This Test Of The Mountain

Download this easy DIY clothing repair guide (only 10 pages) from Uni of Kentucky

link to PDF

https://fcs-hes.ca.uky.edu/sites/fcs-hes.ca.uky.edu/files/ct-mmb-147.pdf

butcherbird

This Is Gospel - Panic! At the Disco; The left ear is the official album version, while the right ear is the official piano version.

Listen to more of my stuff here.

Download it here.

Oh yeah I forgot that was a thing that existed. Quite understandable, considering I’ve only read the first chapter 8, 9-ish times. Poor Root, it didn’t ask to be burned up by virtue of Sette’s foul mouth and Duane’s pig-headedness. Rest In Pieces

"Empathic trees" I cannot recall any empathic, or even sentient trees in this comic as of yet. Would you be so kind as to clarify?

The Wand’ring Root in the first chapter!

my personal curse is the knowledge that I function best with rigid structure and strict routine but am almost totally incapable of independently establishing or maintaining that structure and routine

is ilganyag's interactions with the blacktongues out of sync with time and she has to actively look for -when- to screw around with people or does she keep relatively in sync with the living world?

I almost hate to answer this one 'cause it can curtail theorizing, but we're getting close to it coming up in the comic anyway.

Have you noticed that Sette is interacting with the world on her own timeline? She's not reaching through a waterfall and knocking Ssael's hat off. Living entities - human or senet - are bound to their own timeline. It flows down and around them, the lens through which they view and interact with their reality. Ilganyag is no different. She cannot time travel, personally, inside the khert.

Of course she can theoretically look at memories from any time and glean valuable, highly anachronistic information from them, but she herself is a causal being trapped inside the khert that cannot interact with instantiated reality and people from another timeline. This would all be so, so much simpler if she could change history. Instead all she can do is research the future through scavenged memories, and try to change what happens.

It's a really awkward position, I find, but fascinating. To know pieces of the future, to have goals that you want, to change little things over a long span of time and watch how you're nudging the future in a different direction. It's like playing labyrinth, tilting the board back and forth as the shiny silver marble rolls inexorably forward, avoiding pitfalls, riding the edge, red eye on that goal of goals at the centre.

Oh no, don’t tempt me to look into the formspring. But I don’t think even I am brave enough/ have enough free time to tread the festering pits of information that can be found on the formspring. On another note, I’m so glad you gave Vliegeng bigger mouths haha

Ahhhh I just finished reading this entire tumblr! So informative! I love you and your story even more now! So, do I get a medal for this feat of obsession-driven lore consumption? Or how about just vliegeng facts, as they are probably the best mythical creature to be created since dragons became a thing in like, BC 800 or whatever. Please seduce me with inessential minutia about vliegengs Ms. Cope~

Most impressive! Before tumblr I used a site called Formspring for Q&A, so as humongous as this archive of useless information is, imagine it four times longer with an even less intuitive UI :)

Since you’ve read all of tumblr though, I’m not sure what more to offer when it comes to vliegeng. Their original conception was in my roleplaying days. A certain horrid demon could only interact with humans (without driving them insane) by possessing the body of a notoriously hearty burrowing subterranean goat-snake. The demon’s master, a Lich named Lord Nihil, kept the poor critter chained up in his lair for the demon’s convenience. I believe Bastion killed it towards the end of the game. Bastion was always killin’ interesting monsters.

But that’s the reason for this illustration, and why the vliegeng looks so glum. It was not a happy captive.

Of course it was repurposed and altered for Unsounded. Instead of gliding through the earth like a Graboid, I moved it skywards, and added its unique relationship with the khert lines. And it’s such an ugly thing I liked the idea of making it distinctly Aldish, to clash with Aldish elegance. This simple contrast helped define Duane’s brother’s character somewhat. Duane had a brother in RP as well, a completely different character who was much more like him. Lemuel is quite a bit different: earthier, less pretentious, less cerebral. His role as a vliegeng handler influenced that development, I think.

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.

Obviously you want the story to stand completely on it's own, but do you think this blog and other ways of communicating with your audience has made you more willing to include details in the story that are more esoteric or require more context?

Mm, prooobably, but I really love dense work. My favourite media is always overwrought, busy, and layered, sucking you into a world that's been illustrated to a degree you immediately and fully buy into it. My favourite fantasy comic is Nausicaa, and it's often called too hard to read, my favourite novel is Moby-Dick which goes off on incredible tangents about the world of whaling. My favourite game is Vagrant Story which has about a dozen ways to play it and a story so sketchy in a world so rich that people are still trying to interpret what happens in it even today. I like worlds where much of what you're seeing isn't explained. You're dropped into an opaque setting, and exploring that setting and putting its pieces together is just as much a part of the experience as following the plot and the characters.

All this is to say that Unsounded would still be a snaggled jungle even if I'd made it before the internet ever existed. This is just my jam :)

There's a lot of stuff about Kasslyne you ain't gonna get a canon answer for. You'll just have to try and go there and see things for yourself.

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.