Sean Äaberg

CRYPTS OF THE CONTRARIAN CADAVERS

I’m currently editing the 4th Choose or Lose book, an adventure in a lowlands cave full of nasty things!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 96

I just played my second game of Magic the Gathering with my family the other night. I’ve always just had a gut “no” response to the game. In actually playing it, & enjoying playing it, I was able to pinpoint what rubs me wrong about the game. The art & the mechanics aren’t aligned. Each deck can be aesthetically & conceptually distinct from everyone else’s at the table. You can have Dr. Who playing against Lord of the Rings. I kept joking that you could make a Taco Bell ...

MOBLIN

Malev da Shinobi did a fantastic job on this DUNGEON DEGENERATES Moblin! Really captured the feeling of the original art in 3 dimensional paint! All the minis are 25% off as we attempt to clear them out to make way for our all new minis crowdfunding campaign in January! Sign up for the GOBLINKO mailing list to get the code! Ok!

TBFB INVENTORY SYSTEM

Chris is working on the beginnings of the inventory system for the Battle for Brüttelburg, have a look!

CHARACTERS

The eight original adventures from DUNGEON DEGENERATES: HAND OF DOOM are a great start. I’m working on 12 new adventurers to go with the 42 already existing ones & a bunch more have made themselves clear to me as I think about all this!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 95

I have changed my vision of “what’s possible” again. I grew up on the Richard Scarry books. Anthrpomorphic Animals of all kinds lived in an idyllic, Switzerland inspired world. He started illustrating these in a more belabored, fleshed out, classic Golden Book approach but by the 70s he had developed a loose, cartoony inking style with watercolors. There are pickle barrels, pickle cars & everything in between. I really like this idea of all these different animals living together bu...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 94

I used to have a hard time with people comparing my work to other people’s work. Every observatory comment felt like an attempt to box me in, limit my horizons. The number of times people have said Robert Crumb or S. Clay Wilson is insane. Especially when my horizons felt more unknown. Eventually I realized that this was not what these people were trying to do, they were just trying to find a way to talk about my work in a way that they understood. Most people don’t know how to talk about...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER

I made a new sign up ad for The Goblin Newsletter for Fall.

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I built up calluses on myself from survival techniques I developed as a kid, being thrust into so many interactions I had absolutely no control over. We all have developed these calluses, some more than others. I’ve been working on lessening the calluses that no longer serve me & it’s like as soon as one is diminished I notice another one. I guess that’s life. This morning I was thinking about my issues with rules. I understand that rules are a way to govern that space where you mee...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 92

We used to live in West Oakland, next to an abandoned theater, in the old rehearsal space of Flipper. West Oakland at that time (2001-2002) had already crumbled & was mostly empty feeling & devoid of energy. The BART tracks were right across from our front windows & we’d have to stop talking when they showed up. I spent a lot of my time conjuring up old Afrocentric ghosts in the place. My attempts were futile, not even a Black dude could have got blood out of that stone. The pla...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 91

One of the things I really like about Punk & other subcultures is that they are mantles that anyone can discover & adopt. The subcultures aren’t something you’re born into, you find them & they just fit, frequently they are like finding a missing puzzle piece. Simultaneously they are incomplete, requiring a host culture to continue. Like the Xenomorph they take on the characteristics of their host culture, but the essential trappings of the subculture are obvious. With Punk th...

MORE CHICKEN WITCH

Alex Siddy continues to work on the Chicken Witch.

TBFB FACTIONS

Chris worked up this video to show me his progress on the factions mechanic for The Battle For Brüttelburg! It’s rough & incomplete but will add a lot of complexity to gameplay! Have a look!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 90

The first fantasy books I read were Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series. I found them in my second grade class bookshelves which held a surprisingly good selection of titles, thank you Miss Brock. This was well before the Disney movie came out of the Black Cauldron (the title of the second book in the series). I was stoked to find these books at school & have access to some sword & sorcery books. Especially with a cool antler & skull masked guy on horseback on the cov...

IT’S FALL

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 89

I am so bothered by doomerism these days. Doomers are people who are extremely fatalistic about global problems such as overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, ecological overshoot, pollution, nuclear weapons & technology. It is obviously a direct product of a certain kind of brain that is exposed to too much bad news. These days you don’t have to look for it, bad news is always following you around because that potential danger gets the clicks. If it bleeds, it leads. A big reason wh...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 88

My tribalism around music has almost evaporated. This is probably due to the tribes disappearing or being so different that there is no reason to try for cohesion. It could also be that I’m almost 50 & haven’t felt positive about that tribalism for thirty years. I spent decades collecting records which I then started DJing around, eventually having a few nights a week at various bars in Portland. I grew up listening to the radio & taping songs off of it. I developed a keen ability...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 87

We watched the Antisocial Network on Netflix & it got me thinking. I have been online since the late 90s & used computers before that even though I don’t consider myself a computer person. I can just distinctly remember my classmates in highschool not being very tech savvy. One of the most important things I learned in art school was cutting class to teach myself photoshop. I could tell that computers were going to be crucial in the future, even if I wasn’t sure how & didn’t...

THE SPIRIT OF NATURE

Here’s an old piece that I colored for use in Epic Spell Wars - Annihilageddon 3 - Satanic Panic

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 85

Portland is surrounded by some of the most beautiful natural areas I have ever seen. When we moved to Oregon the overwhelming green of it all & the rich river valleys that originated inland & worked their way towards the sea were particularly amazing. Bald eagles are not an uncommon sight. In living here, these things became background noise to my cultural frustrations with the state & my struggle to make it. Having escaped the gravitational field of what I wanted initially, which...

DUNGEON DEGENERATES RESTOCKS!

Achtung! We restocked the lore books, Missions II & III & the Malingerers! At GOBLINKO!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 85

I think of most political footballs as tar babies. If you aren’t familiar, The Tar Baby is an Uncle Remus story. Uncle Remus is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler. Uncle Remus is a kindly old freedman (freed African-American slave) who tells a collection of folklore collected from Southern Black Americans, many of these stories survived from Africa & have correlatives there. The stories are intended to teach & entertain.

I am reprinting my version of the Tar Ba...

AD&D DEMONS FOR LABYRINTH LORD

I drew these classic AD&D demons for the Labyrinth Lord RPG back in 2007 or so, the gig didn’t pay well so I busted them out as quickly as possible. I probably should have taken longer. They turned out alright.

PORK SHOP PRODUCTS

Some original product graphics from the PORK SHOP. It was cool to create a conceptual store & feature a selection of items that really communicated an idea to our fans!

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 84

Today is Katie’s birthday. I knew when I hit puberty that I was incomplete. Nothing I found could fill that hole. It was obvious to me that I was incomplete, I could see myself dying at 22 easily. I didn’t have a vision of my future. I didn’t know what I would be capable of when complete. Luckily I only had to endure that incomplete, empty, wandering feeling until I was twenty two. When me & Katie really connected in art school, it was obvious. We got engaged after a month. We both ...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 83

The social media platforms haven’t delivered for a while & the dispersal has gone from a trickle to a drip & the intervals between drips keeps getting longer & longer. Meta makes me pay to access the large audiences I have built organically for years, which I do begrudgingly because I got bills to pay & mouths to feed. These platforms have that weird simultaneously sterile & dirty feeling of an elementary school cafeteria. No swearing, but puke in the corner. I use their...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 82

I watched a documentary about Oakland’s current state of self-destructive decline. THis situation seems very similar to Portland, just more concentrated in pockets, but with more crime. A toxic socialist lady was interviewed & she had a list of historical grievances for everything. She decided that Target was based off of slavery & that they deserved to be stolen from. That none of the crime was unjust & it was all based off this desire for revenge. I had a hard time watching. H...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 81

I decided to study marketing last summer & this has evolved into studying writing. I am a natural at both & they have been intertwined in my life since I started to understand myself & the role I played in the world. It took me a while to make peace with the fact that I am a hustler. I had to come at it via the rapper E-40 & the idea of selling tapes out of your trunk when the business wouldn’t return your calls. I’ve been writing since I was eleven, it always just seemed ...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 80

When I was a kid I was constantly ensorcelled by the wall of tiny text & brutalist images that made up the Johnson Smith catalog ads that were ubiquitous in the backs of comics. I never ordered anything from them, but the ads really got me, not as a successful ad in making me buy something but as a cultural object. My friend Andrew Horwitz ordered from them & he got their actual catalog with his order. A hundred pages of cheaply printed, newsprint mystery! The descriptions were freque...

THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 79

I was watching a short documentary called “Taste of The Tenement” about the Tenement Museum in NYC & specifically the recipes that are part of that project. There is so much attention given to the food culture of minority groups it was very difficult to figure out what my cultural food, what the real food culture of nativised Americans is. There are a few distinctly European & British isles recipes that were handed down through the generations that we ate but the real thing that d...