ZSF: Badger's Hole Ep. 0

Official playtesting of ZSF kicked off Monday night with a fun session zero. The group of four players (and me) created their weird PCs. The character creation rules seem to work very well... no one was confused and we had four solid PCs, some backstories, and some reasons to be together after a little over an hour. Including banter and discussions.

We started the adventure during the final 30 minutes of play. The PCs had been hired to crew the SS Stymie on a mission to check up on a lost science faculty. No other details were given other than the pay of $200 up front and $300 upon completion. Not a fortune, but a solid little gig.

The characters are a bit of a mixed bag of weirdos.

Lucian Kane is a drug-dealing devil. Literally a devil, as that is one of the 12 Forms you can roll if you choose. He bought a fake engineering background to get hired on the gig.

Z the Inscribed is a kind of experimental artificial person. Genderless, sexless, and created to aid/serve humans on a cruise ship (I think). But a tattooing incident resulted in a death and now Z, uncertain if they did it on purpose or not, is on the run and in existential crisis mode.

Nurse Twitchet is a flytrap plant person in pants. They are out in the ZSF just looking for love, it seems.

Doctor B. P. Chitterbati is a spider person and an engineer who is for damn sure very well-read.

The PCs are on board. The ship was locked down suddenly... seems the good Captain Deuce failed to pay his docking fee at Hellion Cross space station. But some quick hacking by Dr. Chitterbati silenced the alert and freed the ship for takeoff.

Now the ship is in space and the PCs learn that there are others on board... two agents of SEDCA... the ZSF's version of the CIA. Who is really behind this mission??

Black Pudding Comics?

Been kicking this one around a while. Black Pudding Comics... drawing from the treasure trove of characters and ideas in the zine as well as my other related works (I mean, there are a BUNCH of characters in the Meatshields of the Bleeding Ox section). Why not tell some stupid little stories about those guys?

I don't want to limit the comic to just material from the zine. Instead, the idea is to do comics that riff on the entire meta-setting of Pan-Gea, the whole "mythos" as I like to call it. There's the ancient world of Pan-Gea itself, then the sword and sorcery world of Yria (which is where the zine lives, mostly), and finally the sci-fantasy space setting of ZSF - the Zoa Space Frontier.

So my idea is to do comics of any of these flavors because they all share the same backbone: the Pan-Gea mythos. The gods and demons such as the Sun and Moon and Hunter Raven and the Worm Witch, and so on. These are ideas that have lived in my brain and in my creations for decades. A sandbox to play in. Might as well play, right?

Right now it looks like I have quite a bit of finished material that would fit nicely into the book, mixed with new stuff I'm working on.

Disclaimer: I'm high on the idea right now and it's Saturday night. This could all crash and burn. I'm just daydreaming here. We'll see. 

I mean, look at all these goofy bastards.

 

Ink Talk Too

Update to my constant preaching about how much I love Sailor Kiwaguro ink.

My second bottle of the stuff went gray. I don't know how or why, but it just happened. One day I'm using it fine and it's as black as ever (which was always very dark gray, not as black as Noodler's for example). Next day I grab my brush pen and it's like... "Oh, is this the gray inked one?" But no.

I inked up a new pen with Sailor.. the ink was gray. Or, at least, much grayer than ever.

Turned the bottle over to show no residue at bottom.

See that gray bot? That's using black ink.

Theories include ink separation, which is dispelled by the image above of the upside down bottle. Another theory is light exposure. But the ink has always been at my desk, which has no sunlight. Nothing has changed.

I dunno. It's fine, though. I'm still going to use it all, because I enjoy artifacts of physical media more than I ever have in my entire life.

I don't know if this is a common thing for the Sailor inks or not. I haven't done a ton of research on it.

More ink talk here.

ZSF Update

I've posted many times about this game and I've changed my mind almost every single time. Last time I talked about the game system, it was based on the idea of getting "successes" on rolls. Same concept as used in games like Vampire: the Masquerade.

But I've since decided against that. The "final" playtest form is a simple 2d6 additive roll, with various conditions for adding more dice, getting doubles, and so on.

Other than that, things remain mostly the same. The character sheet elements, which I've been teasing for over 2 years now, remain the same.

Playtesting soon. The game is reaching a form that I'm comfortable with. I might have too much material going on. I don't know yet. It's a big world and I just keep having ideas to fill it up. Thankfully it's the whole damn galaxy so there's plenty of room for it.

 

Dawegama Brush Pen

A couple years ago for Xmas I bought myself a bunch of brush pens to try out. I have been using a few of them consistently, but there were a couple I hadn't yet cracked open.

Recently I inked up this Dawegama fountain brush pen, a Chinese pen from what I can tell. Very cheap at less than $10.

It has a metal body and a snap on cap that, honestly, snaps very nicely. Cheaply made, the pocket clip is janky and wiggly. Which is fine for a cheapo.

It has a built in plunger feed. You dip the tip into your ink, then slide the plunger up to suck the ink into the chamber. The body screws off in a less than satisfying scratchy way. Not very precise tooling, doesn't feel like it'll ever seal quite as tightly as you'd want.

The tip is very soft and flexible with real brush fibers. But it isn't precise either. It doesn't come to a consistent point. You cannot get a consistent line. But you can get a huge range of thick to relatively thin, making it a useful wash or fill tool where precision isn't your primary concern.

One drawback is the body is thin so the ink chamber doesn't hold a lot. It holds slightly less than a more typical pen, from what I can tell. I say this because I burned through the chamber very quickly the first time I used it. Or it felt that way, anyway.

Like the Yongsheng 3009 (another cheap brush pen), this one gets a 2 star rating. Not the worst, but not great. I might go 2.5 out of 5... it does feel slightly better than the Yongsheng to me. For price, it's well worth having one just as an ink fill tool to play around with. But I don't see myself using this for any kind of profession or precise work. This is a sketching tool.

Here's my guide to brush pens, if you're interested.