Dubbing Differences: Mickey's Christmas Carol

Merry Christmas! Here are the differences I found in Mickey's Christmas Carol:

Bastion: Acolyte Church

You are awarded a Bastion when you reach 5th level. During downtime, you can invest gold into your Bastion to upgrade it with new facilities and services. At the end of a downtime, you can choose a number of available services equal to your proficiency bonus and gain their effects until the end of your next adventure. You can gain multiple uses of the same service unless otherwise stated. See the original post here.

Acolyte Bastion: Church

The church is a place of worship, divine revelation, and spiritual protection where the faithful gather and miracles are performed. As an acolyte, you can use your Church to bless yourself and your allies with power from the Upper Planes.

My Thoughts on Dungeons & Dragons 5.5e: The Player's Handbook

Despite what the almighty Wizards of the Coast proclaim, and even though it's kind of backwards-compatible with 5e, the 2024 update to D&D is a new edition. Its changes are significant enough, and the phrase "the 2024 version" is clunky enough, that I'm just going to refer to it as 5.5e. Or "five-five."

Anyway, I got the 5.5e Player's Handbook for my half-birthday this year, and for the most part I'm very impressed. I'll save any further elaboration for the specific points below.

D&D Mechanics Inspired by Heroes of Might and Magic 3

Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete is and will be one of my top 5 favorite PC games of all time. It's epic. It's timeless. Its music never gets old. It's like the best board game ever invented and put into computer game form. It has an awesome map editor.

I've been on a Heroes kick this past month, and as usual, D&D has been on my mind and has been looking for inspiration. Heroes of Might and Magic III has some great mechanics that could be inspiring for D&D ideas.

Lords of Magic Fansite

In 1997, Sierra released a PC game called Lords of Magic. It was really hard, had some awkward bugs, and in general was forgotten among most of the PC gaming community, but it was an amazing game! The setting was classic fantasy, divided into eight faiths: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Chaos, Order, Life, and Death. Each had a different primary race makeup and personality, and each was organized into champions (warriors, mages, and thieves), cavalry, infantry, ranged, scout, three levels of mythical creatures, and a legendary creature. I always loved the unique interactions between the barracks, the thieves guild, the mage tower, the capital, and the Great Temple of each race. Each race also had its own set of spells and artifacts, all of which fit their respective faith perfectly.

In the 2000s, several fansites were made for Lords of Magic, but the sites have since gone the way of all Geocities sites and are hard to access now. So I made my own!

lordsofmagic.wordpress.com

Dubbing Differences: The Three Caballeros

 

Okay, this one here? This is a big one. The Three Caballeros was released by Disney in 1945 as a goodwill message for Latin America. Uniquely, as part of Disney's goal to make this movie specifically for Spanish, Portuguese, and English speakers, the three main characters—Donald Duck, José Carioca, and Panchito Pistoles—have the same voice actors in all three versions! It was a bit difficult to understand Donald's Portuguese in a few places, but for the most part, Clarence Nash did an admirable job throughout. And it was fun to watch the film through a Brazilian's eyes and see the ways that the three languages presented in the film overlap like a Venn diagram at times, just like they do in the English version. Here are the differences I found:

Bastion: Sage University

You are awarded a Bastion when you reach 5th level. During downtime, you can invest gold into your Bastion to upgrade it with new facilities and services. At the end of a downtime, you can choose a number of available services equal to your proficiency bonus and gain their effects until the end of your next adventure. You can gain multiple uses of the same service unless otherwise stated. See the original post here.

Sage Bastion: University

The university is a place of arcane secrets and research where the mysteries of the universe are unraveled and the barrier between planes of existence is thin. As a sage, you can use your University to obtain vital knowledge and enhance your arcane abilities.

Chrono Trigger-style Dual Techs in 5e

Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games ever made. Everything from the complex plot to the incredible soundtrack to the lovable characters and their interactions with each other has an element of polished quality to it that is hard to find anywhere else. Its storyline in particular, with its themes of time travel and preventing the end of the world, is very inspiring for a D&D campaign.

Bastion: Soldier Barracks

You are awarded a Bastion when you reach 5th level. During downtime, you can invest gold into your Bastion to upgrade it with new facilities and services. At the end of a downtime, you can choose a number of available services equal to your proficiency bonus and gain their effects until the end of your next adventure. You can gain multiple uses of the same service unless otherwise stated. See the original post here.

Soldier Bastion: Barracks

The barracks is a Bastion of martial training, as well as a place of blade and armor honing and strategic discussion. As a soldier, you can use your Barracks to help augment your fighting abilities in coming battles. 

Bastions that Level Up Like Characters

 

One of the most fun parts about playing Dungeons & Dragons is leveling up. Before the campaign even starts, many players enjoy looking at their character class and looking forward to later levels when they can use more and more powerful abilities, or mapping out a complex multiclass build to make the most of the levels in more than one class.

Dubbing Differences: Beauty and the Beast

I found the following notable changes in the Brazilian Portuguese dub of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Kind of an uneventful dub. Almost everything is translated word for word and there's not a ton of wordplay.

Elfsong of Elturel (from Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus)

I recently discovered Suno, an AI that makes music. And it does it surprisingly well! I can't believe we live in a time when you can type some lyrics into an app, choose a style, and then seconds later have a catchy song that no one has ever heard before playing!

I'm currently working on an actual album of my past poetry and other text put to music, which will be out soon. Until then, playing Baldur's Gate 3 gave me the idea to use Suno to make a D&D resource. This is a song that plays in a tavern in the module Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus.

The song is sung in Elvish, so I took the time to make another video translated into Sindarin to simulate what non-Elvish speaking player characters might hear. The translation itself was made word by word, so its grammar is probably terrible, and I changed a few words so that they would rhyme. But I think it does its job of sounding mystical well enough. The hard part was making Suno sing the same tune to different words, but I finally got it to work.

Enjoy! And if you're running Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, you should also check out my infernal war machine tokens I made to go with it.

Usually I dedicate this blog to my own works, but the following is a Chinese fairy tale that I enjoyed in my 6th grade literature textbook, but couldn't find anywhere online. I finally found it in an obscure book on Google Books, and copied it down here for the enjoyment of all.

Po-wan and the Living Kuan-yin

retold by Carol Kendall and Yao-Wen Li, minor punctuation edits made

10 More Magic Items Analyzed with My Crafting System

A few years ago, I aimed to reverse-engineer the crafting system in D&D 5e and find a better formula for balancing custom magic items. I'm really proud of what I came up with, and it was fun to see how several existing magic items in the DMG fit it more or less perfectly. Re-reading that post gave me the urge to look at some more, so let's get started!

I highly recommend you read the original post here before continuing this one, but below is a cheat sheet with the basic formula and guidelines I came up with.

Not quite what was planned.

 So... Project Month 2024. It came and went. And I didn't get as many projects done as I had planned to.

Dubbing Differences: Disney's Robin Hood

 

I found the following notable changes in the Brazilian Portuguese dub of Disney's Robin Hood. I had a lot of déjá vu while writing these down. I must've told my brother about them too or something, but I could've sworn that this was the first Dubbing Differences post I've made. Weird.

Hourly Comic Day 2024

I need to remember to do this every single year. Or possibly even multiple times a year. Such a fun way to practice drawing and cartoonistry, and a fun little journal entry to boot.

Project Month 2024!

 

Dubbing Differences: Winnie the Pooh

 

I found the following notable changes in the Brazilian Portuguese dub of Disney's The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh:

Storytelling Principles I Learned from Avatar: The Last Airbender

 

I'd be surprised if anyone hasn't seen the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series yet, but if you haven't, then stop reading this blog and go get a Netflix subscription and watch it NOW! There are very few series, if any, that have better worldbuilding, character development, and storytelling than Avatar, and I hope by exploring its storytelling tools, I can reverse-engineer ways to add engagement in my own stories and roleplaying games. The main aspect I'm going to be discussing is variety and contrast. The variety of places, things, concepts, characters, and pacing in the show are what I think make each episode and season unique, and what contribute to a rich narrative that is hard to stop watching.

D&D Mechanics Inspired by StarCraft II

 

I browsed an old strategy guide for Age of Empires: Rise of Rome from 4th Grade, and pretty soon my years-dormant interest in real-time strategy games was enthusiastically re-ignited. I played Age of Empires, Age of Kings, StarCraft, and now I'm playing the third campaign of StarCraft II, Legacy of the Void. You might not think that RTS games have much in common with an RPG like D&D, but good inspiration can be found anywhere, and here are some of the things I've been inspired by from the past few weeks playing StarCraft II.

Card Game: Scuttle

I've always loved games that have a high simple/accessible-to-fun ratio, and for a long time I thought it would be amazing if there was a fun, strategic game you could play with a simple deck of regular cards. Eventually, I discovered Cuttle, which checked all the boxes of what I was looking for: Easy to get the materials for, the first combat card game ever, and with interesting mechanics that wouldn't require too much explanation to new players.

Quick Guide to Making a Fun 5-Stage D&D Boss Battle

I've run quite a few boss battles in D&D 5e since I started playing it several years ago, and almost none of them were very memorable, or even fun. In a few, the boss died very quickly from one or two critical hits (probably a paladin, or maybe a spell attack); and in others, the battle lasted so long we were all exhausted, and the sweetness of the victory suffered from it. I've realized from playing some memorable boss battles in games like Legend of Zelda and Assassin's Creed: Origins that to be fun, a boss battle must have one very important thing: stages.