#that's what LAYOUT is for

[ribstongrowback]

after trying to play Uknown Armies for a while i think that what bothers me is that it didn't go hard enough into its weird shit and instead is kind of stuck in the time of monsters between the sandboxy days of old and the more ritualized, codified phases of play of modern storygames such as blades in the dark. feels like a game that wanted to modernize its genre but didn't know where to go with it and ended up missing its mark.

While UA a game about driven people trying to do dangerous shit for profit and ideology, in a comparable (though very distinct) way to Blades in the Dark, it focuses also on very specific things that people can do with its magic, in a way that is tied to this philosophy of game design that i find good OSR tends to tease out which is giving people weird tools to see what people do with them. But it also gets very diluted and messy with everything else.

for those of you who haven't played it, UA's core resolution mechanic is a d100 roll under sort of affair. the main things under which you roll are attributes that are determined by how hardened you are on five Shock Gauges that represent the sort of trauma life throws at you (Helplessness, Isolation, Identity, Unnatural, and Violence). for example, being very hardened to violence will make you better at Struggle, which allows you to punch people, but worse at Connect, which allows you to relate to the folks you meet. your gauges accumulate Hardened notches which allow you to shrug off some kind of trauma whenever you manage to stand firm while faced with horror, and a secondary track takes up failed notches whenever you lose your shit, serving as a sort of insanity track. this system is already fairly rich and complete in itself, i'm only giving you the basic view of it, but it is fair to say you've already got a game with only that, and that is a problem, because what UA wants to be its core is its Identities.

Instead of skills, your character can put percentile points into Identities that represent core aspects of who they are. This can be a job, an occupation, a hobby, an art they perform or even just a belief they hold dear. In some circumstances, you can roll under your identity rather than the appropriate attribute, and failing a roll guarantees you'll get more points at the end of the session in that track, which is the only way to progress in something without getting worse at something else.

this is also where magick with a k comes in. if you wanna do magick, not only does it have to be one of your identities, it has to be THE identity that you obsess over. normies can obsess over normal things like tax filing, but you are obsessed with being so wrong about cinema that it allows you to do looney tunes shit to people. and the thing with this is that, what it wants to do, right, is give you something that you'll always want to use. it states outright in the book that it considers being a magic user in the same way as being an alcoholic, you never really cease to be one. it's always there and you can't ever really be anything else because a single drop can make you plunge again and it's always right here, waiting for you.

which i find interesting and compelling! you could make an entire game about this! there is so much stuff in there you could make an entire game about! but it's all so incoherent it ends up being less than the sum of its part. the core drive of the PCs in UA is to advance the Goal of their cabal. the goal is basically a track measured in percents and the players have to do stuff in the background to advance it. they just say that they do a thing and they think about how much time that take and then they roll d10+5 if it's a thing that's just kind of the cost of doing business and 2d10+10 if it's something that would bring them major advancement. and that's supposed to be the core of their personnal arcs. and it has basically 0 interractions with the part where you can make hats that melt people's heads. sorrow.

[technikki]

if there's anything i've learned from the current state of social media it's that this is one of the worst possible notifications you can receive upon opening an app

[julnites]

Red riding hood comic collab with the wonderful @yeehawpim (go check out their blog for loads of great comics!) 🌷 See the layouts he did here!

[jenniesarchives]

[anxietyriddledsquid]

comic i drew out of a scene from the clone wars novelization by karen traviss

[yawnzshit]

who gets me WHO GETS ME!!!!!

( insanely in love with him ; I love him sm 🙏)

[barghest-land]

today's flocking sketches!! wanted to try some more wide shot scenery this time so i was mainly focused on colors, composition and the feeling that drawings hold overall. maganpaulia, kaprosuchus, torosaurus and regaliceratops. also my first large ceratopsians ever!

[miuhyein]

　　　　　　she 　　became 　　a 　　victim

𓏶゚𓈒ㅤㅤㅤㅤ 𓂃 ⑅𑂳◌ 　　　　　　　 @bambicito

　　to 　　my 　　busy 　　schedule

　𓎢𓎟𓎡 ೃ࿔ 　　　　　　　　 　⸻ ㅤ𓊑ㅤ

[yippee-optimistically]

so ii16 huh

[hadaldemon-nsft]

tw: suggestive, nakedness if you really squint (but nothing that matters is shown), character ooc (?), cursed, mdni

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so, um... remember when people were comparing Shadow Milk with Sonic?

(video has audio, mind the volume in public areas)

..........................yeah.

Randomly remembered that cursed song because of that. btw, song is Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone (Smooth jazz cover)

[olasketches]

I don't feel anything

[dollw0und]

she's my spirit animal

[remxedmoon]

(you worked yourself to death.)

yeah i wasn’t kidding when i said these would be coming soon. <- haha funny joke marshall. so!! remember when i said that this post would be coming out last weekend? guess whose tablet broke a few days after saying that! so sorry for the delay!! this is long overdue. here’s a link to the drive, as always! everything in this part of the update should be in the miscellaneous folder (outside of the menu icons, which are in the menu folder. wauaua).

unedited versions below the cut, plus some notes. fair warning 90% of this is just ui stuff lol

so! all of this was already done by the time i posted the enemies. the delay isn’t *entirely* because of the tablet issues, i just managed to get distracted by making: even more redraws! i’d say new update soon but after what happened last time i shouldn’t jinx myself. but! almost All of the art for the initial mod release is done!!!! exciting!!!!!!

please be nice to me (silly) this is my first time doing frame by frame animation in… give or take 5 years? i followed the original animations pretty closely, so they don’t look Awful but i am Aware of the jank. i’m not an animator!!! they’re Good Enough for my purposes.

hey did you know that the original teleport map is slightly off center. did you know that. that’s not the case for the redraw for the record but it did make things a little harder. despite that, i think you can tell i was having fun with the dormont part of the map. i would’ve put more detail into the house, but we never really get a more detailed look at it??? and i didn’t want to make assumptions. so that part’s just traced from the original 👍. anyways shoutout to the clocktower being Curved for whatever reason

outside of those, all of the added art is actually just spritework. i didn’t know this at first, but there’s a TON of copies of sprites from the icon set. Basically Everywhere. so those are added now! and should work properly! also added a few sprites that were Missing from my original batch. not going to put them all here, but a few Important ones (which i actually had to make new art for) are the rock paper scissors cheatsheet, the Larger versions of the craft signs (used in the calamité fight and. probably somewhere else idk), and the craft signs for the tutorial kid fight!

aaaand i think that’s it! for stuff from this update. yeah no there’s more coming buddy. my tablet already broke one time this week there’s no way it’s happening twice. i’m not working on portraits Just Yet (though the temptation has been There), but i’ve got the title screens, a few backgrounds, and the ending cgs done! along with a few other assorted cgs sketched out. because im out of my fucking mind. so, uh, see you soon!! enjoy!!

[moon0fairy]

Reasons not to kiss him - Kentakim

Poem: Yes & no by Natalie Wee

[sunshinepixels]

Move in day 🚚🏠📦

ft. another florida house from yours truly

[seaseren]

My brain supplied "Alphinaud making a replica of Sharlayan in minecraft" and then immediately followed it up with "Fourchenault got investigated by the forum for leaking state secrets because Alphinaud made some very, very educated guesses."