Okay But Imagine Super-zombie-strength Duane With A Fully Metal Pymaric Body. He'd Be Alderode's Terminator!

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link to PDF

https://fcs-hes.ca.uky.edu/sites/fcs-hes.ca.uky.edu/files/ct-mmb-147.pdf

Genuine praise and applause here, you've achieved something unprecedented to me as a reader: I feel shaken and uncertain about a protagonist I once liked, but also still completely invested in their story.

Right now (I've just read 18-80 to 84) I feel you've struck a great balance of surprise (at Duane) and trust (in your story). Perhaps because no single choice of Duane's felt out-of-character, as they slowly added up? I honestly can't predict how I'll feel about him and his flaws by the end of Unsounded, but for once, I'm enjoying that unease! Because of the care you've taken in building your characters so far, I at least still have faith in *you* to reach a satisfying ending.

Oh this should be a question, hmm. Were you at all tempted to foreshadow Duane's recent/future choices more obviously (by character or plot), softening a bit of the impact for a smoother story? Because again, I'm glad you didn't – perfectly threaded needle to keep me captivated.

So glad you're having a good time!

I hope Duane's current state is pretty well telegraphed, though I know it can be hard to remember past instances when the webcomic delivery spaces everything out. He's repeatedly shown himself to be hypocritical and selective in regards to kids. The army story ended with him continuing to train babies in the killing arts and accepting a false narrative that he had never let one of them die. This led right into him turning a blind eye to the Litriya twins for the sake of helping the Aldish invaders get to the construct facility. He felt AWFUL about this - we saw it - and tried to make up for it, but even that very action was already going against what was said in the black water: God is not attainable by transaction. Duane was trying to erase that debt to Litriya. It doesn't work that way! Like Claggart said, you got to acknowledge your mistakes and keep moving.

Duane started to. He truly did, when he spoke to Lori and the Peaceguard, then moved to go defend the shrine. But then Mikaila was there in the sky and all development was cut short in tandem with his poor rotten head.

What did he see when he and Toma and Elka approached Port Morstorben's ravaged gate? Not all the dead bodies. Not a vision of Sara asking him to help defend her people. Instead Duane saw Lemuel and Leysa and Mikaila. The eels have always known exactly how to steer Duane towards his worst self, and they use his best self to do it. They use his blind love for his family, his loyalty towards his homeland, and his faith in God. These can all be fantastic attributes or they can make a monster.

So yeah, I feel like the foreshadowing is there pretty thick. What makes it still compelling, I hope, is Duane's selfishness and reluctance to change are so often counterbalanced by his earnest desire to make things better and to help the people around him as individuals, in the moment. There's not an ounce of real malice in the man, but when Duane stews, he often talks himself into making the wrong choice. When he acts with all the compulsion of a big-hearted protector, he tends towards selfless compassion.

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

Cool, thanks for answering! ^.^

Two things: 1) what exactly is the Foi-Hellick affair? I know it was an Aldish civil insurrection of some kind but I am interested in the details the details and 2) (if this is not too spoilery) What exactly was Queen Sonorie's agenda in having Duane killed? I never fully understood that. P.S. Love your comic so much it has taken over my life

Haha, don’t let it take over your life, there are better things out there like coffee and foot rubs.

You ask about intentional mysteries! Well, the Foi-Hellick affair isn’t too mysterious, it just hasn’t been discussed in the comic yet. The Foi-Hellick affair/war/insurrection/rebellion/call-it-what-you-will was indeed a civil insurrection. It concerned an attempt by two wealthy families recently joined by marriage (the Foi-Hellicks) in the Aldish district of Avelpit to declare their independence from the Aldish state and become a holding of Cresce. Queen Sonorie reneged on her promise of military aid after the mastermind of the affair, Roger Foi-Hellick, absconded to the Crescian court, abandoning his family and his cause. The Foi-Hellicks tried to go Just Kidding Bro but it didn’t work out so well for them. When it became clear they were going to be made an example of, they recruited a citizen army and hired southern mercenaries, kickstarting a pretty brutal few years of warfare that they ultimately lost. Badly. Impaled-on-spears-in-front-of-their-own-children badly.

Duane and his brother served in the army during this. We’ll see some of it firsthand in an upcoming chapter and meet many of the players. This was a very important event, which is why I threw in some early references to it.

As for why Queen Sonorie had Duane killed, you can believe Duane’s speculation here, or not. Duane thinks Sonorie wanted to encourage the ill feelings between Alderode’s two religions by making it look like she supports the Gefendur. The idea that Sonorie would kill a Ssaelit priest for them would have to positively infuriate Duane’s camp, no? If Alderode falls to all-out religious civil war, that can only be good for Cresce. “Divide and conquer,” suggests the zombie.

But this is only Duane’s speculation, and all he has to go on are words written on a wall in his own shed blood.

spell your username without using the letters in your name

mine is ptipi

What does Shaensigin's voice sound like in human tongue? Is she better at speaking spider-paw words or the language of two-toes? And what is her natural tongue/sounds, if any?

Shaensigin is very good at spiderpaw talk and something of a mimic. In a time long past, she and Ilganyag had a game they’d play, where they’d start with one word, and go back and forth repeating it, adding a new word of their own every round. Whoever couldn’t repeat the entire string of words first lost the game.

Shaensigin kept up with the bird pretty well.

More impressively, Shaensigin helped the Inak create their language. She’s not only good at it, but responsible for large parts of it. Of all the senet beast gods the two-toes have and still do worship, she has the longest history with them.

Humans can’t speak the two-toe tongue; we can’t make the right sounds. I’m not even going to try and type them out, but there are clicky knocks they make in their snouts, a growled consonant, and little gruffs :3 When I imagine Ruffles squeakily gruffling to her nanna I wish to slightly die.

Pier underside

OFFtober Day 8: Game of Mortal Fall

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.