#spinningthehamsterwheel

[roselarkpublishing]

spinningthehamsterwheel replied to your photo “If you missed out on getting the Weird & Wonderful Holiday Romance...”

Well-written, but disappointed it wasn't gayer. Joy can't carry all that weight on her shoulders alone!

We’re glad that you thought the anthology was well-written. Our authors worked very hard on that as did we.

As for the stories not being “gayer,” we had 6 stories featuring bisexual characters including Joy’s including MM, FF, MF, and MMF. And yes, bisexuals can end up in a relationship with those of the opposite sex and it still be a bisexual and queer relationship. Additionally, we approached several authors of LBGTQIA+ to submit... they didn’t. Joy put out the call, appealed to her friends to submit, encouraged authors who write LBGTQIA+ stories to submit. They didn’t. The reason we were most often given: No one will want to read my queer stories. We tried to encourage them, but it couldn’t penetrate. And that’s not on them. It’s on the people who won’t buy their works, or support them, and it’s on the purity police who flag LBGTQIA stories as inappropriate or banish it to the erotica dungeon.

In the end, the anthology wasn’t “gayer” because authors who write LBGTQIA+ stories didn’t submit their stories for consideration. Not because we weren’t willing to feature them. ^_^

[nyamafriend]

you maniac! you blew it all up!

Listen I saw the big red button and I pushed it, I’m SORRY my curiosity got the better of me (/l)

[noviteropodcast]

That cliffhanger! Chomping at the bit for season 2. Any news on it?

We’re glad you enjoyed! However, Novitero is only a one season show. So, sadly, there will not be a season two.

[vaspider]

The top image on your new dress post looks more like a blouse than a dress (and I can't find it on the site), is that a hopeful hint of things to come?

That we’re gonna have blouses? Oh yes. Oh yes. These are our new chiffon blouses, which I am literally as we speak adding, along with the new dress styles. 

[anewcalamity]

I was deeply disappointed upon actually playing BotW that Kohga was just such a... non-entity to the plot. Even the Yiga themselves barely mattered outside of the Gerudo questline. I was expecting so much more after reading ANC =/

Sorry to crush your hopes and dreams. Fanfiction do what nintendon’t, I guess

[thebibliosphere]

I've seen a bunch of posts and info about Vlad and Nathan, but managed to miss pretty much anything regarding Ursula (like, I didn't even know she had scars). Do you have centralized character info in a post somewhere?

Ursula is intentionally kept as a mystery because her character arc is central to the plot. But I do have a few things I typed up when people asked so I will repeat them here for anyone interested:

Ursula is of mixed descent. Everyone thinks she is going to look a certain way because of where she is currently living in the world. But when asked “when did you move here” she does this sort of slow blink, and goes “Oh, no. I never moved. You all did.”

My girl’s watched continental drifts and stars being born. She’s got no time for your colonial whitewashing bullshit.

Like Vlad and Nathan, she is also bi/pan and doesn't care much for the social constructs of gender binary. She’s considerably older than Vlad and he’s somewhat embarrassed by this. Nathan continues to give zero fucks and courts her like she’s 20 something. She’s wryly amused by this.

She was once the lover to an Empress whose kingdom sunk beneath the ocean. She was on the other side of the world when it happened. She still looks for the lights some nights.

In her present form she’s short and stocky. Her hair is the color of dark honey and curls wildly if left to its own devices. It reminds Vlad of early renaissance paintings, and he’d like to paint her some day. Nathan likes watching her braid it. He buys her silly little trinkets to lace through the plaits. Ursula who has worn crowns, treasures all of them.

She eats almost as much as Nathan and never says no to honeycomb. If comics existed she’d read them. In their lieu she greatly enjoys reading the new publications known as Penny Dreadfuls—both her and Vlad collect the same author and by happy coincidence each have copies of chapters the other does not. They’re trying to get Nathan interested but he’s not a fan of fantasy. A world with only humans is just too unrealistic. Not to mention worryingly speciest.

She bears a lot of scars. She does not hide them.

She has a natural talent for the theatrical and in another life walked the stage. She likes plants but gardens begrudgingly. She’s forgotten her original name but doesn’t mind.

She has been alone for a very long time.

[prokopetz]

RPG systems ask: What would you recommend for a fantasy western setting? Like, wild west with trains, gunsingers, saloons, etc, but also magical elements inherent in the setting? Preference towards gunfights being dangerous, rather than running firearms rules in D&D where average players can soak bullets all day.

You’ve got a couple of major options here.

The first (and most obvious) is Deadlands. This one’s real old-school, first hitting the shelves over twenty years back, though there’s also a more recent version that revamps it as a campaign setting for Savage Worlds. Both iterations of the game take place in a dystopian Old West where the American Civil War has dragged on for over two decades due to the intervention of evil spirits and the risen dead. You can be a zombie gunslinger, a steampunk mad scientist whose inventions are powered by burning the souls of the damned, or a card-sharping huckster who literally gambles her soul with the Devil - with spellcasting rules involving actual poker cards, no less!

You can pick up an omnibus version that combines all of the required books for the classic version here, or the player’s guide for the Savage Worlds revamp here. Note that the latter is not a standalone game, and requires the Savage Worlds core rulebook to play.

(A word on content: both the classic and revamped versions of Deadlands are very keen on insisting that racism just wasn’t a big deal in the Old West, and employ some astounding mental gymnastics to justify that claim. Charitably, one might assume that the writers are just trying to level the playing field for certain character concepts and doing it in the most ass-backwards possible way, but even so, it’s cringeworthy at best.)

If you’d prefer something more modern (and less self-consciously Edgy­™), you might have a look at the official RPG for Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn setting. In a nutshell, the game takes place in a milieu where certain individuals can ingest and “burn” specially prepared metals to gain supernatural powers, ranging from enhanced strength and stamina, to telekinetic control of nearby metal, to speeding up or slowing down time. The core game takes place in a sort of apocalyptic Renaissance setting; the Alloy of Law supplement advances the timeline a couple of centuries into a pseudo-Wild West milieu - and yes, that includes magic gunslingers.

You can get the digital edition of the core game here (with a free quickstart version here), and the aforementioned supplement here.

[plottwiststudios]

More than 10% funded on the evening of the first day. Hype!

And now we’re approaching 30%! All the hype! <3