La rekompencoj de pacienco [sic] (Patreon)

Dear heroes,

Yesterday I completed and submitted the text of Holy Mountain Shaker. Finally. It's still too long, and there will probably be some final editing, but the core of it is done. In the end, it took a lot of hacking and chopping to get it there. However, I've received approval from Gavin "Necrotic Gnome" Norman (as kind a fellow as one could meet), to release some of the extra content that didn't make the cut. Including:

• The history, conflicts, characters, and details of the town of Plish. There just wasn't room to fit in all the conflicts between old traditions and new mining industry, the newly arrived miners and the old settlers, the details of the cult of the God Fish, and more. So ... I guess that's going to be another faux-fin-de-siècle release to fit in with the Lastlands - with Bridge, Vreley, Gomily, and Rudvey.
• A large part of the bestiary. Again, there wasn't room for an entire ecology structured around the numinous emissions of the God Fish. I guess I'm horrible at scope creep, but I've got everything from cave wisps as varieties of plankton-analogues feeding on the decay particles given off as the divine aura breaks down with time, plant-like sessile filter-feeders that harvest the wisps, various crab-like creatures, fish, amphibians.
• More mythic histories. Again, just wasn't room to describe the backgrounds of the glab-glab fish folk, the so-called needle gnomes and their rock-folders, the purifiers left to slow decay in their bunkers, the rebel golems in their ageless plastic bodies, and the singular time-shifted para-human ziggurat-tender (not saying it's the doctor, but it's the doctor).
• Several unique scenes and items. Again, just too tangential. The dragon nursery with the storm-dragons feeding on the spirit pearls given off by their dead mother dragon and the potential for the party to ravage the surrounding lands for miniscule profit or get a dragon pet? Check.
• Journals and notes. Stories of some of the NPCs encountered, not least the notes of the foolish burglar who tried to steal the heart of the mountain and failed.
• The town a thousand years later, in another aeon, if the party failed completely and travelled through town, because why not.
• The overland map. Didn't make the cut.
• The NPC adventurers. Other regulars to encounter in the dungeon? Didn't make the cut.
• Art that won't fit. As you might see from this post, I drew art to encourage myself to write. All of it simply won't fit ... so ... I'll try to share it in some way. 

I think it's obvious that I tried to do too much for a simple adventure. <_< ... Ah, well. That's a musing for another day. For now, this is simply some content that I plan to polish up and release here on the stratometaship - and eventually publish as a PWYW Apocrypha of the Holy Mountain Shaker to the Mountain Shaker once that adventure is printed and ready. However, I won't promise a timeline for it - I'm very keen to get back to Seacat and finally flesh that out - maybe reach a version 0.7 or 0.8. It would be nice.

But first, this coming Monday is a holiday here in Korea, so it's time to take it easy for a few days.

Now, Let's Look at Some Pictures!

I'm sure nobody will begrudge me sharing a few pictures and describing the process and background.

This is a raw photo of my illustration of the God Carp's stomach. Like all of my art for this adventures (and most that I make these days), I do the line art and most of the inks in physical media. Working with screens a lot, it's a relief and a joy to work on paper. There are also far fewer distractions, which just helps immensely.

For the colour piece, I simply clean up the photo of the physical piece using the levels and curves tools. I use blue pencils, because it makes it easier to knock them out digitally (just blow out all the blue hues). I colour primarily in Procreate on the iPad using a few brushes I've adapted. Mostly I use a few very soft, blobby flat brushes (with minimal anti-aliasing), some "sprays", and then apply a nearly 50% grey noise layer as an overlay to add texture to the colour work. I like this very simple approach because it's fast, striking, and highlights my hand-drawn inks.

This is the God Carp's eye. Because I plan on trimming and making a final crop in the digital piece, I'll often draw a bit more than I will need. Here I tried out some (very poor) pencil shading, but the pencil I used didn't really give me the effect I wanted.

So I blew it out in the levels adjustments. There's still a bit there, and I might go back and fix it up (i.e. add more of it to the lower waves. But I'll see about that.

Sometimes the raw photo is quite bad, like this one. There's a shadow of my hand at bottom right and I caught the edges of the book. This really doesn't matter. I'm only leaving the black ink lines when I start colouring and those edges will get cut anyway.

Though you can see I was careless in this piece. I didn't check the whitespace and left a shadow there. That kind of little screw-up isn't unusual, but it'll get cleaned up before the picture goes to print or any kind of release. For now, since I don't even know if this picture will fit in the book, I didn't bother going all the way and cleaning it up. And, well, a bit of imperfection leaves it looking more human too.

In this piece I got all the white space by creating a single "base" colour layer and using an alpha mask on it. That's like masking all the parts of the picture that didn't have colour on them, so I couldn't get paint outside of the areas I wanted coloured. Simple, but effective.

Here's one that I haven't coloured yet. You can see that the colour of the page is all over the place, the white balance is completely shot. Honestly, if I wanted to make "nice" shots in black and white, I'd have to use better lighting (soft, from two sides, at angles to cut glare, maybe a light box). But, for how I'll use them, it'll do fine.

Better lighting and cameras also make it possible to capture paper grain, which works very, very nicely. Though for that, it'd help if I also erased some of the blue lines. This dragon hatchling isn't making it into the final adventure, but I quite like its cheeky expression.

In this one, of some needle gnomes, I used a brush to get the black flood fill in the middle. The back gnomes are going to be paler grey, to contrast with the one in the foreground.

Ok, running short of time. Gotta walk the dog soon, so just one more ...

Here's the Abbey of Heillig the Ascenseur. Hoping for some boring elevator music style rest this weekend. 

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Peace and grace, everyone. Let's see all that seacat stuff written and laid out soon.

Also, many new heroes joined over the last couple of weeks. I'll get around to greeting everybody properly at soonest. But, for now, I have to mention that I've noticed the discord integration acting distinctly flaky. Roles getting lost, and the like. So, in lieu of a personal greeting to everyone, if you can, come on over to the discordium and say hi: https://discord.gg/aJCDj9w6Yu

You might get gret by a Possum. It's a possumbility.

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Thank you for your support and patience this hard month, everyone!

Cheers,

Luka