Amy Jean is a funky artist who does a lot of music posters. I found her through falling in love with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Her style meshes perfectly with the band's aesthetic.
I would describe her work as funky, psychedelic, and blacklight poster style. Also... pinball machine backglass! Oh... and tee shirt ready.
What's going on with me right now?
Life is happening. Family life is pretty good. We're dealing with the dystopia of the United States one day at a time. How fucking hard it is to get rid of an obvious existential threat to your own nation? Pretty god damn hard, it seems.
But I digress.
Here's a quick and dirty overview of the Doomslakers rules:
It's a d6 pool. Basic roll is an exploding 1d6 (1d6e). You add dice based on the skills you have, tools, and other factors. You need at least one success. A success is either 4, 5, or 6, based on difficulty and all that. It's a fairly standard success-based pool system.
Instead of hit points, you rack up damage. There's no upper limit for damage. If you take 6, you add 6 to your running total. At some intervals, you have to make an impact roll. This is a 1d20 roll + current damage. So if you have racked up 12 damage, you roll 1d20+12 on an impact table. The results range from minor hindrances (usually reduction of pool dice) to death.
So you can die in one roll from one blow.
There is a meta currency. Luck points are earned when you roll your lucky number in an action roll. Since the number is 1-6, it will come up pretty frequently. You will earn luck points multiple times per session. I hope that leads to players being willing to spend luck freely instead of hoarding it.
One of the things you can do with luck is defer your impact roll. Ultimately you must make the roll, but luck can put it off. There are other mechanics that can reduce damage. So the idea is you might be able to reduce your damage total before being forced to make an impact roll, thus giving you a better chance at not being killed or knocked out.
One of my concerns is that the impact rolls will be too frequent. I mitigated it by having thresholds for when they are made. You don't make one every time you get hit, unless you get hit pretty hard. But there are triggers that force the roll no matter what.
At the end of a fight, if you have any damage, you have to make that impact roll. Luck can't prevent it.
Anyway, that's the core mechanic of the game at the moment. It applies to all actions, not just fighting.
But I am toying with the idea of changing it to a d12 pool. The only reason for doing that is to get some granularity out of the numbers, which is just another tool in the kit. But that also makes luck points less frequent, so it might not be worth the trouble. I need those luck points flowing because they do a lot of heavy lifting.
The Doomslakers RPG itself is based on the setting (implied and explicit) of Black Pudding. It is an original system and has no direct basis in D&D... so it isn't a Black Pudding RPG, directly. Black Pudding zine remains a classic D&D based zine, at least for the first 8 issues. This game is a riff on the ideas within where you play the role of an agent of the Doomslakers Adventure Company, taking nasty, dangerous jobs in the seedy city of Seapath. If you see it in Black Pudding, you will probably see it in Doomslakers in one form or another.
I've seen the Attacker album Battle at Helms Deep floating around the internet for years but I can't remember actually listening to it until today. I didn't expect it to be awesome. But it is.
The sound is pure heavy metal. This was from 1985, merely two years after Slayer and Metallica debuted. Metal was just starting to develop sub-genres, but it would be a while before we became obsessed with such divisions. This isn't thrash, death, black, grindcore, or speed. It isn't power or pirate metal. It's just heavy metal. Thrashy crunchy riffs with soaring and screeching vocals, rock and roll rasping vocals, and hard rock drumming. Plenty of tempo changes and shredding lead guiarts.
It's a true metal masterpiece, if you ask me. This is in the vein of Saxon, Raven, Judas Priest, and Mercyful Fate.
This blog is about me, the stuff I do, the things I like, and whatever else I want it to be about. Today I want to talk briefly about something that happened yesterday, completely unrelated to anything I normally post here.
Our dog Thor has died. He was a very small chihuahua. He was about 12 years old.
For the past year, he was very slowly declining. It started when he stopped being able to jump up on things. We got a dog ramp, which helped. But lately he was even struggling with the ramp.
But he was still pretty spry. He had a healthy appetite and barked a lot. He was fully mobile other than vertically.
He was my pal. If I was on the couch, so was he. He was not a player... he didn't have toys. He only had his people. The other dogs are toy fiends, but Thor couldn't care less about that. He wanted the treats and the snuggles and to bitch about the neighbors.
I loved him. It was a sudden, unexpected death. Based on our timeline, he was barking at the neighbors and doing his thing, then he was dead less than an hour later. When I found him, he was still quite warm.
Rest is peace, you annoying little friend. The house feels emptier.
Alexi Gorboot (Алексей Горбут) is an artists I know almost nothing about other than seeing his work on Instagram. It's van art ready-made for a blacklight and done up in a comic book style I really adore. He doesn't appear to have a website, so his main point of contact is socials like Insta and Facebook.
He has an intentionally classic-looking comic book art style with flat, vivid colors in the vein of someone like Skinner or Jason Galea. But I think his primary inspiration is simply old comic books. The colors in old comics are famously very flat and vivid (though faded and halftoned, depending on the era). I think Alexi is consciously emulating that vibe. I dig it.
I was a teenager in the 80s when Helloween dropped. We didn't say "dropped" back then. I was 16 when I saw their video for Halloween on MTV's Headbanger's Ball. I'm quite sure being on the Ball is what propelled them into fame.
But this isn't a post about Helloween. It's a post about the artist Frederick Moulaert, a Belgian who drew lots of fun cartoony art for the band Helloween. I had completely forgotten about those ad spots and CD case drawings. But dammit, Frederick was killing it in those days. The one that stands out in my memory the most was of a woman leap-frogging a pumpkin. You know the one, you metalheads out there.
So it looks like Frederick has his time in the spotlight in the late 80s, in terms of doing heavy metal art. Then he moved on to other things and currently I believe he's mostly a website designer. My selfish brain badly wants him to do a bunch more lowbrow comic art, though.
In terms of style, he's solidly European. He did some art for Fluide Glacial and Spirou. His work would fit perfectly into an issue of Heavy Metal, but I'm not sure he ever did anything for that magazine.
I can't remember where I first laid eyes on the work of Russian artist Waldemar Kazak, but I know I liked it. His paintings are like looking at "what if Norman Rockwell painted beautiful women, airplanes, and weirdos?".
From perusing the artist's Facebook page, you can see that he draws a lot. Like... he puts everyone to shame with how much he draws. His approach is naturalistic. He posts a lot of color sketches of local parks and scenery, life drawing, as well as his whimsical illustrations. And he is able so shift between that immediate, naturalistic style to a more commercial, vibrant style with extreme cartoon exaggeration.
He also posts a lot of concept imagery of some unusual cars. I don't know what's up with that. I think he is a professional concept artist.
Check him out.
