#the most chaotic painting process i've had so far

[coloriza]

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hello! I've been batting around an idea for a warlock of the undead whose patron is an eldritch Far Realm entity, but haven't been able to find much in the way of official lore for the plane. I would love to hear your take on the subject, if you had any ideas for the landscape and inhabitants and such!

Planescape: The Far Dead Realm(s)

So for those not in the know, the far realm is the d&d cosmology's designated corner for lovecraftian shenanigans, being the default origin of most aberrations as well as anything particularly "madness" related or stuff too weird to fit into the morality based system of planes.

I'm not a big fan of the far ream ( insert joke about me being too weird to fit into the morality based system of planes) because it makes the entry level cosmic-horror fan mistake of conflating tentacles with the unfathomable and paints things beyond human perception as innately hostile and entropic.

To me, the astral sea is the place where all that far-realm weirdness should live, being that its the place where thoughts become physical heedless of any physical constraint. There’d naturally be alien environments that were hostile to life native to the material plane, either in that they were unsuited to conventional biology, or operated on a different set of physics/math/coherence to more traditional reality. That said, it does serve our storymaking to have a bad place from whence things can come from/be banished to, so for that end I'll let you in on my own version of the unknowable plane: The Dead Realms

TLDR: The dead realms are a cosmic junk heap, myriad realities that have become unstable or suffered through an irreparable apocalypse and have inturn scoured or abandoned of mortal life and the gods that oversee them. Seeking to avoid further disruption of the cosmos, the great entities which govern the astral sea quarantine the dead realms in their own fold of space. Cross contamination renders the plane into a simmering cauldron of chaotic energies, as civilization plagues and reality storms crash against eachother with the tomb-prions of world eating gods as backdrop. Any breach of the realms’ containment could lead to potential doom, as anything that can survive the end of multiple worlds is likely more than capable of ending a few on its own.

Ironically, the reason that the asker can’t find lore about the far realm is that its on purpose, and that’s sorta the problem: The far realm was written to be intentionally vague, hearkening to unseen and unknowable horrors of the lovecraft mythos.  The problem with that is that as part of the greater dnd multiverse ( atleast the default one) the far realm is a place you theoretically CAN go, and given that some of the game’s biggest baddies originate there, meaning that there needs to be more about the plane than a simple gesture at it being gross and full of tentacles.

Compare the thematic weight of a party visiting the far and dead realm(s): The former is weird, surely, but other than horrifying chaos, the far realm doesn’t really say anything. On the contrary, both heroes and their players can understand the dead realms as a forewarning of what happens if they fail in their cosmic level responsibilities, and see echoes of their own desperate struggles among the ruins.

Geography:  The process of transposing multiple worlds into a single plane is not a gentle one, even more so when many of those worlds do not share an underlying model of reality. The cracked remnants of planetary bodies float together like asteroid clusters, while flat-earth geographies impose themselves on space at awkward angles like planes of glass, or weave through it like ribbons of a shredded map. Remnant kingdoms are scorched as newly arrived worlds bring their stars with them, and blighted seas spill from one celestial body to the next like wine spilled across a table from a tipped glass.

Its junk drawer architecture, a dumpster into which broken worlds are heaved with no care for their condition or where they might come to rest, slowly ruining eachother like kitchen scraps heaped upon old clothes layered over discarded furniture

Inhabitants: Despite their name the dead realms are not empty, besides the monstrous scavengers Vast wastelands conceal remnant holdouts and the decaying lairs of senile god kings. Only those great authorities of the cosmos decide when a realm is beyond saving, and those left behind on it are considered forfeit to save the greater cosmos from the horrors they endure. That said, there are other entities that live in the maelstrom, and they are far more threat to a wandering party that’ve become stranded in the forbidden realm:

Kaotori*: Once a group of arcane explorers who sought salvage and secrets from the oldest reaches of the dead realms, they were lost in the depths where time itself had begun to rot. They trickled back one by one, transmuted into resin soaked horrors and scattered across the centuries both before and after they left. Stripped of all but a few scraps of their previous identities, the remnants of their former lives knaw at them like the ache of a rotten tooth, which the Kaotori are desperate to extract. Turning their wicked power to the task, each Kaotori combs the cosmos for any trace of its former life, looking to extinguish the source of these memories that it might finally know some twisted form of peace.

Eldrazi*:Like beetles skittering over and through a fallen log until it is mulch, the aberrant broods known as the Eldrazi toil endlessly to return the material of dead worlds back into raw stuff of creation, dismantling matter, magic, and creature alike until all they touch is cosmic dust. Mostly harmless if left at a distance, Eldrazi do not distinguish intruders into their domain from unprocessed worldstuff and their domain extends ever forward so long as their is material to reclaim.

Ancient automata: The engines of forgotten ages still stir on many abandoned worlds, whether they be crystaline consiousness of superhuman intellect or the derlict mechanisms of a single tinkerer

Feral Celestials: while many angels are content to wander from task to task, there are those so dedicated to their divinely ordained mission that they choose to go “down with the ship” when the time comes to ring in the apocalypse. After their particular endtimes have come and gone, these entities slowly begin to waste away, being reduced over time to becoming avatars of strange faiths, or hunting through the wilderness little better than beasts. 

Outergods: Whether  they reign over a destroyed worlds, were imprisoned within one,  or maybe  just like the vibe, the dead realms are full of outergods, which make up the only pantheon for those desperate souls stranded in the expanse. Kronos the cannibal god reigns over lands of dust and ruin, Cezil’Tek holds entire worlds in still and silent loneliness, While Shub-Nuggurath and her brood flourish in toxic swamps and fleshy jungles, just to name a few

* You can find 3rd party stats for these creatures online,

Adventure Hooks:

After falling trough an unstable portal or getting lost fucking around with teleportation, the party find themselves stranded in the dead realms, specifically in a barren desert landscape with a half-buried city built into some wind-scarred cliffs their only landmark. Far off in the distance, amid an alien sky, they can see a massive purple-green cloud approaching, which is in fact a rogue ocean displaced from its original bed that will come crashing down on their desert world in a matter of days. With time running short and an entire city’s worth of secrets to distract them, the party must comb through the ruins for a means of returning home lest they drown along with the desert world.

Following scraps of planear lore and desperate to protect their home from an otherworldy threat, a party of spelljammers must slip past the watch of the celestial authority to salvage pieces of a planetary warding system. This system allowed another world to stave off the threat in the past, but didn't’ stop its original architects from falling prey to the whiles of an outer god and leading their world to doom from within. Now situated among the junk drifts of the dead realms, this fallen world is slowly being eaten away by eldrazi as the last zealots of the outergod look for cruel and desperate ways to stem the tide.

Monstrous aberrations comb the countryside, attacking villages, searching for something, pushing the party into cooperation with a goodnatured  wizard who was exiled from the circle of mages for his curiosity about forbidden magic.  During a moment of heroic sacrifice, the wizard inadvertantly opens a rift to the dead realms and ends up falling through, becoming lost in time and space and eventully transformed into a kaotri... the very same kaotri that has spent centuries combing through the multiverse looking for this particular kingdom. Warped irrevocably and wracked by the pangs of a now recursive present, this Kaotri now seeks to wipe its once home off the map, and just use that recently opened dead-realm portal to do it.

Art

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 29/09/2023

I Saw a Brainwasher Today

Season 1 Featured on: GilvaSunner's Highest Quality Video Game Rips: Volume FOUR HOURS! Also on: PC Master Rips

Ripped by Xarlable

It shocked me to realize that, four months into this blog's lifespan, I've still barely touched the SiIvaGunner channel's first big story event - Season 1's Reboot. To many, myself included, it was a turning point for how they consumed the channel: It escalated the channel from a joke or a one-trick pony into something truly worth taking seriously, with an ongoing narrative and stakes at play that many of us didn't even realize were possible.

So lets set the stage, briefly. We're about four months into the SiIvaGunner channel's life in 2016, and most things are proceeding just as they always have. Funny Flintstones! Funny mashups! Funny screams and funny melodyswaps, a grand ol' time all around. Yet one type of joke in particular - inserting Snow Halation from Love Live into various rips - has been receiving pushback from the audience at large as apparent by the dislikes and comments left on videos. So things are proceeding smoothly, most people are content, yet...there's a sort of unrest bubbling underneath it all, a rift between SiIvaGunner and its audience, between what the people behind the channel want to do and what the audience wants to receive. After a long buildup, the camel's back snaps in two, and the Reboot commences - in direct response to the neverending bitterness of those against Snow Halation's inclusion on SiIvaGunner as a whole.

The Reboot was simple in concept - the in-universe entity that runs the channel runs into a fatal error and restarts itself, only "refreshing" all of its jokes in the process with similar-enough equivalences. The Flintstones theme is replaced with The Simpsons theme - the "loudest orgasm" scream is replaced with the Howie Scream - Love Live's presence on the channel is replaced with IDOLM@STER, and so on and so forth. Even without the story videos laying things out and introducing us to The Voice Inside Your Head, the Reboot's statement was clear - as soon as SiIvaGunner stops doing what its team is passionate for in order to appease its fans, things *will* go awry. Being part of the community at the time (as a very new member right before the Reboot) was simultaneously enlightening and absolutely insane - we KNEW what we as a collective had done to deserve The Reboot, yet we had no idea what it would lead to or how to stop it. Needless to say, everything was pure chaos - SiIvaGunner had officially gripped me with its narrative and I was all in.

And that chaos is really why I picked I Saw a Brainwasher Today as today's feature. Compared to what we had before the Reboot, its so starkly different in style - its far removed from the typical Nintendo music that gave the channel its identity, its tone is chaotic and noisy due to the two songs mashed up, and neither of those songs had any presence on SiIvaGunner beforehand. Sure, in today's landscape its a pretty simple mashup of two similar-sounding themes, but its context painted such a different picture: it was the perfect instillation of everything the Reboot entailed and all the emotions we felt during it. Deep in the mix you can faintly hear the screams of some old SiIva memes, which adds tremendously to the atmosphere described - its a rip that's just flatly impossible to divorce from its original context.

And yet...here I am, sort of presenting the rip to you outside of that context. Hrm.

This blog's a tricky thing, huh?

[whmp]

I just wanted to say that your video game looks really cool! I'm a (fairly beginner) game developer and overall it just looks really great. I love the graphics and style. I do not consider myself a sadistic person and I can confidently say I have never had any urge to hurt somebody, but I'm still super hyped to play your game.

Anyways, I guess I'm just curious on how you're making it/ any details of the process so far you'd like to share.

hehe thank you so much anon!!! don't worry, the "have you ever wanted to keep someone in your basement" was (mostly) a joke, being a sadist is by no means a prerequisite. : ) the process itself is a bit chaotic - such is life of a solo developer. i'm spread a bit thin between animation, modelling and programming so when making the game i'm trying my best to stick to my strengths: for example, when you look at characters and items, most of them have only very basic textures, but they do have a neat little shader on top which makes them look cel shaded. there's also a hefty dose of VHSesque post processing on top of everything! i left for a bit of a vacation recently, hence the lack of updates, but i YEARN to go back to work. on top of the to-do list is to finish up the time-simulation system. originally i wanted the game to be in real-time like animal crossing or something, but i've since shifted focus to a different approach with a simulated time, kind of like in stardew valley or minecraft or pretty much any game with a day/night cycle. the two tasks i dread the most are going to be fixing whumpees hair and his skeleton. god. take a look at how this smug fucker's hair look like:

if you know anything 3d you're probably getting a headache just from looking at this terrifying thing. stop. stop looking at it now, please, avert your gaze and don't make fun of my topology skills. if you don't - on the left there's a wire frame of polygons that when painted gives us the poor little meow meow on the right. as you can see, his hair is SUPER DENSE when it comes to polygon distribution. basically, a good 95% of whumpee's geometry is concentrated in his hair. i have since changed it (it's an old screenshot) but his hair still is a bit too dense for my liking - this is the sort of thing that WILL cause performance issues further down the line. i should just shave him bald i swear.

the second thing is his skeleton (or rig, or armature or """avatar""" if you go by unity's terminology). there's no nice way of putting it, his bones are fucked up. i rigged him in blender and upon being transported to the game engine environment, his spine just sort of left his torso. i managed to shove it back in, but it's far from ideal. here's how he looked like prior to the Bone Surgery:

scary. think of the back pain.

to summarize, gamedev is hard, bones are bad, but i really want to get back to work. hopefully i'll post a major update post within a week or so! no taglist on this post since it's not really an update, but @fanboy-enby-undead mentioned wanting to see bloopers/glitches so here's an @. : )

[lovelycherub]

Long Live Life Author QNA!

Recently, I had the pleasure to interview @denn1s-lessing and @gekitoutsu-rispba about their JJBA fanpart Long Live Life! It was an honor since 3L is one of my most favorite JJBA fanparts and I always wanted to see what the behind the scenes of making it was

My Interview with @denn1s-lessing:

Q: How does the writing process for Long Live Life go?

A: We first plan out the major plot beats of all chapters (Jocelyn discovering the Crest of Stone, for example) and write down the events and how they play out. Then we figure out how to best and most naturally connect each scene with one another, keeping in mind things like characterization, character development, where the location is and so on. It's like painting; first you make the rough sketches for what's supposed to be there, then refine them until you're ready to paint the whope piece. We also do chapter summaries, but while they're quicker the chapters don't come out as good as the ones where we used the other method.

Q: Do you and Rispba have any inspirations?

A: Mh, I can't really speak for Rispba but I *did* notice that she takes some inspiration from magical girl anime for character design. As for me, I am inspired by the art movement of realism and pirandellian philosophy (Luigi Pirandello, an italian playwrighter). Another inspiration for me is Valerio Massimo Manfredi and DeAndrè's music. Along with that, I draw from my real-life experiences. Sure, I never had to play an intense scopa match or got slapped by a spirit, but I *did* go through some rough patches in my past.

Q: Who is your favorite character to write for?

A: I really love writing Calliope! She's a pretty strong woman who knows what she wants, plus she's sassy and direct, something not many kids have unfortunately. She's also my favoruite character, along with Erina and Matteo! Stands like Whitesnake and Prosciutto (Yeah he's not EXACTLY a Stand but for convenience's sake) are fun too, altough they are more on the quiet and contemplating side

Q: What's the process of making up a original stand?

A: The process is quite simple, quick and straighfoward: we come up with powers and a name (usually placeholders, but then those placeholders stick), then stats if it's a recurring Stand and assign it to a character, or come up with a new one. We don't give much thought as we should when it comes to developing Stands, since we tend to focus more on the character and what they do with it.

Q: Do you have the full story of Long Live Life planned out (have an ending in mind for it)

A: yes! We planned out the whole story and went through different plots before we set on one we liked. it's how we like to do fanfiction: plan EVERYTHING out before posting anything, so things will be streamlined. Doing the opposite is a common mistake (or feature, call it what you want I'm not telling you what to do) in the fanfiction I've read, along with a few shows too. The old Long Live Life story followed that principle and it suffered from it severely

Q: Was Jocelyn always meant to be a child or was she older when you first started drafting the story?

A: She was always meant to be a little kid! Though if you're interested in seeing her all grown up, an adult version of her appears in the story's epilogue.

Q: What scene was the most challenging to write for?

A: the hardest thing to write was Duran's fight, Piazza in Vita Morta. Duran for some reason gave us (both here and in the old 3L) a lot of trouble, he was the biggest roadblock. Now we passed that roadblock though and so far we're doing quite alright. There is a lot happening in that chapter, it's incredibly dense and long, with many elements present. To call it chaotic is to underestimate it. That scene was so far the hardest thing to write, again, and I'm glad that's over with.

Q: How do you choose the music references?

A: We pick the first song that we think of, we don't worry about the music references

Q: Once Long Live Life is done, do you plan on making more JJBA fics?

A: Yes! We are working on a sequel story called Wind of Melodies, where Sid's son and a few of his friends (plus an old face) join Eurovision :) we'll expand magic in there too. it's going to be awesome, trust me!

My interview with @gekitoutsu-rispba

Q: I heard that you were the one to come up with the idea for Long Live Life! What inspired you to make a JJBA fanpart?

A: Honestly, I don’t work well in the realm of major, canon characters. I prefer to make up my own stories that use the rules of a certain universe, but not necessarily the main characters. And a fanpart was a perfect outlet for that kind of thinking

Q: You mainly write the action scenes, and I was wondering what the writing process for them is?

A: Honestly there isn’t much of a process? I just do the fights based on who’s there and where they are- a fight in an apartment, for example, requires different strategies than a fight in a public plaza. I do try to keep things even between both sides until the point where the story needs to continue.

Q: Who writes the most, you or Dennis?

A: Dennis, by far. I try to do what I can but I’m working full-time and often feel burnt out by the end of my shifts.

Q: Have a personal favorite chapter so far?

A: The panic station chapter! It was a fun change of pace and a nice breather chapter.

Q: How do you come up with the designs for the characters?

A: I wanted 3L to have a different feel than regular JoJo, so I used a different point of reference- street fashion instead of haute couture. I do tend to keep characters powers, personalities, and various other things in mind, but normally it does boil down to what looks good on them.

Q: If you were able to rewrite some chapters of 3L, what would you change?

A: Honestly I feel like this whole thing was a rewrite of our original idea and there’s a lot of little things I considered changing before publishing. Ultimately, however, I’m proud of what we’ve written so far.

Q: How long have you been writing fanfic for?

A: Not long, actually, this is my first work I’m seeing through to the end. I have lots of ideas but can feel very insecure about execution.

Q: Dennis told me that you'll be making a sequel to 3L. Is that still in the planning phase or is the story already laid out?

A: It’s kind of in the middle ground. We have characters and a plot laid out but nothing is absolutely set in stone and probably won’t be until we get closer to 3L ending

Q: Do you have a favorite character in 3L?

A: That’s like asking me to choose between my children tbh but joss has the most personal connection to me so I’ll go with her

Q: How did you get into JJBA?

A: Honestly it’s been a long time so I don’t remember exactly how but I know it had something to do with all of the music references (I’m a sucker for a good reference)

Thank you again @denn1s-lessing and @gekitoutsu-rispba for letting me interview you! Also, check out @hopeful-mothwings to see my interview!