When you’re writing and you can clearly see in your mind the exact expression a character is wearing or hear the exact nonverbal sound they are making, but completely fail at coming up with a way to explain it.
And he was smiling very smiley-like, you know, like a smile except even more smiley.
Typing various versions of ugh/egh/argh/blagh while repeatedly making the noise you’re trying to spell but none of them sound right
Every time somebody refers to vampires as “draculas” I picture, like, a vampire suburb, and the Draculas are that one family that’s conspicuously wealthier than all the other families that everybody low-key hates. They roll up at a neighbourhood social and folks are like “oh, fuck, it’s the Draculas, okay, gotta play nice HEEEEEY VLAD!”
(The Draculas are, of course, embroiled in a long-running passive aggressive feud with the Wolfmans down the block. Naturally neither family would ever openly acknowledge it, but everyone knows.)
I realize the tags say werewolves, but it’s funnier to me if the Wolfmans are also vampires but because they’re sensitive about their name they’re really conspicuous about being vampiric, which is probably the source of the feud because conspicuous vampirism is the Draculas’ whole -deal-.
Maybe the Wolfmans are vampires who turn into wolves while every other family in the neighborhood turns into bats, and they’re really touchy about getting called werewolves behind their backs – which of course everybody does, because suburban vampires are just awful.
I mean, Dracula originally turned into a wolf just as much as a bat,
before pop culture shifted the public’s mental association closer to
bats.
That could also be a point of feud too.
The Draculas have a complicated relationship with the fact that their patriarch could transform into both a bat and a wolf. The neighborhood has quietly agreed to just avoid bringing it up in their presence.
So of course the Wolfmans bring it up constantly. Not, you know, as a topic for discussion or anything – it’s just downright uncanny how often that little fact seems to come up in passing!
The Wolfmans’ daughter is coming up on her Bat Mitzvah, and the jokes about it are gonna get someone FUCKING MAULED.
I think one of my absolute favourite things about TAZ is that Griffin got to write a campaign in which the three free agents, the three moving parts that he relied on to make his story work, were the three people he knows best in the whole universe. People talk about Griffin’s story being ‘on rails’ but it’s not. It’s just that – unlike most DMs – Griffin can predict his family’s behaviour in advance in a way most people couldn’t hope to do. If he were playing with a different group, the story never would have turned out the way it did, but because he knows his family, he could fairly accurately predict the big decisions.
He writes a voidfish into the story, because he knows his brother is kind to animals, knows he’d never leave a sentient baby jellyfish on a planet about to get eaten, not even narratively. He’s not writing Travis into a corner, Travis would never consider doing anything else. He writes Taako a sister – a best friend, a twin, a soul mate – because he knows that Justin is a big brother to his very core, knows that his instincts will always fall in line with sibling loyalty and devotion, even when he’s playing an aloof elf who doesn’t care about anyone. He writes his dad into the trickiest position of them all – facing true horror, sitting across the table from the end of the world – and he knows that his father will respond with compromise and understanding, with love and joy and compassion, because he’s seen that grace in his father his whole life. Griffin was betting on those qualities that he already knew his family possessed, and it was the safest bet he ever made! Because they were amazing, and he always knew they would be.
“I do that” is basically “as you wish” in the language of the McElroys
jinlinli 