If You Want The Rewards Of Finding A New Favorite Song Then You Have To Submit To The Mortifying Ordeal

unrestrained summer fun

Twitter | Instagram

milfs…,, milves,

Hi it’s time for my twice yearly “I have feelings about Ghost Trick” post

cracking open a cold one with the boys

At what point did you decide you wanted to take your RP setting and assortment of characters, and turn them into a fully fleshed out story? Was it something you had in mind all along, or was there a turning point? If so, how did you start the process of taking loose concepts and fleshing them out into the super detailed world of unsounded?

It’s complicated!

Long, long ago, I was working on a fantasy novel called Tanners. It took place in Alderode, starred a group of thieves, assassins, and social outcasts, concerned a war between rival gangs, and was not great. I was still in my early twenties and impressively stupid.

A couple years later, my friends and I were in need of a new setting for our RP after we fell out with the owner of the place we’d played in previously. I sat down and wrote out Sharteshane, which existed in the same universe (and borrowed a few details) from Tanners.

I’d already pulled Duane, Sette, and Murkoph from Tanners for the purposes of RP in the older game, and started developing Bastion to be my main in a new game in this new setting. It worked well. My friends and I had a lot of fun there over the years, and the setting and characters all just became increasingly more rich and detailed as the stories spun on.

All good things must come to an end though, and RP eventually did. Afterwards, I needed a new project, and webcomics were really taking off. I wanted to do one too! I went back and looked at Tanners (which I still loved even though it was dumb), looked at RP, and decided that the latter could save the former. I took cool things I’d discovered and developed in the game, like Duane and Sette’s chemistry and the Black Tongues, and decided to work them into something entirely new but familiar. It would lean heavily on things that were and are important to me, like highly dysfunctional families, the irreconcilable evils of human institutions, and sad boys beating each other up.

It all came together pretty quickly once I decided to do it. I had the pieces and I knew the themes. It all plugged together with minimal stress.

While most of Unsounded’s big concepts were devised specifically for the comic - pymary, the khert, senet beasts, the First World, Cresce - you can still see the seam between RP content and Tanners content if you know where to look. That seam is where a lot of the plot and conflict happen. Alderode and Ssaelism are almost purely Tanners. Sharteshane and Gefendur are purely RP. Duane and Murkoph are Tanners and Sette and Bastion are RP.

And I really like this. Because Duane slowly making his way towards home feels like me making my way home from RP to Tanners. Tanners was a place of naivete, ignorance, comfortable tropes. RP was a place of worldliness, experience-building, chaos. Duane and I are heading home, but we won’t recognise it, and it won’t recognise us.

Anyway, many of the (what probably seem like neurotic) details in Unsounded come from years of me DMing that RP game. If you know anything about DMing, you know you have to be able to pretty quickly conjure up answers to all kinds of player questions, and be able to write and world-build in real-time as you play. After ten years of writing and refereeing Sharteshane, though, I didn’t want to spend excessive time there in Unsounded. That’s why the story barely touches the place, and we’ve spent most of our time in Cresce and Alderode.

I know for a fact that I reblogged a post about the Ultimate Grilled Cheese a few weeks back, and I'm 99.9% sure I tagged it 'food' and yet now I fancy trying it out can I find that post? Can I find that damned post. Tumblr search function strikes again

Obviously you want the story to stand completely on it's own, but do you think this blog and other ways of communicating with your audience has made you more willing to include details in the story that are more esoteric or require more context?

Mm, prooobably, but I really love dense work. My favourite media is always overwrought, busy, and layered, sucking you into a world that's been illustrated to a degree you immediately and fully buy into it. My favourite fantasy comic is Nausicaa, and it's often called too hard to read, my favourite novel is Moby-Dick which goes off on incredible tangents about the world of whaling. My favourite game is Vagrant Story which has about a dozen ways to play it and a story so sketchy in a world so rich that people are still trying to interpret what happens in it even today. I like worlds where much of what you're seeing isn't explained. You're dropped into an opaque setting, and exploring that setting and putting its pieces together is just as much a part of the experience as following the plot and the characters.

All this is to say that Unsounded would still be a snaggled jungle even if I'd made it before the internet ever existed. This is just my jam :)

There's a lot of stuff about Kasslyne you ain't gonna get a canon answer for. You'll just have to try and go there and see things for yourself.

tricks your ghost

Good stuff.

You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - The Oatmeal

This is a comic about the backfire effect.

Read it.

Her breath is nature’s sigh, she’s watching over you.