Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys

Vow 🪝

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.

I didn't think Duane was so misogenistic ;_; since he, in the end, tolerated his daughter learning pymary.

I think we’re fooling ourselves a bit if we don’t acknowledge he’s something of a misogynist. The challenge with Duane and with many of the characters in our cast is that they are inescapably marked by the cultures they grew up in. Just as we ALL are. We ALL have biases within us that we have to acknowledge and consciously overcome. There is no pure and unblemished person. It’s not possible in this bitch of a world.

Duane relenting that night and agreeing to teach Mikaila pymary was a battle - fought and successfully won - against his own misogyny. It was a good thing. But it was not a moment when a light switch flipped and he was suddenly a paragon of gender equality. He’ll keep struggling daily with his biases the same way we all do.

Everyone around you has biases. You can write people off because of them, or you learn to love in spite of them and help them understand more and grow. I do this with Duane the same way I have to do it with my dad and a lot of other people in my life. It’s the most difficult thing.

tricks your ghost

Does one ever really "stop" being influenced by the things they read, watch, play, or otherwise experience, fiction or otherwise? You can't endlessly tinker with the story of Unsounded, and I imagine you already know what you want to say with it... but do you see yourself still able to change or evolve, either during the making of it or beyond? Signed, someone feeling old and stuck.

>>Does one ever really "stop" being influenced by the things they read, watch, play, or otherwise experience, fiction or otherwise?

I think that's up to you. My sixty year old mom listens to the same Tom Petty albums for hours, and watches the same episodes of MASH over and over and over again. For her, media has become a warm and comforting bath after a long day. Maybe that happens to all of us as the world gets more alien and we need that comfort. I don't think it has to be that way, but I think it takes real effort to continue to connect with new stuff; to let it in. The new stuff won't be catering to you so you have to do more work to understand it. And work sucks. But if you care about staying connected to the changing world, you gotta do the work to change with it. Or don't. It's your call.

If you feel old and stuck, let new stuff in. Don't dismiss it, even if your experience lets you recognise the same old tropes repeating themselves.

That latter thing is a problem I have. The older I get, the smaller the world seems. We just aren't very interesting animals. We make the same things over and over because we're trapped in such a tiny, limited world. Teach a hamster to paint and all you're gonna get is canvas after canvas of water bottles and hamster wheels.

>>You can't endlessly tinker with the story of Unsounded, and I imagine you already know what you want to say with it... but do you see yourself still able to change or evolve, either during the making of it or beyond?

Unsounded's changed a lot as it's gone along. It's a very long comic, but it's broken into storylines that have reflected my own changing self as the years have dragged on. I'm sure you've noticed it's gotten a bit more cynical in recent chapters. Sette has sobered up as she and I have experience more of the world. It'll keep changing, too. There are places I want to go in it that I couldn't have gone ten years ago. There are things I want to say that I didn't even know existed back then. Fortunately, while Unsounded's narrative highway is complete, there's plenty room to traverse that highway dynamically, via vehicles I've yet to even decide on.

So yeah, if you're stuck, Anon, get in a different car. Maybe get on a hippopotamus.

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Hi it’s time for my twice yearly “I have feelings about Ghost Trick” post

this is going to have me on my hands and knees dry heaving

So what you’re telling me is Plats all have ADHD? :D

Is "get through life by going with the flow, with minimal effort. just letting everything happen" a common mentality of platinum caste, or is it just Mathis Quigley being Mathis Quigley?

Plats have a hard time with long-term plans and goals. It seems almost clinical, like their brains have difficulty conceptualising the future. Matty mentioned it once, that it was “hard to think” about his relatively shorter lifespan.

Quigley seems to have spun this into disregard for others and a desire to avoid conflicts. Vienne, on the other hand, seemed bolstered by it. It made her seem braver and more selfless since she couldn’t really *feel* her own mortality. And overall, Plats seem a little more cheerful for it, a little more likeable. Helps their reputation as a “blessed” people.

Whole thing is creepy.