CoX: GG-EZ
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.
There were two people he used to be. Once, he used to be a quiet, insular kid who wore hoodies all the time and grumped about being short and feminine but never dared to say anything. The other was a raging, loud, abusive asshole on the internet, winning the game and making everyone involved feel bad. Even himself.
He did lose once though. That loss came with it a dare and a bet and a crossplay and then that got him attention from another cosplayer, and that became a friendship. A friendship that wasn’t based on bullying and winning or on shame and shortness. Took some time, but he learned through it to bring who he was together; he could be a cute, short, prettyboi AND an apex gaming predator AND he could be a friend, all at once.
Then six months later, his friend came back to him and asked him to join her, to pilot a big, stomping, videogame-powered mecha, the realest cosplay possible.
Continue Reading →Game Concept — Goncharov Card Game Concepting
I am tired and my brain hurts and I am exhausted as I try try try to make graphic work for Bloodwork happen. The website is down and up and down again and that’s maddening as hell, and the dog is weird and the dishwasher’s replaced and aaaaaa so what I decided to was exorcise a brain worm about a Goncharov card game.
Bloodwork: I have a Normal Brain
Hey here’s the Bloodwork banner:
T-Shirt: Trans Vegas
Hey, Talen, you do a lot with the trans flag in your designs are you trying to say something yes I am trying to say the trans flag is kickass and right now you need every bit of random reasons to make it clear to say, any trans youth around that you’re not a total shithead and if they’re afraid there’s a reason to look around and see people who care about their existence and are less likely to suddenly turn out to be a fascist anyway hey let’s look at this design it’s from Fallout New Vegas.
The design is a bit small and hard to see on a white background so I recommend if you get it you put it on something dark.
You can get it on stuff and I recommend it on a shirt or get some stickers and slap ’em places you think are cool and I like it on the pin too.
CoX: Hext and Unburning
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.
“Is that her?”
“Unburning?”
“Yeah, the former sidekick of-“
“You know, don’t call her that.”
“But she was, until the incident,”
“Don’t mention that.”
“Why, what’s the worst that-“
“You know, maybe just stop talking.”
She’s not broken. She’s not wrong. She’s just not like you. Unburning is an angry young woman, in a way that sentence simply could not capture. Some heroes struggle to keep their power under control, and hers is the power of fire that burns as rage – where she becomes more angry, she becomes more powerful… and she recognises that seductive risk.
So, she keeps herself withdrawn. Careful. Quiet.
She knows when she’ll need to be loud.
“Oh, suuuure, it used to be all ‘poison apple’ and ‘cursed to be a frog’ but y’all don’t seem to remember when the time came to solve plagues and poxes, it was the witches that did that, jeeze. No respect.”
Hext. Just Hext. Once, a sidekick, now out on her own, she goes now by just Hext. She’s got that sly, not-quite-impressed college girlboss feel, like she’s free from some form of oversight, except her life and education has featured oh-so-much worse than textbooks. Running around beating up bad guys in her early teens, she’s done with living in a shadow, learned her lessons, and her former mentor… well…
… yeah, none of that, not no more. Bored with that.
Continue Reading →Bloodwork: Signifiers, Associations, Locations, And Violence
Here’s the banner!
Bloodwork: But how do you win?
Boobidy doobidy here’s a banner
More thinking About Making QUeer Games
Do you remember Hannah Gadsby?
They’re an Australian comedian, who made the comedy special Nanette, and its follow-up special Douglas. That’s where I know them from. They’re good specials. I liked them a lot. It takes a lot to get me of all people to tune in to a comedian standing in front of an audience just being funny when there’s no presence of a dinosaur or laser beam to keep me from feeling selfconsciously like I’m being educated about art.
Continue Reading →Bloodwork: Emergent System Design
Boom here’s a banner.
The Privilege of Acceptable Voices
Bloodwork: Systems And Entanglement
Blah blah blah here’s the banner!
Thousand Word Chunks
Bloodwork — Abstraction
Hey, we’re talking more about Bloodwork, the card game about building a network of vampires in the context of a 90s aesthetic representing new and interesting ways the society we live in is parasitic and we’re going whoosh okay.
Shirt 23.05 — Haru-Ni ’06
Anime in my mind comes in strata. Different ages, different things that made significant changes to the landscape of anime. Things that feel contemporary weren’t, because I got to watch them at the same time. Things that were contemporary didn’t seem to be to me because I missed one. And in 2006, there were two different anime that shook my world launched – and I didn’t enjoy either of them until they were years old, unaware that the impact they had was nearly simultaneous.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a really great series that I should write about sometime, and Ouran High School Host Club, an equally excellent anime that made a lot of millenials grapple with being gay or girls or gay girls, both hit in April 2006. They were important in ways it was hard to explain, and even now they’re both handy touchstones where you can point to them to just open conversations about anime of that time. They, in a way, ruled the world.
And they both had main characters named Haruhi.
Here, then, I present stickers for you to show which you support in their quest to take over the world of anime as of 2006. If you’d like them, you can get them, with Haruhi Suzumiya as the Presidential runner, or with Haruhi Fujioka as the Presidential runner.
How To Be: Amity Blight (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.
Hey, you know The Owl House? That’s a recent animated television program that has all sorts of conversations around it about the way queer representation gets handled and creators get treated and yes, did you know, did you know that Disney are a bad company? It’s the first I heard of it too! Anyway, The Owl House kicks ass so I want to do a How To Be about a character from it and…
And how hard could this be if … oh jeeze, I see the word count.
Okay!
CoX: Labyrinthal
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.
Day job? Youtuber. His name’s Acre, even. The channel’s pretty popular, in the low thousands, where his channel is guides on history, as told by examining historically interesting weapons and swords.
Thanks to this, he did one day get his hand on a cursed, haunted axe, which complicated his life quite a bit. Now, when he picks that weapon, the spirit of the Minotaur flows through him, which – well, he wrecked his studio recording the video unboxing it.
But a secret identity is too useful to pass up, and Acre is out on the streets, doing what he can to take advantage of this power.
Continue Reading →Midmonth Bloodwork Work — Stuffness
Alright, Bloodwork, it’s a vampire game, it’s a builder game, it’s like Machi Koro but instead of an idyllic seaside town you’re making edgy vampire associations that look like Multi-Level Marketing pyramid scheme.
I’m thinking about this game a lot today, and part of what I’m thinking about is the game’s relationship to stuff. Specifically, the kind of material boundaries I have to deal with in the creation of a game which relies on a pyramidal card structure, modelled on the classic 52-card card game pyramid.
Magic, Eugenics, And How To Do Not That
Do you have magic in your setting?
Does that magic have a genetic component?
Okay, bad news, you’ve justified eugenics.
The Magic of Goo
You know that book I wrote (that I’m willing to admit)? One Stone? The story set in an alt-history British Empire at some mangled point in history where they have guns and trench warfare in the middle east, but also farmers unions are recruiting to mass-harvest food and oh yeah, there are dinosaurs. It’s an ahistorical setting that’s about how stories about fantasy kingdoms that are clearly England feel to me, as an author raised on those stories from the wing of the empire.
I mentioned, offhandedly, to someone recently that the magic system of One Stone is – and they interrupted, asking hang on, what magic system?
The Szudetken Empires, Part III
This is a continuation of the previous post describing the Szudetken Empires peninsula in Cobrin’Seil.
The Bernean Lodges
Where the forests weave in tight against people and farmland is hard-fought from its ownership, there are the night-time howling stands of the Bernean Lodges. Tall, narrow houses, with tightly angled roofs to slough off the snow and rain, the people of the Bernean Lodges isolate themselves from other communities, because they are keenly aware of the way that Szudetken is full of monsters that look like humans. In response to the threat of werewolves, ghosts, changelings, cultists and other horrors, the Bernean people opt to threaten and endanger almost everyone who moves around in their spaces,
Continue Reading →The Szudetken Empires, Part II
This is a continuation of the previous post describing the Szudetken Empires peninsula in Cobrin’Seil.
Voolfardisworth, The Glimmering Net
Where the land becomes mountainous, the castles of Voolfardisworth start to jut up on various cliffs and high peaks, overseeing inevitably, valleys of small communities beneath them. Sometimes known as the Fard, the Fooly or the Fanged States, Voolfardisworth is an aristocratic nation composed of many different, widely distributed noble houses that would rather you not admit they’re vampires (and may even do something to make it so you can’t).
Continue Reading →The Szudetken Empires, Part I
The largest single nation on the Cobrin’Seil continent of Bidestra is Dal Raeda. That is, at least, for those who measure around the edges of the nation, following its perimeter along each distinct shape, and measuring out the distance there. Of course, this does not accommodate for a measurement where an observer takes the furthest points of the nation, at all of its edges, and maps the space that contains; if one measures by that means, then obviously the largest nation on the continent of Bidestra is the Eresh Protectorates, a set of city-states strung out like beads on a string across the King’s Highway. A box, drawn to contain all of those cities, thanks to their distance between one another, could almost contain the entirety of the continent. A third method of measuring exists, where one looks for the area dictacted within the boundaries of the land mass, and composites together that space, such that deep canyons and tall mountains can exert influence on the scale of the nation.
By this metric, as uncertain a measurement as it can be, then the largest single nation on Bidestra is easily one of the six empires that occupied the peninsula known as Szudetken (pronounced schoo-det-ken).
Continue Reading →Prototype 23.04 — Blood Work
There’s not been much public work on this one. Most of my public spaces are annoyingly, lacking in engagement from the audience I’m used to — a very awkward thing which means I might start making points of using maybe even a discord? To get people to talk to me about the stuff I’m doing so they can engage with it? Not sure.
Either way, I have been thinking a lot about necromancy, about death and life, and the ways systems feed on one another so of course I’ve been thinking about multi-level marketing cults and vampirism.
Continue Reading →The Redbubble Bummer
Redbubble announced, at the tail end of April, starting now in May, that they were going to charge a flat fee for people who make money on their site. This sucks and here’s a thousand words about how this sucks and how I may stop making stuff to put up on Redbubble, which, also, sucks.
I Wanna Be Cool
Dredging Up Schmavenloft
In the maps of Cobrin’Seil, up and on the right someplace, there’s a place called Kryphaneos. Setting aside that that name is very close to The Kingdom Of Mal-Bad, Kryphaneos is definitely one of the signs of an unrefined worldbuilder’s ‘that’ll do.’ Kryphaneos was my all-purpose place for horror stuff, dark magic came from there, there was an ostensible kingdom with supposed capitals and places and purposes and that was all a thing but it was a thing that happened over there. Kryphaneos was very much a ripoff of Ravenloft, as written by someone who didn’t read any Ravenloft books — a kingdom of nothing but dark horror, divided up by foggy lines, where the most notable detail ever provided about it was that nobody wanted to be there.
As time goes on and I keep trying to refine these ideas I meant to write down someday, I figured it was time to confront this space of grim and dark horror, and write down what I wanted it to be. But this isn’t that, this isn’t a writeup of the place, as much as it is instead, a consideration of what I want that place for. What do I want to have in this part of the world, and why do I want it to be different to just any old existing space.
Basically, if I have an Evil Country, why do I have it? What’s it for? And why is it there, and most of all, does answering those questions make my world a place that sucks to exist in?
Continue Reading →
Pitch: Development Issues
You know for all that this blog is a space to put down my own creative work, it’s kind of shocking how ill-equipped it is to talk about things I can’t do. I do board games and card games and talk about RPGs and anime and media and a lot of being angry about fundamentalist christianity, but there are rare times when there’s other stuff that interests me as well. Remember that one time I presented some recipes? What about the occasional outbursts of flag threads?
Here’s something I don’t think I’d ever have the means to make, then: I’ve been thinking about web shows.
Continue Reading →CoX: Ironworks
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.
How much work do you have to do to convince yourself that you’re normal?
He goes out at night wearing gauntlets he built, with knuckledusters designed to keep gangs down and send a message. He returns home to the mechanic shop and sleeps. And through it all, he tells himself he’s a normal guy, just fighting crime how he can.
Which doesn’t explain the flaming aura.
Or the unbreakable bones.
Or the way gods shudder at his presence.
Callum thinks he’s a normal guy, fighting evil with no greater purpose. And he couldn’t be more wrong.
Continue Reading →How To Be: Samus Aran (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.
Really gotta specify that ‘in 4e D&D’ on this one.
When we talk about How To Be, the point has always been to take characters that are interesting in some particular way then see how we can carry that vibe into the creative space of 4th Edition D&D. What we’ve seen, when we try and make things like a real-world-alike gangster or a robot dinosaur, is that there are some concepts that seem very easy to translate into the play space that really aren’t. Zelgadis is a D&D character and he was very challenging to translate to the game just because he’d already been filtered through another set of different game rules. Minfilia showed us that when a character leaves large parts of their method and ideology as blank slates, there’s a challenge creating something in the space that fulfills that character.
Extremely defined and extremely vague characters, in both directions, are hard.
Anyway, let’s look at Samus Aran.
Shirt 23.04 — Can’t Lose
I need very little encouragement to make some things. Over on my Patreon (where you can sign up for as little as a buck to give my brain good chemicals), I suggested this shirt design as a potential one for this month. One person went ‘I like it,’ and so I went and did it.
I was aiming at evoking a university sports team logo (which I looked at a lot of) and the DOOM logo from 1993 (which I also looked at a lot of, but for different reasons). This design involved learning a lot of things about how to make 3d-looking shaped text, which is how I got this eventual ‘curving’ effect — it involves the Lens Distortion tool in GIMP.
The popped text above and below the logo was made first in a vector program and then also made 3d in GIMP, too. Honestly, looking at this piece I’m pretty proud of how many pieces of this involved developing or refining a new skill to do something, or built on a skill I’ve gotten so used to I didn’t even conspicuously think of it.
I kinda want to get a hoodie or coffee mug with this on it for my dad but I think he, a preacher, might balk at the actual pentagram.
Anyway, you can get this design in black star or white star versions.
Horny vs Spite
When explaining creativity to newcomers, I express the idea that everyone who makes something makes it out of one of two possible motivating factors, when viewed broadly enough. The line is:
Everyone who ever made anything made it out of one of two possible motivators; horny, or spite.
This maxim serves to get the conversation started. You either wanted the thing to exist that didn’t exist yet, or they were mad at the thing for not existing the way they wanted it to. These two driving could also be seen both in terms of just ‘wants’ – but I think that when you simplify it that far, you leave the listener without a valuable handle, a way to grapple with the idea.
Continue Reading →