Wow, So Many Props I Could Put On A Play

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 HAVEN’T PLAYED THIS GAME IN FOREVER BUT THIS IS AMAZING AND I HAVE SO MANY EMOTIONS ABOUT THIS AND I JUST

I mean don’t get me wrong I loved the game but that ending-?????

So yeah enjoy this crappily drawn infinite wall of text I DID WHAT I COULD WITH WHAT I HAD TO WORK WITH

(also please open in new tabs if you want to read anything goddang tumblr makes things tiny)

(p.s. I did another dumb thing as a sequel)

So people of Unsounded Discord started discussing who qualifies as a magical girl in the comic and they were coming up with bad ideas like “Mikaila“. They were all obviously wrong, so I decided to take the matter in my own hands. I am so sorry.

Mother Whale's Funeral

milfs…,, milves,

Did you actively design Cresce and Alderode to be opposites of each other or did they sort of evolve that way as you were writing the comic?

They were designed to be foils. Can’t have a story without conflict! However I didn’t design one to be markedly or obviously “better” or more just than the other. They both have their problems. I’m not extraordinarily interested in the fight between them, because neither are ideologically pure. You can’t honestly cheer for either side. If you DO, that’s fine, but there is plenty of space and reason to dislike them both.

I’m more interested in the citizens of each place and how they deal with each other on an individual level, and how people in general are able to live in a world where no one is ideologically pure; where almost all institutions are self-serving and wicked. That’s a big theme in Unsounded. All group endeavours are rotten, or become rotten. Trust individuals, but never institutions.

This will all carry through to Alderode. There is no “right” caste. There is no “right” religion between the Ssaelit and Gefendur. There are good people, good intentions, and good days all carried along by a river of time and entropy. That’s life.

SISYPHUS GETS A 9 TO 5

[spoilers for all of severance season 1. words by northernlion, brain worms by me]

This Is Gospel - Panic! At the Disco; The left ear is the official album version, while the right ear is the official piano version.

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Black-Backed Jackal (Canis mesomelas) in full flight at Etosha National Park in Namibia (1965)

credit: American Institute of the Humanities