Category Archives: Making

Articles in this category are about tools and ideas about making things, and my belief that you can make things.

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.

an icon of a goblin hut
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Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 2 — 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. It’s 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!

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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 — 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. It’s 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!

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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.


An image of Rin Stormenni, a brown-skinned, blue-haired Viera bunny boy. He is wearing a midriff armour top, and a featureless visor mask that hides his expression in the middle of an old city. The image has blood and burnmarks in the background.

“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.

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A Mechanic For Love

Hey, have I shown you this already?

A card face illustration. The left side is dedicated to a tall region called 'tall portrait + name plate'. The right hand is split into a section labelled 'rules', then 'payout 3,'
payout 2,' and 'payout 1'.

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.

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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?’

an icon showing a pair of linked rings
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Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 1 — 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. It’s 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!

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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. It’s 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!

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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.

A shirt depicting a Ralts pokemon, sitting in a pile of cushions, reading a book, with the catchphrase around it reading 'Do What You Want To'

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.

Here! Check it!

How To Be: Power (in 4e D&D)

In How To Be we’re 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 ‘feels’ like the source character
  • This isn’t 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 ‘feel’ as soon as possible
  • The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic

When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t 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 – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll 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.

A How To Be cover title graphic. It shows a 4th edition book cover with Power on it. The top title is 'All That Power', the bottom title is 'wait there needs to be wo' spilling off the side of the book. Power is mispositioned in the page so the text covers her eyes. In the background is the Chainsaw Man logo.
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Speed of Words

Hey, how fast can you get a message to the nearest major settlement you don’t live in?

an icon of a love letter

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.

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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.


A highly stylised and abstracted image of a white femme wearing a bodysuit and leather jacket, in a cityscape surrounded by leaves and roses. Across her is written the word Poisonberry written in a permanent marker font.

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.

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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 don’t like the Phyrexians as a villain type, and I don’t like the implementation of D&D in Magic: The Gathering and I don’t like Urza, and I don’t like Lord of the Rings and I don’t like Dr Who, that meant that the release of Wilds of Eldraine marked a point where I finally had seen a release I didn’t 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 ‘eugenics grandpa’s sad feels’ again and park there.

But that doesn’t 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?

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MTG: Introducing — Vox Maxima

It is 917. You are anxious about the news. You knew things were going to go badly, but you didn’t know they’d 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.

It’s called the Necrocalypse. The actual specifics are confusing – there’s 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 – you can see it, the moment that happened to everyone else. You know where you are – a Kraivh Cremains Bazaar, here to trade with the bone dust that drives the heart of the Kraivh Assembly’s 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 everyone’s 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.

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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.

an icon of some scissors
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Decemberween ’23 — Decay!

There’s 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 shouldn’t.

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 they’re not off the site either.

Anyway, one of the friends I made on Twitter was Decay, and Decay is great.

Decay's cohost avatar, which is a picture of Entrapta, which does not properly convey their chaotic Harry Duboisish stumbling through the virtualised halls of the Great Enemy, The Computer
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Decemberween ’23 — 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.

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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.

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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!

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T-Shirt: One Flesh One End

I didn’t start this year expecting to be profoundly affected by The Locked Tomb books. As I write this, I have only finished three of them BECAUSE THE FOURTH ONE ISN’T OUT YET, but sometimes, a design haunts the brain and wants to get out. Hey then, here’s a fanart design that I hope doesn’t violate a fanart policy.

And here it is being worn by a digitally stitched-on model

If you want to see this design on things, you can get it here! I would personally recommend, if you are in some way a giant jacked gay lady, that you should get a version of this shirt without sleeves, as it would make Gideon Nav proud (I think).

Desert Bus ’23 Game Jam Game: The Coffee Question

Okay here’s a weird, non-standard thing.

See, I made my game jam game. I put it on this site. I hated it and brewed about it for a bit. But i believe in tracking my mistakes as well as my successes, so I figured it was better being done and moving on. But then a few days later, before the jam ended, I got a different idea and wanted to act on that, and so I did. What that means is this article has two distinct parts.

Part 1, here, before the fold, is me just showing you a game and linking to its itch page. After the fold is Part 2, the original version of the article, which is written by a more bummed out version of me.

The game I made is called The Coffee Question, and it’s based on the idea of trying to remember a complicated order for the whole staff when you run down to get people coffee. It’s a small game, only 27 cards, and it’s fully cooperative. You play it in two rounds, and have to try, collectively, to memorise an order of the food you’re there to get. Consider it a lesson about writing things down. It’s also built around a lot of different references to what I think of when I think of Desert Bus and food, though some concessions have been made to make the things hard to remember.

I think it’s fun! I recommend it! I like cooperative games for Desert Bus, feels more charitable. You can go get it over on itch.io. You can also get it here:

The rest of this article is preserved for archival purposes, and the other game is there for consideration, but really, don’t worry about it. The game is fine I guess, but I was really upset by the whole process. This one also had the same kind of upset but after writing about how you should route around those problems, not doing that in my followup shows how silly I can be.

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Sonic Rushdown

Gotta go fast!

Sega as a company has what seems to be a pretty prosaic attitude towards fangames. You can use their art and sprites and characters in fan media, even fan media that makes a videogame, and as long as you’re not asking anyone to pay money for it, they seem to be fine with it. It’s not a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as much as it is a “Won’t ask, don’t sell” policy, and it’s a policy I might be stretching to its theoretical limits with this.

I made a Sonic the Hedgehog card game.

They exist already. Sonic the Hedgehog has a host of card games already. They’re almost universally terrible, games that rate somewhere around Snap. Now, the fact that Sonic the Hedgehog has shown up in a bunch of terrible games is unremarkable – both in that tie-in board games are often terrible, and statistically, Sonic the Hedgehog games are just as often terrible.  It’s rolling some loaded dice, is what I’m saying.

Wanna see what I came up with?

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Game Concept — Bad Advisors

Did you hear what the king’s advisors were talking about? Well, I heard from one of them, that they think that the other advisors are too focused on their wine, or their parties, or their lovers, or enriching themselves. Why, you didn’t hear it from me

This is a concept writeup for a card game. The aim is a single-deck, form factor game which needs no sorting, you just shuffle it up and go. My aim is for a game that fits into our $20 range on Invincible Ink, so think like an ordinary deck of playing cards in terms of size.

As a setup note, this game imagines each player is pretty translatable to one another. You start the game by shuffling up a deck and dealing it out to everyone. The vibe here is something like Cockroach Poker.

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T-Shirt: Valid To Eat Fingers Jujutsu Kaisen Shirt

I like the anime Jujutsu Kaisen. I like odd memes that make sense mostly if you’ve boiled your brain in Tumblr long enough that the conversation has cooked away and left nothing but meaning-chunks behind. Together, that resulted in this design:

And here it is, on a shirt!

This design has enough permutations that I thought it best to make a whole collection of them. You can have them in solid black, solid white, transparent lines, black text and white background, and of course, the gradient version I favour. They’re also on masks if you’re particularly weird about people being near your mouth!

How To Be: Harrowhark Nonagesimus (In 4e D&D)

In How To Be we’re 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 ‘feels’ like the source character
  • This isn’t 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 ‘feel’ as soon as possible
  • The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic

When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t 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 – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.

I’ve had this one in the drawer since like April, I didn’t realise just how much I was going to enjoy digging into it two books later.

Oh and hey, sorta-but-not-really spoiler warning? I don’t mean to spoil the books to examine the character, but there is some inextricable hairs that come off with this particular bandaid. Particularly, if you know nothing about the books, there’s a vision of ‘proper’ fandom that says I shouldn’t do anything that gives you any impression of anything in the story, that I should somehow make a hermetically sealable piece of media because someone hypothetically should know nothing about the book when they first engage with it. This is silly. Telling you that, for example, in Harrow The Ninth we get to see that Harrow is a really good necromancer, that shouldn’t be considered as a violence against engagement with the books.

I liked the books, by the way, I think you should check ’em out.

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Game Concept — Lysen Co.

Welcome to your new position of Commisioned Human Resource Dispensation here at Lysen Co Food Technologies! We trust that you’re going to do your best for the betterment of all mankind as represented by the correct and accurate construction of optimal ‘tiger team’ panels for the full-time distribution of actualised test partners! Don’t worry, we know you’d never let us down – no member of our employment family ever has!

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