Far away in the northeast, past the Stonefather Mountains, there is a peak that looms above all others. Rather than appearing majestic or unconquerable, it appears bleak and ghastly, missing large chunks and cutting an irregular jagged rip out of the horizon. This is Mount Barr, named for an ancient Golemmac king.

In a cave within walking distance of an untouchable peak, isolated behind violent winds and driving snow, a woman from Jolecretia sat and meditated. Her name was Esther Fonseca, and she was a very kind, very thoughtful person. Her lichen-hair was curled conservatively, in a classical sort of style thought of very fondly by her family back home. Her eyes were bright and expressive, and she was always smiling.

Truly, she was a lot of things. Before the Warlock, Tanner Mandel, tore her life apart in a single night. With a knife and a bloodied palm, he crept into her family home while she was only a teenager, and with flashes of Red magic and silvery metal, one by one they were all snuffed out. Everyone but her. Her mother, father, three sisters, and ailing grandmother. All so that one Warlock could have his way with magic that was forbidden for a very good reason. Fearing for her life, she only escaped by slipping through a door in the washroom that led to her parents’ bedroom, then pushing a bookcase over to trap him. By the time the warlock heaved off the sturdy wood and burned away the books, she was halfway across town and still rushing, making her way out of the Vasquez province and out of Jolecretia’s domes entirely.

When she reached the border of Golemacia, she was no longer running out of fear. The loss of her family settled quickly and horribly in her stomach, in much the same way a swallowed handful of coarse gravel would. Every action made her sick, but the realization that she would feel sick until she did something about it made her determined, and furious.

Unsure of what to do, she fell back on the story of St. Xavier, who led the Jolecretians into salvation in the wild tundras of antiquity. If he could wield the radiance of Yellow magic with his hands because of his compassion and faith, then perhaps she could as well. And so, just like St. Xavier, she sought out a mountain. After weeks living on the hospitality of a local Golemmac village, she departed with a meager pack of supplies and hope in her heart. It is unfortunate that she chose the first mountain she encountered, because there was none more treacherous and unusual in all of the Stonefather mountain range.

Little did Esther know that in the coming months, she would find counsel in ghosts, and learn from the strange hermits who populated the depths and heights of Mount Barr. The mountain was broken for a reason, and learning why changed everything for her.

Go directly to the Read More link if you want to skip my preface and go right to the nitty-gritty. I won’t take offense, I understand.

There are many, many ways to bring a universe to people. For Crumbling Gods, it all started with a book. But implication and verbal illustration can only take a reader so far in understanding the scope of the world, and even then it’s rarely at their own pace. I remember being young and reading Tolkein, and thinking “This is a fantastic world, but we’re moving through it so slowly, and spending our time on things that don’t interest me as much as that thing the older person mentioned.”

That’s where Dungeons and Dragons came in. Suddenly I was plunged into a world full of these fantasy creatures- some I was familiar with, and some that were so much more! A balrog is big and scary, but suddenly not as unsettling to me as a mind flayer, or a beholder. And I, a Human Warrior afraid to try anything more complicated on my first try, was suddenly able to go out with my party and confront these strange things. On my own terms, for my own reasons.

These two events shaped my perspective on literary style and all games in the years to come. I found myself wanting to read exciting adventures with a fast pace and surreal flavor. I found myself playing games where my character was a colorful whirlwind of damage that I controlled, making my way through the game’s maps on my own terms.

When I started sharing the universe of Crumbling Gods with my friends, I heard many times over that they’d love to see it as a pen n’ paper game setting. It took a while for me to finally agree, but when I did, I decided I would pull out all the stops- accessibility for everyone, style in every corner, an emphasis on game mechanics that feel gamey at the right times, so that everything else is a matter of roleplay. The storytelling and player interaction is broken up by encounters built around teamwork, where putting on a brave face and pooling your skills with your allies makes all the difference.

Under the cut, you’ll find everything about the current state of the Crumbling Gods RPG, which is currently in full-blown development. When a playable Alpha is finished, that will get its own article. For now, let’s get started with this preview:

Read More

acetaminophens:

• hey so likes ignored
• you must have your ask open so i can ask you what you want drawn
• winners (?) chosen in order of who reblogs first
• only one reblog
• no nsfw drawings will be done sorry!!

good luck i guess???

Deep in the steamy northern jungles of the Isle of Groad, spiraling streets of shaped clay brick still cut through the trees, leading to sweeping ruins of a civilization that rose to power in the earliest days of Nohren.

Mid-relief engravings on nearly every dusty wall reveal something about the lives of the Ul’gek, a proud people whose empire could not keep up with the unrelenting modernity that came with the Age of Living Color. While the world was young and inert, they somehow rose from the ground without so much as a nudge from a god, and they began to build, to tame the world surrounding them even as volcanoes belched red-hot danger into the open air.

The Ul’gek are depicted as standing quite tall, most over six feet, with arrow-straight posture and a proud, fearless stance. The weapon of their culture was the fiber whip, and their armor of woven palm fronds and packed fur was segmented intelligently, a facsimile of insect plating even in the most rudimentary armor kits. With large, expressive eyes and rounded, somewhat flattened faces, an early hurdle of their civilization was overcoming a crippling blind spot directly to their front.

Enter the most important relic of their culture, the Gazing Headdress. A fixture of Ul’gek culture after its inception, this hat of feathers, fronds and bronze panels polished to a mirrorlike sheen allowed the Ul’gek to compensate for their otherwise limited vision. Once this breakthrough made its way into their popular culture their architecture and society as a whole erupted out of the tribal stage, and Gekto Tziven, their sprawling metropolitan city-nation, was born. In their language, it means “Ring-Home of the Gecko,” and true to its name, it was made out of more than one hundred concentric ringlike walls, varying in height and completion depending on the district of the city.

Most of these rings have fallen apart in their antiquity, but the innermost ring remains, built out of sandstone and clay, paneled with polished bronze. It was here that Star King Li’dune passed his edicts and ruled the Ul’gek people. The Ul’gek treated their king as a god in mortal flesh, sent down to them from the stars to guide them into glory. Within the innermost circle, another incredibly important culture-shaping event was decided:

The Ul’gek would master the boar. And so out they went, into the jungles with whip and cestus, capturing and subduing the huge boars that roamed between the trees unchallenged. In a decade, the tusked monster-pigs were broken and bred as riding and pack animals, and the Ul’gek thrived.

Like the later-coming Mani-La, these industrious ancient people were subjected to a terrible fate. Though nothing as bombastic as the destruction of the Mani-La rainforests wiped the Ul’gek out, they died all the same, and just as helplessly. The Spear of the Sky struck Nohren with a calamitous blast of unfiltered magic, from one pole to the other. When it struck, Nohren’s colors burst into life, and societies sprang out of seemingly nowhere. First came the Chelonai, and then the Mani-La, and Rangi, and Coyote, and Avva and Coleops. And they sent their emissaries around the world with a newborn wanderlust.

The Ul’gek were defiant when these emissaries came knocking, and refused to take part in the changing world. Isolated out of stubbornness and refusal to partake in the Age of Living Color, they suffocated as a people and slowly died, loyal to the Star King until even their final breaths.

An adviser to the Star King left a glyphic record of it all, decoded thousands of years later by the Croken. The record shows that Li’dune relented in his stubbornness often, claiming that it was time to join the world, but he was old and ailing. His speakers never took his word to the public, and any revolution that could have been died there in the innermost circle with him.

Yes!

OOPS THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PRIVATE.

Ah well. I am still on Skype, internet at large.

Possible article today- and while I’m here typing, I want to put out another great big thank you to all of my new followers. You folks are wonderful and I’m so flattered that you’re here.

But moving on, there’s a possible article coming today. Could be the next part of Cazra and Io’bo, could be the next part of The Prodigy. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m absolutely losing my mind over here because depression is a nasty thing and I really don’t have anyone to talk to.

So here’s what I’m gonna do about that.

Do you like any of the following:

• Making friends?
• Pen and paper games?
• Talking over Skype?
• Writing?
• Reading?
• Video games?

If you said “yes” to any of these questions, you might like talking to me! In order to do so, fire up Skype and look up the username “invisomarsh”! I’ll be there and I’ll be online, quietly toiling away on the Crumbling Gods tabletop game project until someone comes along to talk. Feel free to say hello at any time!

Correction: You got your very own special extra gif because I’m that excited you’re here.

Thank you all for following me! I’m so glad you decided to push that button. I’ll do my best to continue making content you enjoy.

Cameron Denton was six years old when he cast his first spell, lighting up an empty stove so that his mother could feed everyone that night. He was a transplant, brought from Quailand as a baby by his father. His adoptive mother was Rocco, and so was he. As far as Cameron knew, he’d been born in the shadow of the volcano like everyone else. The ridges of red feathers climbing the contours of his ears told him that. The brilliant yellow irises lighting up his face and fresh scales cropping up around his tiny knuckles told him that. But plain as day, without a brush, without a palette, he had seen the curls of yellow whip around his fingertips and light up the insides of that old wood stove.

His adoptive mother took it as a sign, and his father too. Soon letters were making their way north by ship, and soon the young boy was following them. “It’ll be fine,” his father said, already waving as he watched his son settle in on the deck of a small mail barge. “Quailand’s a good country, I should know. You’ll fit right in, my boy.” The woman who thanked him and praised him for lighting her stove was nowhere to be seen that day.

A week passed over water, and then Quailand was on the horizon. There was no volcano there, and no buildings were in a comfortable shadow. The clay red of the cobblestones looked to him like a corn snake winding between buildings, letting the little mousy carriages wander along its back until it decided to snap one up. Cameron found himself swallowing hard when he hit land, unable to take his eyes off of the trotting horses and rumbling wooden wheels.

Just follow the map, my boy, he remembered. You’ll fit right in at the academy, I’m sure. Make sure you go right to the dean, he’ll know you’re coming.

The young boy ran a hand along the top of his head, feeling the first few tiny feathers of his crest. They were already raised in a short, stress-induced mohawk. Once again he swallowed, and once again he put one foot in front of the other.

A nagging thought settled in the back of the six year old’s mind like a filthy bar of lead, making itself comfortable among the youthful flights of fancy that typically made their home there.

I’m going to grow up, he assured himself, hating the sound of it even as he thought it. I’m going to grow up before anyone here gets the best of me.