thedeadone.net » Lost Heroes RPG

Wordcount

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:53:51 +0000

One of the positive things for me that has come out using Google+, was when I was complaining about my inability to make time to write, between early starts, a full time job and two kids, my wife and myself are pretty exhausted by the time they’re in bed.

It was suggested by some¹ to stick or target a word count per day, post about it regularly and so build up the habit of writing. Once that suggestions was out in the open I had no choice but to try it.

A few other things have been percolating in my mind as well. I’m sure many of you have already seen the “sitting is killing you” infographic where it extols the terrible dangers of sitting. Made me think of how sitting in my favourite chair (which I loving now think of as my seat of DOOM!) in the evening, my body just turns off, leaving me, at best, to watch TV, or at worst, troll the internet from my laptop. I can’t write when I hit that seat in the evening, I’ve tried.

So, for my first experiment, I took the laptop to the kitchen table, turned off the wireless (the internet is nearly a bigger danger than my seat-of-doom) and started writing, resulting in about 1000 words and taking a reasonable amount of time, about an hour and half. So that became my target. Afterwards I retreated to my seat-of-doom and let my brain switch off for a while before bed.

And so far it seems to work. Sure there has been up and down days where I’ve written less than 800 words and other days where I haven’t written anything (I think falling asleep at the laptop is a good excuse). I haven’t slavishly stuck to the word count metric though, because sometimes starting a new section means pulling in notes and organising them and planning how to attack the section, so few words are actually written but the same amount of brain-space used. In that case the amount of time becomes important. I do post on Google+ about my word count but not every day, noting why I failed if I did.²

I think I’ve hit a good rhythm with the word count. It’s about long enough to get something done but not that long that I start to steer too much into brain-shutting-down-for-the-day. So I don’t have much re-writing when I read back over the words. I’ve also focused steadily on one project, which has made it easier to just sit down and start writing. This blog post is an attempt to use up some of that word count to do something else, such as blogging. And more importantly, I’m starting to get an “itch” when I get home, grabbing the laptop and bringing it in the kitchen so I can write while the kids play.³

But there is a downside. First, I’m not playing any computer games at all. I was really getting into Oblivion: Elder Scrolls, but now I’ve stopped. I have an not-yet-played copy of Portal installed. I haven’t made the time to play. I’m sure that doesn’t sound like a great evil, but still playing games exercises other parts of my brain than TV and books.

I read less. Much less. This is a greater evil! I have two books out from the library that need renewing, not a normal situation for me. I’m also spending over an hour, in the kitchen, by myself, leaving my wife in the living room by herself and sometimes left waiting because there is some show we like to watch together.

But so far, having a word-count target seems to have worked for me for getting over procrastination and other excuses. In fact, this post counts to 832 words of my word count for today. Yea!

And finally and probably the most important thing in this post, do you think footnotes work in a blog post? Are they distracting? (I have a tendency to want to read the footnote within the text of other people’s posts myself).

¹ Not sure what the right protocol these days for naming names or linking to profiles. The discussion was on a “Limited” post on Google+. One of the strength of Google+, at least early on, was connecting with people of the same interests, writers (both with stuff published and not) in Ireland.

² It seems folks on Google+ either don’t mind such posts or like to see them because they think it’s neat or even inspiring to see someone start a new habit. So there you go, another +1 for G+.

³ Doesn’t often work that well, spending 15 minutes writing one sentence because my wonderful son wanted to draw beside me and kept wanting me to look at what he was drawing is frustrating because of the context switching my mind was doing. Sometimes it’s better to shut the laptop and draw with my son instead.

Final renderings and access to an A3 scanner!

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:13:28 +0000

So this is the final rendering of the “Meave” image I asked people to vote on last week. Because there wasn’t a clear consensus, I just mixed the two, some in front, some in back. It’s not perfect. It’s still quite tilted to the right, but I’m happy with it.

I also discovered my work has a A3 scanner. It only scans in at 300 dpp but that’s not too bad. So I re-scanned my “Matthew” image.

There is a distinct similarity in the two pictures, which I’m going to have to break with the next one!

The one on the left or the one on the right?

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:30:17 +0000

Quick poll, which is better, the picture on the left or the right?

If you can’t tell the difference, the one on the left has the crows behind the character while the one on the left in front.

(If you can’t see the poll, visit thedeadone.net to vote)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Now that I’ve got both images on the computer, I’ve already answered my own question…

New Lost Heroes Image: Renegade Chosen Matthew

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:30:29 +0000

If you’ve been following me on twitter (or sharing with me on Diaspora), you’ll probably have seen the work-in-progress photos of this image. It took me about 8 hours to do this. I suspect I could have done it in less time if I could have done it in one sitting, but I don’t have that luxury. I quite like it, it’s in theme and concept with my original idea.

I think I’ve come a long way in the last few years in terms of my drawings. I now approach an image as a project, which includes multiple iterations, design considerations, foundation work, etc. And this one was no different. I had a character designed from my Lost Heroes RPG project (I’m currently working on the rules a bit) and I wanted to do a new character image.

So this is Matthew, a Renegade Chosen. His body and face are covered in scars where he pulled himself together in the Void. His knife is actually the remains of a sword that he created while in the Void. It burned and melted away as he cut his way back to Earth. The knife allows him to make quick short trips into the Void and travel instantaneously to other places. However there is a darkness to his power, a manifestation of his power in the Void, a shadow.

Initial design stage

One of the early stabs at layout

When coming up with the image design, I did sketch out some concepts, and figure out what the character should look like. I used a number of manga/anima books that I have as reference. They are clean sharp images. This allowed me to jump to the next stage and create a clean outline of the character.

But then came the power of the lightbox, my favourite piece of drawing equipment (besides pencils and pens). I created Matthew’s shadow and played around with placement of the “portal” and the shadow. Once I knew that worked, it pretty much started to fall into place.

Originally the shadow held a version of the sword that was complete, but the placement of it, looked bad. So I left it out. It’s nice how the image evolved though. This was the last stage before I started adding some shade:

If I had a graphics tablet I could probably do more of these stages online and tidy up the image better, but I do enjoy using a pen or a pencil on paper.

Now back to actually doing some writing!

For fun or for success?

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:30:47 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this in the back of mind for a few days, but I find myself looking at my projects in two ways. Pet Projects or Products.

I hear a lot about how to make creative works successful, you know mantras like “fail early, fail often”, etc. On one hand I have a ton of unfinished short stories, ideas and notes filling up my notebook and unfinished scraps of software on my laptop’s harddisk. Yet I still preserve with my Lost Heroes RPG, a project perhaps I should have quit on an age ago when it has become apparent it’s not going to be some sort of whirlwind success or if a minor success (for the record, I’m not going to quit on it and I’m currently working on a rules system for it).

Makes me think, there are two types of projects, defined more by your attitude towards them than anything else. A product is something you’re trying to “sell” (in some abstract sense) and if it doesn’t sell or find an audience, it’s a failure. But a pet project is something you do because you want to do it. It’d be great if you find an audience, but if you don’t, so what?

For me products are the stuff I do in work. I get paid to do them and they are done at a professional level. You have to be ruthless about it, avoid adding new features, doing everything as right as you can straight up.

Pet projects are stuff I do for fun, in my spare time. I make mistakes, I learn. I explore options and tangents and cut away stuff at my own impulse. Lost Heroes RPG is my on-going pet project. I’ve learned about writing, mythology, game design, etc. and it’s brought me in contact with other gamers and writers. Even if, no-one else reads it, I’m still enjoying working on it.

It’s a little bit about sanity too, if I’m working on something because I’m enjoying the work, then “failure” is only what I chose it to be. If it’s a product, I can prepare myself for failure by simply distancing myself. I’m not talking about what failure is, only how I treat and react to my spare time projects.

TDO-Mini-Forms was also a pet project, one that perhaps should have been a product in hindsight. I was working on it because I was enjoying it. I was learning about PHP, coding for the web, working with WordPress and so on. But people were and are using it, expecting a supported product. That’s a bit of a disconnect, working on something as a pet project but random people consuming it as a product. I would have been happy with a small number of users and supporting them, while extending it and learning how to do things right.

But the number of users is quite high. Still not getting used to google occasionally telling me about some random dude on Twitter who stating that it’s utter crap because of X, Y or Z. It stomps all over why I was enjoying working on it. Turning a pet project, not into a product, but into a chore was/is a death knell working for the appreciation of faceless strangers. Will I start up work on TDO Mini Forms? Maybe, but I’ll need an attitude adjustment towards it first. I’d be tempted to start over, doing something from scratch, taking what I learned from TDO-Mini-Forms. I’d also need a machine that gives me reams of extra spare time to work on it as well.

I think if I were to start trying to write a novel (I have a few ideas) for example, I would be treating it as a Product, taking on board everything I’ve learned from writing Lost Heroes RPG and the various little flash fictions or short stories I’ve hacked together and being a bit more ruthless about it. The same would go for any software project I might start that’s bigger than a very simple tool.

A free roleplaying game: Lost Heroes is available online right now

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:43 +0000

The big creative project I’ve been chipping away on for ages is finally online (though so much left to do). I chucked it up last night after (literally) months of procrastinating. It’s a roleplaying game, intended for pen and paper, though what I’ve put online is only the setting which is feck’in huge. Mostly because I’ve spent time doing a lot of reading of mythology for it.

It’s called Lost Heroes and I’ve talked about it a few times here. It’s going to be a fudge based game (Fudge was what FATE was originally based on). The setting itself is the modern day, except the “ancient” gods and pantheons didn’t go away. (I put ancient in quotes, only because some of these pantheons still, or now have resurrected, active religions). It includes Angels and Demons, the Norse Gods Aesir (Odin, Loki, Thor and so on and not the DC’s superhero Thor character, which is such a deviation from the original mythology), Celtic Gods (Lugh, Donn, Morrigan, etc.) and Greek Gods of Olympus (probably my favourite). Anyway you can go download it right now and read it for yourself. It’s certainly still needs work, but I am proud of it.

Now though I’m unsure what the next steps are. I’m currently still researching the system though I do have an older draft of it and tons of notes and ideas. But what do I do with what I have put online? (Suggestions on a postcard, or, you know, just comment below). I’ll probably submit it to a few choice communities but I don’t want to spam it around too much.

Review part 1 of my Custom Dice

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:02:34 +0000

As part of winning these custom dice, I have to do a review of them. However I haven’t gamed in months, certainly not since I received the dice. So instead I’m doing a “part 1” of the review now, which is, in a sense, a bit weird as it’s my design on the dice! Part 2 will come when I actually get to game.

My Fudge Dice

So in lieu of not actually gaming with them, I grabbed my big bag of dice and compared them to my other fudge dice. I bought a set of 16 dice from Grey Ghosts years ago. Comparing them physically the dice are all the same size. Of course my new dice are printed rather than engraved like my current fudge dice. Just rolling them randomly on the table together I notice no difference in them.

Visually there is certainly no problem in picking out pluses and minus when you roll a bunch together. In fact I think it’s easier, the pluses and minuses on the printed dice are bigger, check out the slightly fuzzy photo below:

I think though that my little Cthulhu icon on the blank side feels quite contracted on the dice compared to the other sides. But that may be an artefact of the design more so than the dice itself. However the quality of the print is impressive. The detail is quite vivid (though you may not be able to tell from my bad photography).

The original design, in case you've forgotten!

Certainly if you wanted to get some icon on a dice, this would be a be a great way to do it.

I’ve rubbed them and rolled them, and so far, none of the print has come off. So it seems quite sturdy. I have been keeping them in my big bag of dice these last few months and no damage to the print at all from being tossed about.

Overall I’m quite happy with them, hopefully they’ll prove to be my “lucky” dice. I think they’ll be kina cool too if I go to cons with them, though I’m generally not big into showing off my geek status. I managed to meet up with my roleplaying group and showed them the dice, which got a good “ah cool!” from everyone. So that’s a decent objective measure there.

My Cthulhu/thedeadone Fudge Dice!

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:18:21 +0000

So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.

I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.

I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.

I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!

I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.

But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:

Now with my two designs, I sent them.

And I got the results in my hand right now:

I think they look rather cool myself!

(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)

thedeadone gaming dice?

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:01:13 +0000

I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

Some new art work: Meave and Dead Eyes

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:38:53 +0000

When I uploaded the photos from my five-year-old daughter’s digital camera, I found some shots that managed to capture unexpected looks and expressions on people. I was so taken by at least one I decided to work up an image.

I was also partly inspired by the character “Meave” that I created in my mind for this little piece of fiction for my Lost Heroes RPG project. Here’s the relevant two paragraphs:

The young emo-goth Meave sits by herself in the school cafeteria. She numbly rubs at the healed scars on her wrists. The other kids just ignore her today. This is a good day for her. …

Meave will see her father, the god Dagda, in the distance watching her. She will run from him, run as hard as a princess of worlds that don’t exist can run. And the crows will screech through the sky after her.

During the process I ended up branching and producing a second more creepy character (which I’ve been referring to as “deadeyes”). Anyway, here are the two completed images:

(Which one works best do you think?)

The one thing I’m learning in any of my creative endeavours; writing, drawing and even programming, is that you learn so much by working through the process from beginning to end and it greatly improves the basic fundamental skills. And the stuff I did during the process, I think, is nearly as good as the end result.

I’ve been tinkering a lot with my drawing process. For a start I didn’t use a scanner. Instead I photographed them with a digital camera and use the photos. This preserves the textures and tones much better than using a scanner. You can see this in the original pencil drawing here.

But there is a catch which I’ve noticed. The shape of the lens of the camera “bends” the drawing. It’s not perfectly to shape, there is a slight distortion. But I think it pays off in terms of the quality of the image.

It was the expression that really captured my imagination and those big lips. I’ve been told I got a good likeness of the person in the photo, however I’m not going to be uploading it here so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I already had the end image composition in my mind, but I needed a good background. I grabbed several reference images from my photo collection and developed this of a murder of crows. The image is good enough stand-alone I think.

I had originally intended this to be a silhouette only, pure black. I used ink with brushes and black markers and I ended up giving it some texture, which really worked. Then, for good measure, I used charcoal to give it that rising tint you get at twilight. Again I photographed it to keep the texture (it was also on an A3 page so my A4 scanner is too small). And once I had the images on the computer I could start playing around with composition:

Prototype of background and character

I then printed out a series of the character study to see how I could “enhance” it:

(You can see where I came up with the dead-eyes concept)

My first stab at moving the sketch to ink was atrocious (and I’m not uploading it here!). So I pass the sketch through some filters on the computer and got out a raw black and white version and I used this as the basis of the first run. I thought it looked cool, though I think part of the expression got lost (but the ratio of the head to body seemed to improve, or had you not noticed that it was off?).

Having everything set up, I just ran with it and dug up the second character visualisation:

Initially I thought it came out better, but looking at the final two pieces, it was simply different but just as good.

Once all the pieces were in place, it was just a matter of getting them into the computer and arranging them in some image editor. I did play around with a lot of the funky effects you can do in software, but I felt they didn’t add to the final image. I think such effects work better if you’re colouring the images.

Both images work, though they each have a different feel. Certainly the “deadeyes” one is more creepy, but the first is closer to my original vision. I learned lots doing this one, and I have a few other projects/ideas I want to do. I may even use this image in Lost Heroes RPG: Book of Gods, you’ll just have to wait and see.

thedeadone.net » Lost Heroes RPG

Wordcount

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