Welcome! This blog is for posting sketches, rambles, and general silliness to the internet.
Current Project: Sulfur & Sucrose
(I track the #blankd tag, feel free to use it if you want me to see something)
If you don't want LinkTree putting your imagery into AI... get out now
Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:
IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.
"I want to make an animated series but can't b/c no one will give me money (and people to work for me) ))):"
make a movie, make a short, make an animatic, make a (web)comic, make a VN, make a book. make it smaller until the only one hindering its creation is JUST YOU.
even if the vision/medium isn't perfect, you can still deliver the story, you can still make art
but it has to start SOMEWHERE and exist as SOMETHING beyond just a promise that other people- other strangers will have to pour their blood and sweat into a dream that only exists in your head
you have a right to make art but you do not have the right to other people as resources to make that art, so stop making excuses and create
I had a big effortpost for why I don't *personally* like the design for realis, but I'll break it down into something simple/short
click the read more for the ramble
unfortunately reading the rules in full did not endear me to it, instead I found more concrete design choices I simply will never agree with
once again it's a system that welds character personality flaws to mechanics, the game does NOT trust you to make a flawed character or act on it organically
players MUST forfeit agency to the GM in order to have agency. Sentences (the ONLY mechanical aspect of this system) are compared, ties are in favor of the "defender", since every character starts with four +0 Sentences, they are obligated to at least 3 instances of forfeiting agency before they can +1 a sentence and actually engage with the CROWN JEWEL mechanic of this system of refining sentences to be more niche. in a worst case scenario, it's actually 12 scenes before they can +1 a sentence
since players can only leverage mechanics as determined by their Class Sentences, so 3 ways (plus 1 "flaw"), most of their agency lies in causing problems, because willingly causing a problem is one of the few avenues to have mechanical agency (charge their token, a way to +1 a sentence). the issue is that the carrot to cause problems is very nearly always the same. it is also possible that multiple characters pick the same "sphere" and then they're all causing the same sort of problem because each sphere of classes gravitate around having the same sort of flaw. to be VERY clear, players causing problems on purpose isn't the issue, it's how narrow the scope is.
as a designer I beg the question(s) of why:
players need to forfeit agency 3 times always to +1 a sentence, why not 1 failure to get a +1 sentence, 2 failures to get a +2, etc.
honing allows you to +1 a sentence temporarily in a session, why not allow the ability to hone all sentences, but at the end of a session, one sentence risks becoming permanently morphed into that modified sentence? (the answer is because the designer doesn't want dice)
someone chided me for wondering why the book wouldn't be better served by being an artbook with short stories and prose- as if the author didn't say this on the kickstarter:
(image from the Realis Kickstarter)
nothing says design confidence by saying the game can be enjoyed without playing it. it's fairly damning with faint praise to admit this of a TTRPG.
realis (at least from the ashcan edition, a paywalled book that's as close to a demo that exists) suffers the same problems a lot of these rules-lite systems do: they provide notes and prompts that are, yes, more than nothing but also (IMO) hard to justify a price being attached to it.
a lot of these systems don't trust you to create your own characters but then want a GM who will spin campaign-spanning lore and world with relative scraps. it feels too small to be a game system but is somehow stretched beyond a 1-page TTRPG and I'm always left asking why I should bother with this instead of regular RP which is free?
anyway: TL;DR, this is DEFINITELY not for me, hope the realis fans can enjoy their game in peace (the KS is definitely doing fine)
copy-pasting my thread from bsky (but with a QOL links)
the Realis TTRPG is def not for me and I wonder (with neutrality) if it would have been better served as a fancy artbook with vignettes/drabbles and an open invitation to RP rather than bothering with slapping on Apocalypse Style RP 101 "mechanics" [1/?]
It's very telling to me that the KS does not feature a single book page that hints at the mechanics/rulings or what the "classes" look like. I cynically wonder if the reason why there is no free playable demo is because it's afraid to confirm it's a game. [2/?]
but in a rascal interview linked in its own KS ("Realis ditches traditional character sheets for prose poetry"), you can perhaps see why the "character class" has no sample on the KS, it's fairly barren [3/?]
the creator talks passionately about how this makes realis special when this would (IMO) be better served as an RP primer or even setting guide. the +0~3 by "adding specificity" to a sentence only sounds novel if you have NEVER penned a character before [4/?]
and once you make your own character, you will quickly rush past "4 core sentences"- I know it's "more" in totality in play- but there are (SIGH) DnD characters with more meat to them. [5/?]
for a writer with a writing background, the idea of show-don't-tell or that the journey's value over the destination seems to be absent in what few mechanics Realis has, is staggering. that your character will only gain specificity, not nuance is in service to -what- precisely? [6/?]
however the loudest dissonance is that it's a "collaborative story telling game" but "There's no explicit way to help or aid in this game. There are bonds, but no one's spending their token to give you a +1 on the Sentence you use." (quote from that rascal interview) [7/?]
meanwhile in AlwaysBad TTRPG DnD one of my players who insists he is playing an Evil Vizier has the highest NPC adoption rate of a talking horse, an abandoned gargoyle familiar, and is currently putting two elf children through college [8/?]
no mechanics were required for this. this kind of thing ISN'T on his character sheet and has NOTHING to do with him being an Enchantment Wizard- and he will have a healthier longevity than a handful of sentences that are both the PREMISE and the lifebar of that PC [9/?]
but as said at the start, Realis just isn't a system for me. I prefer TTRPGs with some abstractions to create mechanical puzzles with consequences so that the RP has some weight and chaos outside of it.
TL;DR: "Diceless" dragon fights don't hit the same maaaan. [10/?]
[AS ASIDE] "but Realis character classes are BROAD ARCHETYPES" I mean so is an evil character with a secret/developing heart, my table doesn't need a game system that welds CHARACTER to PROFESSION for them. (this is what I mean by RP 101.) [11/11]
new tier of unfathomably lazy "activism" in the wild
"Actual historical scholarship" my ass, what a fucking joke. imagine wanting to claim you care about something but not enough to find an article/report written by a person. or to bother writing your own post.
TIL Baldur's Gate 3 will be getting a TV series and personally I would be interested in either: a passionate take of a Dark Urge Paladin (with a focus on oath vs urge and all the manic tragedy it entails) or an action-adventure comedy of the standard plot, but from the perspective of Volo fucking around
but lmao at the chances of either happening
we're definitely getting THE most average'd out beats of the main plot because execs think the main party and plot were the best parts of BG3, not the player agency. I can near guarantee all of the blandly good choices will be taken but with a sprinkling of heroic posturing that will be condescendingly childish despite how the characters will definitely say the fuckword
I think the remaining mystery is HOW they're going to budget for the fantasy elements, CGI and makeup ain't cheap
hi guys! discord is doing a survey on how people would like ai to be integrated into discord. take it and say fuck no to every question. when you get to "in general, how do you feel about discord inegrating ai features?", respond that you would actively get everyone you know off of discord and wouldn't pay for nitro or other shop items if they added ai features.
2025 was Pretty Bad for me this year, most of it was a blur, and it could have been financially better (I'm stable, no worries).
as usual, many ideas/WIPs were thought, but no real material progress was made on them, however I'm optimistic about my return to creation, whatever form it happens to take.
here's to a better year, and to feeling and being more alive
PS: I need good media recs, there's still a dungeon meshi and land of the lustrous hole in my life. (doesn't have to be just anime/manga, but if it's a series, preferably something finished and at most a collective 30-40 hours runtime, TIA)
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
janainaart
yousharknotpass
