Archive for ‘1. Glorious and Saber’
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This is the “end” of the original arc that start with #1. Basically, I had a lot of fun with it and the characters are beginning to really show some depth (well, except for Glorious). If you are curious, Glorious is a Twilight (that’s the yellow glow with the circle missing) and Saber is a Dawn caste (the star burst). Twilights are the “mages” of Exalted, normally wise and intelligent. Dawns are the fighters and warriors and generals.
This is a very stylistic comic. The white on black just looked cool to me and seemed appropriate to running away in the middle of the night. Don’t worry, I’m planning on this going on for a while now. The next arc is already planned out.
EDIT: Jukashi mentioned that I got the caste mark for Saber wrong. I had the Zenith one, not the Dawn caste. Thanks!
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Everyone is allowed their moment of brilliance. Glorious will probably have a few of these, but I’m hoping that you’ll be able to count them on one hand by the time I hit the triple digits.
I do hate the background of the prison. I need to redo that one after they leave. I suspect there will be another remodeling coming up. Making this comic came pretty easily, which is always a good sign, but I wasn’t sure how to really show that Glorious is climbing her bitch-out.
I love limit breaks. Yeah, they aren’t the Final Fantasy “I squish you all!” type of breaks, but they have such wonderful role-playing possibilities. It is an excuse to just let it go. Now, many players I have seen treat limit breaks as a flaw, something to avoid at all costs and will argue with me to make sure they don’t have to roll. But, most of my group actually gets into them, asking me if they can roll. When they do break, like the first time when all but one player broke at the same time, it creates some of the more memorable adventures we’ve had.
Sadly, on this strip, I had to write it about five or six times and even now, I’m not entirely sure it works. But, I had fun doing it plus I get to finally move the plot out of the throne room (red on red is hard to draw).
Oh, the charms, the horrible charms. Actually, this was almost my original idea for Gray the Unlucky. I think it looks fairly good so far, but I’m going to see how it works out over time. I also got rid of the blur on the Glorious Solar Sabers (Saber has one too), mainly because it killed my machine and I like the cleaner lines.
Mask of Winter’s sword was based on the image in the second edition book but Glorious’ saber is actually just random squiggles and some changes with unions and difference operations in Inkscape.
This comic also points out one of those things I feel a lot of storyteller’s do, including myself. You rarely see a group running away from a fight and they rarely truly lose. So, they get this sense of invincibility which is actually pretty hard to balance on since most players don’t like their characters getting squished. I’m still struggling with that balance.
This also marks the first time I had a comic done before Thursday.
More of the Exalted stuff, playing around with how charms are displayed. This ties into my original plans for Gray the Unlucky and how every charm and dice pool would be displayed over the person using it. Since this strip was partially created to get me used to doing graphics for that comic, I’m using it to see what looks good. Don’t know about the successes on the die rolls (the red, white, black, and yellow dots) though.
The hard part about Glorious is that his “native” language is LOLcats and l33t. Both languages aren’t my strong point. In fact, I actually have to look it up and I keep getting a bad “accent” on the LOLcats mainly because I don’t misspell easily on purpose. He also isn’t… “smrt” which doesn’t help.
It was after I made this strip that I decided that all extras must be grayscale. So, this guy is going to be showing up later, mainly because he can talk (I’m thinking extras have only punctuation in their speech bubbles). Also, I like consistency, even when it comes to making changes to the appearances of things.
This is also the point where I’m starting to use sound effects for some actions. Not sure how it will work, still playing with those.
You’ll notice I changed the outfit of the Mask of Winters. Basically, this came from some really good feedback that the MoW wasn’t really that obvious as a Deathlord. So, I created a slightly different uniform, then used Glorious as an excuse why it changed. Why he made the change to both the armor and the throne room should become more obvious as the character develops. *gasp* I know, I have a plot or something!
I always loved the idea of a baby Deathlord. Yeah, they are actually powerful Solars who made a Bad Decision™ when they died, but frankly I like the screwed up view. Plus, the cute adorable eyes. How can you hate the cute adorable eyes?
The initial comic. This came with one of the things I find most amusing about the second edition of Exalted, a typo in the Mask of Winter’s entry. In the first edition, he has a Lore 10 which makes him more intelligent that pretty much all of Creation, the Underworld, and Yu-Shan. In second, they forgot to add Lore entirely, so it looks like he doesn’t have any dots of Lore (Exalted, p. 321). And, if you use the rules (Exalted, p. 108), he can’t read. Which doesn’t make sense if you know the character. I mean, he’s suppose to be one of the nastiest creatures a character could expect to encounter, and they shouldn’t survive the encounter. So, it sounded like a good starting point to learn how to make this comic.