dumb, too.

My personal experience with finding hepatica is that they are elusive. For one thing, they are really small — those plants are about 3″ high and the flowers are about the size of a penny. They grow in drifts, but you can walk right by them and never notice them. I’ve had a few instances where I found a single group and then looked down to realize I’d nearly stepped on a few on my way there.

I’m also not entirely certain about what sort of habitats they like. I have often found them growing on hillsides or at the base of trees. The hillsides make sense — they like well-drained soil — but I’m unaware of any symbiosis they might have with particular trees. And even knowing those facts about where to find them… I’ve not had luck finding them in places I might expect to find them.

I know of only one place they grow in my town, and I try to make it there every April. Here are some pics I took last year at that pilgrimage site: Robbs’ Hill Conservation Area in Lunenburg, MA.

In conclusion: stay sneaky, hepatica. If anyone caught on to how beautiful you are, you might be in danger.

Fanfic journal: Bright Future, chapter “Sarn”

(I have been absolute rubbish about posting fic journals for Bright Future in the past year or so, but I’m trying to get back into it! I have a lot of back-dating to do…)

Read “Sarn” here

Chapter Summary

She’d had this vision before, or something like it. Little details were different, but the idea was the same — a Jorlan-who-was-not-Jorlan, beautiful and empty, claimed by cold darkness at the end.

On the morning of the Menzoberranzan infiltration, Mavash is haunted by another vision from her quori.

Chapter Front Notes

I am so, so sorry this chapter took so long to get out. Unfortunately, not long after I posted the last chapter, my mom passed away. As an only child and the executor of her estate, all the estate work has fallen on me. As well as, you know, that whole grieving thing.

Anyway, four months later and I am just now getting my life back. Please enjoy this short-ish chapter, knowing I am a good 3000 words into the next one!

CW: mention of past suicidal ideation

Chapter End Notes

Sarn is Drow for “warning.”

Mavash’s dream/warning is based on an actual dream I had. After I awoke, I was like, “Wow, I bet Mavash was dreaming something like this the night she saved Jorlan’s life.” I’ve been dying to use it for a while, but I figured now was a good time?

Why Mavash needs a warning now, I leave as an exercise for the eager reader 🙂

Completely unrelatedly! If you have any interest in Pathfinder, I recently wrote a one-shot about my character in that game and her complicated relationship with her mother. If that sounds like your jam, you may find it here: “The Tide Falls Away”