Planar Lensing
How many wheres are there?
There are three major media franchises these days that all work with the idea of multiplanar worlds. Sometimes this involves creating a huge and complicated network of just coincidentally competing brand merchandise lines, where two companies bickering about a contract results in a storytelling direction that explains why Uncle Ben is a different guy, but sometimes it’s a direct choice and it’s done because you want a new place to be, a new whole world to play with.
When building worlds, adding these ‘alternate worlds’ – referred to as planes hereon out – can be a great way to continue the ongoing need of the worldbuilder, which is where am I going to put all this stuff? What I’d like to present here are just some ways to talk about how you’re using planar spaces in your worlds.
Continue Reading →Create Tension when You Can
You don’t know how to write well.
Wip Assessment 1
I keep my files organised in directories on my hard drive, which is a thing the youths don’t do any more, because of woke. I even use silly tricks to handle how they’re organised. Did you know you can put a ! on the front of a directory name, which will ensure it’s always sorted to the top of the list, so if there’s some sort of universal toolset or template directory you want, you can use that to keep it up the top for easy access? These are useful tips for if you want to run the Windows version of Xtree Gold, which they call ‘Explorer’ to manage your files.
I keep my games in progress there. Hypothetically, that’s also where completed games go. I haven’t completed many games this year. Or last year. Or â look, it’s been rough since basically 2020, that’s when I can say for sure things got difficult. There have been a lot of reasons to slow down production, not the least of which is just money. Making games is a hobby and it costs money and I’ve just not had as much to play with lately. Shipping costs have changed, production costs have changed. I’ve talked about this before.
But those are why the game doesn’t get pushed to a product that I can sell you.
As of this moment I have 34 directories in my GameDev directory, with components of games of some degree or another, that are all labeleld as, in their own way, ‘WIP.’ Works in Progress. What are they waiting on? What is keeping the Works In Progress as In Progress?
Continue Reading →CoX: Bael
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
So he’s an incubus? Is that the word for a boy one?”
“Succubus and Incubus refer to ‘bottom’ and ‘top’, you know.”
“Whoah, really? Then which one is he?”
“I’m RIGHT HERE.
Bael really doesn’t like the word ‘sidekick.’ It hovered over him too long – first as a Demon Prince’s human-world emissary, then the caged pet of a Thorn mage, and finally as the protege of one of Paragon’s heroes. It was a tightly-packed few years.
Now the leader of the Young Spartans, Bael makes it his job to get the best out of his entire team.
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 3 â The Million Eyes
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This third section indicates the midpoint of the story and the collapse of a lot of hopeful ideas; this is where the party meets with the Jatku Outcasts in their jungle fortress, and learns the horrible truths about the Necrocalypse, the Emperor, and the truth of the dead woman Jatku, mother to one of the Princesses.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 3: The Iacon Colleges
The Iacon Colleges represent the coalition of the finest magewrights, researchers and technician in the Kraivh Empire. The Empire is a place of faith and trust, but it is to the colleges they turn when they want to make their vaulted cathedrals and also sick sky skimmers. The Iacon Colleges represent a drive to understand the world that the Emperor is keeping safe, and the Iacon Colleges do so through rigorous study, abandonment of the unnecessary, and a kind of focus that could drive a mushroom through a solid concrete slab.
It is the Iacon College who first spoke of the coming disaster, it is the Iacon College that can find murky shards of lost history, it is the Iacon College whose great towering spires, near to the heart of the Empire, most closely align with the needs of the empire. Where a billion are lost, many of them are lost in the Colleges, and all they have left behind are parts and notes. The Iacon Colleges seek to remake their history, even if they have to time travel to do it.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Mistral Motion
I think about the responsibility I have to an audience.
One of the fun things about getting older is seeing the ways that things you have had in your head for a long time have endured. You get to see the thread reaching back all those years and how many things you’ve got that you do that you can connect to odd or interesting sources. Fox and I routinely reference Strong Bad Emails at one another, sometimes with the right level of levity (“look who thinks he’s clever dan“). Quotes from the Bible, inflections from 1990s sitcoms, the occasional idiom from a They Might Be Giants song. Sometimes, I’ll stop mid-sentence and we’ll have a little chat about oh, huh, I guess that’s where that’s from, huh.
These are literally memes; they’re transmisable ideas, things that cling to the memory and can be easily exchanged, which in turn promotes their existence. They are used for a meaning below their exact meaning. If I say someone’s Clever Dan it’s bringing with it a framing that speaks of children’s cartoons.
Continue Reading →It takes a great person to get an idea
But don’t go public, it’ll ruin the plan
‘Cause no matter how intelligent or clever you are
You’re only as good as your fans
CoX: Nightbug
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
Shout out GO WHOA!
âA powerful transformation
BAM BAM into space!
âPlunge forward!
Fight!! Transform!
Go ahead and be reckless
Using the courage of the night,
âRise up!
When stars connect
You should kiss the moon!
If you’re here,
âMy dreams will surely come true
When all our smiles become one,
âThe future will be won!!
“Nice suit.”
“Thanks, my mom gave it to me.”
Continue Reading →Goblin, Vandal, Sugg
Every word you’ve ever used comes from somewhere. The structures you use to discuss ideas is informed by ideas that came before it. I’m not getting all Sapir-Worf about this (and if you don’t know what that is, you don’t have to know because it’s probably not true), but rather wanting to draw your attention to the way the world you live in is in part defined by the words you use. If you’re an English speaker, there are ways you describe food that are a byproduct of French invasion centuries ago. Words like ‘technocrat’ and ‘hyperspecialised’ are constructions that borrow from how intellectuals used to use Latin. Your swear words are almost all from the poor working class, and used to describe sex, god, or excrement, and that’s not how all swear words work in all cultures!
Your world shapes your language.
In any given fantasy setting you work on, you don’t usually have the same linguistic history to justify why the people there talk like we talk now. In fact, to be completely fair, they probably don’t talk like us at all: you have fantasy languages, across fantasy constructions. Any given phrase a character in your world says is probably not using the exact same words as we are and we’re all working with a sort of fictionalised fantasy that makes the concepts reasonably translate across.
There’s a whole treatise then about how we handle Native American names and loanwords that we italicise like etouffee.
Point is that you have words, in your world, and you can attach stories to them. You’ve probably seen me talk about Orcs and how they relate to language and stereotypes, along in my long post on the word ‘Orc’. Here’s another set of examples I like for my world of Cobrin’Seil, as they pertain to the best little evolved raccoons, the Goblins.
T-Shirt: am crab!
I drew a cute little crab. I put it on a design.
Pretty happy with this. You can get a sticker of it here!
Bloodwork Update 11
Oh snappers it’s another one of these, and yes, I have not forgotten about Bloodwork even if I’m writing this two hours before it goes up!
Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 2 â College Days
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This second section is about the characters travelling through the Kraivh highways to the city that holds the Iacon College
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 2: The Kraivh Empire
The world is broken; wounded, and one in seven in the entire empire expunged. A billion are missing and amongst them were workers, guards, scholars â and those missing people have left a wound across the entire world. Thankfully, the strong leadership, the head of the Kraivh Assembly, have been able to hold the institutions of the world strong in this great, yawning disappearance.
The armies of the Kraivh defend the borders. The Osteotheruges pick through the graves and memorials, trying to find the truth that has been lost. And even Emperor Kraivh, The Eternal Undying himself has assigned his closest blood to the quest of solving the great question, beginning the quest meant to solve that mystery, and in the process, bring back a satisfactory answer to be spoken in in the Vox Maxima.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →T-Shirt: Stained Heart
Here’s the design!
Here it is on a shirt!
FFXIV: Rin Stormenni
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
“If you follow this path, of this abyss of love, then you must do it knowing. You will be bane, outcast, criminal, rival, sinner. All the world will hate you, young one, and you will have no kingdom but that of strife.”
The young man beamed, dripping still with tyrant’s blood.
“Then I shall be the Prince of a Thousand Enemies.”
Self-made outcast. Valiant crusader. End of days. Bun goes hop.
It’s not arrogance if it’s justified.
Continue Reading →A Mechanic For Love
Hey, have I shown you this already?
This is a card that’s meant to represent a piece in a worker placement game, where the pieces also represent the places they’re meant to be placed. And I think this might be a game where your workers can date other people’s workers.
Continue Reading →What’s Marriage For?
Marriage is a thing that’s so important to our culture and media that you’ll see it in an embarrassing quantity of everything. Setting aside media genres that are just dedicated to some version of it (and yeah, a lot of those ‘romantic’ things people are making are really just just about marriage things), there’s still stuff in our language and everyday common existence that speaks of marriage. If nothing else, consider we have a mode of address that specifies whether or not a woman is married, and asking to not be treated with that language is seen as a different dispensation. It is, to the audience of most of this conversation, a thing that The Empire tells us
What does it mean to be ‘married?’
Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 1 â All The Emperor’s Daughters
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This first section is going to be the establishing shot; it discusses the characters that are going to be introduced, the goals of this story section, and then the beats of the story that the writer can then take as their subsequent storytelling. This helps inform character dynamics for flavour text and the later appearances of characters on cards.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 1: The Emperor’s World
Ten years, ten long years of life, disappeared from the collective memory of all citizens of the world. People blink and wake up, seeing about themselves a world defined by new factions, new ideas, and new technologies, many of which they may have even had their hand in inventing.
Where am I? What’s going on? This isn’t the body I remembered, people don’t call me the name I remember – what has happened to us.
This is the new world of the Vox Maxima – waking up the moment after, all the anxieties of before confronting a new world, and a new life. What is this world, and what is present here? What is strange and what is it that your damaged memory can manage as being somehow normal?
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. Itâs composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →T-Shirt: Reading Ralts
This one might not be around for long. Consider it a ‘limited run’ design. Typically speaking, anything that’s too obvious and related to Pokemon, even if you draw the art yourself, gets bumped off the Redbuble store, eventually.
Point is, I drew artwork, back in 2023, of a Ralts having a chill time reading a book, with a message I personally think of as inspiring, and put them on a shirt. This design was made for someone in particular, inspired by them, but I don’t want you to be deprived of it. I have my copy now, so I don’t need to worry about it being, like, taken down too much…
But you might want a copy of it.
Alt Text and Habituation
I’ve been trying to consistently put alt text on images here on my blog.
Continue Reading →How To Be: Power (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be weâre going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that âfeelsâ like the source character
- This isnât meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character âfeelâ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the âfeelingâ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition itâs worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isnât going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things â itâs not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like youâre lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and weâll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
I suppose, in addition to any of the other standard comments you see from me in a How To Be post, I’m going to be mentioning some details from late in the story of Part 1 of Chainsaw Man. To that end, consider a spoiler warning in effect. You’re going to learn some stuff about how Power’s story goes, in general. No point by point, and I will keep the details broad, and if you’re interested in Chainsaw Man I do recommend you check it out. You know, if you don’t mind an action horror manga where discussing the character requires a mandatory Spoiler Warning I suppose.
Speed of Words
Hey, how fast can you get a message to the nearest major settlement you don’t live in?
I bring this up because I’m about to talk about fantasy worldbuilding, okay? We’re about to get into the cool dork stuff in a minute, but before we get going we’re going to wind up talking about a bunch of real world communication stuff that you may not have examined unless you’re like me and hang out with cool academics talking about it.
Continue Reading →CoX: Poisonberry
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
She goes by Risty, and her surname, well, you’re not going to find it on her ID, because you don’t get to see her ID, because what are you, a cop? But she’s got a hero identity – Poisonberry – that she carries over from her runaway days, a name you’ll see tagged on New England underpasses.
Girl’s a metronome, wildly swinging from withdrawn, sullen and snarling, to cocky, arrogant, and ten thousand percent. She may not think of herself as a superheroine, but she does know she’s sure as hell super.
Continue Reading →MTG: The New Mechanics of 2023
2023 saw a lot of new Magic product, and of it, a lot of it I disliked. Since I donât like the Phyrexians as a villain type, and I donât like the implementation of D&D in Magic: The Gathering and I donât like Urza, and I donât like Lord of the Rings and I donât like Dr Who, that meant that the release of Wilds of Eldraine marked a point where I finally had seen a release I didnât actively hate for over a year. After getting Kamigawa Neon Dynasty and Streets of New Capenna I was so happy for how Wizards were handling new and old places, so you can imagine how irritated I was to watch them drive the flavour bus into the ditch of âeugenics grandpaâs sad feelsâ again and park there.
But that doesnât mean these sets with their terrible stories and annoying characters and embarrassing fandom sycophancy are necessarily bad. After all, they have individual cards I can appreciate and they can also have mechanics that I can poach and play with like legos. Setting aside my personal antipathy though, what about those sets yielded toys for me?
Continue Reading →MTG: Introducing â Vox Maxima
It is 917. You are anxious about the news. You knew things were going to go badly, but you didnât know theyâd be this bad. You run through the streets of the city, trying to get the feelings out of your heart, feeling your fingertips numb, the swell in your throat and the agony of knowing, of knowing this.
The world is going to end. Sometime in the next few years. Sometime soon.
Itâs called the Necrocalypse. The actual specifics are confusing â thereâs a confluence of so many magical factors, and it seems to be directly tied to activities of spellcasters. The same people who made the world you live in, with the towering, safe, well-cared for and healthy hallmarks of the life you lived were all at the expense of something… coming. Something eventual. Something inevitable.
You take in a deep, helpless breath.
You close your eyes.
You open your eyes. It is 927.
You stand in the bazaar, surrounded by the noise and sound of the clink of coins and the lowing of the camels and the other animals here for trade. Everyone around you hesitates too â you can see it, the moment that happened to everyone else. You know where you are â a Kraivh Cremains Bazaar, here to trade with the bone dust that drives the heart of the Kraivh Assemblyâs great industrial and military engine…
… but you have no idea what you did yesterday.
Or the day before that.
Ten years of your life, disappeared, and ten years of everyoneâs life.
Ten years missing.
What happened?
A DECADE LOST
You blinked, and ten years disappeared. The world is changed, with five factions grappling to contend with this new reality and its new crusades, rebuilding the missing time and what it means, in the great empire of the Kraivh Assembly.
A BILLION DEAD
One person in nine is gone. A whole Empire, spread across what were a host of countries, holds the world together, handling the tragedy. But as instantly as the Empire appeared, so to do its enemies – beset from without and within by threats to its tenuous stability. The machinery of war has been set in motion as everyone contends with the sudden, widespread loss of their time.
Planeswalkers are stranded, unable to Planeswalk away. The Emperor holds the Assembly together with both hands, turning to his daughters to quest to save the Empire. They travel the land, meeting its people, and trying to understand the words that destroyed a decade. They seek to express the Vox Maxima – the greatest voice.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →Don’t Forget Simple Tools
I started this list, the list that became this article, about three years ago now and just added to it over time. Then I’d remove things when I saw I wasn’t using them any more, and I’d always call into question if I was being silly, right? Like, notepaper and pens, duh, obviously you know you can use those.
But you do know that right?
Like, if you’re making a board game you can take a piece of printer paper and draw your board on it. You can use a circle stamp to make the spaces if you want them reasonably consistent. You can just make things with pens and paper and sticky tape like you’re a little kid and nobody can stop you.
Still, if I’ve had the draft for years I either need to finish it, or delete it, and thus, I want to present to you a handful of cheap tools I’ve bought from the supermarket for making things that I have found useful.
Decemberween ’23 â Decay!
Thereâs a very real consequence to being my friend, in that I will bring you terrible things to point and laugh at, unless you make it clear I shouldnât.
Twitter has been a strange part of my life, in that it is simply put, a bad space and the actual reach and improvement it gave my life, while tangible, is hard to quantify versus the effort it took. I try to think of it less as a product I spent my labor on and more a play space I used, and try to ignore the ways in which whatever chemistry drove that place also absolutely scrubbed layers off me in the process of its operation. But Twitter is something I think of as a site I used, and my account only persists so when someone inevitably links me something because theyâre not off the site either.
Anyway, one of the friends I made on Twitter was Decay, and Decay is great.
Decemberween â23 â Drawfee
If you’re passingly aware of being funny on the internet, a discipline started with Seanbaby, perfected by Loading Ready Run and then monetised by College Humour, you might already know about Drawfee. The Dropout network, the continuation of the thing that once was College Humour, has its own spinoffs, and its own subscription service.
I don’t have the subscription service, mind you. I just look at the stuff made by their artist spinoff, the artists who run a channel now known as Drawfee.
Drawfee is an artist channel, where the general gimmick, as repeated, is that they take your dumb suggestions and make even dumber drawings. They don’t, usually, the art they produce is full of character and life and there’s all sorts of ridiculous joy to be seen while these friends draw and talk to one another about drawing. There’s some stuff that talks about general trends in art – like the Octobertober, where they do a bunch of October art challenges, every day grabbing a bunch of random prompts from a different kind of art challenge, whether Cutegirltober or Inktober or Cringetober.
There are typically four standard artists – Karina, Jacob, Nathan and Julia – and they have distinct voices, art styles and interests. You’ll pick up pretty quickly who likes doing what, depending on the subject matter. Nathan has a very low key, chill vibe, Karina is a gremlin cat with a knife, Jacob is Standard Male Art Nerd, and Julia ignores the brief. And… that’s it. That’s the show. They show up, they make a video about them drawing, and that’s half an hour show, every few days. There’s a stream channel as well, for more long form art where they talk to one another, which has the energy of, well, hanging out with other artists.
Continue Reading →Starting New Habits
I bought a sketchbook yesterday.
Not yesterday when you read this of course, but yesterday for me.
I bought the sketchbook at the Reject Shop. It was not a nice sketchbook. It was not an expensive sketchbook. It doesn’t have a nice cover. It doesn’t have a leather case to keep it in. It’s not like the leather cover my sister got me for my bullet journal. It cost me $3 and its brand name is ‘VISUAL ART DIARY.’
Today, I started drawing in it.
Do You Want Invincible Ink Stuff For Decemberween?
Decemberween is coming! Decembeween is oh so near! Decemberween is for giving! Decemberween is almost here! Decemberween, Decemberween, it’s fifty-five days after Halloween!
If you are at all interested in Stuff I’ve Made as products for presents for people in the coming months, I’d like to make this my official opportunity to tell you to go check them out now. It’s November, it’s near the end, if you’re in the Mainland USA or Canada (which my metrics indicate you are), and if you want something to arrive for you over there in order to give it to someone as a gift, now is a good time to set aside some coins and check out the stores for our stuff!
Here, let me show you the kinds of things I make that you may want to spend some money on!
