Gearing up for the holidays has honestly not been as busy that I thought it would be (probably mostly due to how I was purchasing people their gifts in November). It's given me some time to do some fun stuff this week.

I want to first say that I've been having fun browsing sites here on neocities, and this week I thought that a maze on Corvarrow's website was of particular note. I enjoyed navigating it, finding notes on the ground and rooms and such. It reminded me a lot of old text adventure games that tell you what lies in each cardinal direction in terms of structure. It does well in terms of establishing a mysterious tone, planting little seeds of lore in a lot of the maze's nooks. I'd really ought to go over their worldbuilding page again so I can pick up more of their vocab lmao

Anywho, on another note, I'm having a good time building the Confluence's worldbuilding page! Right now its just the magic system and some of the species that populate the place, and I have a lot to go, but it's still nice to get this stuff in writing instead of trapping it in my head. There's this one nation that I'm trying to figure out how I should write about on that page right now (it used to exist and now sort of does? and its weird) but I reckon I have time before I get to it.

Speaking of the Confluence, though, I meant to talk about my most recent TTRPG session last blog post but I didn't end up getting to it. So I'm going to give a bit of context before talking about the session.

The game I'm DMing is not using DnD. It's using this other game called Fate, which I highly recommend for anybody feeling a smidge too restricted by having to follow other systems or having to make a million homebrew things to get your ideas to work in 5e or anything like that. Its rules are free online. The game takes place in the Confluence, and it centers around a very colorful cast of characters:

Art is by my friend, Peahead! Once they have anything I can link to I will do so. He's great.

So from left to right, we have Indigo, Vraka Boom, Bearna, and Thrain. Each of these characters are the player characters (my wife plays Bearna as a matter of fact). And they all have something in common: they all died a while ago. Each of them has been brought back from the dead by a necromancer, Napoleon, and he's got big plans. Funnily enough, Napoleon is about 5 feet tall, which isn't that short for his species but the rest of the party towers over him lmao. It reminds me somewhat of how Napoleon Bonaparte was technically of average height but everybody thinks he was short.

Tangents aside, Napoleon brought back the party in the hopes of joining a secret society of necromancers, known as the Grand Hagiocracy of Undead Liches (or G.H.O.U.L.). It's a very exclusive and competetive organization where advancement in the ranks requires killing those ranked above you. In order to get in, you have to kill a current member. Recently, the gang attended their first GHOUL meeting. Thus leads us into the most recent session.

After the session (and having some interesting talks with higher-ranking members), the party went out to have some fun. They went back to the place they were staying at, this dieselpunk factory-turned-inn-and-casino where they went up to the roof. The party had packed some alcohol for the trip, and Bearna, a no-longer-retired druidic pirate, knows how to cultivate what one might call some fun plants (I'll be honest, DMing this kind of thing while never drinking or doing drugs was weird lmao). Additionally, having not consumed such substances in such a long time, it had an amplified effect on their characters. Everybody was having fun. Vraka played a lot of roulette and never won or lost on account of putting stuff on both red and black (he's lucky the website I was using to simulate roulette never had the ball land on green). The party shot the shit for a while, just talking and opening up about things (which would require so much more context and I'm writing this on a night before I have to work lmao) before they ran out of drink. Thus began a quest for alcohol.

It wasn't hard to find a tavern, and the party quickly found the Tarnished Cog. After drunkenly smashing the door of the place down, they also quickly found that apparently the nation of Avalon had passed the prohibition of alcohol into law. They were able to bullcrap their way into a secret room in the back of the building. Here they hung out for a while more, talking and talking until they realized that the security around the secret room were skeletons themselves. Undead. They quickly realized the sort of place they were in. Whoever owned this place was probably a necromancer. A GHOUL member.

Tensions rose and they began to make a hasty retreat, but they found a man with 11 skeletons armed to the teeth and in pin-striped suits examining the door's damage. After a quick attempt at extortion on the part of a man named Johnny Two-Bones, a fight quickly ensued.

I'm going to save the description of the fight itself for the eventual serialization of this game. I'm hoping that, now that I have an AO3 account, I might start writing everything happening in this game. In the meantime, I invite you to view this picture, which was the final action performed upon Mr. Two-Bones by Vraka. I'm sure that killing a gang leader (and due to the necromancy, all of his goons) at the same time will have no repurcussions for the city of Terminus in Avalon.

It was a fun combat and a fun session. Technically two sessions since the combat was its own session, but one encounter I suppose. I'm looking very forward to next session (which might be on 12/13 depending on if I have time to DM). This game's been going since June 1st of this year and I'm really happy it's been going on for so long.

Anyway that's it for now. Have a good night!

Heck of a week lmao

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Things were busy last week. Thankfully the aforementioned three thanksgivings went smoothly. There isn't really much to comment on other than saying that I got to pilfer my biological father's unused dvd collection to take some stuff for myself (and now I have copies of Annihilation, Arrival, Gravity, and some others that I want to show my wife). We were both absolutely stuffed after three thanksgiving meals though lmao. We ended the day with me showing her The Truman Show. It was a great day.

In addition to Thanksgiving, my wife and I went to an art museum (I'd rather not specify anything location-wise so I'm going to keep that vague) and we saw a very cool collection centered around the Roman emperor Trajan. The guy ruled around 1st century AD. We saw a lot of statuary, mosaics, and frescos largely. There were two pieces in particular that I really liked - the first was this gladiatorial helmet. I love the Roman gladiator helmet design in general, and seeing one up close was really cool. I'm legitimately surprised at how much detail they put on the helmet, these scenes of myth that were really cool to me. Additionally, there was Trajan's column.

Of course it'd be hard to get this thing into an art museum so they had this setup where a large printed picture of one of the layers of the column was wrapped around a massive cylinder, and they had mirrors on the floor and ceiling you could look into to get a sort of illusion of its height. Apparently people aren't entirely sure how it was made, though people have their theories about lifts used to raise the layers up and stack them atop one another. One the one hand thats a lot of effort to put into glorifying your military campaign, but on the other hand having a successful military career under your belt generally made you a popular emperor, as the populace would percieve that as a strong ability to lead. I should read about the Roman empire sometime. Maybe after Hollow (which I'm actually almost done with).

Finally my wife and I went to the Renaissance Festival together! It was an exciting year because we'd both been working on this wolf skull mask that I finally got to wear, along with a hood and such. I called the outfit my scurvy dog outfit because in conjunction with the mask/hood I was going for a pirate-y vibe.

We got a lot of compliments on our costumes and a lot of little kids pointed at me which was funny. The nicest times were when some kids ran up and were like "Your mask is cool!" and similar such things. Some of them also traded trinkets with my wife. I think I'd ought to give trinket trading a shot honestly.

My wife's birthday was on the first of this month so I think doing all that with her (and getting her Paprika on dvd amoong other things as a gift) made her birthday nice. I don't think any of the stuff we got up to would have been near as fun without her. I think that that sentiment rounds out this blog post nicely.

Anywho, in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night! (If you haven't watched the Truman Show I urge you to change that).

Today's been less busy than yesterday but still busy nonetheless

This morning I made another photobashing piece of an NPC from the ttrpg game I'm running - Napoleon the novice necromancer. He's a fun guy. I'd ought to put him on the OC page soon. Most of the time he wears all-black robes and jingles as he walks with all of his tools and implements. The picture was originally going to be his usual attire but I found a really cool print with the New York Public Library that was referred to as "Jodelet" and I immediately knew I had to use it, hence why Napoleon is in his fineries. He needs to make a good impression with the more esperienced necromancers afetr all.

In addition to that, I've been preparing for Thanksgiving. I've got three families to balance this year (though it's usually four so I suppose I'll take what I can get). My stepdad's side, my wife's side, and my biological father's side. My mom's side isn't really doing anything cohesive this year. I'm hoping to not deal with too much stuff on that front. I'll be seeing all of them at some point for sure, but it's still a lot to juggle. I hope your Thanksgiving ends up being easier than what I've laid out lmao.

Anyway to round things out, with the workweek about to begin, my posts here are about to be a bit more infrequent. I'm really glad I got this website up at the speed that I have, so maybe I'll be able to post more than I think I will. Nonetheless I think I'm going to be a lot less active until the weekend. I've got a session of my TTRPG game next Saturday so I'll be talking about that here very soon. See you then!

I'm having a lot of fun building this website lmao

Ive got everything other than the OC and Yeenz pages built up now. I still need to start porting my worldbuilding stuff from a collection of google docs over to this thing (Maybe tomorrow?). I did choose to scrap the reviews/logs page since I figured the media recxommendations page would be enough. I set up some links to my letterboxd and goodreads there and called it good. My wife gets excited each time I update this thing lmao.

Website stuff aside, I've done a lot today. Did some holiday shopping since I like to be early on that sort of thing and I got recommended this video on how to do a type of photobashing and I got inspired to dabble in it. I'm really happy with how my work on the photobashing (you can see it on my creative works page) and I plan on continuing. As I see it, I could do this photobashing to make something really cool. I've always wanted to make a TTRPG book (whether that be a setting guide, adventure book, or even a whole TTRPG rule system from scratch) and this in my toolkit would be really nice.

Finally, I went outside today. I don't do it often enough because its usually too hot where I'm at. There's this park near me I was meaning to explore and I ended up walking for a solid 1 1/2 hours just exploring some trails (which with my bad foot I was a little impressed by). I hope I can do that more often.

Anyway, Ive got some session prep I need to do. My players are currently in this diesel-punk-esque city and have just peeved a gangster who's about to send all his henchmen their way. It's going to be very fun I reckon. Hopefully I'll be able to finish constructing this website and get that worldbuilding stuff up here soon as well!

Ive set up the blog page on this website! Reckon thats a good reason to make my first post.

I'm enjoying having a neocities page a lot lmao. I've been having fun with the html (my only prior experience being the homebrewery). This process is a lot more in-depth than that though. I'm especially prowd of setting up the navigation sidebar for the blog, and I'm looking forward to tackling the other pages on this site

Shifting the topic over to what I'm currently doing, I've got a few goals I'm going to start pursuing. I'm DMing a TTRPG campaign right now (I'll talk more about it in future posts) that I'm hoping to serialize on AO3 and I'm getting back into reading. I'm about halfway into "Hollow" by Brian Catling right now and its making me go feral. A lot of reviews mentioned that it was like reading a Hieronymous Bosch painting and I very much agree. This book is dark and surreal and I want to shove the book directly into my brain so bad man. Highly recommend checking it out if the phrase "surreal dark historical fantasy" piques your interest at all

It's following three storylines that you rapidly swap between the perspectives of, with the background being that there's this church (called the High Church) and their Oracle has died. The first (and my favorite) among the storylines is following this band of mercenaries transporting the new Oracle to what used to be the Tower of Babel, and all of the mercenaries had to have committed just the worst crimes imaginable because the Oracle feeds upon their sins indirectly (there's a whole ritual called the Steeping where the men speak their sins into a bone-filled box called the Pyx and then the Oracle eats the bone marrow afterwards and then gives prophecies). The second storyline takes place at the destination at a monastery full of monks where one of the monks has lost his voice under mysterious circumstances and its being implied that its very related to the death of the previous Oracle, and the third follows a woman named Meg (but derogitorially she is called "Dull Gret" by other townsfolk) who was friends with a witch and has sworn vengeance on the Spanish authorities that have now imprisoned her son. I love this book so much man

Anyway that's it for now. I'm looking forward to making more posts here and getting my site up and running!