I HAVEN’T PLAYED THIS GAME IN FOREVER BUT THIS IS AMAZING AND I HAVE SO MANY EMOTIONS ABOUT THIS AND

Do you think you could do a video with some Tainish readings? Is that too difficult?

Not a video but here’s a quickie http://vocaroo.com/i/s0Et5Nmmgxta

I have to take my dog to the vet now, she’s got like an alien growing out of her eyelid, this can’t be normal.

At what point did you decide you wanted to take your RP setting and assortment of characters, and turn them into a fully fleshed out story? Was it something you had in mind all along, or was there a turning point? If so, how did you start the process of taking loose concepts and fleshing them out into the super detailed world of unsounded?

It’s complicated!

Long, long ago, I was working on a fantasy novel called Tanners. It took place in Alderode, starred a group of thieves, assassins, and social outcasts, concerned a war between rival gangs, and was not great. I was still in my early twenties and impressively stupid.

A couple years later, my friends and I were in need of a new setting for our RP after we fell out with the owner of the place we’d played in previously. I sat down and wrote out Sharteshane, which existed in the same universe (and borrowed a few details) from Tanners.

I’d already pulled Duane, Sette, and Murkoph from Tanners for the purposes of RP in the older game, and started developing Bastion to be my main in a new game in this new setting. It worked well. My friends and I had a lot of fun there over the years, and the setting and characters all just became increasingly more rich and detailed as the stories spun on.

All good things must come to an end though, and RP eventually did. Afterwards, I needed a new project, and webcomics were really taking off. I wanted to do one too! I went back and looked at Tanners (which I still loved even though it was dumb), looked at RP, and decided that the latter could save the former. I took cool things I’d discovered and developed in the game, like Duane and Sette’s chemistry and the Black Tongues, and decided to work them into something entirely new but familiar. It would lean heavily on things that were and are important to me, like highly dysfunctional families, the irreconcilable evils of human institutions, and sad boys beating each other up.

It all came together pretty quickly once I decided to do it. I had the pieces and I knew the themes. It all plugged together with minimal stress.

While most of Unsounded’s big concepts were devised specifically for the comic - pymary, the khert, senet beasts, the First World, Cresce - you can still see the seam between RP content and Tanners content if you know where to look. That seam is where a lot of the plot and conflict happen. Alderode and Ssaelism are almost purely Tanners. Sharteshane and Gefendur are purely RP. Duane and Murkoph are Tanners and Sette and Bastion are RP.

And I really like this. Because Duane slowly making his way towards home feels like me making my way home from RP to Tanners. Tanners was a place of naivete, ignorance, comfortable tropes. RP was a place of worldliness, experience-building, chaos. Duane and I are heading home, but we won’t recognise it, and it won’t recognise us.

Anyway, many of the (what probably seem like neurotic) details in Unsounded come from years of me DMing that RP game. If you know anything about DMing, you know you have to be able to pretty quickly conjure up answers to all kinds of player questions, and be able to write and world-build in real-time as you play. After ten years of writing and refereeing Sharteshane, though, I didn’t want to spend excessive time there in Unsounded. That’s why the story barely touches the place, and we’ve spent most of our time in Cresce and Alderode.

a thing

At first hearing that Duane was at any point in his life anything other than a bookish, pedantic wizard nerd caught me off guard, but then you think of all the times he ends up punching people and begin to wonder if there’s more ‘bully’ left in him than he’d care to admit

Wait, what was the divine revelation that made Duane pursue priesthood? Or will it come up in the comic later?

I don’t know if it’ll ever come up in the comic, and Duane’s always been kind of embarrassed to speak of it aloud because it makes him feel like one of those backwoods zealots that preaches anecdotes from a stump, but yeah, he had an Experience when he was a kid. Ssaelism is a very rational faith. It doesn’t encourage you to go around saying Ssael appeared to you in a vision and told you where you left your lucky kedis foot. If you tell your priest that Ssael speaks to you he’ll roll his eyes and suggest you stop mixing beer and wine.

Anyway, Duane was badly injured in a street accident (it was totally Lemuel’s fault, he was being a little shit) and very nearly didn’t make it. Duane was a very rambunctious kid - some might say a bully - and though his grandfather was teaching him pymary Duane tended to use it like, well, Sette might. To make his brother and their peers miserable. After he was hurt he was bedbound for a few months and his interests abruptly turned bookish. At the same time, frigging Sonum Ssael started talking to him in the back of his head, saying he needed to straighten the hell up.

Even after he recovered Duane was hobbling for a year and never took up his old role of neighbourhood bully. Instead he began studying his grandfather’s books, reading everything Ssael ever wrote, and spending way too much time in the ghers library. He shocked his grandfather by beginning to beat him in their play-duels, and shocked his dad by humbly requesting to attend seminary and become a cleric instead of becoming his apprentice in their family print shop.

Duane always heard Ssael with startling clarity in his prayers. That voice went away after his bad night in the snow.

spell your username without using the letters in your name

mine is ptipi

Bacteria do have souls, but binary fission doesn’t produce new souls 99% of the time, so most single celled organisms share these sprawling souls that just get bigger every time they divide. Over time they compact down into these big mats of soul get compacted into geological layers that gradually accrete to the world soul. Sexual reproduction creates new souls but they’re much shorter lived as a result, and rarely make it into the bedrock, so most of the world spirit is from the Proterozoic.

This looks really nice, thank you! I especially love how floofy you've made his cloud... hair? Yeah let's just call it hair.

for @rainwvalker who said: “Umm if ya wanna how about some king C action”

he was so much fun! i had to mess around with brushes a little to get the effect i wanted and i love the brush now. im probably going to doodle with it a little more and see.

Hi Ashley - I asked a question about Uaid about a month ago and wanted to thank you for responding so quickly. It didn't help, but left me more amazed at how well you kept him drawn so (mostly) consistently all these years. In any case, I posted my newest creation in the discord and several people said I should send this to you. I've loved the comic for years and have been wanting to make a creation based on Uaid and other characters for a long while now. It's taken me just over a year, but I finally finished. So here it is: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pepa_quin/albums/72177720309065124 Thank you so much for the great comic, I'm looking forward to everything else you have to show us.

I'm absolutely flipping out right now, this is ASTONISHING! Everyone go look!

The colours, Uaid's perfect round face, the astonishing detail of it. Uaid's interior is so good and on-model! Pink toe nails! I see Matty, Jivi, Cutter (lol), even pukey Starfish in his early story attire. Even the slave cart is full of slaves! Then as if that's not enough, look at the Wand'ring Root in the back! Duane putting the smack down on it and Sette wigging out!

This is just one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I'm honoured you took the time. Thank you for sharing it with all of us! <3

if you want the rewards of finding a new favorite song then you have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of listening to unfamiliar music