My comic got turned into a real thing!! How freaking exciting oh my God! DM me if you would like to own it... 45 dollars plus shipping, it's a high quality gdang item.
:'D Violet Core has less than three days left on KickStarter.
So far two of our stretch goals have been hit! the humble B-Type has been added to the game as a micro-supplement. That's them there! they look cool...but they are very prone to getting one shotted. They don't even got a violet core, they need to recharge! ugh.
and @kkdreamboat is gunna make a soundtrack for the game!
The next big one is more art, with work from the talents of @oddsbod and bachelorsoft commissioned for the game if we hit it >:D
People really need to get better at distinguishing between a games core ideas, and additional flair.
Let us suppose I make a character for OD&D, Bertha the Cleric. I decide that Bertha - along with having black hair and green eyes and poverty-stricken parents - is gay. I then go on to play OD&D with Bertha, and she goes and explores various horrible trap-filled holes in the ground with some other adventurers, and they walk away with big sacks of gold and level up.
Does this make OD&D gay? Is OD&D now queer media? No. Bertha's gayness wasn't actually important to the gameplay, anymore than her eye colour was. That gayness - while potentially neat - was flair.
OD&D didn't prevent me from playing a gay character, not because it's a game with queer themes, but because it's entirely disinterested in if my character was gay.
Hell, my decision to make Bertha's parents poor was a more meaningful choice; wealth is a central concern of OD&D and the pursuit of wealth is a motivation for most player characters.
The same is true for many more modern games, such as D&D 5e, Pathfinder and shadowrun. While you are able to make your PC gay - and the book might even helpfully state that you can do this (as if you ever needed the book's permission) - that decision remains flair. Your PC being gay will not, if you play as the book expects, meaningfully affect events.
This is even true if the books include canon gay characters. If the princess in your module has a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend, that's probably also flair. The trick is to see if swapping it out so the girlfriend becomes a boyfriend; if this doesn't meaningfully alter events, then that gayness was, again, flair rather than something the game cares about.
Sometimes things disguised as mechanics are also flair.
Take alignment in D&D 5. You choose lawful good. Does this change what kinds of spells, abilities, or items can affect you? Are you penalized for acting in a unlawful and malevolent manner in a way an non-lawful good person would be? Are you rewarded for acting in a lawful or benevolent manner in a way another unlawful or non-good character would not be? Does the spell Detect Good and Evil even detect that you are good?
No, it does not, despite the rules saying it is a core aspect of your character that defines how you behave in game. The reality, however, is that choosing a dagger as a backup weapon is a massively more impactful choice than choosing your alignment.
Eh, there's an argument to be made that alignment is supposed to dictate actions and that if you're not behaving according to the alignment on your character sheet it's the character sheet that ought to change, but overall I agree.
Alignment has become less and less mechanically relevant with each edition. The high-water-mark for "alignment matters" was probably AD&D 1E? Now even the most well-known alignment-dependent mechanic - the paladin's smite - has nothing to do with alignment. And even decades ago in 3.X detect evil wouldn't pick up every Evil Human Commoner 1 because you had to either be more powerful than that or wield magic that aligned you with otherwordly powers before you'd shed enough motes of pure Evil to be detectable over background Evil radiation.
Also, Alignment has never had a coherent definition. The original definition of Law vs Chaos "Fantasy Creatures That Were On Team Gondor" versus "Fantasy Creatures That Were On Team Mordor" in the wargames that immediately preceded D&D as such. Every attempt to define Law versus Chaos since has been even less coherent. And it's not like Good and Evil are any more settled either! Especially looking at some of the behaviour of "Good" people in earlier editions, such as attempting to genocide the mongrelfolk because they're ugly being a Good thing that all Good people should definitely 100% do. Or writers giving Evil a spell that results in instant, painless ego death and the Good equivalent is "we tortured you for 10,000 years of subjective time and now you're on our side."
In theory if your character sheet says "True Neutral" but in practice you constantly go out of your way to feed the hungry an risk your life to defend people who cannot possibly reward you, the DM should say "Hey I think your character is actually Neutral Good". But that's just trying to boil the entire complexity of a character down to nine categories while nobody agrees on what is in those categories. It's not great!
Law vs Chaos works just fine if you make them primordial cosmic forces with no moral weight, and assume that all mortals are always neutral (unless magically fucked with). Making alignment a matter of personality and morality is where it gets icky.
Oh lemme go one step further, maybe. Good vs evil as primordial cosmic forces that *also* have no moral weight, same as law vs chaos.
Capital G Good and capital E Evil as polarities that, on a divine level, are unthinkable, terrifying, abstract, things whose surface mortals scraped up against when they first could dream, love, and regret, and couldn't understand what they unleashed by naming. Capital G Good and capital E Evil as like, reliquaries in a church containing sanctified human hearts; the heart in the jar is not a living heart or living human being, (and Good is not necessarily good, or Evil evil) but it's an exaggeration and intensification of human body and experience in an artistic and holy context that would never occur in reality (generally afaik humans are not born with hearts that are decorated gilded and venerated on altars?). But you use them to meditate on the living heart inside you and the rest of the body it's hooked to, a cousin to the heart in the jar.
If ttrpg Good and Evil is something you want to hook up to alignment, rather than just using them as the cosmic outside forces of reality, you could play it as like, Good and Evil alignments as your fixations, your fears, what language and logic defines you? Pain or relief, punishment or forgiveness, charity or transaction, forgettings or owed pounds of flesh, all kind of independent of personal morality. I imagine also that would depend on having explicit and identifiable identities in your given setting as to what the planes of good and evil are? Outside of like, good people get reward vs bad people get punish?
hmm hold on got some Writing bubbling up in my gut, gonna cram it under a keep reading divider
THE HEAVENS AND HELLS
The Rulerships, Outer Existence
Domains of acceptance, punishment, and memory, the thrones and prisons of gods. They are the most difficult modes of existence to reach from the Prime Material, as they coalesce around the relationship between mortal life and divinity, after life on earth is spent. Pilgrims, heroes, and fools of legend have made miraculous pilgrimages to both these poles of Outer Existence, and rarely do they find what they hope for.
The dead, those not trapped in the Bardo or entangled in Faerie or Nightmare, are generally drawn to Outer Existence on mysterious paths. These outer planes are generally represented in art and magic by the All-Seeing Eye and the Three-Cord Rope: memory, judgment, and the divine's subsuming embrace. The defining traits of both Heaven and Hell.
The Hells
Inferno, the Great Pit
Anguish, terror, shame, and evil. A landscape shaped by self-destruction and the desire for punishment. Hell is where you cannot stop remembering yourself. Devils scheme and feud over these abstract mindscapes of judgment, and to devilkind's momentary victors goes the prize: to be seen and known by the vast assembly of the damned.
Hell sits far closer to the waking world than Heaven, as the anxieties and dreams of both devils and mortals are bound so tightly to life on earth. Power and vision is often unwisely borrowed from the Great Pit, and the gods and demon-lords of the dissatisfaction-desire spectrum burn here at various levels of fury and glory.
There are seven demiplanes puncturing the flesh of Hell, where its substance is most volatile and dreams most closely of earth. These are realms that most closely and deceptively resemble the Prime Material Plane, linked here by an ancient desire to escape but an inability to recognize either earth, heaven, or anywhere in between. They are strangely much more difficult to escape than Hell itself—we call them the Thorns, the Abyssal Planes.
The Heavens
Elysium, the Green Margin
Where the wind smells of the sea, and the lowering sun is slight, pale, and gentle. Heaven is where you are seen and remembered. Vast silent waterfalls hold up the curve of the sky, and keep the silence at bay. There are deep, dark canyons, and ruined cities overgrown with grass.
Perhaps the least understood or well traveled of any higher or lower plane of existence. Elysium is where life can find peaceful separation from time on earth, and unlike Hell, it is abstract and dreamlike in a way not dissimilar to the Primordial Planes of the elements. The gods most openly celebrated on earth are bound to this Green Margin in the sky above the sky.
There are seven demiplanes that circle Elysium's threshold, where the waters of heaven pool and stagnate. Corrupted immortality and paralyzing ignorance crust like sea salt on these boundary-places, where things that were never alive mimic life—we call them the Gray Beaches, the Planes of Rot.
So, i want to post that comic i've been working on- it ended up being 69 pages (done in a month with my girlfriend... not sure how we pulled that off tbh), and im super proud of my writing? the pacing, how we set it all out... its nice to have something finished that shows that off
so here it is
BUT also, the context of the previous two rounds, because they're also relevant
round 1
round 2
plus a couple of fave panels that i drew...
anyway if you like lesbians and emotional drama and alsosome murder then have i got the ocs for you
Find a wall covered in ivy, vines, moss, or similar, and clear that vegetation away. Using chalk and charcoal draw a realistic door (with keyhole, hinges and doorknob) on the surface below. Write upon the door: “Ynn, by way of [the current location]”.
Leave, so the drawing is no longer visible, and on return the drawing will be replaced by a real door.
When it is opened, the Gardens of Ynn will be on the other side: infinite, overgrown, extradimensional. This realm is full of magic and treasure, worthy of exploration and plunder by sellswords, occultists and adventures.
The doorway remains there for a full day, after which it fades away as if it never existed, leaving anybody still on the other side stranded.
After working with Emmy Allen (@cavegirlpoems) to remaster The Stygian Library in 2020, we’re teaming up with her again to remaster its sister book The Gardens of Ynn. This time working with the fantastic RiotBones on the interior art. We’ve got plans for a fancy clothbound cover for The Gardens of Ynn, as well as a matching reprint of The Stygian Library you’ll be able to pick up on the project.
The Book
The Gardens of Ynn is a point-crawl adventure set in an ever-shifting extradimensional garden. Each expedition generates its route as it explores, resulting in new vistas being unlocked with every visit.
The adventure is perfect as a zero prep session for any party of fantasy adventurers, no matter the system or the sub-genre. We found most ‘zero-prep’ adventures to be bland and lacking in colour, so in Gardens of Ynn every room, encounter and monster is popping with vibes. It's a big garden full of whimsy and delight and surreal perils.
Gardens of Ynn is statted generically for Old School Systems, but you would have absolutely no trouble using it in a game of 5E, if you were comfortable statting up some weird monsters.
Included within:
Systems for generating locations within the garden, including hothouses, memorial gardens, chess lawns, the Mask Gallery, hypnotic gardens, fleshy gardens and of course the Splicing Vats.
50 monsters tailored to the Gardens, including myconid composters, rose-maidens, rust-bumblebees, floral spiders, bonsai turtles and the enigatic Sidhe.
Details for The Idea Of Thorns and other dream-viruses.
Tables for generating treasure, Ynnian mutations, and various other useful details.
A unique class of Ynnian Changelings, human survivors adapted to the garden.
A point-crawl roleplaying game adventure set in an ever-shifting extradimensional garden.
thanks to the continued wizardry of my teammates the UI I've been designing for The Price of Flight is getting implemented! Really excited about how it's all starting to come together
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
janainaart
yousharknotpass
