I’d planned on putting up a poll for completing our second year of Shards but ran out of time last week. If you haven’t seen it already, there is a poll up for 1 month in the upper right. Whatever character wins this poll shall be the subject of our new Donate button I have in the works. Other polls will follow but I’m not entirely happy with this poll plug-in so I’ll just let this one run its course and we’ll see from there! I want a really customizable poll. Like, people can type in an answer to a question, and you can get a reward picture for voting, and more importantly to let people see the poll questions again and not just the results every time you visit the page for the next month…
Um… You can’t guess how exausting a vacation can be until you have 2 kids under the age of 5. Yeah… So the strip is almost done. I have been working on it for 2 days now and it looks great. Might have to post it with a bigger image so you can see the details. I am planning on doing a pin-up for the 4th of July like last year and I did complete the revisions to the Characters pages, both the Opposition and the Heroes section: Alice has a new pic, added more Opposition, subcategorized the Opposition, added character pages for every listed character. Soon I’ll be back on track for Monday/Thursday posts. Will be posting the strip soon!
I’ll be on vacation from June 29-July 15 and am looking for a little padding: guest strips, guest pin-ups, etc. Anyone with any interest whatsoever may submit and it will be published here! Yes, here!! All submissions will be reviewed on a humor/story basis andd not artistic skill so don’t be shy. We will likely post anything anyone sends us because we appreciate anything anyone is willing to offer. Here’s the stats:
Deadline: June 28, 2012, midnight EST
Entry type: anything PG and under goes! We’ll review anything!
Size: We use a resolution of 75ppi and a size of 600pixels wide x 826pixels high but something equivalent will work. Has to fit in our comicbook/page format of taller than it is wider.
So, submit freely and often! If not, I will have a lot of sleepless nights doing just pin-ups because they are faster than strips and I may not be able to post strips as normal on my vacation. Help!
It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post, but I feel it’s time. Please bear with this long post because I have a lot to say :)! I FINALLY got the chance to run the Shards RPG the other day with a group of 5 who handily completed the Sweeney Toddler chapter.
Hats off to very fine role playing from everybody ESPECIALLY to the player playing Muffett (who happened to be the most inexperienced role-player at the table). She took Muffett’s personality and made it her own: believable, authentic, and unpredictable. Her actions forced hearty role-playing, and the interactions between her and Dorothy forced very interesting interactions between ALL players. The depth of character development this session was astounding. Characters involved were Cinderella, Jack, Dorothy, Alice, and Miss Muffett.
The more time I invest in this system, the more I see its appeal and flaws. The most basic parts of the system are done, but all the powers I’ve created have been on the fly, no concrete system to the powers’ damage and effects. Making a customizable power system is by far the most challenging creative aspect I’ve ever encountered in my 23 years of being a Game Master.
I still don’t even know if I’m up to the arduous task of attempting to seek funding and publishing a system like this. Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition is on the horizon, I’m curious to see how they incoroporate the desires of the current player base with the need to gain new consumers.
But the role-playing isn’t the only thing that’s coming along in our lives. Jade and I sat down and had a long discussion about Shards and its current progression. There are many stories that have occurred so far. Some of them are far too adult to ever post as one of our standard webcomic stories. In addition, we want you guys to meet some of the more constant characters in our universe. Two of which will be showing up in the next chapter. You’ve met all of our heroes. We want to introduce you to our antagonists and foils. Which means skipping many stories and glossing over what happened very briefly in a strip or two.
Jade and I have considered making a full comic book for sale of some of the stories that we are skipping over. We’ll keep you guys posted on it :).
Yay! We have a piece of Velvy fan art that I found notified in my DeviantArt account. DSHigsby sent us this little gem and this one! So cute!! It is up in the Fan Art Gallery as well. Check out DSHigsby’s other DeviantArt stuff, too!
