Kidpix commission for @catchaspark!
Three views of @scribblingface’s character Calida interacting with NPCs from the most recent arc of @ourlightsinvain‘s Blades in the Dark campaign (made in, among other things, heartfelt gratitude to her for both getting me into watercolors/inaugurating my collection of physical ATCs with her own lovely paintings).
These are in reverse chronological order from top to bottom. The bottom card shows her joyful reunion with Perceval, the man whose life and soul she saved in the first arc of the campaign; the middle card shows her stumbling on Phaedra, the ancient ghost who possessed her as a child; and the top shows her failure--or say inability--to persuade Philip, a fellow victim of possession, dead now twice over, to come away from the fire that was his only light. Each card is 2.5 by 3.5 inches and the photos are pretty true to life. I’m thinking of opening commissions for similar mini-paintings of tabletop scenes and other SFW illustrations, maybe starting at somewhere between $50-$100 depending on complexity and size: if you’d be interested, drop me a line either in the replies or in my askbox, and I’ll do a separate post with more formal thoughts on process?
We played Dread, a Jenga-based horror game, in 1805 when Napoleon was master of Europe. It went great. The boat didn't sink, barely.
Played DRINK ME and DEBRIEF by Paracelsus Games. One was hilarious. The other was upsetting in the fun way. Here is a long, spoilerful review of both.
I played (a 2-person modified version of) the narrative game ECH0 from the 2019 Emotional Mecha Jam! The result was funny, coming-of-age-themed, antiwar, and very sad.
Brushing significant dust off my Dreamwidth to post a combined review of two tabletop games, Role Over Play Dead’s ECH0 and Paracelsus Games’ Debrief. These were both relatively quick pickup one-shots, although Debrief has more background reading. Highly recommended for fans of mecha anime and John le Carré, respectively.
Goose Shit by Evil Mary Oliver Who Lives in Your Head
You do have to be good. In fact, you have to be perfect. Having even one perturbation will disqualify you from going to the grocery store. You are obligated to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting, backwards, in underwear made of red-hot puff adders. You can't let that soft, fallible animal of your body love what it loves. Are you kidding? Tell me about despair, yours, and keep telling me, and don't stop, or you'll completely explode and go to jail, and then hell. Meanwhile the world goes on without you. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of hailstones are beating down on your head, pouring into the buildings and deep gutters, the corpse-laden mountains and the rivers-- did you read that article about the one that turned bright yellow from pollution? Meanwhile the wild geese, hissing and shitting everywhere will not leave your yard. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, you can always get lonelier! And I can help. I call to you like the wild geese, harsh and intimidating, over and over announcing your place-- oop, sorry, never mind, someone else took it.
Fairly early on in @ourlightsinvain‘s Blades in the Dark campaign, @scribblingface‘s PC Calida went to visit a fortune-teller named Anatolia the Diviner--not about the future, but about the past. She heard tell of two predecessors’ visits: one from Perceval Rowan, a concert pianist and music magician curious about the use of his ancestral property to host the opera that supposedly ended the world; and one from Alienor Crenher, a then-doctoral candidate reluctantly investigating her own Cataclysmic inheritance.
The conversation took place in a greenhouse with a pool of still water inset in the floor. Calida only saw herself reflected; but she wasn’t the only one looking.
More recent doodles from @ourlightsinvain’s Blades in the Dark campaign: @scribblingface’s wizard PC Calida infiltrates a dystopian-utopian World’s Fair with the help of our NPC cohort, Lucas, undercover as “Captain Carrot from Discworld.” Also, my character Nico learns of the existence of two relations: her nephew Noah, an aspirant necromancer and god-king at 4, and “Antlion,” the oldest Imperial automaton still in service.
the best thing that we can do right now to fight for abortion rights is donating to your local abortion fund, especially in states with “trigger laws” or laws that will immediately take harsh measures to shut down abortion rights as soon as roe is overturned. If you don’t know your local abortion fund or states with trigger laws, here’s one in Texas, one in Louisiana, one in Georgia, one in West Virginia and one in Mississippi (all states with such “trigger laws”). There’s so many more beyond the handful i just listed here but times like these are the time to donate and support the incredible work that these organizations do for their communities.
sorry, better version of this post: here is the national abortion fund archive where you can find your local abortion fund and here’s an article from the cut about abortion funds explaining which states are trigger law states and the specific regulations around abortion they have (also links abortion funds themselves at the bottom)
infinite silly tabletop comics, “sorry.” My PC in @ourlightsinvain’s Blades in the Dark campaign, Nico Diamond, has an older brother who took anchoritic vows that translated(?) him(?) to a different(?) plane of existence; she’s never gotten over her resultant snit and has since taken to haranguing the city’s highest religious authority, Alastair Rowan, about his impending resignation + taking of the selfsame vows. Here, she tries a new angle of approach: baked goods.
More kittencam on our imaginary cat (hunting enchanted correspondence)
Did a bunch of small analog illustrations this week for the Blades in the Dark campaign I’m in with @scribblingface, @catchaspark, and GM @ourlightsinvain (our collective campaign moodboard is viewable on @gatecrashed, which also has more info about the setting and PCs). The above is a stolen memory of two important historical figures in the world of the campaign: Phaedra, an opera singer and magician suspected of playing architect to the apocalypse that sealed off the afterlife and shattered the sun, and Orion Hipparchos, an actual architect with a tin ear (or so he sat accused of, 30 seconds before this image was captured by fate).
They were meant to get back to a party...? But the party's forgotten them!
Three PCs, three interpersonal approaches. In that for all another person was undeniably present.
Some quiet moments in the lives of PCs and NPCs… a new look, a faithful catsitter, an out-of-tune ukulele, and a very cool robot.
Aphra, you also notice that this is a fracture that radiates the faintest, narrowest hairline cracks to everything else in the city; to everything else in the world, maybe. This is the heart of all fractures that you are looking at. You don’t personally feel close to it, but when you stand close to it, in the right way, you can see that there is a fracture in you, that runs through the floor and back toward the colonnade.
...
The other questions in her mind fly out of her head. She walks as close to the colonnade as she can, watching that thread of light. Are there two, across her body? Does it widen as she gets closer? Not two threads, but it branches. She is testing the limit of the air supply. She turns around and walks backward, as though along a tightrope, almost superstitiously, as though reeling out the line. Two strands tethering her, in opposite directions; the fracture, and the air.
-- GM and player narration, Session 45, Arc 2 of the Unbroken Sun
Happy birthday, @catchaspark! Please enjoy this highly saturated illustration of one of my single favorite moments in our campaign.
(Context: The Unbroken Sun is a 4-person Blades in the Dark campaign run by @ourlightsinvain with players @scribblingface, @catchaspark, and myself since May 2020. If this image piques your interest, check out our aesthetic/inspiration blog at @gatecrashed and our GM’s post-mortem of the first arc of the game on Dreamwidth.)
The Magnus Archives AU where Adelard Dekker survives his fight with John Amherst and goes on to deal with all manner of fear-related problems by just fucking sealing their avatars in concrete. Eventually, he collects a complete set for every entity and it accidentally constitutes a successful ritual for the Buried.
maybe you can be who you want to be
“I was young and I looked on his flame, and now I am old and lost. He was young and his flame leaped towards me, but he turned away, and he is young still. Do candles pity moths?”
Morgoth’s Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien