#castalia strife

[drpcreates]

Week 2 of InkBlot's OC Spring Up Challenge: Tulips vs Hyacinths

I had to pick tulips. I literally have a drawing of Hepsiba (right) setting tulips on fire so I thought it would be fitting to bring her back. Castalia (center) and Jaime (left) are just enjoying the flowers. Hepsiba has illusionary powers so that poor tulip in the foreground is actually fine. 

I was going to add something else to this piece but I cannot remember for the life of me.

[flirtationisms]

location: the hall of spring / spring party date: tba event: spring party status: closed featuring: @castaliafairbank​

“My friend!” Dottie’s tone was a warm thing, syrupy sweet and cloying and influenced heavily by the amounts of fairywine she had drank leading up to that moment. She walked up to Castalia, a beaming grin on her face. Two glasses of fairywine rested in her hands, one in each hand. She held out the untouched glass. “Would you like some, my dear?”  

 Warmth built within her with every sip of her own fairywine, enough to pull her attention away, even briefly, from the ever building tension at the high court. She knew the dangers that surrounded her. She knew the heavy scent of blood in the air. She knew the ways violent revolution spread. It was a thing the born-fae would likely frown upon, the ways her mortal life—the ever shrinking percentage of her time lived overall—and yet the memories stuck still. 

They echoed loudly, a cacophony of screams and cries and whispers and shouts and gasps and metal slicing through the air and worse. They followed her in her dreams, nightmares of red and silver and a language rarely heard now and her mothers worry and the shaking of hands and the speeches of men who thought themselves the best leader. They followed her in waking life, in the ways she learned not to trust not because of the cruelty of the fae but the cruelty of humans, in the ways she waited for chaos, for strife, for blood.

Another sip of her wine and a blink of her eyes before she returned from a moment of grief, of strife, of suspicion from a time before she shifted, before she learned the taste of immortality. “It really is quite delightful. Especially if you know the ways to avoid playing the fool.”

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Doc Savage, Gothic novels, Underwater, Appendix N

Horror (Cemetery Dance): Up until the publication of The Monk in March of 1796, the Gothics mostly followed Walpole’s formula. The books usually featured a mystery or threat to the main character, an evil villain threatening the virtue of a virginal female, supernatural elements such as a ghost or an ancestral curse, and secret passages in crumbling mansions or castles. That template carried over into the next century, as evidenced by the bulk of the stories published in the pulps during the 1930s.

Cinema (cbr.com): MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: A Doc Savage movie was cast and ready to go when they abruptly changed to an entirely different film at the last minute. In the mid-1960s, the success of heroes from novels and comic books like James Bond and Batman led to producers looking to see whatever other 20th Century heroes that could be adapted into films. Producers Mark Goodson & Bill Todman (best known for their TV game shows) decided to pick Doc Savage to turn into a matinee idol.

Westerns (Six Gun Justice): Gordon D. Shirreffs (1914 – 1996) started writing in 1945, after serving in World War in Alaska and the Aleutian Campaign. Coached by published boy’s adventure writer Frederick Nelson Litten at the Chicago campus of Northwestern University, Shirreffs broke into the young people’s market with pieces in Boy’s Life, Young Catholic Messenger and the later pulps like Dime Western, Ace High, and Six-gun Western. Experiences at Fort Bliss during the war served Shirreffs well in nailing down the gritty scenery of the Southwest, a setting that served him well throughout his career.

Cinema (Bloody Disgusting): While William Eubank‘s Underwater kicks off with immediate intensity, wasting no time plunging Kristen Stewart and the rest of the cast into the deep sea nightmare we bought a ticket to experience, it admittedly lags a bit around the middle, and unquestionably could’ve used a tad bit more monster mayhem to pick up the energy. The film’s monsters, with their massive gaping maws and spindly, Cloverfield-reminiscent legs, only actually kill one character in the entire movie, and for the most part we only catch glimpses of them in the darkness.

Science Fiction (Gizmodo): Futuristic militaries are a staple in science fiction. With their powered armor and laser guns, military science fiction novels are among the most exciting reads out there. Except for one problem. Most are not really about warfare. While military SF involves military personnel and technology, the cores of the stories tend to focus on elements other than warfare. Before I’m tracked down and shot for saying that, let me qualify that statement.

H. P. Lovecraft (The Mary Sue): When it comes to adapting the works of H.P. Lovecraft, it can be hard for some creators to decide whether they should ignore the racist politics that are embedded into the work, or address it head-on. As a Black fan of Lovecraft, I have long come to terms with the fact that he would dislike my existence, but still, find it endlessly frustrating when his “fans” insist on making excuses for his behavior.

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): When I was around 12 in the basement of a friend’s house, I found an old copy of Weird Tales (I’m not sure about the magazine, but it must have been a pulp) and read my first Conan story. I loved it; not just for the action—I was a big fan of action stories—but because Conan was a barbarian. He was outside the settled boundaries of propriety and decorum. He made himself up as he went along. He wasn’t a woman, but I was already so sunk into the abhorrence of womanhood that that actually worked in his favor. Conan was outlaw fiction. I knew my own path forward was to be an outlaw.

Appendix N (Goodman Games): John Anthony Bellairs was born on January 17th, 1938 in Marshall, Michigan, which he described as “full of strange and enormous old houses, and the place must have worked on [his] imagination.” A shy and overweight child, he “would walk back and forth between [his] home and Catholic school and have medieval fantasies featuring [himself] as the hero.” He found refuge in books, excelling in college as an English major and even appearing on an episode of the TV quiz show G.E. College Bowl in 1959, where he recited the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in fluent Middle English.

D&D (Jon Mollison): It’s time to break the seals and talks bout why you should run your D&D crew through Autarch’s Nethercity.  But first we need to tuck all the sensitive and classified data behind the fold. Don’t click next unless you want to have the Secrets revealed through antiseptic blogging rather than rich play at the table.

Biography (DMR Books): Well, Crom willing, I’m here to celebrate Robert E. Howard’s birthday, despite the slings and arrows and technical glitches of outrageous fortune. I thought it would be fitting to review David C. Smith’s Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography which came out just over a year ago. I’ve had several people ask me online about it and where it rates alongside the other two big REH bios. Let’s take a look.

Blogging (Brain Leakage): Doing that forced me to create some regular columns, like my ‘Pocky-clypse Now reviews and my Kitbashing D&D series. Both of those proved to be popular, and have managed to get me some regular readers. Several posts of mine got shared in regular PulpRev and OSR gaming blog roundups, like Castalia House Sensor Sweep, The DMRtian Chronicles, and Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog. Each time that happened, I’ve reached a wider audience and gained new readers.

Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When you do find something new, it is usually very new. But every once in a while you stumble upon something old that is new. Blue Book’s covers and interior art were such a delight. Here was a collection of Burroughs artwork that you just never see. Not in the old fanzines, not in the non-fiction books. It is almost like we all forgot they existed.

Fiction (DMR Books): Pulp magazines are just plain awesome. For readers of old-time literature, they’re colorful time capsules of the nostalgic past that any time traveler would love to visit, and they’ve held a fascination for me since I learned of their existence.  I couldn’t say how many times I’ve fantasized of stepping into a turn-of-the-century Five and Dime and plucking mint issues of Argosy and Weird Tales off the racks–imagine gazing on freshly printed copies of the February 1912 issue of The All-Story which contained the opening chapters of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Under the Moons of Mars… holy freaking smokes!

Robert E. Howard (Adventures Fantastic): I don’t know when “The House of Arabu” was written. It wasn’t published until 1952 in The Avon Fantasy Reader #18 under the title “The Witch From Hell’s Kitchen”. I like Howard’s original title much better. The story has been reprinted several times, but it isn’t as well known as much of Howard’s other sword and sorcery. I did notice that the version reprinted in The Ultimate Triumph had a slightly different closing line than the version in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.

Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): Christopher Tolkien has passed away in the night of 15/16 January 2020 at the age of 95. These two men taught me more than I can express about the literary life and what it means to be, and how to go about being, a literary scholar. I became friends with Humphrey in the summer of 1978 when I attended a summer program in Oxford. A few years later Humphrey put me in touch with Christopher. Though I had some excellent and helpful teachers in college, none of them affected me as profoundly, or as lastingly, as did these friendships with Humphrey and Christopher.

Leigh Brackett (Wasteland & Sky): As an example, I just finished reading Leigh Brackett’s Last Call from Sector 9G and had some thoughts about it. For one, the story was written in 1955 and it doesn’t quite feel like it. The era was full of misery and strife in her field, and yet she produced this gem in Planet Stories that could have just as easily come out of Weird Tales in 1929. It has a more timeless feel.

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): I woke up this morning thinking about old-school historical potboilers. Yeah, I know. But you all know by now that my mind functions this way…Actually, there’s a straightforward explanation for why I roused from my slumbers with visions of F. van Wyck Mason dancing through my head. I hit the pillow after scrolling through a Kindle series of novels set during the French & Indian War.

Pulp/Cinema (Don Herron): I didn’t have anything particular in mind, but then pulp expert John Locke jumped into the fray. “One of my sub-hobbies is spotting pulp mags in movies,” John just wrote to inform me. “My latest is a doozie. “It shows a Navy man reading a Fight Stories. “Better yet, the issue has a Sailor Steve Costigan story by Howard.

Writing (Emperor Ponders): Well, sure, but before my mind was even able to process that, what struck me the most was how uncomfortably written the entire thing is (or, at least, the first paragraph.) And I don’t mean typos, grammar errors, and such, but something that is deeper and harder to explain but is quintaessentially modern.

Gaming (R’lyeh Reviews): Conan the Barbarian is a supplement for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is the first in the ‘Conan the…’ series of supplements which focus on and take their inspiration from Conan himself at various stages of his life and what he was doing. Over this series, the supplements will track our titular character’s growth and progress as he gains in skills and abilities and talents. Thus this first supplement looks at Conan as a young man and his life among the people of his homeland, at the beginning of his career which will take him from barbarian to king, essentially the equivalent of a starting player character.

Sensor Sweep: Doc Savage, Gothic novels, Underwater, Appendix N published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[drpcreates]

November's bday drawing is complete! This month I have my OCs cooking together, although Leith and Castalia aren't actually contributing lol. I'm glad I was able to finish this before the month ended because time has been super tight recently. I plan to finish next month's early so I can compile everything together before the end of the year.

[drpcreates]

Felt like recreating a project from college into digital form. This was the first time Takeru and Senon saw Castalia. The boys have been out in the wilderness with just each other so Takeru was weary of this new face that would eventually become so important to both of them.

[drpcreates]

InkBlot’s OC Spring Up Challenge month prompt: Cherry Blossoms vs Clovers

If you thought I was done, should've thought again! I had to also do the month prompt! Thought I'd so something different and focus on clovers. This was a pretty ambitious drawing, I don’t think I’ve had an illustrated this populated before. So to finish things off, I have all of my OCs from the other drawings this month!

Just as a reminder, from left to right is: Sophia, Castalia (flower crown), Delilah (purple hair), Crystal, Harun, Galen (orange shirt), Calder (tank top), Jaime, Cherry (red dress), Harper (bright green shirt), and Hepsiba.

[drpcreates]

I had a thought recently on how my satyr OC Castalia would disguise herself if she was around humans and I have an almost full proof disguise. The main issue now would be her tail, I think she'd just wear a long jacket on top of this.

[drpcreates]

This is a silly idea I've had in my head for awhile, the Senon Protection Squad. These 4 are the only ones trusted to be around Senon alone. From left to right we have Ira "The Tank", Takeru the "Mother Hen", Senon, Castalia the "Big Sis", and Harun "The Mentor."

I also have a bonus image! Ember is an honorary member because Ira trusts her but she's also a literal fire imp so Takeru isn't 100 percent sure. Ember thinks its funny and is honored by her button.

[drpcreates]

Real quick pause from the celebration and important news to bring 3 of my girls to your attention. I always internally think of Castalia, Crystal, and Aileene as the popular girls of my OCs. They're not mean girls but they are the ones to be jealous of.

[drpcreates]

Castalia wanted to dress as a dragon and I happened to know the perfect dragon that fit complimented her. So she is dressed as Cupid from Dragalia Lost

[drpcreates]

Castalia is the closet person, besides Senon, to Takeru. People think he's just some brick wall in person form but she knows better. Castalia remembers vividly the first time he opened up to her, in a moment of vulnerability, and she got to see who he truly is.

Back when it was just Takeru and Senon, Senon got very sick and Castalia reached out to help. Takeru felt like he was letting down Senon and didn’t know what he’d do if the kid didn’t get better.

[drpcreates]

So I decided that since its Valentine’s Day that I’d do some drawings of my OC couples. I wanted to try and make cheesy Valentine’s cards with fun sayings but time was not on my side so I went with simple drawings.

[drpcreates]

So I ended up being late on this birthday because I was catching up to a birthday from the day before anyway here is my OC Castalia Strife. She is a satyr with elvin blood. She’s one of my eldest OCs and has had her design reworked constantly, mostly because of her horns, hair, and legs.

Castalia likes causing mischief, golden jewelry, and sunsets. She dislikes things that obstruct her appearance, anything in her way, and spicy foods. She’s self-centered, cunning, and level headed.

[drpcreates]

I have a photoshop file dedicated to practicing drawing my OCs and I decided to color some of the best ones. I realized that I ending up drawing 3 of them in the same pose, it was an unconscious decision. I guess I got to work on poses while I work on breaking “same-face syndrome”

Edit: I added the last two after working on different leg structures and poses 

[drpcreates]

Happy Birthday to my girl, Castalia Strife! Since the weather is turning cold  around here, I felt it was appropriate to have Castalia walking through the snow.

Castalia enjoys snowy days, flowers, and being outside. She dislikes werewolves, people missing with things she thinks should be hers, and being denied/rejected. She is shallow yet trustworthy and determined. Castalia’s favorite food is grapes.