wizardthieffighter

Looks Back, Looks Forward

Hello Heroes.

Hello Passersby.

The days of quarantine continue to tick and rattle by. Slow, like wind-swept boulders. Swift, like forgotten blossoms. Forgotten, like yesteryear's snow. It's a strange timescape, where I busy myself all day, yet the days sag and melt like wax before the flame.

I look back on ten days, and can't recall much. What have I done? It's hard to recall.

Still, the wax runs and cools and new shapes forms. Boulders and mountains of wax, ready to g...

Hwelcome Aboard, Everyone!

We're speeding towards 500 heroes on this mildly psychedelic gaming voyage. Unbelievable - when we were 50 or 100 I could barely have conceived it. Yet here we are.

How do you like the new album/cover/place art? Our ship of vomes looks pretty spiff, eh what?

Anyhow: I made it back home! Wow. That was a trip.

Also: I've made it through most of the work on delivering the UVG. Gods, that was also a trip!

So, number one, invitations

I turned off auto-membership of ...

Zoa of the Vastlands V1.0 COMPLEAT :)

Ha! I only took twice as long as I'd planned, so I'll call that a success! This started when one of the heroes asked for a random creature generator and I went a little overboard. So here goes:

• 24 pages
• UVG-compatible
• More than 10 illustrations
• Roughly 40–50 tables
• creature generator
• creature modificator
• expanded observation / research xp possibilities
• research tables and results
• expedition sponsors and thei...
  2020-05-07 20:33:03 +0000 UTC View Post

No Zoa Yet ... But Free UVG For Int'l Workers' Day

If you haven't nabbed UVG yet, now's your chance over on itch.io, 100% subsidized by the d.w.a.r.f. with the coupon code UVGWORKERSDAY:

https://wizardthieffighter.itch.io/uvgworkersday

Peace and health everyone!

—Luka

Hey, Wait, Wait, What About Zoa?

Uh, yeah, frankly ... I found out there's a chance I could get back to Korea via Vienna, and I spent today contacting three...

Even Odds on Zoa Release Tomorrow

Hey, heroes!

First - even odds on me making two releases this month. I've got to pop in a bit more art and add some more generators to Zoa of the Vastlands, the "naturalist companion" to the UVG. I wasn't planning on doing this now, but Grinning Maniac ... uhh ... spurred me to do it, and I'd wanted to for ages ... and since I got seacat's bit done for this week, I decided to also play a bit more with UVG's layout.

Well, it's going to be 16 pages-or-so of creature generat...

Breve Seacat Update 4

Dear heroes,

Welcome to Friday. I hope all of you are well and enjoying yourself on this time asteroid. The travel gates will remain closed until access to Saturday is restored, which should be in about six days. This is just a temporary glitch. All will be well. Please do not use the swimming pools as they have been infested by a craniophagic nanomachine augmented bacterium.

Here's Seacat Update 4!

It's not yet finished, again, because this beast just keeps growing. But I d...

Wallpapers and Seacat 0.4 Inbound

Dear heroes, dear visitors,

thank you for your patience, thank you for your ears, and thank you for simply being around in these strange, hard times. It is not often that so many of us can help so much by simply staying home. Still, it is a hard and lonely, and tests us day in day out. Let us remind ourselves, we are here for one another, we are in this struggle together, all of us.

Now, to the art. To escaping from the here, from the now.

Four Wallpapers

Ok, first t...

Advancing Slowly Upon The Pinnacle of the Seacat

Hello heroes,

I hope I can prevail upon you with some distractions. It's late here and I'm kind of exhausted, so here's:

• New art for seacat
• New skins: the biomancer and (most of) the golem mechanic
• New spells (lots and lots of biomancy)
• Expanded random bad mutations
• More skills and abilities

What's coming next, likely in smaller chunks:

• Wrapping up reformatting tourist, skeleton, and weapon.
• Adding the gene...
  2020-03-29 20:40:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Road of the Biomanticore

Dear Heroes,

first, let me thank all of you who took part in the poll earlier this week. So many of you answered that you truly made it simpler for me to figure out where and how to proceed. The results were clear-cut.

Slightly fewer than half (45.3%) wanted both fictions and games, agreeing to me cutting up large updates a bit so they're more more manageable.

A slightly larger plurality (48.8%) wanted just the games, agreeing to me cutting up large updates a bit so they're ...

Forward Into The Distraction Zone (and a chapter of fiction!)

Dear heroes,

The times are upon us. Exhausting. Terrifying. Sad. Worse is yet to come. I am praying for all of us to come through these difficult weeks and months safely, with health and loved ones untouched by the horseman pestilence.

I spent almost all of last week in a frenzy of communication and preparation. Trying to alert friends and family, local authorities and journalists. Anyone and everyone I could reach. It's taken a toll and I'm exhausted, but ... I think I did some g...

Games During the Epidemic

Dear Heroes,

Don’t panic. Don’t give up. Do your part. We will remember 2020 with 20/20 hindsight. The virus is well and truly upon us and if we are lucky it will be only our economies that are a little battered. We will be living through strange and unusual times for the next year at the very least. We will be changing the way we live and interact. In some ways, perhaps permanently.

I am going to repeat the very basic advice: right now it's up to all of us to...

Rrypo : Small Update

Hey, heroes, happy March!

Small surprise: I've updated Rrypo a bit!

• some new art
• fixed some text alignments and orphans

Don't thank me, just tell more people to join. It's like a pyramid scheme. The more folks join, the more art I make, the higher ... oh, who am I kidding. You don't have to do anything.

Here, enjoy.

Cheers,

—Luka

Seacat Update: 4.5 Heroes and Some Rules

Dear Heroes,

Here we are now, finally. Seacat is rolling and picking up bits and bobs of UVG along the way. This was my goal all along, but I hadn't realized quite what a task it was.

I thought to myself, "Oh, Luka, this'll be easy as pie! You'll just roll up the rules from the back of UVG, and expand them with a few more skins or skeletons or classes or whatever you decide to call the ...

Hey, Luka, What's Taking So Long?

Uh ... hi? Thanks for your patience. It's taking long because of the writing. I wrote a lot. Then I edited a lot. Now it's looking better and it's much easier to navigate. And the rules are better written and better structured.

So, tomorrow you're going to get Part 1 of Breve Seacat. Tentatively titled "As Ready As I Got It This Month".

• It's going to include 3 or 4 new skins compatible with UVG
• Expanded and polished magic rules
• new spells
• new abili...
  2020-02-28 20:52:46 +0000 UTC View Post

Terrible News: I Am Verbose

Or even verböse.

I thought I'd trim down each of the Seacat heroes to just about 1,000 words. Still quite long, but something I could squash into a spread. Totally. And then I just failed miserably. The Electric Wizard alone clocks in at 3,600 words.

Check it out, it's in the attachment and here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gqCMLUEeiJuBM8F...

Piercing Heaven's Eye

Hello Fair Heroes!

There'll be shipping dates to share about UVG soon enough, but for now ... what have I been up to? You may recall I've been muddling about a bit. Slightly rudderless in the after-new-year.

A large part was the knowledge that I really needed to get back to my home country again. It's been eight years since I've actually lived there and following the highs and lows of the last year, I felt strongly the need to recalibrate. I finally made my decision and on the 19t...

A Giant Flying Head For The Heroes (UVG Module)

Dear Heroes!

My short, 16-page mini module for UVG is ready. It's intended as a bit of a bridge between the massiveness of the UVG and the massiveness of Red Sky. That said, it stands almost entirely on its own, and doesn't need either of those two products to work ... but it would fit right in.

Unfortunately it's 48 pages long.

I got so close!

Inside:

• a sectioned illustrated schematic of the flying head!
• music!
• raiders!
• ...
  2020-01-21 14:53:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Get A Head (Soon)

Hey every hero out there!

So, the self-standing module on players acquiring a flying head fortress is nearly ready. It's a bit longer than I planned because ... of course. Sure. Why not.

I'm making a split-level diagram of the head. And then I want to add a few mechanics and complications for running a game where the players have a massive floating head of destruction. It ... changes some things. Primarily, it makes adventure come to the heroes in a big way, because  the more...

May You Live and Prosper in 2020

Hello the heroes! Hello the visitors!

It is a pleasure to chat with you again, now that my short winter holidays are over. I hope at least some of you have had the chance to peruse Longwinter ... which was far longer than any update on this patreon should really be. But there you go.

Last year was really long, eh? Incredibly long. I thought I'd do some sightseeing over my holidays, but no. It was not to be. I spent a week doing my utmost (and nearly completely succeeding)...

Longwinter 3 Ho Ho Ho

I cursed at myself and swore, this little thing would be written before year's end. I would not let another winter pass with Longwinter hanging over me. I would not rest until it was done.

It's 1:30 a.m. now and in a dozen hours I head off on my vacation.

But Longwinter is finished.

Or, you know, finished-ish. I didn't complete all the art. The layout, well, I'll let Anna tweak that later. But, finished-ish. Goodish enoughish. It was supposed to be short .....

Gentle Traveler, Harsh Mistress

Dear heroes,

welcome to winter again! I thought Longwinter would be finished last winter, but the sands of time for me were running slow, and though I was quick, not dead, ... well.

But though the end is near, mark my words, believe my soul, we'll save Winterwhite before the end of this year. So, this is just a little teaser and warning - an update will probably extract a pound from y'all.

Twobooks

I am doing something I'd planned for a hwile, thoug...

Here We Are, The End

My work is done, my brush has won.

Dear heroes, we are here at the House on the Edge, at the precipice of finality. The project that took much more time than I could have expected is completely completed from my side. The Ultraviolet Grasslands and all the attendent stretch and special and additional bonus material is done.

This project has been ... an experience. Mostly good, but I hope to not repeat it in the same way. I took almost the entirety of the work upo...

Sweep of the UVG and News of the Woueast

And all the art is done and done.

For a while I thought of doing the final art for the ref screen all-digital, but in the end I gave myself some freedom from the screens, and did it old school. Very big and in ink.

Then I stitched it together in Affinity Photo together and colored in in Procreate and now ... well, yes, certainly it's off to the printers. Last of the pieces, together with ...

Finally Finally Finally

Oh dear lords of light above. I'm free. Finally.

The UVG ref screen is done.

Designing the ref screen for the UVG was truly, truly hard. It was a nightmarish slog. It's not just that I'm tired, with the project 4 months late in total. It's not just that it was really hard to design because I had to trim, adjust, and tweak a series of massive tables to fit on four coherent pages. It's not just that thinkin...

Digital detox • clearly doubling down • roleplaytime

Dear heroes,

This post is not primarily about games. It is about life, creativity, peace, and what follows from there. It may be of interest to you—I do go on at some length about how I see games and my work— but if it is not, I thank you for your forebearance.

We'll be back to our regular programming soon, specifically:

• finally completing the UVG referee screen (and wallpapers from the art thereof),
• Longwinter 3, at long long last,
• a...
  2019-11-07 05:21:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Halloween Seacat Treat: Skeleton Tourist Weapon

Hello heroes all.

Here we are: an introductory hero book for players of Seacat. If UVG was all instructions (sometimes only lightly detailed) for the referee, here is a stripped-down booklet all about making some unusual heroes.

I did not choose these first three strange and atypical skins for Seacat. They chose me. I set out to write the last chapter of Longwinter and in the back of my mind I had an awareness of the kind of hero skins I had planned for the first edition ...

Seacat Update Inbound

& other news.

Heroes! News approaches.

First, a welcome to everybody who's just joined. Now a brief round up of what's I'm up to.

• This week we should have final final say on the UVG, so the last thing to do is assemble the Cat's (DM's) screen, and then we're done. I'm done. I've got freedom. At last. Phew! It's been a long one.
• Longwinter is going to be completed come next month ...
• Along with a delayed haunted house adventure. It's fi...
  2019-10-28 02:48:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Bonus: Funereal Black City Wallpapers

Well, well, well.

Not only are all the UVG book covers done ... just have to finish the DM screen art, and then every single last piece of UVG art is complete.

Literally, down to one last piece of art.

Horn toot.

Also Writing News

I've also got mildly exciting news on the Longwinter front. I'm back to writing and the end is in sight!

It's been a bit of a harrowing week, between a nasty head cold and all, but I eventually made the decision to pull the plug...

Finall Errors ... of course

Well ... no launch is without an iceberg hitting the champagne jar, I guess, so here is mine. I was sure I'd done a bang up job getting the list of patreon heroes as of August 2018 perfect and ready in the book ... and ... it turns out, nope. I didn't. Nope.

Me and spreadsheets, love and robots in the time of cholera.

Please check the thank you page (page 194) if you were a patreon backer at the time and let me know if I've missed you. Oopsie.

Oh, right, almost forgot to me...

The End, Our Friend, The End

Whelp. All the art in the book is done and colored.

All of it. Every last smidgeon. Yup.

Done.

Time for a bit of rest!

Full kickstarter update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedfuneral/the-ultraviolet-grasslands/posts/2643874

Mood: cheesy

---/---

Cheers, everyone!