She was slain in later epochs by the New Sun, only begotten child of the Flesh God. Thus ended the Virgin Medusa.
Ash, plague, filth, hordes of desperate Tirsteen civilians, packs of feral shackleminds falling to ghouls, and the stench of the rotting Flesh God make the imposing corpse of Ebét an unpleasant place to stay. “Far better administer the newly liberated provinces from a new city,” says First Secretary of the Liberated Provinces Landalá, “Ulkhét, the old necro...
2019-01-28 12:20:00 +0000 UTC
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Good morning and good Saturday everyone.
This morning I got an unexpected birthday present: 300 heroes now frequent the stratometaship. Three Hundred. Three. Hundred.
If we discount the allies and the slaves and the followers, that's a heroic stand at Thermonuclearpylae right there.
Thank you, everyone, most deeply.
Please, give yourself a hand. You are truly amazing.
And News
As is of course tradition, I over-estimated how quickly I would get the next ch...
2019-01-26 01:44:07 +0000 UTC
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Dear heroes,
Last week was a thrill. First of all, a great thank you to everyone who decided to pre-order Witchburner. Second, what in blazes happened?
By Friday I was utterly astounded.
So, context. With Exalted Funeral we decided to ... ahem ... test-run our partnership and our printer with a small, limited print run of 250 copies of Witchburner. I drew about twenty more ...
2019-01-21 09:05:54 +0000 UTC
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Dear heroes,
I have some cool news. Preorders are open for the Witchburner limited edition! Head over to www.exaltedfuneral.com and let the folks there take care of the first print run of any of my books every. Huh. Considering that, they might actually be valuable some day. Who knows.
Anyway, yeah. Preorders are open. That's nice. But it's also nice that there's actually a 1/3 discount off the list price for the heroes. Enter the promo code metalburn...
2019-01-14 07:29:56 +0000 UTC
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Dear heroes,
This week I got less art and writing done than planned (though I still wrote about 6,000 words of Skeleton, so there's that ...). The last couple of days, I spent quite a few hours figuring out how to handle online communications and, particularly, online harassment.
I had a very minor encounter with a troll on Twitter. The kind of encounter Twitter recommends to report, block, and shrug off.
Things Trolls Imply
I decided not to do that because it was th...
2019-01-11 10:33:08 +0000 UTC
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Magnificent Heroes!
May the tides of the gentle stars bring you good cheer and good fortune. I bring d6 news from the oracles of the new year.
1. Witchburner is coming out in a limited first-edition print run. I've partnered with Exalted Funeral's Matt and Cristin to the physical world. Last week we got the green light from the printer and the books should be ready to later this month (fingers crossed all the proofs come out shiny). This limited edition h...
2019-01-07 01:30:40 +0000 UTC
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Dear friends.
Dear heroes, all.
This year has been an absolutely incredible rush for me. Over the course of this year, thanks to your support, the stratometaship has grown roughly seven-fold.
Your encouragement and your money have shown me that there is value in my writing, in my art, and in my game design. Without you, there would have been no Ultraviolet Grasslands and no Witchburner. There would be no Red Sky Dead City, there would be no Longwinter (unless we rename it ^_...
2018-12-31 05:33:25 +0000 UTC
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Dear Heroes,
First, happy solstice!
Second, the second 'chapter' is complete. I've adjusted the tone of the book somewhat - the book demanded it as it grew longer. But, more than just expanding it, I've also reformatted how I present it quite significantly.
Particularly, I've marked each of the spreads depending on who the target audience is: just referees, or referees and players.
The sections for referees and players have grown much larger, with a relatively comprehe...
2018-12-21 14:58:57 +0000 UTC
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In a day or two I will post the next chapter of Red Sky Dead City, adding two locations: the Esplanade of High Sphinxes and the Antidiluvian Tomb Warren. Here's an excerpt from the tomb warrens:
The air thickens with age, the sun weakens, the sky flattens. Color leeches in the featureless white expanse. Ice sprites dance with every stale breath. The tombs are odd, squat, unsettling. Fawn marble and cream limestone, now stained dark brown and dull black, dominates the quarter.
2018-12-18 04:49:13 +0000 UTC
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Dear Heroes,
Last month was a bit of a long wait, wasn't it? Longwinter took longer than I'd planned, and I'll try to avoid that for the next update. So, what have I got planned for this month?
1. Red Sky Dead City - I'm working on the next part of the great dead city dissection game. Chapter 2 will add
- day and night time encounter tables for the dead city
- crossing the river of life - tables for getting back and forth between the secure East Bank and...
2018-12-04 06:48:33 +0000 UTC
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It's done!
I ... it ended up 52 pages long after layout. I did not expect that. And that's without the faux-travel guide to the barony of Brezim. I'm not sure what to say right now, so I'll let the excerpt (p. 36) from the "true history of Brezim" talk:
"A hundred years ago Verdek and Ivan Greencorner came up the valley with four hundred civilized soldiers. The oldsettlers met their muskets and maces with bows and traps.
That first summer the Greencorners burned...
2018-11-27 09:55:14 +0000 UTC
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Hello, the heroes!
This post is much later than I expected. I'm laying out the first part of Longwinter, and aside from the "why are you here section" and a few connecting paragraphs, it's mostly written. I've divided it into two parts:
Skin (the part that's for players and referees), which includes: maps, peoples, places, beliefs, and rules for time, survival, and recovery. In the next update I will add equipment, magic, and treasure.
And Bones
2018-11-26 00:06:19 +0000 UTC
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Longwinter is coming along, but I am running into surprising challenges as I structure it into two books, one for everybody (players especially), the other just for Referees (the hidden mechanics). Fundamentally I had to take a several day detour to design the format of Skeleton (the overarching WizardThiefFighter rulebook) so that I could write and create to a single format.
Skeleton Sidetrack
In the process I realized that one crucial goal of what I am trying to do is...
2018-11-09 05:31:47 +0000 UTC
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Hello heroes!
What's been happening? Well ... a lot of time went to making sure Witchburner and What Ho, Frog Demons! were published (and they were, and you can share links to them on DriveThru or, for the pumpkin-hued edition, on itch.io).
2018-11-01 00:46:39 +0000 UTC
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I was about to write a post about how I have great news, the Witchburner manuscript went through its editing, I laid it out, it now looks great, and then I realize: we've reached seven hundred dollars.
Seven hundred.
I'm floored. Thank you. I really ... thank you.
It's one a.m. here and I have no words. I've spent all day finishing entering edits into the final version of Witchburner, testing bookmarks, tweaking them, adding an updated back cover, and now ... now I have no words.
2018-10-23 16:10:37 +0000 UTC
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Dear heroes of the stratometaship,
I give you Chapter 1 of Red Sky Dead City, the doom sandbox of the murder of the greatest city in the world, Ebét of the Hundred Gates. Or, as the humans of that world would say,
The greatest city of all, Ebét, far away across the Seas of Moonbeams and Fog and Poison, beyond the farthest reaches of the limber golems and the swooning maidens of the liberties, has fallen. The mystical ra- tionalist army of Iks has brought down the corpse-fat ...
2018-10-16 06:15:28 +0000 UTC
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Hello folks, welcome to the new and condensed decision-making committee of the stratometaship.
I declare the results of the last poll in: 62 of 229 members voted. That's a round 30%. Of those, 51 (82%) voted full steam ahead for up to two posts a month, 11 said, yes, but they won't pay for the second one (18%). I'll take that as quite a rousing endorsement and relegate finding the perfect solution until such a time as the second monthly post becomes less hypothetical and more iminent.
2018-10-07 12:48:36 +0000 UTC
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Dear patrons,
It's that time of the month, when we sit down by the fireside and discuss where to send the stratometaship hurtling next. When I bare my bear and sole my soul with you.
From May till now this patreon has grown intensely. We're at around $600 dollars now (the actual amount Patreon displays is not entirely accurate because of declines and payment issues).
UVG was a fantas...
2018-10-04 02:05:04 +0000 UTC
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Witchburner is complete.
Update, 2019.02.08: this post has been made public, the patreon editions of Witchburner have been removed from it. For visitors or new subscribers, it is available at https://wizardthieffighter.itch.io/witchburner-halloween-edition .
It is about four times long...
2018-09-30 06:02:05 +0000 UTC
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Oleg bowed before the idol of Fourface as the tattoo was applied, marking him forever as a citizen of First Emperor’s Forum. With every stab of the ivory needle, he prayed with the priest and midwife to the Three Avatars to accept him as the avatar of his town.
Witchburner is nearly written, the layout is close to complete. It won't be quite as art heavy as I first planned, because it has more text. It's clocking in at around 18,000 words, which is a little shorter...
2018-09-27 03:17:21 +0000 UTC
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So ... yeah.
I'm kind of blown away. It is a great feeling to see everyone here, it's great fun, it's exciting, it feels good. Even my wife is now making a little dance when somebody joins the patreon. Thank you everyone.
I'm planning to redesign a few things about the patreon, about the tiers, and so on, because, frankly I want to put more effort into writing and illustrating really good stuff--so I need to find a way to make that work together with the various reward levels! What worke...
2018-09-14 18:24:44 +0000 UTC
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Wow ... the UVG is ... uh ... kind of done. For now. I’ve set up a document to track errors and questions, and I’ll share it in the comments in a bit. If you find I’ve missed something, or would like to see more description or art on some part of the UVG, the next month or so is the perfect time to tackle that. Meanwhile, I’ve finally set about writing down my little palate-cleanser: Witchburner.
If you’ve followed me on social media for the last month or so, you might have seen...
2018-09-08 18:57:15 +0000 UTC
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An old woman in rusted golem armor (HD 6, avatar of the city), approaches along a foot path from a ramshackle house at the farthest edge of the cliff.
“Leave it be,” she says, “It is harmless now, and all its promises are lies. I can return you home now, if you like.”
---/---
IT IS FINISHED
This final update of the Ultraviolet Grasslands completes the manuscripts, stretching many months (and twice as many updates as originally planned) from The ...
2018-08-31 16:04:36 +0000 UTC
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Roads and the fossils of roads past accrete in the dusty, tired descent to the oily ocean and the inhuman city. Iridescent fumes come off the surf that pounds the garnet and olivine sands north and south of the Black City. The silence is unearthly, even the waves burble and sigh demurely, as though afraid to disturb the end of the world.
Mummies of ancient travellers and meditants sit in the lees of dunes, desiccated and preserved by the ionizing sea air and electromagnificent radiation.
2018-08-30 16:30:40 +0000 UTC
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I’m writing a small palette cleanser to slot between the UVG finale (probably coming this week) and the next bigger work.<br><br>It’s inspired by Witchfinder General, Diamondhead, Blood Ceremony, and Witchcraft.<br><br>Where the UVG is expansive, this one is claustrophobic, small, and intimate.<br><br>
2018-08-14 13:51:32 +0000 UTC
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I'm on holiday this week, so I really shouldn't be on my computer right now ... but let's pretend this is my astral projection writing this post.
This is a little [AMAZING] treatment patron Andrew Downs did my Twinklestar illustration. In his game he is starting off each adventure with a little holographic missive from a Catlord that employs the adventurers to track down various bounties. He made this gif to display on screen as she delivers her opening monologue each session.
I th...
2018-08-07 05:34:18 +0000 UTC
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The old ways of the troglodytes weep still with their chemical signals, staining the waters that pool in their deeps, scum-skinned and gelatinous, with the darkness that eventually ate those pitiful creatures' souls.
--/--
A small thing to tide everyone over, while I prepare to head out on my well-earned vacation on Saturday. It's been an incredibly busy seven weeks teaching a summer school on creative writing, and I plan to return with the final update sometime in mid August.
If a...
2018-08-02 08:08:27 +0000 UTC
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Readers, heroes, patrons.<br><br>This last week, and the next two weeks, things are very busy in the run up to my vacation. I’ll be posting some pictures here and there, but I can’t promise I’ll make much headway on either UVG or Skeleton. That’s just how it goes.<br><br>Meanwhile, here is Peak Bird - last redoubt of the feather merchants Yug and Nam, who supplied the ageless serpent of the Memory Makers with its rainbow plumage. Pursued by the betrayed Makers, Yu...
2018-07-27 02:14:23 +0000 UTC
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By the darklights of the gently phosphorecent encyclical, this update came faster than you expected, eh, what? I'd planned to release it alone, but then I was well-surprised by the new patrons and decided to release Skeleton as a teaser yesterday.
Now, I hope you will forgive me the spamming of your inboxes as I release the 15th update of the UVG. It is nearly finished. All that's left before the final book kickstarter is ... the Black City.
This update adds:
1. The Endless Houses,...
2018-07-19 07:18:13 +0000 UTC
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Ladies. Gentlemen. Humans. It feels like just yesterday when I was flabbergasted that we'd reached 50 patrons, 100 patrons, $100 dollars, then $200 dollars. You're starting to really make me feel like the #UVG has legs and we'll get something cool and epic out of this game!
So I've been pondering how to say thanks, wows, surprise.
I thought about launching a WTF discord ... but that'd be a distraction.
I thought about revealing the tarock deck ... but that's not finished enough.
2018-07-18 09:36:50 +0000 UTC
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