The Wizard's Shotgun

Really nothing else to say. I've been screwing around, playing video games and having headaches instead of actually writing the sort of stuff I was supposed to be writing, so you get this silly comic instead of updates. Enjoy!

Complete and Utter Nonsense.

Is what MS Paint Adventures are. And yet this site has managed to devour something like 10 hours of mine in the past two days. Yeah, I'll grant you that I've got grand fuck-all to do with myself these last few days but cmon. For anything to have occupied anybody's time for that long, in two sittings, is something that strikes a very bizarre chord in somebody's mind.

Lemme give a quick example from Homestuck, one of three (four?) adventures on the site.

Welcome to the party, motherfuckers!

That image is of one Rose Lalonde who is barbecuing some variety of harlequin Imps with her occult knitting needles that she'd alchemised using Build Grist she'd gotten from slaying an Ogre by stabbing it in the eyes and riding it down the waterfall on the side of the house that appeared when she was transported from her world to a game world in order to save her from a predestined apocalypse that spans hundreds of thousands of years and at least three time paradoxes so far.

Yeah, it's a trippy ride. But it makes a lot of things really interesting. You can smell all of the self-references, references to gaming media (text adventures, obviously, but also mystery novels, big screen movies, roleplaying games, computer games, you name it, it's somwhere in there), it breaks the fourth wall multiple times, and it's basically utterbrual radness. It's rudenasty. It's other words that I'm stealing from the adventure itself because you probably haven't read it and even if you did, it's more of a clever homage than actual theft (see how I covered my bases there?) and it's awesome.

It's exactly the sort of bizarre, self-indulgent, free-wheeling, make it up as you go along and tie it in anyways silly-serious fiction that attracts young gamers (like yours truly, of course) to old-school gaming. There's nothing like strapping on your +2 Shield, consulting your talking psychic sword, and going into a ten thousand year old crashed spaceship filled with frogmen with tentacle faces and martian teleporting panther things to plunder the advanced technology for a fraction of its worth (if anybody knew how to use it) and selling it to some toothless old man for a fistful of silver because he's got a pointy hat and a great big shining stick.

When I get this Donjon nonsense rolling next month, it's going down. We've already got a half-started game with a Zombie Meatmancer and a Werewolf Mercenary planning on breaking into a town with the Meatmancer's bile magic to scour a hole in the walls and then wear the population's skins for some bizarre and arcane reason. I see nowhere for this campaign to go but straight sideways, because we're already on the rollercoaster of btichin' awesomesauce and the ride's just startin'.

Lovin' it, baby. Lovin' it.

Great Ideas

From toothpastefordinner.com

It's one of the more frustrating facts that great ideas always come about when there's absolutely no way to express them.

For instance, yesterday I took a nap at midday, because I'm on spring break and I'll do what I please, thank you very much.

When I was dreaming, I dreamt that I was in this place where I'd hung out with my friends, like a hockey rink, and everything was so different but so familiar. I found these old notebooks of mine, and opened them up, and there were these bizarre pictures of men with swords and with these wierd, gun-arm things. In the background were enormous white, patchwork-steel towers that projected a translucent blue sheet into the sky. The combination of them made them look like transparent blue plates of glass riveted together, and I knew that the world was ancient, that the technology that goes into protecting the world is being destroyed, and that the blue plates were what were keeping people alive, between the devastated atmosphere and the meteor showers, and acid rain and all of that beauty. The natives were half-barbaric savages, the last remnants of a planet-spanning empire that permeated all of their stories and subconcious. It was a world of destruction and remnants of ruined dreams.

When I got up, I wrote it down immediately.

This stands in stark contrast to when I look at my blog and say to myself, "Dude, you haven't updated in like a month, go write something about that stuff you were thinking about," and so I lazily slap together some words and call it a day because if you don't stay in the habit of writing you'll never write anything.

The other cool thing I thought of in a dream is basically a plugin for magic, where in order to get any magic the spellcaster has to sacrifice something or obey a taboo for each spell, like if they want to cast fireballs they must have a taboo to always carry an open flame, or to always eat raw meat. The cool thing is that it starts with low-level spells so even if the player is smart and gives himself minor taboos, by the time he wants to learn Grobar's Deliberate Frostfire Beam he has to decide that he's plucking out his own eyeball or scarring his face with hideous tattoos or something. And that's if he hasn't already done that...

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali's "Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Horse"

I'd been wanting to see Salvador Dali's works for a long, long time now, and had ever since I'd seen those banners with the moustached man staring down at me from lampposts.

"I'd like to go see that, " I'd say to my girlfriend.

"Yeah, me too!", said she.

And we put it off for a while. But it's hard to put off going to see one of the most striking, original, and creative artists of the modern age when the museum he's in had free admission yesterday. So we gathered ourselves up and went.

Let me tell you, actually seeing the pictures is a beautiful thing. How can you get a true sense of the detail that went into some of the enormous (easily 12+ feet tall) paintings through a computer screen or a book? It loses something ethereal and undergoes a transformation from an actual artifact of dedication and passion to a pedestrian image, little more than a postage stamp. It's a damn shame more people can't go out and see real art.

Speaking of damn shames, this excursion made me realize two things. One: How coarse I feel. Not because people around me are so fancy, or so enlightened when I am not, but because I felt like yelling at people to quit standing two inches in front of the painting so that nobody else can see it, or to move your ass, you've been standing there trying to look smart for ten fucking minutes or the always delightful, Will you quit goddamn giggling at breats, you pre-pubescent shitheads? It's never felt more bizarre to be outside of my comfort zone, to be honest with you. The only time I'm around real crowds is when I'm on active duty, and it's a different feel of a crowd. Sure, people are, as they say, gaggle-fucking around, but everybody has a purpose. You're not standing in the way because people need to get by, and if people need to get by, you all part like the damn red sea to let people through. I guess it has to be something in the training that makes you other-centered. Even if you're a selfish prick, you can at least realize that you're not the greatest thing out there. Hopefully.

The second thing I realized is that people are shallow and stupid and do not deserve a great artist like Dali. People would offer their silly-ass conjectures about what this painting "means" and what this is a metaphor for, like great art can be reduced to trite banalities and crass gestures. There isn't any sort of meaning of life hidden in art, there isn't some sort of greater spiritual message in beauty. "C'eci ne pas une pipe", catch my drift? This picture is a picture. It is what it is. Dali's most famous image, the Persistance of Memory, do you know why he called it that? Do you know why it was made?

Was it a comment on how memory isn't as persistant as we think, with the clocks representing the breakdown and inconsistency of that most rigid construct itself, of time? Is it a metaphor for how everything is flexible and flowing no matter how we decide to categorize it?

Let me tell you.

Dali was painting a landscape, and then wanted to add something a little more unusual to it. He then thought of adding soft clocks, painted them, and asked him what his wife thought of it. She said that anybody who saw it would never forget it. Thus the name. That's it. That's all the meaning you get.

Like my girlfriend said, "People need meaning. Art does not."

Crabmen

The Karkinos
An intelligent race of nearly man-sized crab creatures, measuring nearly ten feet from side to side and standing roughly six feet tall. They have two pincers where the hands would be on humans. Their left pincer is small, longer, and more dextrous, but their right pincer is larger, tougher, and more powerful. When fighting they tend to use either attempt to grab their foe with their larger pincer and tear at their soft bits with the smaller, or use the larger pincer as a shield and the smaller as a sort of dagger or spear.

Karkinos, or Crab-Men as they are commonly named, tend to congregate around harbors and wharves, attracted by the cast-off, rotten fish, as well as the barnacles, algae, and seaweed. They also enjoy the activity of human life, which they are intensely interested in. They are content to merely observe, however, as they cannot meaningfully interact with humanity- they are unable to speak, and are able only to make broad gestures and hope they can be understood.

Scholars have determined that the Karkinos language is nonverbal language, consisting of pincer waving, eyestalk wiggling, leg shuffling, and mandible waving. It is therefore unable to be utilized by humans, who lack most of the necessary appendages. Attempts to communicate using human emulations of their language has been a universal failure. It has a written language, oddly enough, which is generally carved using the tough mandibles of the crab-men. It, too, is entirely alien and remains that way despite the best attempts of academics.


Crab-Men are almost entirely passive with humans, and there have been cases where Karkinos have dragged the bodies of shipwrecked sailors onto land, only to disappear again before the sailors can mouth their gratitude. Some sailors claim to have seen the Crab-Men cities and claim that they are made of coral and algae, while others maintain that they are made of enormous slabs of stone. No reputable source has been able to verify if the intelligent Karkinos have cities or if they live a nomadic lifestyle, and no Karkinos has seen fit to answer either way.

Coruscate

According to dictionary.com, the word of the day today is coruscate.

I'm thinking of the open sea, and the way it glitters and shines. And of sea-raiders who slice the sea open with their narrow skiffs. And how they'd see nothing but endless, shimmering waves for days.

I'm also thinking about how early people thought that the sky was made of water, since it was blue. No idea what they thought clouds were, but that's just fine. The point is: What if the glass holding back the sky got cracked? What if the sky was literally falling?

What if the entire world is just a floating disk in the middle of a peaceful ocean, with water above and below the world, and to every side, and nothing can get in or out of the world except through magic or steady patience and a willingness to potentially destroy all the world's life. Demons and gods alike would be fishmen, drawn to the world because the sun disk is the only source of light nearby, and they both need and covet the light. Are there other disks? Is travel possible or would the pressure kill any land-dwelling life on contact? Does the sun rotate around the world or does the world itself spin? What if the sun really was pulled by a god's chariot and when it was down it was merely underground, and it was possible to see where the sun went at night and what sort of beings would be nearby?

Perhaps it would be demons, and every night the demons are trying to trick or slay the sun-god's burden, trick him into laying it down so the demons can finally really feel the warmth and dryness instead of constantly being banished outside of the world. Perhaps it would be the trickster god (a mainstay of any pantheon) who merely wants the disk because it is hard to attain, and to attain it and hide it would be a fine trick indeed.

Maybe the moon finally caught up to the sun?

Dark Skies Above Us

A Crayonian Sorcerer, perhaps?

You may not have noticed, but I've started working on V2: Dark Skies Above Us. It's in extremely preliminary stages at the moment, little more than a couple of ideas floating around in my skull. With any luck, it'll have more juicy goodness without all of that overly crunchy crap, and it'll probably be a little more dungeon-crawly. V1: Servants of Plague didn't have much dungeon crawling at all, featuring a more open-ended, go wherever you want sort of area with slight limitations. (For example, I added a key to get above the giant garbage pit of the first floor that was being carried by the patrolling Orc Sergeant, since my players blitzed the keep and I didn't want them to ignore all the rest of the stuff.)

Since this seems like as good of a place to say it as any, my Player Character Hack is also almost done. It really needs a name, which is unfortunate, since nothing really seems to fit it well. There's just something about names... If my home campaign world had a name, it'd be easier, since then it'd be "GAMEWORLD COMPANION" instead of being called absolutely nothing, or worse, "Crayonian Classes." How pretentious can you get?

Anyways, the part that's taking so long is replacing the art I'd taken from sources on the internet and from my hard-drive's art archives, and replacing it with free, open-domain woodcut art. It takes a while, especially when there isn't really any art for wizardly type guys unless they're being hauled off by demons or some other such silliness. I suppose that could work, technically, but I'd be much happier with some other line art like the art I've been using, such as the nice artwork that I've used at the beginning of this blog post. Anybody know any kind-hearted fantasy artists?

Death by Mold / What's Next?

One of my players the other week died because they set foot in some yellow mold. The mold, being a weaker variety than normal, dealt less damage than it normally would have. After being burnt a little by its acid, they took note and decided to drop a torch on it.

Normally, it would have resulted in a normal bit of damage, but this mold happened to be underground in an extremely arid environment. The fire spread out, and burnt both the players for a tiny bit of damage, which unfortunately was more than the Minotaur ("reskinned" fighter) could bear. He died, leaving the cleric to flee back to the surface where the Minotaur's brother was waiting for the two of them to come out. When only the cleric returned, Minotaur II vowed to finish his brother's works.

Just a quick anecdote on one of my favorite player deaths. Set ablaze by a yellow mold's corpse! Classic.

Creativity and You

I know that there are multiple ways to be creative, and that different things work for different people, but I'm also known to be insane and disregard what other people say to me.

For example. When I want to sit down and write, I refuse to read anything related at all to what I'm writing. I have this tendency to let my prose get Vancian when I read Jack Vance, to get archaic when I read Lovecraft and to get direct when I read Frank Herbert's Dune. And it doesn't feel right when I merely ape another person's style. There's no satisfaction in it.

The only way to avoid it, then, is to seclude yourself from the outside world's creativity and find what's inside your head. And then to write it. To create it from nothingness.

There are people out there who work best when they take another person's idea, a fairly recent idea, and try to do it better. They fix things a little to make the game they thought they were getting into, with their own little idiosyncracies and whatnot.

This is what's happening in the video-gaming community today. Any look at amateur game makers will show you three hundred thousand Super Mario clones, Sonic clones, Space Invaders, Breakout, and the like. There's nothing wrong with learning, or practising based on what you already know to try and get accustomed to the software, hardware, and programming language you're using, but what are you accomplishing?

Is there any point to publishing what are, in all reality, your scraps? Did you ever find Monet attempting to sell his daily sketches and pass them off as real art? If he did, wouldn't you find that crass and pretentious?

The point is this: Publishing things, and attempting to show them to the world, should be about increasing the value of the entirety with your contribution. In other words, if you haven't got something creative to give to the world, don't give them anything at all.