anyways ryan and sharpay’s dad constantly telling ryan to straighten his hat and ryan always turning it back when he’s not looking is a metaphor for his sexuality
Your campaign is going to be about your players finding a set of color-coded MacGuffins to save the world like it’s Legend of Zelda/Final Fantasy or some shit like that
The question is: what are the MacGuffins in your campaign? What do they do?
Probs a bunch of different colored orbs that turn out to be dragon eggs. Whoever gave the quest, either a dragon or dragon cultist, will betray and steal the eggs in order to do…something.
This is where my mind went immediately:
The orbs are literally the orbs of dragonkind. The orbs were made in ancient times by a powerful wizard out of the first dragon eggs, one for each kind. This wizard’s intent was simple: to use them to control all kinds of dragons.
Pretty much everyone regardless of alignment thought that this was a bad idea and an epic war was waged with the wizard and their dragon thralls on one side and pretty much everyone else on the other. Eventually the orbs were liberated, one by one, and the wizard got their ass kicked. Everyone agreed that this orb business was not good for anyone so each orb was hidden in a remote location.
Now, millions of years later, a wizard who is actually the descendant of the aforementioned wizard has discovered that their ancestor simply wasn’t ambitious enough: with the proper ritual involving the five chromatic orbs of dragonkind a person could not only control all chromatic dragons, but the goddess Tiamat herself. With a literal goddess on their side, the wizard would be unstoppable.
The wizard contacts the PCs after several years of studying, saying that they simply want to get their hands on the orbs so as to destroy them all in one fell swoop. Through their research they’ve discovered where each orb was hidden (in an appropriately themed elemental dungeon, of course), and the PCs only need to liberate them and gather them all in one place for the ritual to take place.
Of course, as the players gather each orb they gain the ire of all other dragons who don’t want to see the rest falling into the hands of mortals. Eventually even metallic dragons will go “What the fuck guys” and start hunting the PCs down so as to stop all their bullshit.
The campaign will either end with the PCs growing wise to the machinations of their wizard mentor and actually going out to discover a way to destroy the orbs, or unwittingly handing them over to the wizard who will then use them to summon and bind Tiamat to their will. Then there’ll be an epic final showdown with the PCs on one side and the wizard’s army of evil dragons headed by Tiamat on the other.
Alternately, the PCs might be too underleveled to take down Tiamat on their own, so the campaign becomes an epic quest to rally all the peoples of the world (now rightly pissed off at the PCs) to take out the wizard and Tiamat.
The obvious answer is something related to dragons, because “color-coded” screams dragons who are themselves color-coded… but it really depends on the code.
For instance, it could be based on the elements, schools of magic / divine domains, the alignments, sentient races, particular ideals/values, gods/a pantheon or a number of other things. I’d actually recommend not using dragons, since they are such a frequent thing and this one treads mighty close to the Dungeons & Dragons movie in a number of ways, but that’s just me. I like to throw a wrench into standard fantasy tropes when I run games.
If I had to pick one of the things I listed, I’d probably either go with schools/domains or ideals/values, or both together. Tie certain positive and connected negative ideals into an object, then assign that object an effect related to a divine domain or school of magic. As more of them come together it gets more noticeable to anyone with a sense for magic / fate, and when they all come together then something Big happens. It’s very Infinity Gauntlet-esque, but that’s a good place to start and honestly any plot about “a set of color-coded magic maguffins” will wind up being Infinity Gauntlet-esque because duh.
Schools of Magic sounds like a neat theme to build your plot coupons around, and it’d be cool to come up with gimmicky dungeons for each school.
Illusion: lots of false illusory walls and invisible platforms Necromancy: lots of undead Evocation: the walls are made of fire Transmutation: the walls are made of flesh no wait now it’s stone oh fuck now it’s mud Divination: the walls are made of crystals which show every possible reality, past, present and future, save versus insanity
When I did this I made them a bunch of McMuffins that were inside of monster bellies and they were completely useless.
unassuming gemstones. if you didn’t know what they were, you wouldn’t think they’re anymore valuable than any other gem of the same type. put them on slots of a magic book to unlock the final area and defeat the true evil.
this post is driving me insane. what the fuck was this person actually sending that student because they obviously edited in the word “pants” and that picture of pants. why pants. what the fuck
low-key upset how so many su fans, myself included, spent hours and hours of time designing gemsonas that represent their gem and creating backstories for them so they would fit into the world su has built, only for the crewniverse to churn out such disgustingly bad designs for canon characters.
who essentially has the same color palette as Lapis (another water-based gem with water wings and a teardrop shaped gem…….crewniverse come on you went to art school)
i’m not saying my design is the best–I’ve never studied design and I’m self-taught when it comes to art, but I certainly feel like more thought has been put into my aqua’s design than the crew’s and that riles me up. and please, don’t get me started on how she looks like a flattened emoji and how they made yet another thousand-year-old character look like a child.
@bannerenthusiast
Hey I said this in the comments but
I have a university education in animation.
I don’t know everything but I do know that you have to animate these characters and some character designs (although cool or whatever) do not work well for that. A design is nice and all but might not work in the actual show.
Cool designs do NOT equal functional ones.
((Also people sure like to complain a lot about stuff like this without knowing anything about it but ok as long as you get to toot your own horn about how much better your design is than the people that work to make the show you like))
P.S. It’s quite an exaggeration to call Aquamarine’s design “disgustingly bad”. She’s actually very unique and has an interesting body type while I notice ‘gemsona’ creators seem to only use typical generic bodytypes sometimes.
As another side note, just because one kind of aquamarine is a certain colour palette doesn’t mean all kinds of them are the same colour. Gem colours range a lot and Canon Aquamarine is probably just as accurate as your Gemsona Aquamarine.
Yeah, I agree with this. Way too many fan characters are overly detailed. this can work for illustration but not for animation, especially animation on a budget.
Also, just because the canon gem looks different doesn’t mean that you have to re-design or scrap your gemsona. The character was never going to be official anyway, so have fun with it.
