Metazoa

First, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and all that stuff.

Alright, this is sort of old news, but there's some fanart for OMS that can be found here and here. Does it count if Breland is a friend of mine and awesome, or that MihoshiK is some kind of badass for commissioning a piece from jaggyd? I totally like to think it does.

Picked up Monster Hunter 3 the other day, but I haven't had a chance to play it much yet, though what I did play through was pretty neat; I'm still too busy working with New Vegas and being distracted by City of Heroes. I'm also trying to use the time that everyone's on break and there's a lull in tabletop gaming as folks go see their families to get caught up with my buffer. I've been doing two pages a day for this last week. While I haven't gotten back to the buffer I used to have, I'm at least into February with the pages.

I've been reading over Fantasy Craft lately, and it looks like a lot of fun. I was thinking about seeing if I can't take the setting of Ten-Ghost, wind the clock back a couple hundred years, and bang and smash the rules into working and running some local folks through an advencha! or two. I'm totally going to write up a Path of Ether and also use family names and guardian spirits as alignments.

In other news, I've since moved to using three-dimensional models to represent time and plot threads in OMS, since I couldn't make one on paper without it looking like a total mess. Also, after a discussion about gravity, photons, neutrinos (and the dark matter properties thereof), the dual aperture experiment, and quantum cascade lasers, I realize that if the Higgs Boson exists, I owe somebody five bucks. Take that as you will.

Finding Things on the Internets

A time ago (I don't exactly remember how long ago; years, at least four years), I had created a supernatural critter to fill a gap in a World of Darkness game I was running, more specifically to create a single villain with which to plague and creep out my players. I threw what little material I'd crapped out over the course of the weekend up on a geocities site and thought nothing of it (and when geocities faded away, I let it, too, fade away).

I discovered some time later through my deviantart account that at least some people had heard of or read it. This came as a surprise to me, since I had hoped, when I got some time, to tighten it up, discard the elements I didn't like, and get to work on it again, but time got in the way, and more fruitful projects kept lining up (and I don't run or play WoD anymore due to the ridiculous prep time horror games normally require).

Then, this afternoon, a friend sent me a message that he found a forum thread on tvtropes about it, and even a tropes page. Strangely enough, the OP even mentions the presence of paedomorphosis being odd or out there, which I agree with, and was even going to remove at one point, but left it in because I'm eminently lazy. Actually, I agree with nearly all the complaints, interestingly enough, and totally endorse the public gutting of the material.

This on the heels of an e-mail about a review of OMS that's appeared in the Innsmouth Free Press, which you can find here. I haven't read it yet, I'm scared to, but I like to pretend it's probably totally awesome, and I'll read it at some point when I've got myself all mentally prepared for it.

In other news, I've got the ISBN, front matter, and a pdf of the interior contents of Ten-Ghost, and it's all looking excellent. There's maybe a sentence or two I'd like to change, but it's a bit late now, and they're no big deal, really.

Happy Fun Think Time Go

It's not that the Mythos is so often "dumbed down" to be made fun of should be worrisome. It's that the very idea that our modern society can make fun of the idea of an uncaring, nihilistic universe and doesn't have to dumb any part of it down that should be worrisome.

It means we're closer in mindset to the horrible things that lurk in the Mythos than we realize.

Think about this: what do you do as part of your daily life that would be considered impossible, madness-inducing, or cult behavior to someone from the 20s, who'd never heard of a supersonic jet, driven faster than 10 miles an hour, or couldn't even conceive of the notion of m-theory without being driven to fits of disbelief? How many video games, starting with the ever so innocuous A Link to the Past, have taught you to think in four or more dimensions? The very notion of the internet or a flash mob is frightening to contemplate under these circumstances.

Things to think about.

A Wild Narla Appears

Progress on Chapter 11 is a little slow due to scheduling and sick. I am about seven pages in, but would like to have more done (I'd like to be done with it and halfway through 12 by the time this chapter ends, but you can't always get what you want).

Looking for More Material

I've got a bit of a mental disorder; I can't really talk at all to people I don't know unless I'm forced or prompted with a script (my mom used to write scripts for me while I was growing up). Typing is no problem, and I can be outgoing as long as I'm dealing with a written medium and have no one's face on the other end, but that's not what I'm discussing today.

It's faces and posture. Facial expressions and body language literally have no meaning to me at all. I don't know what someone's arm or face or body placement means at all, and in order to do this right, I've got to use reference charts (which, thankfully, I've mostly memorized now; you have no idea how much this has helped me. It's because of my attempts to do art (horribly) that have allowed me to actually go shopping by myself, even if I don't talk to the cashier) to even get a facial expression. Still, I'm entirely guessing on annoyance or surprise or anything like that (and as anyone who's looked at my attempts to draw backgrounds knows, my sense of spacial perception is crazy; my roommate finds it amusing to move things around when I'm not in the living room and watch me try to re-navigate when I come back in. Asshole.).

It's difficult, since I learn expressions and postures by rote and chart, I basically have to learn to redraw a face every time I want someone to have a different expression, which brings me to the real main point.

I have a large amount of physical reference material, but it's limited. I keep trying the exercises I can dig up with tutorials online. Anybody out there have any good ideas for helping me improve?

Call of Cthulhu

Investigator Name: David Andrew Bartlett
Occupation: Artist
Colleges, Degrees: Miskatonic University, BA
Birthplace: Glowbury, MA
Mental Disorders: Dissociative disorder, not otherwise specified
Sex: M Age: 22
STR: 9
DEX: 12
INT: 17
Idea: 85
CON: 8
APP: 11
POW: 18
Luck: 90
SIZ: 10
SAN: 90 (It's a bit lower than this right now)
EDU: 18
Know: 90
Cthulhu Mythos: 00 (It's a bit higher than this right now)
Damage Bonus: none



Accounting 10%
Anthropology 1%
Archaeology 1%
Art: Drawing 60%
Art: Painting 75%
Astronomy 1%
Bargain 5%
Biology 16%
Chemistry 1%
Climb 40%
Computer Use 26%
Conceal 15%
Credit Rating 15%
Cthulhu Mythos 0%
Dodge 48%
Drive Auto 20%
Electrical Repair 40%
Electronics 11%
Fast Talk 60%
First Aid 30%
Geology 16%
Handgun 20%
Hide 10%
History 67%
Jump 25%
Law 5%
Library Use 52%
Listen 25%
Locksmith 1%
Machine Gun 15%
Martial Arts 1%
Mechanical Repair 20%
Medicine 5%
Natural History 26%
Navigate 10%
Occult 5%
Operate Hvy. Machine 1%
Persuade 15%
Pharmacy 1%
Photography 47%
Physics 89%
Psychoanalysis 1%
Psychology 31%
Ride 5%
Rifle 25%
Shotgun 30%
Sneak 10%
Spot Hidden 40%
Submachine Gun 15%
Swim 25%
Throw 25%
Track 10%
Fist/Punch 50%
Head Butt 10%
Kick 25%
Grapple 25%
Hatchet 20%



Call of Cthulhu is by Chaosium Inc.

Goin' Down to Eltdown

The Eltdown Shards are bizarre fragments of seeming pottery found in 1882 and named after Eltdown in southern England, where they were first discovered. These shards date to the early Triassic period. Previously believed to be untranslatable, there have been several "translations" made, such as The Eltdown Shards: A Partial Translation, by Gordon Whitney. There are also a variety of non-collegiate translation, most of which make the rounds among cults.

The translation by Whitney is similar to another text, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, produced by the archaeosapients currently termed Yithians, which describes the planet Yith and the first encounters with the Yekubians. There also appears to be a shard that contains the formula for summoning a being known as the "Warder of Knowledge." It should be noted that the formula for dismissing the Warder is either not present or intentionally damaged. However, the majority of information contained on the shards deals with shoggoths, and may or may not make vague references to some sort of "prime source," which means that it's more likely the shards were inscribed by the Elder Things.