Fanfic / Vow of Nudity

Cover art for story 3: Skies of the Damned

Vow of Nudity is a series of NSFW Dungeons & Dragons fanfictions by Haara Brightwater, published on Archive of Our Own.

The stories take place in an original setting where the Genasi Empire, a Romanesque superpower, wages war on the Mixed Lands, a collection of city-states scattered through untamed wilderness. Thanks to their technical superiority and elemental mastery, the Genasi seem all-but-guaranteed to eventually accomplish their goal of conquering the entire continent and enslaving every other sentient race.

The series protagonist, Haara, is an escaped slave from the Empire who now lives in the wilderness as a monk, eschewing all material possessions (including clothes) except for a hand-carved wooden spear. Most stories involve her going on some sort of adventure to aid or earn money for the Silver Lining, an underground slave liberation front. All stories heavily feature combat nudity as a theme, and often include flashbacks to her slave years that tie characters or events from her past into the present-day storyline.

The series also uses full D&D mechanics; Haara has a character sheet posted, and levels up based on experience points. The author also rolls dice in-story to determine her success or failure when she takes actions, similar to a one-player D&D campaign.

The currently released stories are:

Show/Hide

• 0. The Destitute Dancer: A prequel story starring Haara's mother (also called Haara), a half-elf dancer who participates in a jailbreak after being arrested for prostitution. Was published between stories 2 and 3.
• 1. The Sunken Temple: Haara infiltrates a mysterious ziggurat and finds herself facing dragons, goblins, and hostile treasure hunters in a race to seize the temple's ancient power.
• 2. The Ghost Ship: A Tortle widow hires Haara to explore the ocean depths and locate a family heirloom, lost at sea, that's preventing her deceased husband's soul from passing onto the afterlife.
• 3. Skies of the Damned: Haara stows away on a zeppelin traveling through untamed mountains, but when someone on board sabotages the engine, she finds herself allying with the crew in a desperate struggle for survival.
• 4. The Lake of Fire: After hearing that the slave who initially trained her has been transferred to the infamous Genasi volcano mines, Haara goes undercover to infiltrate the mines and rescue her former master.
• 5. The Butcher's Basement: Haara returns to the Genasi capital to witness a once-a-decade atmospheric phenomena. An interwoven flashback recounts the time a noblewoman locked her in a basement to prevent her seeing the previous one.
• 6. The Witch's Sacrifice. A forest witch attempts to sacrifice Haara in a demonic summoning ritual, which goes awry and ends with both of them trapped in the demon realm, forcing the pair to work together to get back home.
• 7. The Isle of Slimes. Haara braves an ancient dwarven ruins on an ooze-infested island hoping to rescue some long-lost slaves. Interwoven flashbacks detail the ill-fated expedition she previously went on that led to their initial disappearance.
• 8. A Valentine's Visit. A short vignette where several characters from Haara's prior adventures throw her a surprise party at her forest hideout.
• 9. Peril in the Frozen North. Haara gets lost in the unforgiving arctic tundra while trying to find a missing Silver Lining agent.
• 10. The Savage Savannah. A Day in the Limelight/Origins Episode for Fiora^note from The Witch's Sacrifice, detailing the circumstances that led to her leaving her native clan in the barrens to become a magician.
• 11. Kidnapped From the Hot Springs. When Haara gets abducted along with several Genasi travelers and discovers their newborn baby is prophesized to win the Genasi War, she suddenly must juggle her conflicting moral obligations while also protecting herself from their barbarian captors.

There are several related series set in the same universe:

Rise of the Naked Dragon

Rise of the Naked Dragon is a series written by Enesseff which follows Sarah, a halfling sorcerer and fellow escaped slave from the Genasi Empire. Currently released stories include:

• 1. The Golden Streak, which details how Sarah obtained her draconic abilities and used them to stage a jailbreak.
• 2. Sarah on the Island of Corruption: After escaping the Genasi, Sarah and Laela find themselves on an unfamiliar island, where a local tribe enlist them to help with a mysterious threat.

The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la

The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la is an ongoing serial written by Skeetknife. It stars a sea elf commoner who gets caught impersonating a royal paladin and flees the ocean to the surface land, where she goes around claiming to be 'the world's first naked knight' and getting herself into trouble. Most of Kay'la's adventures involve her pathological lying and her impulsive rashness coming back to bite her with humorous consequences.

Curse of Nudity

Curse of Nudity is a series also written by Haara. It's set in the Mixed Lands and stars Spectra, a changeling townsperson forced to wear a necklace that destroys any other clothing she wears. Unlike Vow of Nudity, this series is fully illustrated.

Currently-released stories include:

• 1. A Changeling's Tale: After spending most of her life working in the circus as a carnival attraction and prostitute, Spectra develops magic powers after a sexual encounter with a celestial being.
• 2. The Forest of Terrors: While looking to improve her magic abilities, Spectra joins an ill-fated trip into the forest and soon finds herself alone surviving monsters, bandits, and other dangers in a desperate struggle to survive.
• 3. Trapped Among Orcs: The celestial who granted Spectra's powers forcibly teleports her to an orc settlement in a faraway desert, with orders to disrupt their nascent alliance with devils or he won't teleport her home.
• 4. Lost in the Faewilds: Hiyeth teleports Spectra again, this time to rescue a hobgoblin princess stranded in the realm of the fey and escort her safely home.
• 5. First Day of School: A short story where Spectra attends her first day of classes at Stoneskeep University.

---

Vow of Nudity provides examples of:

• Acid Attack: Averted with the Oozes in The Isle of Slimes. In stark contrast to their usual D&D stats, these rely on their sticky bodies to "grapple" their prey and are weak to water. Lorewise, it's because these originate from a now-abandoned dwarven laboratory that was genetically modifying them into docile livestock, until releasing them in an emergency to defeat a besieging Genasi platoon.
• Acid Pool: In Kidnapped From the Hot Springs, the khenra barbarians force Haara to jump into a highly-acidic pool to retrieve a gem they lost.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: When Spectra gets stabbed in the stomach during a fight in the bandit hideout, she slowly bleeds out and would have died had Mona not turned her into a tree until their teammates could arrive and provide medical aid.
• Alliterative Title: Every story follows the Dungeons & Dragons name format for its chapters, for example "Titans & Tempests" covers Haara's final stand against the Storm Lord. There's also the prequel story, The Destitute Dancer.
• All That Glitters: In The Ghost Ship, the villain's plan goes off without a hitch...except that the magnificent gemstone he stole wasn't the Piscine Stone. Haara points out that its previous owner was a lower-class sailor, who would have likely owned something humbler, like the sea-glass pebble the villain left behind on the ship.
• Ambiguous Gender: Alee, the genasi newborn prophesized to bring victory to the empire, never has their gender revealed and in every scene is just a sleeping baby bundled in a blanket.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent:
  • Haara learns of her half-elf mother and half-orc father in one story, then visits the orc tribe where they lived and learns her mother’s backstory from the tribe leader, even visiting her gravestone, and at no point does her father ever appear or get brought up.
  • Fiora’s origin story shows her growing up with her mother in a remote village, and her father is never acknowledged. The narration even mentions that she relies on her mother’s job as a courier to get the house to herself so she can secretly learn magic, indicating he’s presumably not living with them anymore.
• Amphibian Assault: Mona (a fairy) was almost eaten by a frog when she was young. Many years later, when her party is attacked by murderous illusions appearing as figures from their past, hers takes on the appearance of the frog to terrify and demoralize her.
• Ancient Grome: The Genasi Empire is clearly modeled off the Roman Empire, with references to Greco-Roman architecture like marble columns, statues, and arches, and a focus on technological advancements like aqueducts, plumbing, and paved roads. (The Void Genasi's palace also displays their family motto written in Latin.) Compared to the Mixed Lands, which are portrayed as a low-tech Medieval European Fantasy setting of disparate and unorganized city-states, it's clear why the Genasi are slowly yet inexorably conquering the rest of the continent.
• Angsty Surviving Twin: Ni-bast, due to being directly responsible for her sister's death in war. Doesn't become fully clear until her appearance in Kidnapped From the Hot Springs, when she refuses to help Haara subvert a prophesy because of her belief that You Can't Fight Fate and doing so only leads to terrible consequences.
• Animal Stampede: One of these occurs when the gnolls frighten off the herd of axebeaks. Fiora ends up having to ride one of them to escape the gnolls with her life.
• Anti-Gravity Clothing: Not clothing, but the flashback to Fiora's time in university shows that her spellcasting orb normally orbits around her head when not in use, and will dart into her hand when she needs it.
• Arms Dealer: Haara becomes one of these for the rebels after learning how to craft magic spears, empowering her donations with many minor enchantments like ranged Genasi-detection or auto-language translation. Though she does refuse payment, happy to do her part to fight back against the Empire.
• Artificial Gill: In The Ghost Ship, the Tortle widow gives Haara a potion of water breathing so she can search for the Piscine Stone in the sunken shipwreck where her husband died.
• Artificial Limbs: An elven slave in The Isle of Slimes has a J-shaped metal slab grafted to his right ankle as a permanent prosthetic. Years later, it's the telltale clue she searches for to see whether he'd been turned into a reanimated plasmoid skeleton.
• Auto Erotica: Fiora keeps a succubus company in her carriage while Haara's washing the outside to pay off a debt.
• Baby as Payment: Gloria's explanation for winding up in the Faewilds is that her father, the king of Duskvale, sold her to the Horned Queen to save his kingdom from a horrible plague. She turns out to be lying; he had far more personal reasons for getting rid of her.
• The Bait: In The Savage Savannah, Fiora baits a band of gnolls into chasing her so she can lure them into axebeak territory.
• Ban on Magic: Fiora grew up in a shifter clan where magic was forbidden to anyone except the "Sister," aka the village shaman/matriarch. Most of the underhanded or immoral choices Fiora makes in her origin story involve trying to secretly learn magic without her clanmates finding out.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Haara has a HeroForge miniature displayed as part of her character sheet at the beginning of every story, but it lacks any sexual attributes.
• Bathroom Break-Out: Spectra does this in the forest to slip behind a tree and escape the guards escorting her back to Stoneskeep.
• Bawdy Song: The shamelessly-sexist shanty Haara's opponent (and his watching crewmates) sings during a musical duel in Skies of the Damned.
• Beautiful Slave Girl: Played straight with Sarah, downplayed with Haara. While her character portrait shows her looking conventionally attractive, most characters who meet Haara treat her like someone of only average beauty, and her character sheet lists her Charisma at the default 10.
• Betrayal by Inaction: After getting told off by the father of the boy she dumped, Fiora stows away on his hunting trip and witnesses him get ambushed by an axebeak, but intentionally chooses not to warn him. This lets the bird get the drop on him and savagely maul him before he can react.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • When the court casts moonbeam on Spectra's parents to test whether they're changelings, both choose to expose themselves to the full brunt of the spell so that it kills them. The judge notes that they were otherwise guaranteed to be hanged for their crimes.
  • When the harpies have the Jackal at their mercy, she taunts them into surrounding her and then detonates a hidden bundle of dynamite to take them with her.
• Bird People: Squawk, the half-witted Kenku cultist in The Butcher's Basement.
• Birthday Suit Surprise Party: The core premise of A Valentine's Visit, though since it's this series the guests are just as naked as Haara!
• Birthmark of Destiny: In Kidnapped From the Hot Springs, the Genasi hail Alee as the future savior of the empire because they were born a Void Genasi, the first ever born outside the royal family.
• Blinded by the Light: While staring down a heavy crossbow and drained of spellslots, Spectra blinds her attacker with healing magic to make a desperate getaway.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: The apparition of King Victor fights using a ceremonial mace as a weapon.
• Blood Transfusion Plot: While stranded deep in the snowy mountains, Haara gives Serris an emergency blood transfusion after a yeti attack and a blizzard leaves him at death's door. He later uses this to deduce that she has elven heritage, otherwise he would have died from her blood being incompatible to him.
• Blowing Smoke Rings: The slimy circus owner blows one in Spectra's face at the end of The Forest of Terrors.
• Breast Attack: Haara suffers these on occasion due to not wearing armor.
• Bones Do Not Belong There: The oozes in The Isle of Slimes have evolved into plasmoids who 'wear' the skeletons of their kills within their bodies. The skeletons appear to be largely cosmetic (Haara breaks one enemy's spine to no functional effect), but their presence allows her to search for the other kidnapped slaves, as each has a unique body part she'd notice if they'd been killed and turned into a plasmoid skeleton.
• Born into Slavery: Haara, who mentions she's far from the only one. Despite this, it seems to be more common for Genasi slaves to be captured commoners or defeated soldiers thanks to the current world war.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: Iaqo, the hexblood leader of the fey bandit party from Lost in the Faewilds, dual-wields a poisoned crossbow and shortsword in combat.
• Bows and Errors: Justified with Spectra's performance in Qalek's challenge in The Forest of Terrors. The picture shows her breaking most of the listed rules (incorrect foot stance, drawing the string across her chest, not wearing protective equipment), and she painfully suffers every single consequence when she finally takes the shot.
• Bows Versus Crossbows: Fiora’s home clan, the Shortfangs, eschew bows and choose to hunt with primitive crossbows. The narration notes that the other clans all find this tradition absurd.
• Boxing Battler: Walburt's combat style of choice. Forger also spends the majority of the jailbreak relying on his fists until retrieving his crossbow right at the end.
• Boy Meets Ghoul: While fighting Kay’la in the beachside cave, a black dragon gripes that her combative attitude makes him less interested in killing and resurrecting her as his undead trophy wife. Sometime later, after she beats him, he tracks her down and humiliates her in front of the whole city as revenge for “embarrassing him in front of his husbands and wives” (implied to be the skeletons and zombies Kay’la encountered in the cave with him).
• Brainless Beauty: In The Lake of Fire, every character treats Walburt like this due to his boisterous attitude and lack of indoor voice. But Haara slowly realizes during their adventure that he's more clever and competent than anyone—including himself—thinks.
• Braving the Blizzard: Haara and Serris get caught in a blizzard while fleeing hostile snow elves through the mountain tundra, forcing her to dig a snow shelter and later give him an emergency blood transfusion to save his life.
• Cacophony Cover Up: After being denied entrance to a city, Kay’la pretends to get startled by a bug and thunderous smites it to draw attention from (and mask the sound of) her nearby horse kicking a hole through the border wall.
• Calling the Old Man Out: In Lost in the Faewilds, Gloria gets a chance to do this against the phantom that assumes her father's appearance. When she meets the real deal upon reaching home, she instead lets her sword do the talking.
• Car Chase Shoot-Out: While escaping the demon city in the back of Carnerri's carriage, Haara finds herself catching and returning javelins thrown from the pursuing royal chariots.
• Catapult to Glory: In Peril in the Frozen North, Haara fires herself out of a trebuchet to put some distance between herself and the swarm of ice mephits trying to chase her down. (It helps that as a monk she can drastically reduce her fall damage.)
• Catch and Return: While raiding the Marquis d'Pratte's chateau, Haara catches an incoming crossbolt and sends it flying back into the marksman's chest, spooking him so badly he stops partaking in the fight.
• Caught in a Snare: When Spectra's mean-spirited abjuration teacher calls her up to help "demonstrate the current material", she neglects to mention that it's magical traps until Spectra's already tripped an invisible snare and dangling from the ceiling by her ankle.
• The Chain of Harm: Consciously averted by Spectra in First Day of School, when she's forced to choose whether she should reveal Goldgrass' secret (harboring a Genasi psionicist) to the university. She ultimately decides, despite everything Goldgrass has done to her, that she's going to give her the benefit of the doubt and keep her secret, simply because she refuses to perpetuate the cycle of mistrust she's all-too-frequently experienced from the other side.
• Chest Burster: After an unfortunate encounter with abyssal swamp vines, Haara comments that she isn't interested in giving birth to podlings in nine months, spurring Fiora to assure her that they'll come bursting through her stomach long before that. (Luckily, she knows how to brew a potion to spare both of them from such a fate.)
• The Chosen One: The core conflict in Kidnapped From the Hot Springs is Haara discovering a Genasi newborn is prophesized to lead the empire to victory, and having to juggle her conflicting moral obligations to Never Hurt an Innocent (a child, no less) against her need to stop the prophesy being fulfilled.
• Chubby Mama, Skinny Papa: Clew and Jenifer (later revealed to be Spectra's parents) fulfill this archetype when we finally see their picture in the golden locket.
• Classical Hunter: Fiora's shifter clan has a whole band of these. She herself mentions having briefly trained to be one, but dropped out due to her passion for learning magic instead.
• Classical Tongue: The Genasi see primordial as the world's proto-language and a source of national pride. Haara can also speak it, due to growing up in their empire.
• Cold Equation: At the end of the flashback story in The Isle of Slimes, the three remaining survivors of the expedition reach the beach with a makeshift raft that can carry only two, and must choose who gets to escape the island and who must stay behind to die.
• Cold Snap: This is the core premise of the story Peril in the Frozen North, which is just as deadly a situation as it sounds thanks to Haara being naked.
• Color-Coded Elements: As in D&D, each Genasi subrace is associated with the usual color for their element.
• Color-Coded Eyes: Haara has gray eyes, signifying her separation from society, rigid adherence to her ideals above all else, and her mystical monk lifestyle. Spectra also has gray eyes, though hers are simply standard for her species.
• Come to Gawk: Spectra suffers from this daily, due to her necklace of forced nudity and her career as a circus performer.
• Compassionate Critic: In Lost in the Faewilds, the party is attacked by murderous illusions appearing as figures from their past, and Spectra's phantom takes a markedly different approach from those who attack the other party members. While the others belittled and blamed their victims for their own failures, Spectra's shows her the life she missed out on, criticizes the world for how it treated her and tells her she deserved better. While it still ends up stabbing her almost to death, its sympathetic attitude proves to be a hint about the true identity of the original trapmaker.
• Compensating for Something: One of the many insinuations Haara uses to get under Petrichor's skin in The Ghost Ship. The older titan in Skies of the Damned also suggests that his younger brother's tyranny comes in part due to size insecurities.
• Compelling Voice: Harpies frequently use their siren song to charm victims in Skies of the Damned.
• Content Warnings: As if the story hadn't dropped enough hints that Haara's dinner date with the king wouldn't go well, the author literally interrupts the narrative with one of these right as she's walking into the palace.
• Contraception Deception: In The Savage Savannah, Fiora's mother offers to smuggle her some silphium to sabotage the mating ceremony she's about to unhappily participate in for their clan.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: The three girls who headline their own stories are incredibly different in personality, combat style, and personal morals.
  • Haara is a stoic Bare-Fisted Monk who's cool under pressure and actively seeks out adventure in the name of helping the downtrodden and combating the empire that once enslaved her. She knows a small bit of magic, but is essentially a melee fighter specializing in physical fitness and strategic adaptability thanks to her high Wisdom stat.
  • Spectra is a shy, overly-timid wallflower with crippling self-esteem issues who would happily live a normal life if circumstances outside her control didn't constantly force her into terrifying dangerous situations. Like Haara she resorts to extreme means to keep herself alive, but often feels terrible about it and struggles to see herself as a good person while second-guessing the desperate choices she makes to survive. As a changeling warlock, she's also far more oriented towards social manipulation and an equal blend of magic and melee combat proficiency.
  • Finally, Fiora from The Savage Savannah is a cheerfully-mischievous Neutral Evil witch who relishes in lying, manipulating, and backstabbing anyone she wants to achieve her ends. Unlike the other two, she has no martial capabilities whatsoever and must rely exclusively on magic to defend herself, and tends to find herself in rapidly-worsening situations of her own making thanks to her selfishness and habitual scheming.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: When a vindictive professor locks Spectra in an empty room to take an exam, she doesn't even leave her a quill or ink. Undeterred, Spectra shapeshifts into an aaracokra to pluck her own feather, then blackens her blood and uses it as ink to complete the test.
• Courier: Fiora grew up in a primitive village where her mother serves as the “runner,” aka the one who delivers messages on foot to other clans in the savannah. Her frequent extended absences are what allowed Fiora to teach herself magic in secret.
• Crazy-Prepared: Serris carries around more gadgets and tools than every other character in the series combined. This extends all the way to two tiny scrolls that let him self-resurrect from the dead without outside assistance.
• Crossover Couple: Kay'la sleeps with Spectra in one chapter of The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la.
• Crusading Widow: Downplayed in that Captain Goldgrass' widow never seeks out Spectra for over twenty years after Spectra's late parents killed her husband. But when Spectra enrolls in her abjuration class without knowing their prior history, her bitterness and cruelty comes out and she goes out of her way to make Spectra's time in her class a living hell.
• Damsel out of Distress: Gloria has already made good on her escape by the time Hiyeth sends Spectra to "rescue" her, and in general does more to actively keep herself free than Spectra, who can barely keep up with her as their adventure gets increasingly more dangerous.
• Danger — Thin Ice: Haara and the saber-tooth tigers chasing her have to contend with this after she lures them onto a frozen lake and collapses a chunk of cliff onto it, relying on her dexterity to navigate the new ice floes and avoid plunging into the frigid water with her pursuers.
• Dangerous Deserter: In First Day at School, when Spectra discovers Professor Goldgrass has been harboring a rogue Genasi psionicist under her classroom, the professor cites this stereotype as the reason she doesn't confide what she's doing to the university. Spectra herself has to grapple with her own fears about this once she finds out, only overcoming it by deciding she won't perpetuate the cycle of distrust others had always levied against her.
• Deadly Euphemism: When the other villagers learn of Faelar’s extensive treachery, they unanimously vote to give him “the silent treatment,” a punishment Haara considers shockingly lenient until she learns what the phrase means in their culture: knocking the victim unconscious, cutting out their tongue, placing them in a public gallows, and waiting until they wake up and attempt to speak before dropping them to their death.
• Deal with the Devil: Ni-Bast, a khenra slave Spectra meets in Trapped Among Orcs, made one with her now-master, a devil blacksmith named Melopi, in order to protect her sister Amehnot as she went off into war; in exchange for Armor of Invincibility for her sister, Ni-Bast would serve him until Amehnot returned. While Melopi fulfilled his end of the bargain honestly, and Ni-Bast didn't need to give up her soul (from what we know), Amehnot was killed by a jealous rival on her own side before she could come home, effectively making Ni-Bast's servitude lifelong.
• Death by Irony: Haara verbally double-checks the king isn't setting her up for this when he promises her "immediate and absolute freedom" if she accepts and wins their duel.
• Death by Materialism: Petrichor dies because he assumes the magnificent blue gemstone is the Piscine Stone, and completely overlooks the sea glass pebble sitting in plain sight on the purser's desk.
• Death from Above: In The Lake of Fire, Haara finds herself unarmed and wounded, fighting a pair of large flaming serpents that would burn her if she tried to attack them. She wins by maneuvering them into place so Walburt can crush them with falling boulders.
• Deliberate Under-Performance:
  • During the flashbacks in The Ghost Ship, Haara deliberately trips and loses a mean-spirited race orchestrated by a quartet of Genasi hooligans because she'd rather suffer the punishment herself than the slave who she was going to outpace.
  • She also intentionally loses a game of darts in Skies of the Damned to give herself an opportunity to pickpocket the winner.
• Dirty Coward: Spectra's smuggler companion in The Forest of Terrors ditches her at the first sign of trouble, leaving her alone in the wilderness to fend for herself.
• Disposable Sex Worker: Inverted. In The Destitute Dancer, Haara's mother is the only protagonist out of twelve to survive the story.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In The Destitute Dancer, Haara's mother seduces a guard during her party's jailbreak. She later repeats the feat against two orcs (at the same time!) during a highway ambush, which is largely the reason they don’t kill her like everybody else.
• Double Entendre: The author consistently uses Performance checks for sex scenes.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Subverted. Haara is initially quite blasé about Walburt being commanded by the female overseer of the mines to have sex with her, while Walburt is quite upset. Haara quickly realizes she's just gotten used to being sexually abused as a slave, and should try to keep Walburt from suffering the same.
• Dramatic Spotlight: When Spectra encounters her idealized self as a trap in a Faewilds dungeon, the doppelgänger gets a spotlight in the illustration.
• Dramatic Unmask: Comically inverted, thanks to the series focus on nudity. Kay'la is a nudist paladin who goes around claiming to be "the world's first naked knight," until the day a mysterious adversary challenges her to a duel in the local gladiatorial arena. Mid-fight, he reveals his true intentions by casting dispel glamour on her to reveal she's secretly been wearing full plate mail the whole time!
• Dream Episode: The Savage Savannah is framed as a dream which Haara experiences thanks to lingering aftereffects from the amnesid she and Fiora fought.
• Droit du Seigneur: The Genasi king holds a right called nocte regi^note the king's night, where a random slave over the age of 18 spends the night in the palace with him, and afterwards is forbidden to tell anyone what happened. Haara originally assumes it's just this, but finds out there's a lot more to the ordeal when it's finally her turn.
• Duel to the Death: In his backstory, Serris challenges Faelar to a non-lethal duel but gets framed and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. After Haara helps him establish his innocence (and discover Faelar was responsible, though without enough evidence to prove it in court), he re-issues his challenge, this time to the death.
• Dumb Muscle: Walburt wrestles wild animals for a living, but requires a team of assistants to organize the hunting expeditions that allow him to actually find them.
• Dwindling Party: The prequel story The Destitute Dancer is particularly lethal towards its main cast. Of the twelve different characters who join the core party, only the title character is still alive by the end.
• Eagle-Eye Detection: One of Serris' defining character traits. Thanks to his private investigator background, he regularly spots discrepencies in seemingly-innocuous scenes or makes large deductions about people from seemingly little information.
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: Both Haara and Kay'la encounter Xorn who eat precious minerals and target the party's weapons in combat.
• The Echoer: Squawk, a minor antagonist encountered in The Butcher's Basement, is a half-witted Kenku cultist who can only repeat the last few words of whatever someone just said to her. (Yet somehow she still manages to carry on coherent conversations with multiple characters about a variety of topics.)
• Electricity Knocks You Out: In The Isle of Slimes, Haara stabs a gauss engine with a wet spear to zap the slimes dogpiling her, and it knocks all of them out (though she manages to remain awake herself while taking massive damage).
• Element No. 5: The Void Genasi bloodline rules over the Fire, Water, Earth and Air Genasi.
• Elemental Barrier: During a chariot chase with demons, Haara orders her water elemental to form a barrier around the back of their chariot to shield it from the fireballs being thrown by their pursuers.
• Elemental Embodiment: Elementals are a type of monster in the setting, with identical stats to the source material except they're shaped like large-breasted women instead of vaguely-anthropomorphic blobs.
• Episode Zero: The Beginning: The Destitute Dancer, a prequel story starring Haara's mother, is numbered 0 despite being the third story published. Spectra's first story is also labeled 0 because it takes place before she becomes a level 1 warlock.
• Evil Living Flames: The fire elemental in The Lake of Fire.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Sex scenes are frequent and prevalent, especially with Haara herself, who can't seem to keep the side characters off her, be they heroic, villainous, or neutral.
• Everybody Is Single: The author seems committed to this, despite the large quantity of one-night stands for both protagonists. Over thirteen stories, neither Haara nor Spectra have ever committed to a relationship with any of the many people they sleep with, and every Guest-Star Party Member goes their separate way at the end of the current adventure. Fiora even comments on this when she expresses an interest in settling down with Haara, but wistfully adds she can already tell Haara isn't the sort to accept.
• Evil Knockoff: In Lost in the Faewilds, when the party is attacked by murderous illusions appearing as figures from their past, Spectra's simply looks like herself, only a powerful college-trained wizard who enjoyed the love and support of a happy upbringing that didn't hurt her and hold her back at every turn.
• Exact Words: The fey contracts in Lost in the Faewilds thrive on these, and Spectra is repeatedly forced to choose her words carefully while negotiating with the fey bandit party she's forced to ally with to get home safely.
• Exotic Equipment: Common with bestial or inhuman species. The primary time it affected the plot was in Fiora's origin story, where part of her dislike of her own people comes from male shifters having penile spines making sex a painful and unpleasant experience for her.
• Exposed to the Elements:
  • Averted; in Peril in the Frozen North, Haara must go to extreme measures to keep from freezing to death while stranded naked in the snowy mountains, from keeping produce flame constantly active to mystically controlling her breathing and heartrate, to killing a boar and covering herself in its fat.
  • Justified with Kay'la, who as a sea elf is used to the frigid temperatures of the deep ocean, and struts naked through the snowy mountains while teasing Bren for bundling up.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: Played for laughs repeatedly with Carnerri, the succubus Haara and Fiora encounter in the demon city. Despite the rest of the abyssal realm being painted as a dangerous violence-filled hellscape, Carnerri initially tries to scare them from her backyard by brandishing a frying pan in her bathrobe, before quickly offering to let them stay if they wash her carriage. Later, her motivation for betraying the demon lord is that he defunded her HOA and passed a local ordnance which makes it harder for her to find parking spaces.
• Eye of Newt:
  • Present as per the normal rules of D&D, but largely averted for the protagonists. Haara only knows a few spells, none of which require material components, and Spectra and Kay'la both have spellcasting focuses that can take the place of any component without a listed price (i.e., almost all of them).
  • Becomes a major plot complication in The Witch's Sacrifice. Haara is stranded in the abyssal realm with a witch named Fiora, who didn't get to bring her spellbook or arcane focus with her, locking her out of most of her prepared spells until she finds its material component somewhere.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: In The Forest of Terrors, the author posts a tongue-in-cheek end card right after Spectra gets eaten by a Giant Frog.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: In The Destitute Dancer, The Vanquisher is a 7-foot tall boastful last-minute party member who arrives just in time for the final fight. He instantly takes on the largest threat (the orcs' hulking bloodthirsty troll), who proceeds to tear him limb from limb.
• Familiar:
  • Fiora has a toad familiar named Toadysseus, until she sacrifices it to escape Murkadoth's tendrils which are designed to prioritize corpses.
  • Kay'la eventually gains a snake familiar after briefly becoming a Magic-User while time traveling to the distant past.
• Fanservice Car Wash: In The Witch's Sacrifice, after Haara gets caught stealing litter from a succubus' backyard, Fiora convinces her not to turn them into the authorities by having Haara give her carriage a sexy scrub-down while the succubus admires the view from the inside. Haara is not thrilled with the agreement.
• Fanservice with a Smile: In First Day of School, Spectra briefly works as a nude waitress for a local tavern.
• Fantastic Light Source: Haara can summon a flame in her hand as a light source, and Spectra can cast the light spell on anything portable within reach (usually a pebble or her necklace crystal).
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Genasi naturally consider themselves superior to all other races, with much of their propaganda and terminology about their war suggesting they think they deserve to conquer and enslave everyone else for being inferior.
  • Spectra also suffers universal distrust and antipathy from everybody in her hometown simply because she's a known changeling.
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In one chapter, Kay'la is magically shrunken down to microscopic size and sent into the king's body to try and save him from his mysterious coma.
• Fantasy Contraception: Despite their frequent sex scenes, both protagonists have justifications for why they never get pregnant (or additionally in Spectra's case, impregnate others). Haara, despite being genetically human, has half-elf/half-orc parentage and completely subverts True-Breeding Hybrid. Spectra, meanwhile, has full control over her fertility (as either gender) thanks to being a changeling, but has mentioned her unwillingness to birth another changeling into the same prejudiced living situation she's had to endure in the human world. Several characters have also mentioned silphium existing as a commonplace medicinal contraceptive.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Averted; the Jackal wields a flintlock pistol, and the dwarves of the Slime Island Factory have muskets. Though firearms do seem to be reserved for technologically-focused characters, as the former is a zeppelin pirate captain.
• The Fatalist: Ni-bast fulfills this role in Kidnapped From the Hot Springs, steadfastly insisting there's no way to subvert the prophesy in stark contrast to Haara's full disbelief in fate.
• Fauns and Satyrs: Qalek, the ringleader and owner of the circus Spectra works for.
• Feathered Fiend: The axebeaks in Fiora's home savannah are large flightless birds who lash out violently against anything they encounter. Every time she encounters them, at least one person gets mauled or killed.
• Felony Misdemeanor: In The Lake of Fire flashbacks, a Genasi palace representative threatens to seize a noblewoman's entire estate when she doesn't answer the door quickly enough.
• Fetish-Fuel Future: Surprisingly averted, despite the preponderance of nudist protagonists and side characters. Most of them, including Haara and Spectra, are outcasts (either geographically or socially) who tend to suffer prejudice and disapproval when interacting with regular folk. The author has stated that she intentionally avoids this trope, drawing instead from her own struggles as a nudist in modern society.
• Fighting Down Memory Lane: In The Witch's Sacrifice, Haara and Fiora fight an amnesid, a monstrous humanoid figure who forces attackers to relive horrible memories in order to disadvantage them in combat.
• Fingertip Drug Analysis: Serris of Tides' hemocraft allows him to identify the racial origin of blood samples by tasting them. He mentions regularly using it at crime scenes or while tracking a suspect, and he uses the ability on Haara to deduce that she has orc and elven heritage.
• Forced Out of the Closet: Spectra averts this in First Day of School, when a goblin hunter hires her to take his son's virginity. By the time she realizes the son is secretly gay they've already got an audience of his friends and hunting mates, so she casts minor illusion to create a small cloud of darkness to hide herself before shapeshifting into a masculine form to service him.
• Forced Sleep: In The Butcher's Basement, Dowager Burnhide grabs a Wand of Sleep from her nursery to use against Haara. The fact that it was in the nursery suggests she uses it to forcibly put her son to bed.
• Forced Transformation: One of the jailbreak members in The Destitute Dancer is a mage who's been turned into a cat.
• Fortune Teller: The circus has a half-elf wisewoman who casts identify to discover the properties of Spectra's mysterious new crystal.
• Fox Folk: Ni-Bast, a khenra that Spectra meets in Trapped Among Orcs - though khenra are technically Anubis-esque jackal humanoids rather than straight fox-people.
• Flashback B-Plot: Haara has already escaped her bondage by the time the series starts, but many stories contain extended flashbacks to her time as a slave, often with their own storyline which is both standalone and related to her present adventure.
• The Freakshow: Seems to be at least a thematic element of the circus' show. Not only are Spectra's changeling attributes hyped up in her routine, the narration notes that a "fat man and painted lady" were the performance before her.
• Frog Men: Splaaglups, a bullywug, serves as Petrichor's right-hand frog in The Ghost Ship.
• Fruit Cart: One gets destroyed during the chariot chase in The Witch's Sacrifice.
• Frying Pan of Doom:
  • Carnerri the Succubus' first scene is threatening Haara with a frying pan when she catches the latter stealing trash from her backyard.
  • Father Pyrestein, a cleric whom Kay'la encounters in the snowy mountains, wields a flaming frying pan as his weapon of choice.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Extremely common. Almost every flavor of the trope is present somewhere, from wilderness warriors and power-drunk magic users to deranged cultists and humanoid monsters like harpies, elementals, and mermaids.
• Funetik Aksent: Used frequently for certain races. Dwarves sound Scottish, Yuan Ti and kobolds trill their "S"s, and at least one gnome spoke with all the "V"s and "Z"s of a pseudo-German accent.
• Gaining the Will to Kill: While she doesn't know it for most of it, the flashback story in The Isle of Slimes proves to be all about Haara gaining this.
• Game Mod: The author released a skin for Haara in Minecraft. Spectra is also downloadable in Koikatsu Party, the game the author uses to make her story illustrations.
• Gaydar: Spectra is shown to have one in First Day Of School, which isn't terribly surprising considering she's a changeling prostitute.
• Ghost Memory: When Haara tackles Fiora to free her from the amnesid's grasp, she receives a dump of memories from Fiora's time in university.
• Giant Flyer: The massive skyswimmer that assaults the zeppelin in Skies of the Damned.
• Giant Spiders: Haara and Walburt fight these in The Lake of Fire.
• Giant Woman: The Matriarch Ooze in The Isle of Slimes.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Happens between Fiora and Haara (and a water elemental, it's a long story) after they barely escape the demon realm.
• Gladiator Games: Walburt is a venator, a gladiator who specializes in fighting wild animals.
• Go-Go Enslavement: Exaggerated; the Genasi forbid their slaves from wearing any clothes at all.
  • Played straighter with Ni-Bast, a khenra Sex Slave kept by a devil blacksmith in Trapped Among Orcs, who is still mostly nude but wears ornamental jewelry that serves to denote her status.
• Gossipy Hens: Aeva, one of the girls in Fiora's home village, is a shameless gossip queen. At first Fiora completely ignores her, but she later becomes a key player in Fiora's schemes when the latter discovers (to her astonishment) that Aeva's secretly been chosen to succeed the Sister as clan matriarch.
• Grande Dame: The Butcher's Basement flashbacks involve a villainous dowager who made her fortune through a slaughterhouse chain and attempts to carry herself like this. Unfortunately, her insecurities due to having grown up a commoner turn her into a cruel and vindictive noblewoman, and she develops a reputation for regularly mistreating anyone of lower status than her.
• Grave Robbing: They don't quite reach the grave, but Fiora mentions she used to steal fresh corpses from battlefields and trade them to a demon lord in exchange for abyssal alchemy ingredients.
• Great Detective: Serris of Tides' main characterization, with a healthy dose of Gadgeteer Genius on top.
• Great Escape: The first chapter of The Destitute Dancer revolves around a hastily-planned jailbreak.
• Groin Attack: Relatively common thanks to so few characters wearing armor. Haara has doled out a fair amount of them (and received a few in kind) throughout her stories. Fiora in particular seems to go out of her way to target male enemies' crotches, due to her outspoken jealousy that they were born with penises whereas she had to magically unlock hers through years of wizardly study.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Several stories include a character who joins Haara for just a single adventure. The two most straightforward examples are Walburt from The Lake of Fire and Fiora from The Witch's Sacrifice.
• Gun Struggle: Fiora originally doesn't want to give Haara her silver knife while the pair are hiding behind a boulder from an approaching devil dog, so Haara wrestles it from her grasp.
• Had to Be Sharp: All three protagonists had difficult upbringings (Haara as an imperial slave, Spectra as a homeless orphan-turned-prostitute), but the most straightforward example is Fiora, who grew up in a primitive village in the Ocher Barrens, a harsh savannah where resources were scarce and most of the wildlife wanted to kill you. Her origin story makes it clear her harsh formative years played a large part in her becoming a Neutral Evil Opportunistic Bastard.
• Hair-Trigger Avalanche:
  • Haara is saved from a posse of harpies when their siren song causes a rockslide.
  • Later invoked by Serris to get down a mountain when he proves incapable of scaling a steep cliffside properly. As he puts it to Haara, who is fervently against the idea:
    Serris: I have far more faith in my ability to burrow than to climb.
• A Handful for an Eye: When Fiora attempts to use her recently-purchased red, yellow, and blue sand as the material component to cast color spray, she discovers the shopkeeper had merely glamoured ordinary sand to look multicolored...so she blinds her opponent with the sand instead.
• Harping on About Harpies: A tribe of harpies cause no end of grief for Haara and the zeppelin crew in Skies of the Damned.
• Healing Factor: Both Haara and Spectra have ways to magically heal themselves or others. Haara has Healing Hands while Spectra can target people with Healing Light from afar.
• Heavy Sleeper: In Kidnapped From the Hot Springs, Alee the baby remains asleep through the entire story, even as the rest of the party fights monsters, gets into shouting matches, and in general everything gets progressively worse around them.
• Hedge Maze: The entrance to the fey bandit hideout is guarded by one of these. Taking any wrong turn within it will teleport the visitor back to the entrance, sic monsters on them, and then randomize the maze so intruders have to do every attempt completely blind. There does turn out to be a logic to it, which Gloria deduces by analyzing how the mazemaker himself must navigate his own creation.
• Heinous Hyena: One of the major antagonists in Fiora's backstory is a warband of gnolls who are portrayed as violent cackling ferals operating on pure murderous instinct and disrupting the local ecosystem with their insatiable overhunting.
• Heroic Wannabe: Walburt spends the early chapters of The Lake of Fire boasting to Haara about how their "noble quest" is the start of their valiant journey that will turn them into heroes of legend. Once they actually reach the Genasi mines and he witnesses the cruelty and injustices on display within (beginning with the bodies of two dead miners left to rot after suffocating on toxic fumes), he quickly sobers up and abandons that sort of lofty talk.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Once she learns how to craft magic spears, Haara actively strives to subvert this for the rebels by crafting dozens of spears that auto-translate Primordial (the native language of the Genasi Empire) for whoever's holding them. She mentions they can be used for reading intercepted messages, eavesdropping on prisoners-of-war, or impersonating Genasi in undercover missions.
• High-Altitude Battle: In the climax of Skies of the Damned, Haara leads a flock of pegasi to dogfight the skyswimmer and its posse of harpies and giant vultures before they can reach the crashed zeppelin.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Petrichor, the main antagonist of The Ghost Ship, is eaten by the same sea monster he hoped to control.
• Hollywood Torches: When Kay'la enters the centuries-old Cenotaph of Alator, the narration mentions the wall torches are using the spell continual flame to remain lit after all this time.
• Horns of Villainy: The Horned Queen is a terrifying fey who rules the Faewilds, and in one story Spectra is forced to team up with several characters all fleeing her (and her incoming forces) for various reasons.
• Houseboat Hero: Serris of Tides, the Guest-Star Party Member of Peril in the Frozen North, is a freelance private investigator/artificer who lives on a boat, crafts his own crime-solving gadgets, and sails the world taking cases for hire.
• Human Pet: When Haara's illusory disguise disappears in the middle of the demon city, Fiora's plan to escape involves putting her in a dog leash and walking her on all fours, to make other pedestrians assume she's a submissive demon who likes role-playing and is merely shapeshifted into a human as her kink. Amazingly, it actually works for a little bit.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: In The Savage Savannah, Fiora witnesses a hunting party prepare an ambush for a pack of sleeping axebeaks, only for an unseen axebeak sentry to jump onto the hunting leader from above and tear him to ribbons before he could react.
• Hypnosis-Proof Dogs: Averted with the demonsaurus, whom Fiora hypnotizes by covering her body in glowing pastes and performing a bedazzling dance.
• I Die Free: A variant in The Lake of Fire, when Umbra warns Haara that killing a member of the royal family will ensure the death penalty if the Genasi ever capture her. She replies that she prefers that over the threat of being re-enslaved.
• Ideal Illness Immunity: Spectra plays this perfectly straight, with her necklace preventing any disease. Haara has a downplayed version, in that she can use her Healing Hands on herself to cure any disease, but nothing's stopping her from initially contracting it. Kay’la gained this as well upon reaching level 3 of paladin.
• Inconvenient Summons:
  • The first scene from Trapped Without Orcs is Hiyeth teleporting Spectra unexpectedly to the Orclands when she was in the middle of a threesome with two clients.
  • Happens again in Lost in the Faewilds, where Hiyeth teleports her away right when she had just started her university entrance exam, after being warned that retakes or absences were not allowed under any circumstances.
• Indentured Servitude: Haara considers it no better than slavery, as seen in A Valentine's Visit when she breaks into an abusive marquis' estate, murders him, then divides his money and untraceable assets among his servants before they flee the chateau.
• Inside a Wall: Haara spends most of The Butcher's Basement flashback crawling around inside the mansion's walls.
• Instant Soprano: Happens to most of the enemies Fiora hits in the nuts, as well as herself when the tables are briefly turned while she's shapeshifted into a demon with male genitalia.
• Interface Spoiler: Subtle ones happen occasionally with the out-of-universe dice rolls. The author generally sticks to the official statblocks for monsters, so when one of them has an atypical stat (for example, the bandits in The Forest of Terrors having overly-high AC and better gear than they should), it's often a clue that there's something subversive happening (in this case, Spectra later discovering the bandits were city guards in disguise.)
• It's Personal: Implied when the Star King gets so mad at Haara he stops using the Royal "We" and switches to singular pronouns during his Villainous Breakdown.
• I've Heard of That — What Is It?: Just to rub it in Fiora's face how much less-qualified Aeva is to become the new Sister (a.k.a. clan matriarch and magic-user) over her:
  Current Sister: Keep it quiet for now, I'll make an announcement after the Mating Ceremony, and then we can start on your first cantrip.
  Aeva: Understood! I won't let you down, your holiness. Um, out of curiosity, what's a cantrip?
• Jack of All Trades:
  • Despite being naked and often unarmed, Haara's build is designed to let her fill every role in the Damager, Healer, Tank (or the Fighter, Mage, Thief) triangle. She's got the melee DPS of a monk, Healing Hands from her subclass, tankiness with 17AC plus sanctuary (see Stone Wall below), ranged/magic damage with produce flame, and skillchecks/stealth capabilities with guidance. The only team role she largely lacks is Charisma, often struggling to get what she wants from other people she encounters.
  • Spectra's slowly becoming this as well. As a Celestial Warlock, she has the highest single-turn healing output in the game, as well as eldritch blast for ranged damage and Armor of Shadows to permanently boost her AC. And, if her published NPC statblock is any indication, she took Pact of the Blade when she hit level 3 to defend herself in melee combat. Finally, as a Charisma caster that can combo her shapeshifting with charm person, she can also hold her own in social manipulation unlike Haara.
  • Kay'la, as a paladin, is the single best solo adventuring class in the game. Self heals, high AC, high damage, charisma casting, a free magic warhorse, and her 'elven trance' racial lets her gain proficiency in any tool she likes after a long rest. Her Oath of Glory also gives her guiding bolt as a powerful ranged attack, something paladins usually lack.
• Jumping Out of a Cake: Fiora and Walburt do this at Haara's surprise party in A Valentine's Visit.
• Kill It with Water: A downplayed version in The Isle of Slimes. The eponymous oozes aren't actually damaged by water, but getting soaked does neutralize their ability to stick to their prey, making it a very important resource in Haara's struggle to escape the island.
• Land of Faerie: The Faewilds, another plane of existence Hiyeth forcibly teleports Spectra to in the eponymous story.
• Living MacGuffin: The author calls this trope out in her notes when one story revolves around a baby prophesized to be The Chosen One. Due to the risqué nature of the series, she assures readers the newborn will remain asleep in its bundle for the entire story, with the plot entirely focused on the various choices and motivations of the other characters because of the prophesy.
• Lethal Letter Opener: Umbra uses prestidigitation to summon a letter opener and slit Walburt's throat during the climax of The Lake of Fire.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Played straight with Serris and Faelar's Duel to the Death. Serris even agrees to use a weapon he isn't proficient in and fight in broad daylight (despite being a drow.) But after Faelar wins and kills him, his followup duel with Haara quickly shows she's far less interested in playing fair.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Fiora's plan to deal with the gnoll warband is to play The Bait and lure them into axebeak territory, where she hopes the axebeaks will defeat them in straight combat. Unfortunately, she bets on the wrong side...
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Averted. When Haara levels up mid-story, the series breaks from the core D&D rules by preventing any changes until Haara's current adventure is over. Any XP earned in between is backlogged and granted as a starting bonus in the next story.
• The Little Detecto: After learning how to craft magic spears, Haara starts carrying around one that glows faintly if Genasi are nearby.
• A Lizard Named "Liz": Fiora's (short-lived) animal familiar is a toad named Toadysseus.
• The Load:
  • Haara's mother, protagonist of The Destitute Dancer, is completely useless in a fight, making her particularly ill-suited for the hack-and-slash campaign she's found herself in. She spends most of her adventure distracting guards or simply taking hits that might have targeted more useful party members. In the end, this is the main reason the orcs let her live after massacring everyone else.
  • Bren, Kay’la’s squire, is a kobold commoner who never does anything to help her, even if she’s being beaten to within an inch of her life.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Played with in Skies of the Damned. During a musical duel whose rules specify both contestants must play "an instrument they own", Haara's opponent (and the watching audience) thinks he wins by default due to her clear lack of material possessions. But after he plays a short shanty on his harmonica, she reveals her proficiency with the handflute and blows his performance out of the water with a classical Genasi aria.
  • Haara's on the receiving end of one during the king's challenge in The Lake of Fire. He promises her freedom if she can draw even a single drop of his blood in combat... and when she tricks him into stepping on a makeshift caltrop, he claims that it doesn't count because she's his property, so technically he drew his own blood using her as an instrument. (Of course, this means it was impossible for her to actually win.)
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: In The Savage Savannah, Fiora's internal monologue mentions G'ren was a particularly disappointing lover the time they had a fling. During the story, he fails in his duties as a lookout, abandons the other hunters to die during an axebeak ambush, gets tried for cowardice, attempts to pass the blame onto her just for being there, and ends up getting exiled from the clan in disgrace.
• Love Triangle: The backstory of Lost in the Faewilds revolves around a love quadrangle in the fairy realm. The Horned Queen kidnaps a village woman and turns her into her consort, but a local bandit leader lusts after her, kidnaps her and presses his trapmaster into filling their hideout with defenses to protect her. But the trapmaster falls in love with her, turns his traps against his own team, and escapes with her to the material plane.
• Low-Tech Spears: Played perfectly straight with Haara's weapon of choice, as a wilderness jungle warrior.
• Made a Slave
  • Sarah's backstory mentions her home village being plundered and enslaved by the Genasi.
  • In Trapped Among Orcs, Ni-bast, a khenra concubine that Spectra meets, explains that she made a deal with a devil blacksmith that, in exchange for a suit of indestructible armor that would protect her sister Amehnot as she went into war, Ni-bast would serve him until she returned. She never did; an ally of Amehnot, jealous of the untouchability her armor gave her, killed her in her sleep, effectively rendering Ni-Bast servile for life.
• Made of Incendium: Magically enforced by Spectra's cursed necklace; any clothes Spectra dons (except itself) instantly burst into flames and painfully destroy themselves.
• Mage Marksman: Forger, the warforged from The Destitute Dancer, fights primarily via channeling infusions through his crossbow.
• Magic Feather: Played for laughs; Walburt originally protested leaving his bear totem at home because he claimed it was the only way he could cast his few spells. Then, after hours of tough fights where they would have been useful, he spontaneously casts speak with animals and excitedly realizes the magic was inside him all along. Haara is not amused.
• Making a Splash: Water Genasi can control any water in their immediate environment or generate new water from thin air.
• Male Might, Female Finesse: Haara and Walburt assume this dynamic while teaming up in The Lake of Fire, with her being a monk and him being a barbarian.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Ayrwyn's marriage to Petrichor shows that Genasi can marry non-Genasi, but are severely stigmatized for doing so. Haara gets under his skin by suggesting he married his slave only because nobody else would say yes.
• Mandatory Motherhood: Fiora's clan has a yearly mating ceremony where all young adults must partner up to procreate the next generation of the village. Fiora herself desperately doesn't want to participate, and part of her origin story involves trying to find a way out of it.
• Mars Needs Women: Everything, male or female, seems to find Haara a desirable sex partner. So far she's been intimate with multiple demons, a dragon, a bullywug, a tentacle monster, a slime monster, a yuan-ti halfblood, a water elemental, a selkie, a werecobra, and most of the playable races.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Fiora's origin story revolves around two plots that are both sexually stressing her out:
  • She's growing up in a clan of Cat People where the guys have penile barbs^note just like real cats that make sex incredibly painful. Even worse, her clan's upcoming Mating Ceremony requires all young adults to hook up and birth the next generation, meaning she's had to sleep with multiple young men hoping to become her date.
  • She's currently sleeping with the clan's matriarch hoping to curry her favor, and the power imbalance means the matriarch is an extremely selfish lover who takes Fiora's services and never gives anything in return.
  • Given this, it's no surprise that when she masturbates in bed to blow off steam, the narration mentions it's the only time she feels like someone's actually servicing her needs to any degree.
• Meaningful Echo: Spectra flashbacks to Qalek's dialogue from her ill-fated attempt at his archery range once she's firing off a life-or-death arrow at the end of The Forest of Terrors.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Benthon’s name means ”the habitat at the bottom of a body of water,” which ultimately proves very apt foreshadowing for how he ends up in the story.
  • Spectra's name means "daughter of ghosts," befitting her status as an orphan. We later learn her parents chose the name because her mother was named Jenifer, which means "white phantom."
• Mechanical Lifeforms: Forger, a warforged prisoner and one of the main characters of The Destitute Dancer.
• Mentor Archetype: The Firbolg slave who trains Haara during her flashbacks in the first story.
• Mind-Control Device: The Piscine Stone, which only works on sealife. (Clearly inspired by the Trident of Fish Command from base D&D.)
• Mole Monster: The savannah Fiora grew up in is home to ankhegs, insectoid predators who burrow through the terrain and hunt by bursting from the ground underneath their prey. They're so feared that when she's cornered by axebeaks, she scares them off by magically conjuring the scent of an ankheg under them to invoke Summon Bigger Fish.
• Moody Mount: When Fiora escapes the gnolls by leaping on the back of a wild axebeak, it's understandably peeved with the situation and tries to buck her off any way it can for the rest of the chase scene.
• Mook Horror Show: The first chapter of A Valentine's Visit recounts Haara's raid on a cruel marquis' chateau, where the vast majority of it involves her (a naked level 7 monk) plowing through countless CR½ guards, most of whom are understandably freaking out as she's defeating 2-4 of them every single turn. Even when they start landing solid hits, Haara sacrifices one attack (out of several) to use her Healing Hands on herself and erase all their damage in an instant. It's at that point the remaining guards realize how totally they are boned.
• Morph Weapon: Spectra gains a Pact Weapon at level 3, which she can summon as any melee weapon in the game.
• Motorcycle Jousting: Kay'la takes part in a jousting competition shortly after summoning her first magic horse, but quickly realizes she has no idea how to ride a horse. So, taking advantage of the fact that one competitor is a warforged on a clockwork steed, she shapeshifts her own horse into an identical copy (to qualify it for the tournament) and then rebuilds it into a motorcycle.
• Multiple Reference Pun: Fiora's self-made cantrip, draught pitch, is a combination of two words also commonly seen in baseball, befitting a spell involving hurling a potion bottle at someone. "Pitch" can mean to throw, as the pitcher in baseball throws the ball toward the batter. "Draught," pronounced "draft," means "to drink," as one might do a potion. "Draft," in sports, is the process of professional teams selecting prospective players. So the pun works on about three different levels.
• The Mutiny: Threatened by the zeppelin crew after the captain vents all their cargo to lighten the ship enough to clear a mountain range in the middle of a deadly storm. They end up betraying the ship to pirates instead, rationalizing that capture is preferable to dying of exposure and starvation.
• Mutual Disadvantage:
  • While fighting Haara in the volcano mines, Umbra casts darkness to blind her, relying on her True Sight to see. But Haara negates that advantage by breaking nearby machinery and filling the room with steam, ensuring both parties have to fight blind.
  • After Serris challenges him to a duel, Faelar chooses the center of town at high noon as the location, knowing Serris had sunlight sensitivity as a drow. But then Serris casts darkness once the duel begins, blinding both parties and ensuring they fight on an equally-disadvantaged level.
• Named After the Injury: The unseen character "No-Limbs Johnson," Played for Laughs in The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la.
• National Geographic Nudity: Fiora grew up in a primitive shifter clan in the barrens, and everyone in her origin story plays this trope completely straight.
• Naughty Tentacles: Haara loses a fight with some in the swamps of the demon realm. Luckily Fiora knows how to call them off... after Haara's unwillingly milked the potion ingredients she needs from them.
• New Skill as Reward: At the end of The Isle of Slimes, Gnarl teaches Haara how to craft magic spears.
• Newcomer Saves the Day: When Kay'la obtains a viper familiar named Trowser, she's originally disappointed and calls it "useless but cute" to its face. (And, to be fair, she's a level 7 paladin with a magic warhorse fighting incredibly deadly enemies on a daily basis.) Then, Trowser comes in clutch four different times while she fights her way through a harrowing dungeon^note First his blindsight lets her survive an ankheg ambush in pitch blackness, then he substitutes himself for a ceremonial scepter to solve a door puzzle, then she uses his poison to coat her blades to defeat a monster immune to slashing damage, and finally he reminds her about the acorn so she can magically grow a tree and punch through the roof to escape the dungeon, and by the end she's proclaiming it the greatest snake of all time and jokingly offering to make it her squire.
• Nightmare Face: Played for Laughs with Ayla, the royal wizard of Axrilas. She's a changeling with face-blindness, so her default human form includes a horrifyingly uncanny amalgamation of blurry and misshapen facial features, but her neighbors and fellow cityfolk all pretend she's nailing it out of respect for her feelings.
• No Indoor Voice: Walburt has more lines ending in exclamation points than all other punctuation marks combined.
• No Name Given: A common stylistic choice with figures of authority. The Star King, the Titan Lord, and the Zeppelin Captain are all left nameless despite being major characters in their stories, their only identity coming from their station. Haara's Firbolg master is similarly unnamed despite one of the few recurring characters and a major part of Haara's backstory.
• No Woman's Land: Somewhat averted. Even though the focus is on female characters who clearly suffer some serious abuse, the setting shows that male characters are going through the same thing around them. Genasi are shown sexually exploiting slaves of any gender, and every slave is forbidden to wear clothes. Haara is also just as likely to encounter lecherous female characters as male.
• Nominal Importance: Invoked by Haara when she introduces herself to The Jackal (who just took her and everyone else on the zeppelin hostage) right after mentioning how it's tougher to kill someone after you learn their name.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: The female fire elemental in The Lake of Fire is specifically mentioned to be busty, and her posted HeroForge minifigure lives up to it.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Gloria gives one to Spectra to justify organizing a purge against her own subjects, citing the many struggles she suffered being accepted as a hobgoblin princess in a human-dominated kingdom. It comes off hollow considering Spectra's background as a homeless orphan left her suffering much worse things than Gloria could ever dream of.
• Obviously Evil: Bren, Kay'la's 'squire,' openly admits to her that his goal is to stab corpses with a needle hidden in his walking stick in order to bind their souls to his goddess 'The Scaly One' and empower her. Kay'la completely ignores this and hires him as her squire anyway so that she can become a real knight.
• Off with His Head!: Wernn, a gnome prisoner, gets decapitated by a guard’s axe during the jailbreak in The Destitute Dancer.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: In The Forest of Terrors, when Spectra gets caught smuggling by a forest outpost, the commander offers to leave that out of his report if she services him and his men. Considering an honest report would lead to life in prison due to the city's crackdown on organized crime, she has little choice but to agree.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: At one point in Trapped in the Faewilds, the core party of six gets attacked by illusory doppelgängers from their past. From Spectra’s point of view, she sees two teammates get trapped in desperate drawn-out duels for their life, two teammates quickly lose their fight and die, and then she herself gets unceremoniously ambushed and stabbed unconscious by her own. When commenters asked about Mona, the sixth and final teammate who was only seen attempting to heal a dying teammate, the author replied that she’d already fought and dispatched her phantom before the team even regrouped. (This was even more surprising considering she’s a tiny fairy who’d never shown any combat prowess before this)
• Old Master: Haara's Firbolg master checks every part of the description.
• One-Person Birthday Party: On the 1-year anniversary of Spectra's first story, the author posted a picture on DeviantArt of her sitting alone in her darkened trailer staring sadly at a single cupcake.
• The Only One: When Haara wants to assemble a team to rescue her former master from the volcano mines, the mission's mandatory nudity^note since they'd be impersonating slaves scares off any adventurers who could help. This forces her to enlist Walburt despite his complete lack of qualifications for a stealth mission.
• Only One Female Mold: Averted with the characters that get artwork, due to the author using a different character-creator software for each one. Haara has the athletic Heroic Build from HeroForge, for example, whereas her mother has the slender dancer body from HeroMachine 2.5 and Spectra has the curvy anime artstyle of Koikatsu Party.
• Opponent Instruction: After witnessing Faelar kill Serris in their duel, Haara challenges him to another with the same weapons, exotic polearms called latajangs. Faelar snidely points out that she's holding hers upside-down. (Her obvious improficiency turns out to be part of her plan to manipulate him into agreeing, so she could ignore her held weapon and kick him into submission.)
• Our Genies Are Different: In D&D canon, Genasi are the rare offspring of mortal-genie unions. Here, they're a full-fledged civilization with their own empire, four distinct subcultures catering to each elemental variant, and they reproduce through biological families like any other race. There's even a fifth variant, the Void Genasi, who serve as the royal family.
• Outgrowing the Childish Name: This is a naming convention of the shifter clan Fiora grew up with. Young males have a 'G' prefixed to their name (like G'leye or G'ren), and they shed the prefix after completing their coming-of-age ritual. Notably, when G'ren fails his and is exiled for cowardice, the apostrophe is dropped and the 'G' is permanently welded to his name (becoming Gren) to signify his irreversible failure.
• Painful Body Waxing: Even worse; in one flashback, Haara undergoes the apparently-standardized imperial procedure of having all her body hair plucked out with tweezers. The process is mentioned to happen every three months until the slave's body hair stops growing back altogether.
• Parents Walk In at the Worst Time: Barely averted; in The Savage Savannah, Fiora's mom walks in seconds after her daughter breaks up with her boyfriend and kicks him out of the house post-coitus. She still quickly realizes what happened. (Also they live in a nudist clan and she's well aware Fiora's sampling boys to prepare for the upcoming mating ceremony, so there likely wouldn't have been much awkwardness anyway.)
• A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: Spectra accidentally turns a college party thrown by Loxodons into an orgy by asking the wrong thing in their native language, which she doesn't speak.
• Personal Space Invader: Walburt’s combat style revolves around grappling his opponent to deal extra damage.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Spectra's doppelgänger from Lost in the Faewilds is dressed in one of these, just to visually drive home how much better she is than the real thing.
• Pirate Girl: The Jackal, captain of a ship affiliated with the Crimson Corsairs in Skies of the Damned.
• Pheromones: When cornered in a cave by four murderous gnolls, Fiora magically conjures the scent of their sex pheromones to confuse them into seeing her as a mate instead of a meal.
• The Plague: Gloria mentions that Duskvale is suffering from one called the "Green Mist", and her father sold her to the Horned Queen so that she'd cure it.
• Plant Person: While not seen in actuality, Spectra disguises herself as a dryad to seduce a forest sentry in The Forest of Terrors.
• Playing with Fire: The Fire Genasi come with latent fire powers. Haara also knows produce flame as one of her three spells.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: When Ayrwyn hears that Haara plans to escape, she pleads (and Haara promises) to bring her along when the time comes. Later, when Haara seizes an unplanned opportunity for freedom, Ayrwyn never forgives her for leaving her behind.
• Polyamory: The Jackal mentions having multiple wives in different ports across the continent, and insists they’re all aware and consenting to the situation when Haara initially interprets this as her simply being a serial womanizer.
• Poverty for Comedy: Walburt's cheerful offhand mention of growing up in a leper colony is played as a punchline.
• Power Nullifier: Any Genasi slaves known to wield magic are forced to wear special metal armbands that nullify their magical ability. Haara doesn't have one since she learned her magic in secret while growing up a slave.
• Power Perversion Potential: Happens to Spectra in-universe, when the only job she can find involves being a circus freak and a prostitute, using her shapeshifting to satisfy her clients' fantasies. Fiora mostly uses alter self to give herself a penis.
• Precious Photo: Spectra grew up never knowing what her parents looked like, so when she starts rebelling against her warlock patron's orders, he gifts her an heirloom locket with their picture to manipulate her back into line.
• Production Throwback: When Kay'la travels back in time for a single adventure, she finds the ancient world running on 1st edition (OD&D) rules.
• Professional Sex Ed: In the opening scene of First Day of School, Spectra is hired by a goblin hunter to take his son's virginity, and also hopefully figure out why he's had such a bafflingly-difficult time losing it on his own.
• Public Secret Message: While at dinner with the king, Haara is quizzed on the Genasi national symbol◊. After she discusses the four elemental colors and nuances of the design, the King seems to accept her answer. But later, after she's truly pissed him off, he brings up their prior discussion to point out there's a fifth color; black, the border color that surrounds and shapes the other four, like the Void Genasi do for the empire as a whole.
• Purple Is Powerful: The crystal that grants Spectra her magic powers is purple. The Void Genasi also have dark-purple skin and rule over the Genasi Kingdom.
• Puzzle Reset: The puzzles Spectra faces in the Faewilds follow this format; if she screws up an attempt, the puzzle randomizes its elements (to prevent brute-forcing through memorization), spawns some hostile monsters, then lets her try again if she survives their assault.
• Random Effect Spell: Fiora's self-made cantrip, draught pitch, deals one of six random damage types whenever she casts it.
• Rapid Aging: In a particularly bizarre case of Utility Magic, Fiora bypasses a brew's fermentation period by using a water elemental for the solvent and casting bestow curse on it to instantly age it up by two weeks.
• Rage Against the Mentor: Spectra's warlock patron spends multiple stories tricking her into doing increasingly-catastrophic things without her knowledge or consent. After her actions ultimately lead to an entire neighboring kingdom descending into a bloody politically-driven purge against its own people, she finally starts screaming about how she's never going to trust or help him ever again, even after he's plucked her to safety and left her in the center of her hometown.
• Raging Stiffie: When Fiora visits and wakes Gren in the middle of the night, he has morning wood which he quickly covers up. Fiora ignores it since she's too focused on manipulating him into agreeing to her plan.
• A Real Man Is a Killer: Fiora's shifter clan has a coming-of-age ritual where a young hunter must slay an axebeak and bring back a trophy in order to be considered a man.
• Real Name as an Alias: The Jackal is a fearsome pirate who doesn't let anybody but her closest confidants know her real name. But during her "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner, which Haara overhears, she reveals her true name: Jacqueline.
• Red Is Violent: The villainous Crimson Corsairs, who hail from Crimson Cove and are commanded by a red tiefling.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Gloria and Spectra assume this dynamic in Lost in the Faewilds. Gloria is headstrong, impulsive, aggressive, and risk-taking, whereas Spectra is nervous, submissive, self-doubtful and overly accommodating.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl:
  • Spectra, the only protagonist who didn't choose the nudist life.
  • Haara assumes this dynamic with Fiora in The Witch's Sacrifice, as the latter repeatedly finds increasingly outlandish ways to get Haara into sexual or embarrassing situations.
    Haara: Why does every single plan of yours involve humiliating me?
• Refusal of the Call: When Haara returns the Piscine Stone to the Tortle family, their oldest son refuses to accept it, even though it means his father's soul will remain stuck in the material plane.
• Replaced with Replica: When ordered by Iaqo to kill Gloria, Spectra tricks him by summoning her pact weapon as a theatrical saber, complete with a collapsible blade, and "stabbing" her in the chest.
• Revealing Cover Up: After Haara escaped from the Genasi Empire, she covered up her slave tattoo with a tribal armband, as well as other designs across her arms, legs, and back to make the coverup less obvious. Someone still deduces her secret in the very first story and immediately attempts to recapture her.
• Revenge Porn Blackmail: In The Savage Savannah, after Fiora's schemes blow up in her face and she's standing trial for her crimes (with the village elders openly indicating they're going to vote for her execution) she asks only for a private moment with the clan's matriarch...whereupon she reveals that she used encode thoughts to create a memory of their illicit tryst, and her mother will be delivering it to every clan in the region if the matriarch doesn't get her off. Since matriarchs are forbidden from forming sexual attachments, the blackmail works and she gets her sentence commuted down to exile.
• Riddling Sphinx: Kay'la encounters one in the mithral mines while hiding from its master, a murderous rakshasa. Apparently it used to use the Riddle of the Sphinx, but the rakshasa changed it to an unsolvable riddle to prevent it from revealing his secrets. (Kay'la comes up with a solution anyway, so the sphinx reveals how to defeat him)
• Rigged Contest: When Spectra asks to transition from prostitute work to something that'd let her develop her magic ability, her boss challenges her to hit a faraway target at his archery range to prove she's ready. After she fails, she learns later that he gave her an arrow with a magnetized tip that repels away from the target, meaning she had no chance of winning.
• Robbing the Dead: After team-killing one of her previous kidnappers, Gloria takes his longsword to replace her ramshackle quarterstaff.
• Romanticized Abuse: Inevitable when so many of the sex scenes are nonconsensual and involve slaves. While the narrative casts the Genasi as villains and paints their sexual exploitation in a negative light, Haara never seems to suffer any lasting psychological damage and the rape scenes are still clearly written to titillate.
• Sadist Teacher: Professor Goldgrass is needlessly cruel towards Spectra, mocking her and penalizing her for tiny reasons and calling her to the front of the class for "practical demonstrations" that inevitably hurt or embarrass her. All of this stems from Spectra's parents having murdered her husband during their failed bank robbery.
• Sapient Steed: Kay'la's horse Lugnut is a fey spirit shapeshifted into the appearance of a kelpie, meaning it can understand Common and generally shows more sapience than a regular horse.
• Savage Wolves: The first monsters Haara fight in the very first story. Spectra, Kay'la, and Haara's mother also face wolves at some point in their respective series.
• Screw Yourself: Kay'la has Spectra shapeshift into a copy of herself before sleeping with her.
• Secret Diary: Clew's journal serves this function for Spectra in one story, helping her bypass the traps he built around the portal to escape the Faewilds. She doesn't learn until several entries in that he was also her father, adding a whole new dimension to the details and relationships he chronicles about his past.
• Secondary Character Title: Played with in the prequel story The Destitute Dancer, regarding the series name. It's the only story where the protagonist herself is fully clothed and doesn't fit the series title "Vow of Nudity," but instead, one of her party members is a warforged.
• Secret Room: On her first day of school, Spectra finds a hidden room under the abjuration teacher's office, with a mysterious and secretive man living in it.
• Seeker White Blood Cells: Kay'la is swamped by white blood cells while exploring the king's body, and later 'outswims' them to reach his heart safely...only to find equally-aggressive undead white blood cells at the source of his infection.
• Selkies and Wereseals: Haara encounters one in Peril in the Frozen North (who even commands a posse of polar bears and saber-tooth tigers!)
• Set Piece Puzzle: In true D&D spirit, the series occasionally includes dungeon puzzles Haara must solve to progress. For example, The Sinking Temple includes a room full of columns that turn into squish traps along a certain pattern, requiring memorizing the order to progress. The Isle of Slimes includes an alchemy puzzle where Haara must brew potions in a certain order to successfully synthesize a bomb to blow open a sealed door.
• Sex for Solace: After Fiora and Gren barely survive a wild goat ambush, Gren starts freaking out and trying to abandon their mission. Fiora stops him by giving him a blowjob to calm him down and give her time to think of further ways to manipulate him to keep going.
• Sex Shifter: An elven slave in The Isle of Slimes has the Blessing of Corellon, meaning he can shapeshift into a female form (or back) once per long rest.
• Sex Slave: A slightly complicated example, in that no story has shown evidence that the Genasi Empire specifically assigns sexual duties to their slave population. But they also don't have any laws protecting their slaves from being abused, leaving the civilian population free to do anything they like to whatever slave catches their eye.
  • In Trapped Among Orcs, the devil blacksmith Melopi has a khenra named Ni-Bast under his thrall, who made a deal with him and serves as his personal slave as repayment for her debt; this is one purpose, out of many, that he uses her for.
• Sexy Cat Person: In a series loaded with sexualized characters, Fiora still manages to stand out due to her mischievous nature, unbridled sex drive, frequent and unashamed use of magic in lewdly-unintended ways, and her questionable morality letting her get away with far more lecherous behaviors than other good-aligned characters.
• Shamed by a Mob: Kay’la is subjected to this after Slekkh dispels her glamour in the middle of a crowded stadium, revealing she’d secretly been wearing armor the entire time she’d gone around claiming to be the world’s first naked knight.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Averted with Haara, who knows disguise self and casts it whenever she expects to be dealing with civilized people, knowing they're likely to be uncomfortable with nudity. Played straight with Walburt and Fiora, temporary party members in different stories who both clearly enjoy walking around naked in public.
• Shapeshifters Do It for a Change:
  • While alter self is capable of far more advanced shapeshifting, Fiora uses it in her first scene to simply grow a penis to have penetrative sex with Haara.
  • Either averted or underplayed with Spectra, despite being a changeling prostitute, as she's so submissive during her backstory that the sex scenes never reveal anything about her personal sexuality, beyond her just shapeshifting into whatever the clients request.
• Share the Male Pain: When Fiora zaps a demon in the nuts during a street brawl, every male townsperson watching the fight oooh's in sympathy.
• Sheathe Your Sword: In Peril in the Frozen North, Haara finds herself being attacked by an increasingly-large posse of local wildlife all inexplicably working together. It isn't until she realizes they're being commanded by a selkie and drops her spear that they pause, to give her a chance to explain herself for recently killing a boar.
• Shield Surf: While fleeing angry walrusfolk in the snowy mountains, Kay’la convinces Father Pyrestein to cast enlarge on his frying pan so they can sled down the mountain on it and outstrip their pursuers.
• Shock Collar: Haara and the other kidnapped slaves are forced to wear them in The Isle of Slimes.
• Shower of Love:
  • Ayrwyn and Haara in one flashback during The Ghost Ship.
  • Haara later has one with Serris and Lysandra at the end of Peril in the Frozen North.
• Sibling Rivalry: The backstory for the two titans in Skies of the Damned. Their father intended for them to duel for control of the mountain range upon coming of age, but the older brother surrendered his claim as the duel was about to start thanks to a vow of pacifism. The younger one took this as an insult and relegated him to serve the harpy colony as a messenger ever since.
• Signature Instrument:
  • Haara can play the handflute, which involves curling one's fingers to blow wind through them and give off a whistling tune similar to a bird call. Its lack of a physical instrument ties in with her disinterest in material possessions and her closeness to nature.
  • Petrichor, a bard scheming to beguile a sea monster, casts his magic with a pungi, an instrument famously used for snake charming.
  • Walburt’s character sheet lists him as proficient with bagpipes, befitting a bombastic barbarian with no indoor voice.
• Signature Scent: While being attacked by axebeaks way above her weight class, Fiora scares the entire flock away by magically mimicking the telltale scent of an ankheg, a local burrowing predator who pops out of the ground to eat other savannah-dwellers.
• Significant Name Shift: Fiora subtly takes advantage of this trope when trying to convince Gren to join her in a risky gambit against the gnoll warband threatening their tribe. The 'G' in Gren's name was originally a prefix signifying his youth, he would have ritually shed it had he not horrifically botched his coming-of-age attempt and gotten exiled from the clan. By calling him 'Ren' during her persuasions, she reminds him of the adult name he could have had, manipulating him to take this chance to regain his honor in the eyes of their clan.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Gloria quickly proves to be far more ruthless and cunning than Spectra expected when asked to rescue a pajama-clad princess lost in the faewilds. To wit, she's thrown herself headlong into multiple deadly skirmishes armed only with a makeshift quarterstaff, team-killed one of her kidnappers when his back was turned, and even held herself hostage at swordpoint to prevent her own capture. It's telling that when she does this, everyone present instantly knows she isn't bluffing.
• Silver Bullet: In D&D, many demons and devils are resistant or immune to nonmagical weapons that aren't coated in silver. This comes into play in The Witch's Sacrifice, where Fiora's silver dagger becomes Haara's primary weapon of choice.
• Sins of the Father:
  • Dowager Burnhide locks Haara in her basement for no reason other than to prevent the young slave from witnessing a once-a-decade atmospheric phenomena. Haara turns the tables by manipulating events so that Burnhide's child gets trapped in the mansion's walls, missing his first opportunity to see it as much as Haara did.
  • Spectra's nudity curse is also court-ordered not because of anything she did, but because she's the changeling daughter of a pair of murderous bank robbers.
  • Similarly, multiple stories (Lost in the Faewilds, First Day at School) involve characters who make Spectra's life hell as long-awaited retribution for ways her parents had wronged them before she was even born.
• Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: Kidnapped From the Hot Springs revolves entirely around this, after a pair of khenra barbarians abduct several people and discover that one of them is a newborn baby prophesized to bring victory to the Genasi Empire. Each character in the party holds a different opinion on matters of fate, destiny, and free will, and have different motivations coloring how they interact with (or attempt to harm) the child.
• Slave Liberation: The Silver Lining's whole thing. However, the sort of guerilla raiding tactics normally seen in this trope seem to be only a small part of their playbook; instead they usually purchase slaves' freedom through legal imperial means and help the newly-freed slaves integrate comfortably back into Mixed Lands society.
• Slave Market: Averted in the Genasi Empire; all slaves are owned by the government, and the Slaver's Guild is primarily responsible for housing, disciplining, and assigning daily work to the slave population. Played straight with the pirates of Crimson Cove, who threaten Haara with putting her up for auction after capturing her.
• Slime Girl: The Giant Ooze in The Isle of Slimes has evolved into a massive one by the time Haara has returned to the island, and serves as the final boss of the story.
• Slippery Skid: In one flashback, a Genasi teenager plays a prank on Haara by using shape water to create an invisible ice slick on the ground in front of her, causing her to wipe out and shatter most of the expensive dishware she was transporting.
• Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: The adventurers who capture Haara in The Sinking Temple force her to run a dungeon puzzle involving timing the proper order to jump along these without getting squished.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Subverted on two occasions. One of the slaves Haara rescues on the Isle of Slimes is a friendly yuan-ti pureblood, and Kay'la's familiar is a viper named Trowser who acts dopey and doglike.
• Sssssnake Talk: Bren, Kay'la's kobold squire, talks like this constantly.
• Sneaking Out at Night: After finding a suspicious crawlspace in her abjuration professor's office, Spectra breaks into the university at night to investigate further.
• Sole Survivor:
  • Haara's mother in The Destitute Dancer.
  • Haara is the only expedition member to escape the island in the flashback storyline from The Isle of Slimes, though enough characters' fates remain ambiguous that she returns years later to search for other survivors.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Walburt can cast speak with animals thanks to being a bear totem barbarian.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: How Spectra's pact weapon works. She can summon it from nothingness, and it can assume the form of any nonmagical weapon type.
• Squaring the Love Triangle: Played for drama at the end of Lost in the Faewilds, where Spectra discovers the backstory behind her dead parents. Unfortunately, the one revealing this to her is a jaded suitor her mother didn't pick, and he's decided he'll settle for her daughter...
• The Squire: Bren serves as Kay'la's squire, though he's comedically useless and never does anything to help, merely stands by snarking while she suffers Amusing Injuries from whatever ill-conceived situation she's gotten herself into.
• Stark Naked Sorcery: When Fiora conducts the ritual to sacrifice Haara to the demon lord, she does so naked. (This proves to be a bad idea when she gets sucked into the demon realm along with her would-be victim).
• Step into the Blinding Fight: When Haara proves more dangerous than she expected, Umbra casts darkness to blind her, relying on her own True Sight and whip's range to attack Haara with impunity.
• Stock Animal Behavior: The Giant Subterranean Lizard engages in a push-up battle with Walburt when both are attempting to assert dominance.
• Stock Ness Monster: The Giant Plesiosaur who appears in the climax of The Ghost Ship.
• Stock Punishment: Spectra gets locked in pillories after being caught smuggling by a forest outpost.
• Stomach of Holding: A robotic variant. Forger, the warforged from The Destitute Dancer, keeps his inventory items in a self-described ‘storage compartment’ due to his not wearing clothes.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: When the fey bandits attempt to force Gloria to drop her weapon, they make the mistake of revealing they're not allowed to harm her. She instantly presses her rapier to her own throat and dares them to take another step.
• Stopped Numbering Sequels: After posting Haara's sixth story, the author went back and removed all the numbers from the story titles.
• Succession Crisis: A large part of Gloria's backstory. The king of Duskvale was infertile, and so he adopted her from a hobgoblin tribe to continue his dynasty through name, if not blood. Her struggles surviving her childhood as an outcast heir to the throne is the main reason she's so distrustful, calculating, and ruthless by the time Spectra eventually meets her.
• Succubi and Incubi: Haara and Fiora infiltrate a city full of these while trying to escape the abyssal plane. Of particular note is Carnerri, a succubus who lets them hideout in her house when they ultimately draw too much attention to themselves.
• Suicide by Cop: Spectra's parents die in the middle of their court trial by ensuring a cleric's casting of moonbeam deals maximum damage to them.
• Summon Bigger Fish: After Walburt and Haara defeat a trio of spiders, Haara notes they were behaving oddly by rushing out into the open, not to mention straying so close to the mines in the first place. Cue the Giant Subterranean Lizard that was chasing them...
• Swallowed Whole:
  • Happens to Haara and the pegasus she was riding in Skies of the Damned. They escape by assaulting the creature's stomach to a degree that it spits them back out.
  • Spectra gets eaten by a frog in The Forest of Terrors and only survives because one of her spells (sacred flame) doesn't require an attack roll to cast.
• Sword and Sorcerer: Haara and Fiora form this duo during The Witch's Sacrifice.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: At the end of The Sunken Temple, Haara finds herself badly wounded, unarmed, and fighting a bronze wyrmling sorcerer who's vastly stronger than her. She defeats it by standing near a load-bearing wall and taunting it into firing a Breath Weapon at her, shattering the wall and letting a deluge of swamp water drown it.
• Tag Team Twins: Ukhetsep and Rhataq are barbarian khenra twins who fight side-by-side at all times.
• Taking the Heat: During the flashbacks in The Ghost Ship, when Ayrwyn gets caught talking to Haara on the job, Haara claims to have started the conversation so that Ayrwyn wouldn't be punished.
• Taking You with Me: The Jackal detonates a bundle of dynamite while surrounded by harpies, murdering their chieftess and inner circle as her final act.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Walburt prevents the Giant Subterranean Lizard from eating him by casting speak with animals and convincing it to eat the nearby spider corpses instead.
• Talking Weapon: In one arc of The Naked Misadventures of Kay’la, Kay'la travels back in time to search for a missing artificer, and discovers that his magic sword has spent enough time in the past to develop sentience. (It immediately allies with her since its master had gone long-deranged from loneliness.)
• Tarot Motifs: In Skies of the Damned, Haara challenges a sailor to a game of "Fate's Mate", which involves drawing cards from a tarot deck and then competing in head-to-head minigames that correspond to each card. Each card's challenge seems to correspond to its face thematically, if the three we see (Strength = arm wrestling, four of cups = music battle, seven of swords = darts) are any indication.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine:
  • Haara teaches herself produce flame, despite her tutor pointing out there are easier spells she could be starting with, because it's the Fire Genasi's signature spell and she wants to use it against them.
  • After spending pretty much every fight hitting enemies in the crotch, Fiora suffers her own Groin Attack during a street brawl and immediately admits that she probably deserved it.
• Tattoo as Character Type: Each Genasi slave is given a unique identifying code that gets tattooed on their upper arm. After escaping, Haara covers hers up with a tribal armband, plus adds more mystical-looking tattoos to her arms, back, and legs so the coverup's less obvious. Overall, her heavy use of tattoos signifies both her adherence to her monk lifestyle and her limbs being well-trained deadly weapons in their own right.
• Teacher/Student Romance: In The Witch's Sacrifice, Haara witnesses a flashback to Fiora's time in university, where she's shown to be romantically involved with a professor while working as his assistant on an expedition to seek out and desecrate demonic remains.
• Team Killer: When Spectra negotiates a team-up between Gloria and her kidnappers, Gloria proves far less willing to forgive and forget, backstabbing one of them while he was distracted defending her from a displacer beast.
  Gloria: He was a rapist and a brigand, his own teammates don’t even miss him. Plus I wanted his sword.
• Teeny Weenie: Petrichor's "size" gets insulted by multiple characters. Notably, when he rapes Haara upon their reunion, he completely fails to notice she had the Piscine Stone hidden in her vagina at the time!
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • The Genasi national symbol◊ emphasizes the internal struggle between the four subraces to see themselves as superior to the other three. Each subrace displays it from a different orientation that leaves their own elemental design displayed at the proper angle.
  • Also Haara and Fiora in The Witch's Sacrifice, as initially neither are thrilled about having to work with the other to escape the abyssal realm.
• Tentacled Terror: Haara is horrified when she spots a Giant Octopus on the ocean floor and quickly hides rather than fight it. The flag of the Crimson Corsairs also has a large red octopus wielding a double-sided trident.
• Terrifying Tyrannosaur: The demonsaurus, essentially a T. rex covered in spikes, is the alpha predator in the abyssal swamps, and its den is littered with half-eaten corpses of all the other creatures Haara and Fiora had encountered to that point.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Spectra is the daughter of two tailors and loves sewing dresses as her primary hobby. However, her late father who's eventually revealed to be a changeling ex-bandit and a murderous bank robber strays pretty far from this trope.
• Third-Person Person: Walburt slips into this on occasion, seemingly at random.
• Three-Way Sex: Fairly common thanks to the prevalence of sex scenes. Every protagonist has participated in at least one (even Haara's mom, who only appears in the prequel.)
• Transferable Memory: The Sisters of the shifter clans use encode thoughts to deliver encrypted messages to each other via clansmen who act as runners between villages. Since only Sisters are allowed to know magic, this ensures nobody else will eavesdrop on their private messages. (Of course, they don't know Fiora taught herself the cantrip in secret...)
• Transflormation: A princess stranded in the Faewilds gets turned into a tree by a pair of mischievous fairies, forcing Spectra to challenge them to a game of wits to make them turn her back. Later, one of the same fairies turns badly-wounded Spectra into a tree to give allies time to reach her and provide medical aid.
• Trip Trap: In Lost in the Faewilds, Spectra turns her pact weapon into a bullwhip in order to trip someone like this.
• Trouser Space: Pulled off without trousers: Haara stores the Piscine Stone in her vagina due to a lack of other options.
• True Sight: Void Genasi can automatically see through illusions and magical darkness.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: In one of the few times we see Haara take the initiative for a sexual encounter, she seduces a pair of traveling twin gnomes so they'll give her a ride to nearby civilization.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: When a story contains flashbacks to Haara's time as a slave, the flashbacks often tell their own complete story, with some elements of it calling forward into the main storyline.
• Underground Railroad: The Silver Lining. If Haara's not explicitly working for them in a given story, she usually sends them any money or treasure she earned during an adventure.
• Unwanted Spouse: Played with; Ayrwyn clearly didn't love Petrichor and only married him for her freedom. But by the time Haara reunites with her, she's suffering so badly from Stockholm Syndrome that she's enthusiastically participating in his schemes and can't fathom being anything but his loyal wife.
• Utility Magic: The author seems to enjoy finding as many alternate uses for D&D spells as possible. For example, characters have used shape water to create invisible ice slicks or bust open a ship's locker, minor alchemy to forge counterfeit money, and floating disk as a makeshift umbrella. Haara herself uses produce flame as a source of light, warmth, and firestarting outside of combat. Even her regular use of disguise self to generate illusory clothing is a relatively mundane application for what's normally an infiltration/subterfuge-oriented spell.
• Victory Sex: Pretty common in the final chapter of any story, often between Haara/Spectra and whatever Guest-Star Party Member accompanied them on their current adventure.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Fiora extols Haara's (supposed) virginity to the demon she's being sacrificed to...then sleeps with her anyway while the demon was arriving to collect her soul. When Haara later points out the logical fallacy, Fiora counters that lesbian sex doesn't count, despite having a magical penis at the time.
• Virile Stallion: The Storm Lord's male pegasi are overly concerned with the 'Sire,' a stallion specifically chosen to breed with the mares of the farm and who lives in special quarters apart from the rest. Haara gets the flock to help her fight the skyswimmer by convincing them the Storm Lord would value them more after defeating such a powerful foe in battle.
• Vow of Celibacy: The Sister (aka matriarch) of each swiftstride clan in the barrens is forbidden from engaging in sex due to ostensibly being "above such base desires." Fiora takes advantage of this to maintain an illicit affair with her tribe's Sister to secretly learn her magic without anyone (even the Sister) knowing.
• Was It Really Worth It?: Fiora's origin story chronicles the web of sex, politics, and blackmail she orchestrated to learn magic despite the wishes of her clan, ending in everything blowing up in her face and getting her exiled (narrowly escaping execution with one final underhanded gambit.) As she's being escorted from her home village, the matriarch's final barrage of snippy comments is a mixture of this and "Now What?", since Fiora may be free to practice magic now, but she's almost certainly going to die in the wilderness without anyone to help her survive.
• Weapon-Based Characterization:
  • Haara wields a hand-carved spear, a simple yet versatile weapon focusing on functionality over flashiness.
  • Kay'la, a boastful paladin with a flair for the dramatic, wields a double-bladed scimitar to showcase the exact opposite.
  • Umbra from The Lake of Fire is a cruel slaver, and correspondingly wields a whip which can sprout spikes with the press of a button.
  • Walburt is a brawny primal barbarian who fights using only his fists.
  • Spectra and her pact weapon both rely on shapeshifting into different forms to adapt to new situations.
• Weaponized Offspring: The Giant Ooze that Haara encounters in The Isle of Slimes can shoot little oozes, and uses this ability to quickly overwhelm a platoon of Genasi soldiers.
• Webcomic Time: The series as a whole averts this due to taking place in a medieval fantasy setting, but The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la isn’t against lampshading its frequent schedule slips:
  Kay’la: I know it’s only been five days since I started chasing that mithral plate, but it felt more like 5 months!
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Largely averted with Haara, who defaults to nonlethal damage when fighting anyone, including nameless mooks. Though she will kill occasionally, especially if a fight forces her to use unconventional tactics (like environmental manipulation or her produce flame spell) that give her less control than she has with her fists.
• Wily Walrus: The thanoi hunters who chase Kay’la and Pyrestein down the Sharpeak Mountains. Granted, Pyrestein had unwittingly led a crew of poachers right to their tribe, but Kay’la wasn’t even present for that and they still tried to kill her.
• Wintry Auroral Sky: Averted in The Butcher's Basement, which revolves around a once-a-decade atmospheric phenomenon but is set in the summer.
• Would Hit a Girl: Pretty much everyone, in line with the dark fantasy setting.
• You All Meet in a Cell: The Destitute Dancer begins with the protagonists all in prison for various crimes.
• Your Worst Memory: Meeting a Void Genasi in the volcano mines causes Haara to instantly flashback to her traumatic dinner with the Star King years earlier.

---