Fanfic / Vow of Nudity

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:

There are several related series set in the same universe:

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 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 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.

Vow of Nudity provides examples of:

• Accidental Pornomancer: Haara never actively seeks out sexual encounters, and would probably be a Celibate Hero if the universe weren't constantly bending over backwards to drop her into erotic situations. On several occasions she expresses disbelief or annoyance at how often she seems to find herself having sex.
• 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.
• Action Girl: Haara's primary archetype, a bare-knuckled brawler who regularly gets into scrapes and comes out on top through a mix of brawn, guile, and improvisation.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Armor Is Useless: Haara's character sheet shows she's statted out so that her Armor Class would actually reduce if she were to put on armor.
• 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.
• 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.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Haara frequently must resort to this whenever her spear gets broken, confiscated, or lost.
• 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.
• 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!
• Blessed with Suck: Inverted. Spectra's clothing-destroying necklace, which cannot be removed or suppressed by any (non-magical) means, is initially nothing more than a straight curse at the start of the story. However, after having sex with the fallen deva Hiyeth and becoming a Celestial Warlock, her necklace now has a heart-shaped pendant attached to it that allows her to cast magic, and doubles as a Periapt of Health. So while she still must contend with her necklace's nudity curse for the foreseeable future, with all of the downsides that it entails, she can now also use it as a means of protecting herself and potentially bettering her lot in life.
• 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.
• Blob Monster: The featured monster species in The Island of Slimes.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Cat Girl: While canonically a swiftstride shifter^note D&D's equivalent of a werecat, Fiora's character art is just a catgirl, and the narration casually and frequently refers to her as such.
• 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.
• 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.)
• 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.
• Clingy Costume: Spectra's necklace of nudity, like all cursed items, cannot be removed.
• 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.
• 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.
• Combat Pragmatist: Haara constantly plays dirty, usually because she's fighting naked and unarmed and needs any conceivable advantage to even the odds. In one example, she agrees to a Duel to the Death using exotic polearms she's not proficient with...just so she can ignore the weapon she's holding and kick her opponent to death.
• Come to Gawk: Spectra suffers from this daily, due to her necklace of forced nudity and her career as a circus performer.
• 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.
• Convenient Color Change: While never mentioned in text, the illustrations show that the crystal on Spectra's necklace will change color to visually match her new color scheme when she shapeshifts into a different form.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Spectra's parents were executed by the magistrate for a failed bank robbery on the same day she was born. Their assets were also bequeathed to a dead guard's widow, forcing their daughter to join the circus to make a living.
• Curse: Spectra didn't even do anything to deserve her nudity curse; the local magistrate forced the necklace on her after her parents were executed following a failed bank robbery, rationalizing that she'd likely follow in their footsteps if given the chance to live normally with her changeling powers hidden.
• Cool Horse: After rescuing the sphinx from the mithral mines, Kay'la learned how to summon Lugnut, a magical fey spirit in the guise of an aquatic kelpie-styled horse.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Double Weapon: After her dual swords get ruined by rust monsters, Kay’la forges a double-bladed scimitar that becomes her weapon of choice.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• Embarrassing but Empowering Outfit: Spectra suffers this to the extreme with her cursed necklace (once Hiyeth adds the purple crystal). It causes anything else she wears to burst into flames, meaning she has to walk around completely naked, but it grants her magical abilities, healing powers, and immunity to disease.
• 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.
• Esoteric Motifs: Fiora's demonic rituals contain objects of all four types (chalice, candle, pentacle, dagger). She even regularly calls her silver dagger an athame in conversation.
• 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.
• 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.
• Extreme Doormat: Spectra at the beginning of her story. When she develops magical ability, she resolves to get better at not being this.
• 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.
• The Fair Folk: Spectra, like all changelings, is statistically a fey rather than a humanoid. This means she speaks sylvan and the list of spells/effects that affect her are completely different to most player characters. (Becomes a major plot point in Trapped Among Orcs when Hiyeth starts teleporting her to do his bidding using conjure fey, which lacks a range limit or a saving throw and puts her completely at his mercy.)
• 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.
• 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.
• 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, and has mentioned her unwillingness to birth another changeling into the same prejudiced living situation she’s had to endure in the human world. An unnamed background character also briefly mentions 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.
• Fauns and Satyrs: Qalek, the ringleader and owner of the circus Spectra works for.
• Fell Asleep Crying: Spectra does it in her origin story, after one of her clients calls her a disgrace to her heritage for living openly among humans as a changeling, disregarding that she has little choice thanks to her curse. The narration suggests most of her nights end like this, due to how poorly her employer and the other townsfolk treat her.
• 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.
• 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.
• Forbidden Fruit: Spectra loves to make clothing, despite (or because) her curse leaves her unable to ever wear any of it, and she often sneaks out to her late parents' abandoned tailory to design fabulous dresses of every make and model.
• Forced Transformation: One of the jailbreak members in The Destitute Dancer is a mage who's been turned into a cat.
• 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.
• 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- although, by technicality, khenra are Anubis-esque jackal humanoids, rather than straight fox-people.
• 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.
• Friend to All Children: One of Haara's contacts is an orphanage matron who moonlights as a weapons distributor, and Haara always brings her orphans hand-carved wooden toys whenever she visits.
• 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.
• Fury-Fueled Foolishness: Even Haara's internal monologue admits she was making a terrible decision when she attacked the wyrmling sorcerer with a mote of produce flame after he boasts about his plans to ally with the Genasi Empire.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Guile Hero: Due to her nudity, Haara is consistently at a material disadvantage to whoever she's fighting, and often must rely on her wits, keen sense of observation, or her opponent's behavioral weaknesses to defeat them. Common tactics involve her taunting or misdirecting them into making a mistake, or realizing something they don't about the environment/situation.
• 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.
• 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.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Played straight with the usual D&D races (half-elfs, half-orcs, tieflings, etc), but averted with Haara herself: the prequel story The Destitute Dancer reveals that her parents were a half-elf and half-orc. It's not even clear whether Haara knows this, as she's always referred to herself as (and her stats are for) a fullblood human.
• 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.
• Healing Hands: Haara specs into the Tranquility monastic tradition at level 3, letting her heal herself (or allies) with a mystical touch. Kay’la also gets this as a paladin.
• The Hermit: Haara lives alone in the wilderness whenever she's not Walking the Earth on a quest.
• 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.
• Holographic Disguise: Disguise self is one of Haara's three spells, which she uses either to generate illusory clothes or disguise herself as another person or race.
• Hot Witch: Fiora from The Witch's Sacrifice is a mischievous and lecherous catgirl with a very open-minded attitude towards nudism and sexuality.
• 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.
• Humanshifting: Spectra's core ability, and the source of most of her backstory troubles.
• 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.
• Iconic Item: Pretty much every good, bad, or character-defining event in Spectra's life can be traced back to her cursed necklace of nudity. It's why she works in the circus, why everyone knows she's a changeling, why she has crippling social anxiety, and (later) why she's able to cast magic spells.
• 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.
• Idiot Hero: The source of much of the humor in The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la.
• 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.
• 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.)
• Item Crafting: Haara is a proficient woodworker, which she's used to craft spears, hatchets, and rafts as needed.
• 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.
• 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.
• Javelin Thrower: Largely averted with Haara, though she does throw her spear in the first-ever scene (while hunting deer). Usually she relies on produce flame to deal ranged damage so she doesn't lose her only melee weapon.
• Jumping Out of a Cake: Fiora and Walburt do this at Haara's surprise party in A Valentine's Visit.
• Jungle Princess: As a reclusive warrior monk who lives alone and naked in the wilderness, Haara showcases many elements of this archetype within her characterization. The other half of her background (an escaped slave from the Genasi Empire) averts some of the fridge logic usually present within this trope, like her well-groomed appearance, cultured grasp of language, and lack of body hair.
• 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.
• Knight Errant: Haara herself fits every bullet point on the list.
• 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.
• 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.)
• Luminescent Blush: Spectra’s illustrations include this pretty much constantly, probably to highlight her shy personality and perpetual embarrassment at her state of undress.
• 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 untouchibality 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.
• Magical Counterfeiting: In The Witch's Sacrifice, Fiora uses alchemy to turn wooden coins into silver.
• 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.
• 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, and most of the playable races.
• Martial Medic: As a Tranquility Monk, Haara has one of the highest raw healing outputs of any class in D&D despite her complete lack of medical training or healing spells.
• Martial Pacifist: Haara calls herself this, but the stories are rather inconsistent on whether she's living up to the ideal, as she frequently starts fights and kills opponents if she has to. When she has the option, however, she'll often choose to deal nonlethal damage with her final hit to leave an enemy unconscious but alive.
• 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.
• 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.)
• 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.
• 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.
• Named After the Injury: The unseen character "No-Limbs Johnson," Played for Laughs in The Naked Misadventures of Kay'la.
• Naturalized Name: Fiora grew up in a remote swiftstride clan in the barrens, changing from her clan name^note “Lost Deer Among the Misty Pines” when she entered Mixed Lands society.
• 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.
• Nervous Tics: Spectra tends to grab her necklace pendant whenever she's scared or anxious.
• New Skill as Reward: At the end of The Isle of Slimes, Gnarl teaches Haara how to craft magic spears.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Fiora has a habit of casually describing hers and Haara's (hypothetical or potential) gruesome demises with a little too much detail.
• 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.
• Nubile Savage: Justified by Haara's background as an escaped Genasi slave, where she was well-fed and groomed for the entirety of her formative years.
• 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.
• Old Master: Haara's Firbolg master checks every part of the description.
• 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.
• 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.
• Personal Space Invader: Walburt’s combat style revolves around grappling his opponent to deal extra damage.
• Perma-Shave: The Butcher's Basement reveals why Haara is like this; the Genasi loathe body hair since they naturally don't grow any, and so all Genasi slaves are forced to undergo multiple hair removal treatments upon reaching puberty until the effects are permanent.
• Pirate Girl: The Jackal, captain of a ship affiliated with the Crimson Corsairs in Skies of the Damned.
• 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 Crystal: Spectra's warlock powers come from the gemstone on her necklace.
• 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.
• Power Tattoo: Haara earns one in Peril in the Frozen North, which renders her immune to cold damage (including frigid environmental temperatures.)
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• Shapeshifter Default Form: Spectra's usual form is a young woman entirely lacking any sort of pigmentation, giving her skin, hair, and eyes a ghostly-white look. Unlike most D&D changelings, she regularly walks around like this in public since everyone already knows she's a changeling, plus her cursed necklace makes impersonation largely impossible.
• 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.
• Signature Move: Kay'la has used thunderous smite in a truly staggering amount of different situations, barely any of them the intended use of the spell (dealing damage and knocking the victim 10 feet away). So far, she's:
  • Used it on herself to send herself flying to safety after being restrained by a deadly foe.
  • Used it on an ant (again, while restrained and essentially beaten) so that the thunderclap awakens and angers a nearby giant into attacking and blaming her opponent for the noise.
  • Used it on herself to negate falling damage (by knocking herself 10 feet skyward milliseconds before she would have hit the ground at terminal velocity).
  • Used the thunderclap to start an avalanche.
  • And yes, occasionally she even uses it for the actual purpose of the spell (sending enemies flying into hazards or off cliffsides).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Stone Wall: Whenever Haara decides to sacrifice dealing damage for survivability, she can become far more tanky than monks are usually able to by casting sanctuary, taking the Dodge action every turn, and healing herself for any attacks that still manage to break through. (It helps that her build also maximizes AC.)
• Stopped Numbering Sequels: After posting Haara's sixth story, the author went back and removed all the numbers from the story titles.
• 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...
• Summon to Hand: Fiora can do this with her spellcasting orb. In one flashback, the orb even rips itself clean from her suitcase on the other side of the room.
• 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.
• Swiss-Army Appendage: Thanks to her nudity curse, Spectra is sometimes forced to shapeshift her hand into common tools since she doesn't have pockets to carry anything around. So far she's turned her hand into a saw and a lockpick on different occasions.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Third-Person Person: Walburt slips into this on occasion, seemingly at random.
• Token Evil Teammate: Fiora, a graverobbing witch who tried to sacrifice Haara to demons...and who she's forced to team up with since she knows the ritual to escape from the abyssal realm.
• Tomboyish Ponytail: Haara has one, befitting her Action Girl status. The Lake of Fire reveals that it doesn't use a hair tie, she loops it around itself to create the ponytail.
• Tongue Trauma: Invoked by Haara whenever she uses disguise self to infiltrate a culture where she doesn't speak the language; she always severs the tongue from her illusory appearance, to justify her inability to answer if anyone attempts to talk to her.
• Trouser Space: Pulled off without trousers: Haara stores the Piscine Stone in her vagina due to a lack of other options.
• True-Breeding Hybrid: Averted; the author has said that she thinks Haara's half-elf/half-orc parentage is the reason she never gets pregnant from all the sex she has.
• 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.
• Utility Party Member: While normally monks don’t have the skill proficiencies to be this, Haara knows guidance as one of her three spells, which grants her an extra d4 on any ability or skillcheck she attempts, provided she’s in a situation where she can cast it.
• 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.
• Weapon-Based Characterization:
  • Haara usually wields a hand-carved spear, a simple yet versatile weapon often wielded by tribal or jungle warriors.
  • 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Haara has a very high Wisdom stat for someone in her early twenties, largely due to her monk training and growing up a slave in the extremely unforgiving Genasi Empire. The Butcher's Basement contains flashbacks to her childhood, with almost no change in her vocabulary, problem-solving skills, or ability to outthink those who pick fights with her.
• Would Hit a Girl: Pretty much everyone, in line with the dark fantasy setting.
• Wrecked Weapon: Haara's wooden spear is often destroyed or lost at some point in each story. Often she doesn't have time to craft another, and is forced to steal a dropped weapon or fight bare-handed for the rest of the current adventure.
• 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.
• Youthful Freckles: Haara has them according to her HeroForge minifigure, probably to highlight her active lifestyle spent almost entirely outdoors.