Sweet Tats
Do you guys know the word “shibboleth?” No worries if it’s unfamiliar. You can learn about the term like I did from President Bartlet, or if you’re pressed for time make do with the dictionary definition.
shib·bo·leth
/ˈSHibələTH/
noun
a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.
I bring it up today because our mutual hobby is worth celebrating. Whenever I see a dice dagger tat out in the world or spot a Hellfire Club shirt at a con, I think to myself: Shibboleth. There go my people.
But what makes this subculture our own — the reason I’m willing to devote so much time and mental energy to it — is that RPGs are not just a lifestyle brand. I may own my share of officially licensed T-shirts and miniatures (and even a cookbook), but these objects of consumption aren’t the reason I love the hobby. As cool and fun as something like Marvel or Star Wars may be, I don’t get to play in those worlds. Not really. I can write my fan fic or immerse myself in their games or extended universes. But I come back to tabletop again and again for a simple reason. I am explicitly allowed to take the building blocks of culture and make them my own.
If you’ve followed geek news lately, you’ve heard rumors about WotC trying to revoke the OGL. It’s early days yet, and I don’t know how worried we ought to be. But it’s important that we pause to consider what’s at stake. The Open Game License permits third party developers like me to participate in and profit from our common culture of fantasy. Doing away with the OGL won’t keep us from making up our own stories around the kitchen table. But it will stymie the creative community that’s grown up around this game.
Ours is a punk aesthetic. We lean into DIY, homebrew, and remix. When at last it’s time for my first gamer tattoo, it’s not going to be trademarked ampersand. It’s going to be based off a dumb inside-joke from my own megadungeon. Because the stories we tell are more important than the products we buy. And that is my own version of “shibboleth.”
How about the rest of you guys? Any sweet tattoos to share? Or lacking those, any opinions on licensing structures that enable rather than suppress human expression? Give us all your best close-up shots and hot-takes down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Not D&D related, but sweet nonetheless. I have a complete arm sleeve of Invader Zim. The number of people that haven’t heard of the show is criminal, so I am doing my duty to advertise!
I’m one of those heretics that found the show annoying, even if the aesthetic was cool as hell. I seem to remember hearing that Jhonen Vasquez intended for the IP to be irritating, but my Google-fu seems to be weak today.
Don’t let me yuck your yums though. Hit me with the explanation. Why devote your flesh-canvas to that little green dude?
It was one of those seminal shows I grew up with. Alongside Ren & Stimpy, etc, Nickelodeon was a markedly different place then compared to now! Also, the image of a comically ineffectual guy who is completely unapologetic about being both weird and bad at his job? Art imitates life, it would seem!
I’ve also just been generally drawn to Jhonen’s art style. So much so, I have a JtHM sleeve planned for the other arm!
Can’t argue with that art style. Like I said: cool as hell.
Just remember by US law the rules can’t be copyrighted, your mileage may vary other places.
So it all becomes and independent world that can be plugged in if you want to.
On the downside their NPCs go away if you’re working indie
Yeah… but once we start relying on fair use instead of the OGL, then the only way to decide *exactly* what people are allowed to use is by suing and getting sued over it. The OGL is basically a formal way of saying what they’re not going to bother sue over. Without it, it’s going to get messy and expensive and litigious, which is going to keep people from trying to publish cool stuff, even if they *should* have the right to.
My stance is that copyright law is a poor way to handle this biz. Having an enumerated license that spells out clearly what can and cannot be done is better for everyone involved. Otherwise… what evankh said. :/
The perspective on the “Hellfire Club” photo confused me for a couple of seconds.
I thought the woman on the left was wearing a giant d20 hat.
For the record: I would buy that giant d20 hat.
There were D&D clones long before the OGL was even a concept. I had a long-running game using The Arcanum as a base, with materials from The Palladium Role Playing Game, Quest of the Ancients and Shades of Fantasy grafted on. Likely these would all be OGL games today (especially considering that The Arcanum started out as supplemental material for AD&D), but not being able to directly copy meant that each had some interesting pieces to them. (To be sure, Palladium might have still been its own thing, given Kevin S’s general modus operandi.)
But more to this point, the death of the OGL will simply mean that people will need to switch to another “open source” game system if they don’t want to write their own mechanics. Personally, I think that a few too many games are OGL-based, and having people branch out a bit would be good for everyone involved. Not everything needs to be some or another flavor of Dungeons and Dragons. There are even other “old-school” games worth dusting off and reviving.
That’s the positive version. A new renaissance in design as original systems begin to compete once again.
The most draconian version of this thing tries to squeeze licensing fees out of decades-old games, functioning as an anti-competitive drain on the marketplace and further homogenization of the hobby under the banner of “buy our official products or get bent.” Throwing the weight of dnd’s 85% market share around can do real damage to the very indies that we’d both like to support.
Starcraft 2 made this exact mistake. You wouldn’t know it, but SC2 is considered a flop over at Blizzard from what I hear.
DnD is gearing up to do the same thing. Get too big and we’re going to slurp up 25% of whatever it is you do. And that sounds like 25% of the gross which is outrageous-that’s not a royalty, that’s extortion. So what I expect to see is anyone using DnD branding to push their *whatever* is just going to stop. There’ll be hold outs, there always are.
…but if there’s a D20 OGL sourcebook you’ve been thinking about, might want to grab it now. I’ve been looking at Lasers and Liches and thinking I might need to do that.
Like I said: It’s early days yet. I don’t know how worried we should be.
My pals in the industry are telling me that “we’ll just continue using the older version of the OGL.” We’ll have to wait for the lawyers to find out if that’s really the case.
I’m honestly not a fan of considering any random bit of D&D or other gaming sign as a sign of “my people”, because usually it hasn’t been. I’ve met plenty of people who I honestly don’t really like that happen to also be into this hobby.
The bonds of friendship that I’ve made over the years have basically all been started away from the tabletop, and then brought together to play the game. Not the other way around.
D&D is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people I have ever met.
“If only there were rules for social interaction! Maybe if I made a random table of some kind….”
I met my wife in a comic shop. She proposed to me with d10s that said “will you marry me” on them. Whenever I move to a new town, I make my first friends by inviting them to a game night.
I don’t know that either one of us is typical, and I’m certain there are people I wouldn’t want to associate with that still wear ampersand shirts. I’m betting we’d have a common reference point for conversation though.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, both in the court system and on social media. Hasbro, in their infinite wisdom, has classic “Little Red Hen Syndrome.” The creators of the original game, its first three editions, several of its expansions, and the original OGL itself have all come and gone. Having had nothing to do with its past success, Hasbro now holds the rights to D&D, and now that D&D is approaching its 6th edition, many of its former contractors and employees have had greater success managing the old, abandoned 3.X content than Wizards of the Coast ever did (looking at you, Paizo, Kobold Press, and Green Ronin).
Hasbro’s analysis (and likely a correct one) is that their 5e numbers are beginning to plateau, and as new players become more experienced players, they are gravitating towards OGL 3.X-derived materials. The release of 6e (One D&D) would have to compete with its own nearly quarter-century-old 3e product– so Hasbro, naturally, needs to curtail the competition or demand a significant cut of the proceeds from things they had no part in creating (sometimes from the very people who originally wrote it).
What’s “fair” or “right” in this situation is moot; it’s more a question of what they can get away with. Friend of this comic Mike Rankin over at his own title Rusty & Co. infamously got sued over his use of certain monsters–including the titular rust monster, a creature design not owned by D&D, Hasbro, WotC, or TSR, as Gygax himself modeled it on a cheap plastic dinosaur toy he used in miniatures gaming. https://diterlizzi.com/essay/owlbears-rust-monsters-and-bulettes-oh-my/
I wonder if the estates of Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, and Jack Vance could team up and put the whole industry out of business.
In this case, I think (hope) that they’ve stepped past what they can get away with. A few proper nouns and subclasses here and there aren’t worth suing over, but if they start trying to shut down major competitors like Paizo, or reprint 3rd-party content without paying a dime, then that’s big enough that the people affected will fight it every step of the way. Or stop making these products altogether, and leave D&D a ghost town.
The realpolitik of this biz is indeed fascinating. The best counterargument I’ve seen was this opening salvo for games publisher / lawyer Tyler Thompson:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/947253023137226772/1060648164664803389/20230105_VIA_US_MAIL_AND_FASCIMILE__425_271_5215_001_Redacted-1.pdf
I’m going to argue against some statements you’ve made (from most to least disagreement):
“Shibboleth”
I disagree with your assessment that tats, tees, etc are a ‘shibboleth’ in any form. By it’s nature it means //outmoded//, //unneeded//. I would argue that if the tat, tee, hat, etc communicates one’s ‘group affiliation’ then it is doing the job as intended. Perhaps some would argue it’s an ‘unneeded’ job, but if the successful communication bring joy tot he bearer or viewer, then maybe it’s very much needed.
“Ours is a punk aesthetic.”
Punk is counter-culture. The ‘geek’ culture is very much one of the major subcultures of the mainstream world, //we are very much mainstream//. “DIY, homebrew, and remix” are not counter-culture, they are not “railing against The Man”. They are foundational to our niche of the ‘geek culture’.
I know it’s ‘kewl’ to think ones-self as being ‘outside the norm’, but gaming has become very much the norm. Enough so that “fake geek” is a very real thing celebs try at to gain standing in our culture.
“As cool and fun as something like Marvel or Star Wars may be, I don’t get to play in those worlds. Not really. I can write my fan fic or immerse myself in their games or extended universes. But I come back to tabletop again and again for a simple reason. I am explicitly allowed to take the building blocks of culture and make them my own.”
I’m not sure understand this. I’ve been playing in and making the worlds of Marvel, DC, and Star Wars my own since the early 80s. I don’t know what is holding you back, it’s not an external thing when it comes to gaming in those spaces.
If you mean in the sense of not being allowed to use their properties to make money, well, sure. But then… look to your own Handbook World and ask yourself if you’d be so keen for another creative to make money off of your OCs or their likenesses without permission?
And lastly the OGL. To be fair, the OGL hurt WotC’s (and more importantly Hasbro’s) bottom line while also quite likely doing the hobby a lot of good. It allowed for the rise of WotC’s main competitor in the D&D space; Piazo and Pathfinder. AS well the over night surge in “Old School” remixe games, which while a lesser contender, also compete with the older D&D brand rules.
I can’t find fault with them for wanting to take a crack at somehow revoking it, or reduce it’s ability to create new competition going forward… but that ship has sailed and they failed to understand the implications of the OGL when they made it. In my opinion they’re now best served by not applying any form of OGL to works going forward if that is their worry, and just accept the lost revenue of the 3rd and 4th eds (and tail revenue of the older editions lost to the OSR games competing on that space).
Re. Shibboleths: The term can be used pejoratively (e.g. “sad devotion to outmoded shibboleths of a bygone age”). That’s not how I’m using it here. Though it may be if the age of the OGL is ending.
Re. Punk: One of the features of punk as a subculture is the DIY aesthetic. Everything is constructed by the individual. Think of safety pins through the nose or customized jackets. This is how we play our games: grabbing the components that we want and mixing them together for our own purposes.
Re. Star Wars/Marvel: I was never given a stake in Star Wars or Marvel. That was never on the table. The OGL offered a promise of shared profitability. To produce content in that market is to create in a common language. And without the financial incentive, you’re torpedoing that creative culture. World of difference between “trademarked” characters (e.g. Elminster) and the game rules that represent “a wizard.”
Re. The OGL: You seem to be coming at this from a “they’re within their rights to reduce competition” angle. From a narrowly legal stance sure. They can try to have their day in court. From a socio-cultural standpoint it’s a goddamn tragedy, damaging a community predicated on imagining and making in a space of shared profitability.
Yeah, I’m going to completely disagree with you on OGL being bad for WotC/Hasbro. OGL is what revitalized a failing product and it’s not 5e itself and it’s published products (which are of varying degrees of poor quality by industry standards) but the tremendous support and investment by the community that has made for the success of D&D.
Effectively, the community did the work for them, and now they want to force them to pay for it as well and own all of their IP.
Not to mention everything that exists outside of WotC content (competitors who rely on OGL) were repeatedly promised it wouldn’t be revoked, creating a more vibrant space for hobby.
WotC/Hasbro wants to have their cake and eat it.
PS: Punk is pretty mainstream now, too.
The OGL doesn’t contain any hint that it could be revoked, only updated.
„revoked“ is not an update.
It will be an interesting shit show to watch Ha$bro try and extort license fees from the businesses that have sprung up from 23 years of sitting on their hands in this matter.
And looking at the dates… the OGL was published 2 years after the DMCA.
It probably was a reaction to the „fair use“ clause of that package, trying to hold on to some control rather than loosing it entirely.
It’s in section 9: you can only use “authorized” versions to reproduce OGL material, and the 1.0 version will no longer be “authorized”. So theoretically, all materials published before the update will still be valid under v1.0, but if you want to publish anything new, you have to use v1.1. Jury’s still out (possibly literally) on new print runs of previously-published v1.0 content, or if/how hard WotC will try to apply it to older material. But it will definitely affect any new products, which will be bad enough on its own.
The key part is §4
4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.
They can’t simply insert a Royalty Fee (to Hasbro) without changing the nature of the license to an extend that equals a revocation.
Also, while there is a copyright notice on top of the OGL itself, I wonder if that can stop anyone from coming up with an Open Rules License with similar effect to slap on future material.
of cause I‘m not a legal expert and I’m sure even if I‘m 100% right it won’t stop them from trying.
But the ensuing legal shit show will give them such a bad reputation amongst players, they might as well start on 7e already: 6e is going to be so unpopular it’s going to flop worse than 4e.
actually it says „any“ authorised version in section 9.
the debate at GitP is quite interesting:
§9 can be interpreted as ‚anything published unter version 1.0a of the license can be used under the terms of version 1.0a of the license‘
version 1.0a+x would only apply to material published under the new version.
Yeah. It’s all to do with “perpetual” vs. “authorized.”
Never have I been so invested in lawyer speak.
Don’t have tattoos but since the tattooist is there i gotta ask: Is he single? 🙂
On a more serious stuff. I know of the OGL thing, being honest i don’t like D&D that much so i don’t mind it. I know it’s rather important for some people but that makes me think, would the removal of the OGL a bad thing on the long run? It won’t stop people from making stuff but out of the constrains of D&D and D20 systems. I rather think that on the end Hasbro will loose creativity and material while developers create their own systems and games. For me there will be a lot more Paizos than before. Could be wrong but that is what it could be end up being. On itself the new don’t surprises me, they have talked the games monetization and being honest, for me, 5E isn’t even an edition but a marketing brand to have people creating material which Hasbro doesn’t needs to invest yet earns money. Hope this end for the better for people like you and for the people that plays, that corporate greed only makes execs loose money. Which only would made things more fun had the game in question being Cyberpunk. Good thing R Talsorian, unlike CDPR, know their own game. That are my thoughts. On the end this may be great 🙂
Tattooist is not a named character and will not be joining the official cast list. (Although I guess that puts him on an even footing with most of the characters we’ve added in the past year.)
My fear is that an anti-competitive WotC further homogenizes the community, throwing the weight of their market share around to create less — not more — successful games in the marketplace.
“Tattooist is not a named character”? Didn’t you just named him? o_0¡
Now you will need to keep him 😛
Yes, except Paizo and anyone who uses any part of WotC’s IP under OGL (and hypothetically, that’s a lot of stuff) could be sued. It’s important to remember, they don’t need to win, just financially destroy the opposing party. This is very much a strategy to corner the market, and once they’ve dealt with the larger of their competitors, do you really think WotC/Hasbro will stop there?
Your optimism is unfounded, I’m afraid.
If they remove the OGL they could sue Paizo and other people only by things they keep doing, not for what they did. The suing to destroy together with the OGL removal could easy fall into a unfair market practice and be subject to a lawsuit against WotC. Just check Activision-Blizzard purchase by Microsoft ig you think government may not intervene. Isn’t only the bad guys the ones they can use court and sues to destroy their rivals 🙂
The most important magical tattoo you can get in 5e is featherfall. It’s first level, so not that expensive of an investment, doesn’t require attunement, you can go entire campaigns without using it, but god damn, not needing to tie up you spell selections on it, but always having it ready is well worth the 25-50GP you might need to spend for that one instance where you’re stuck at the edge of a cliff with a terrasque barreling down on you.
My first Pathfinder character spent more than it probably should have to get once a day Feather Fall, and MAN, does it come in handy when you need it.
Snapleaf is my copilot: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/r-z/snapleaf/
I think the gaming community could learn a lot from the open-source software people. The various software licenses have enabled a lot of the most popular, successful, and user-friendly software on earth. A big part of it is that some of the biggest early proponents of software in the PC era were also big proponents of liberty, creativity, and the rights of people and programmers (Richard Stallman and Larry Lessig come to mind), so the industry was shaped from the start with that in mind.
As I understand it (not an IP lawyer), one of the important things the OGL contributes to licensing is the separation of open game content from reserved product identity. The systems and game mechanics are (mostly) not copyrightable anyway, so they’re “shared” by default; the OGL saves everyone a lot of time in court and money for lawyers to decide exactly where the line lies – WotC defines what they’re definitely willing to share, and everyone else has no reason to fight it. This lets them protect their unique and much more valuable trademarks, settings, adventures, and other distinctive IP, while sharing the things which don’t threaten their business to share (and may even be productive, in terms of building an ecosystem of products that all use the same system).
It’s been a while since I studied the various open-source licenses (we talked about it a fair bit in college), but the only one I know of that specifically calls out trademarks and product names is the Apache license (https://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). It reads a lot like a software-specific version of the OGL, at least in that part. Some people have *very* strong opinions about why GPL is better than MIT, or why Creative Commons is so much better than BSD, but I always felt the fact that you *are* sharing is more important than the exact details of *how*. I think that Apache, or any license that lets you reserve your unique IP and share the rest, would allow for the kind of creativity and thriving industry we see in the 5e-sphere right now.
Relevant sections of the Apache 2.0 license:
“2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.”
“6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.”
Irrevocable is the key word this week, but explicitly protecting derivative works (in gaming contexts podcasts, actual plays, art, dice towers, cosplay…) is also really important.
If I quote you in an academic context, how would you like to be credited?
Well, I’m not sure I said anything quote-worthy, but if you like, my name is Evan Hoffman.
Not sure if I need to include this biz in my present projects or not, but it’s good to have my ducks in a row up front.
IDK who this WoTC dude think he is, but all my source books are licensed by “TSR(TM)”.
He can try and have a go with them if he like to for all i care…
They won’t go for your books. They’re going after publishers and content creators.
It may ruin the hobby for future generations, but your books will be safe! :p
I doubt that either Hasbro or WotC will truly try to _revoke_ the OGL, because that would create such an endless legal nightmare that it would absolutely destroy their credibility in the gaming world, and possibly (though unlikely) the Dungeons & Dragons brand as a whole. At absolute minimum, every single work that draws on it would most likely need to be brought before a lawyer to determine where it stands, with the costs probably on Hasbro thanks to contract law (since they’re the ones altering the contract); with how many products draw on the OGL, and how successful some of them are, this would quickly cost them a LOT of money, and they don’t want that.
They may instead try to alter the contract, though this wouldn’t be that great for them either. While it would be more viable, it would also alienate a large portion of the player base, who would most likely instead go straight to Paizo, WotC’s biggest frenemy; considering that at this point Pathfinder is legally distinct from D&D, yet still operates on the OGL, the end result is that there would be _at least_ two different versions of the OGL floating around, which may or may not be compatible with each other. Some products might be legal under both, or legal under one but in violation of the other. And any product that’s in violation of WotC’s new one will most likely just continue to use the old one, switching names to Pathfinder equivalents and unpersoning D&D if necessary. (And that’s if the new license can even be applied retroactively, which it most likely wouldn’t. If it’s not retroactive, WotC would have to actively maintain both versions of the OGL simultaneously, with everything that used the old one continuing to do so, and new works going under the new one instead.)
Either way, they have to tread _very_ carefully here, and be sure not to sour the player base’s opinion against D&D, or they’ll just create the 4e fiasco all over again (but worse, since 4e itself was salvageable; PF2 is at its core just “4e, take two”, and look how popular it is). When you’re on the edge of a precipice into the abyss, a single misstep can kill even the tallest giant.
Welcome to the comic, Moose!
You’re right that “revoke” is an oversimplification. As much as I love my school, it’s been frustrating this week that I wound up at Georgia Tech rather than American. If I’d gone to the latter policy-focused institution, this is exactly what I would have studied. As it is, I find myself learning legalese with the rest of the laymen. Even so, I need to gather up the lawyerly responses I’ve seen scattered across the net this week, because this mess may very well affect my academic work anyway.
As it stands, it seems to me like WotC are within their rights to declare OGL 1.0 “no longer an authorized version.” How that plays out in the marketplace (and whether it will actually play out in front of a judge) remains up in the air.
They failed to define what “an authorized version” is in the legalese, so to contest the continued use of the OGL as it currently stands, they’d have to convince a court that the definition is what they want it to be.
The common sense take on “authorized version” would be “this version right here that you personally published over two decades ago and have been allowing people to use for the entire duration without question”, so it’s very unlikely they’d win a court case on the subject.
That said, if the new version of the OGL includes language that defines what an “authorized version” is and declares older versions unauthorized, and some sucker actually makes use of it? They’d then be legally bound by its terms to regard the 1.0 and 1.0a licenses as unauthorized.
The only tattoo I’ve ever seriously considered getting wasn’t tabletop related; the triforce on the back of my left hand.
But I mean, that’s the back of a hand. That’s nearly as bad a place for a “first tattoo” as the face is, so I’ve never gone and gotten one.
Not to mention it’d be solid yellow, and apparently yellows don’t do so great for tattoos.
Why is Zelda that significant to you?
The series was my first exposure to a “fantasy” type setting. I suppose now that I think about it more, that IS vaguely tabletop related.
As I grew up and played more games I ended up really liking the setting as a whole beyond it just being the first fantasy world I encountered; cyclical reincarnations are a neat concept that aren’t generally made use of in media… or if they are, you generally just see one iteration with hints of the previous one strewn about.
And I really like how the McGuffin of the series works in order to feed the plot of the games. If Ganondorf could just stab Zelda and swipe her third of the triforce that way, there wouldn’t be much reason left for Link to try rescuing her, lol.
Gotta have balance in your heart to keep the thing from splitting on you, or at least the ostensible cooperation of the other two triforce bearers by getting them all in the same place at the same time.
My tattoo is actually a lot like Wizard’s 😀
So the backstory is that my Changeling: The Dreaming character Mathias Knight had a big ‘gear’ motif, gears on everything, his Maker’s Mark was a gear, his greatsword was three circular saws linked with gears in a sword frame. He got a tattoo one year for Samhain celebrations, a chain of gears traveling down his arm (not all on the same night, he completed it later). Eventually, he made some magic ink and had a different fae tattoo artist go over the gears again, but now he was able to pull the chain off of his arm and use it like a whip.
In 2012, I was gonna be a dad, but the kiddo made it to 12 weeks and couldn’t make it further. Rough time. Not knowing what their name should be, my wife (at the time) and I decided that Robin was a pretty good call either way the biology went. So!
Years later? I have a robin on my shoulder, sitting on a chain of gears that’s traveling down my arm, and each gear besides the first two has something different on it to mark an important element of my story. Gears 3-6 each have a symbol of an important (to me) name (Caleb, Garret, Aeris, Mia), and the next five (that still need to put on, I’ve resolved to add 1 gear per year) will have ‘a winding path into mountains’, ‘a book with the last page written’, ‘a fun way to hold hands that my partner and I enjoy’, ‘a white lily’, and ‘a Withering tree’ from the artwork that the artist who’s making my book’s cover art put together for me recently. I’ll happily detail any and all of these if you’re curious! (because clearly I didn’t add enough detail already 😀 )
And also I don’t think I’ve posted this to you yet, happy new year!