GOZR: Towers

GOZR time! For more about GOZR, check here. For further more about GOZR, click here too.

It's been about 1 year since I started working on this project. In that time I have put a lot of hours into it, off and on. I put it down for a month or two, then I pick it up and work on it relentlessly for a few weeks, then I put it down again. Such is the way until I reach the point of no return.

Current page on the drawing board is about towers.

The land of GOZR is a far-future sci-fantasy wasteland in which the Pretty People angered the Sun and were wiped out for their affronts. Now only the lowly gooz remain... the ugly ones who served the Pretties so long ago. The ruined world is full of ruins. Gooz, poking their heads out after all these years, are bold enough to explore them.

The ruins include a lot of towers. Any party of PCs wandering the wilds has a 2 in 6 chance of spotting a tower on any given day. Of course the GM is free to pre-populate the setting with towers as they wish. This game is not proscriptive about how you play, it isn't terribly procedural, though it does include lots of procedures for generating randomness. It's a god damn romp, after all, not VCR instructions.

So right now the towers page is just a few random tables to determine height, thickness, and general traits. I might include an example tower too. We'll see.

One of the things that sparked my imagination while doing this page was a little table I included about the tower's vertical situation. One possible result is that it is already fallen over, so you could have a little tower crawl through a fallen tower where all the inner space is agog.

I could cap this at one page, and probably will, at least for now. Just a simple page of random tables for tower generation. I went a bit over the top on magic (10 pages) so I'm already swollen bigger than my intended 28 pages (I'm at 33 and not finished yet).

Far too soon to say, but my hope is to publish this as a "issue one" and then get into a second floppy that has more options. Like... you can just use the first floppy and be fine but if you want more fun shit you get the subsequent issues. We'll see how it pans out.

Arzra

Back in the early 2000s I was doing more comics. I had this comic going for a few months (doing 1 page a week) that was about a gender-shifting catperson named Arzra (spelled backwards: Arzra). I really fell in love with this character. The whole gender-shifter concept, for me, was a direct inspiration from Tanith Lee's Death's Master. Lee's Flat Earth books are foundational to my inner fantasy worldview. I place them squarely in the sword-and-sorcery category alongside Robert E. Howard's Conan.

Anyway, Arzra was a gender-shifting catperson version of Conan. I wrote the character as a wanderer, getting into adventures, with a strong sense of savage honor. At this time in my life I was a pretty rabid individualist in my philosophy. I would have called myself "libertarian" at the time, though the term for me had a different meaning than what we think of today (I always picture cowboy hat-wearing rednecks with guns screaming about free speech today). For me, this was about opposing authoritarian moral police.

Arzra was meant to be a vehicle for me to tell exciting fantasy stories that could be sexy and philosophical at the same time. I have several scripts lying around and they generally involve the character wandering into a weird place and encountering a weird entity, usually with some kind of dialog exchanged that cuts to the bone of how I felt about religion and morality. Arzra wasn't inclined to take a knee before authority and he had no interest in being responsible for anyone other than himself. She was a barbarian, after all, albeit with a sharp mind. She could slice you open as easily with her words as with her sword.

The art to the left was part of the comic, which was done with brush markers, colored pencils, and Prismacolor markers on bristol. I believe the pages were something like 14x14 inches. It was a lot of fun to do, but the amount of labor that went into each page was a bit much for me to sustain over time. And these were totally rated R pages with lots of nudity, making it a bit awkward to share later on Facebook and the like.

I did a bunch of drawings of this character for the period of a year or so and I really hoped I could turn it into a "regular" comic book series. Alas, doing anything "regular" just doesn't seem to be in my DNA. The only reason Black Pudding has persisted (yes I'm still working on #6!) is because it has very few constraints. I allow myself to wander and do whatever I like, within the domain of old school D&D style gaming. If I tried to make each issue themed or have an ongoing comic in it I'd probably flounder and sputter out. Much love to creators who can crank out issue after issue of comic book series over time. Salute!

Ahmry

This one is from around 2008. It's ink on bristol, I believe. And it's one of my favorites from that time period. I have a color version as well, but I wanted to just post the bw drawing here. What I like about it is the simple composition and the mix of shading styles. Not too busy, it feels like it has the right amount of detail. I can look back at this and smile.

More Original Zyn Dweomer

In this post I had some images for the races of my setting, Land of Hof, which I was calling Zyn Dweomer for a time. Here's a map I drew for the setting when it was Zyn Dweomer.

The idea at the time was to have three kingdoms.

Arcazia was the land of the elves, who were masters of spacial magic. In theory their domain was limitless because of the way they used their magic to warp space and time, bending it in ways that defy logic. The elves here were also darkly humorous and weird. Their customs were abominations to the puritanical humans.

Grynmere was a vast lake or inland sea surrounded by picturesque hills and fields. This was the land of the grimmers, a sort of mix between goblin and dwarf and gnome. Their deal was hospitality. You go to Grynmere if you want good food and relaxation. But don't start any shit because you'll be at the bottom of the lake wearing iron boots.

Ondwaland was the human lands. Humans in this version of my setting were just the most regressive dickheads imaginable. Loosely inspired by Rome and the Catholics and imperialism in general, they had this oppressive monotheistic religion and a mandate from god to dominate the world.

So the idea was to have this constant tension between these three peoples. There would be an uneasy treaty at any given time, with the humans trying to find ways to expand, the elves fucking with the humans, and the grimms trying to remain neutral and make mad cash off the stressed out humans coming to their lands for respite.

One of the ideas lounging around in my folders and my head that will probably never see the light of day (in this form anyway).

The Original Zyn Dweomer

From 2008, this little race graphic is a visual note about the five races of my setting Land of Hof, which I briefly changed to Zyn Dweomer for a month before deciding ZD was gonna be all anthropomorphic animals.

Norg are horned giants and they actually have bluish skin.
Oribii are short cartoon people. You can see them in Black Pudding #5.
Mongra are animal people.
Grimmers are like goblins and orks and shit.
Arcazians are elfs. I actually drop some Arcazia on you in Black Pudding #4 on the elf page of the OSR Playbook.

My older ideas seep into my newer ideas, demanding that I use the most prominent elements of them somewhere so they don't fade away and die.

Here's another version.