Rafe's 18 Month Birthday

29 June 2013 | sila | | Family Pics
 

Here we are at Adik's 18 month entry! The boy is now 1 and a half years old!

Short break in the action

* Mouse over the picture for captions

 

Westward RPG: Brawling

28 June 2013 | Hisham | | Artwork, Role Playing Games
 

I sometimes use MyPaint, an open source painting program to create my work. It has less features than GIMP, but I love how the brush paint digitally as I move the Wacom tablet stylus. This is how I painted the "Brawling" artwork for Wicked North Games upcoming Westward RPG that was featured in a previous post.

At first I sketched the scene quickly in MyPaint using one of the Pencil tools. Initially the person who was throwing the punch was a man, but then I changed it to a woman in mid-sketch.

I decided on a yellowish hue for the image before I started painting the sky upon the layer immediately below the pencil sketch layer.

 

Eclipse Phase: Blimps and Back Seat Driving

24 June 2013 | Hisham | | Artwork, Eclipse Phase, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games
 

We're friend of the children. We even have a FREE CANDY white van.The adventure continued on and around Venus... even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we're not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we're talking about last Sunday's Eclipse Phase session.

As Kage's people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock.

Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecaft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane... toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to async Quill - in real life this was communicated by text message - who suggests the dog-shaped sociopath flexbot Kay be launched from Jovian space to go after the wayward ship. "Fetch, boy!" Hokusai thought that Kay would return, hurtling back from deep space with the Special in his jaws.

In other news, the Jovians had started playing nice with Planetary Consortium, and then promptly started unilaterally dropping giant mobile atmospheric processors on the Galilean moons to begin terraforming them.

Finally, they learnt that Hitoha Hiroshii, sister of their teammate Mitsuba had started to extend her influence in the Planetary Consortium. Their uncle Miyazaki had gained a position in the Consortium.

 

59 Months

22 June 2013 | sila | | Family Pics
 

One more month till Yaya hits the half decade mark! Woohooo!

Poster child for barrettes?

Note: Mouse over the pictures for captions

 

Star Wars Living Card Game and Not Dying

22 June 2013 | Hisham | | Board and Card Games, Star Wars
 
That Rancor is a potent attacker

Another gift from the GOKL gang, I finally started playing with Irfan the Star Wars: The Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. Designed for two players, but with a future expansion rule that would allow for more than two players, I spent the last couple of days duelling cards with Irfan. He has won once and I twice. It was enjoyable.

I'm certain we got some details of the rules wrong because we played and read the rules on the fly - and I never really played any card games before this. We kept discovering new things that we missed when we played earlier. In any case, you can view the video tutorial by FFG here.

 

Avocado Sandwich

15 June 2013 | Hisham | | Food
 

When we balik kampung a couple of weekends ago, we bumped into our old neighbours in Sitiawan, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Ling, who lives near Atok and Opah's house. Ain and I had a brief chat with them about the good old days, and they gave us some freshly-picked avocados from their yard.

 

Monsters of the Shattered World Podcast, Season 2

12 June 2013 | Hisham | | Artwork, Role Playing Games
 

In the debut season of Monsters of the Shattered World, an imaginative fantasy podcast that features the story of an adventuring party produced by Brent Newhall, I was commissioned to illustrate two out of the five episodes that were made.

The second season, however, I was tasked with completing all seven episodes of the podcasts. Here are some of the illustrations I drew for season two.

To listen to each episode, click on the link above to download them for free at Troll in the Corner, or obtain them from iTunes here.

Mouseover each artwork for the title of the episode it was created for.

The Goblins of the Red Eyes
 

Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems

10 June 2013 | Hisham | | Artwork, Eclipse Phase, GOKL Actual Play, RPG Actual Play, Role Playing Games
 

The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign "Fastball Express" has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two.

So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. 

However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited "for security reasons". (That doesn't sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had then disappeared along with their egos without a trace from the aerostat.

Venereal disease investigations!
 

However, as I wasn't able to attend the second session, I discovered that the company had experienced a TPK. After successfully completing the mission, a chunk of the Parvati outer skin came off and sucked the group outside. Everyone fell many, many leagues down into the inhospitable Venusian atmosphere.

 

Opah's Orchids

05 June 2013 | Hisham | | Family Pics
 

It's the school holidays! So we headed back to Sitiawan to spend time with Irfan's Atok and Opah.

The pond has a school of koi in it

When we arrived, some orchids hanging at Irfan's grandparents' garden over the koi pond were blooming. It was quite a spectacular sight as the following photos of the individual plants show.

Does anyone know what species of orchids they are?

 

Westward Scenes

03 June 2013 | Hisham | | Artwork, Role Playing Games
 

Here are some scenes I drew as filler are in the Characters, Attributes and Skills section of the Westward RPG by Wicked North Games. These scenes, also drawn by Alexander Gustafson, Ryan Rhodes and Cory DeVore, gives players an idea of what your players can be doing on the steampunk planet of Westward and what the millieux feels like.

Because thumb wrestling wouldn't be manly enough...

You could arm-wrestle an Enclave - a steampunk cyborg - and win!