Hishgraphics

Eclipse Phase: Moose Kipper

Last Sunday, the Eclipse Phase group, playing the members of the Gamera Security hypercorp finished off our investigation of Cloud Nine aerostat on Venus.

After their "patron" Kage Musha ordered all GamSec operatives off Cloud Nine so his personal force can take over what seemes to be the hypercorp Yamaha-Pacifica's illegal weapon manufacturing facility there, Billy Cable Jr. and Hokusai Tarnungshaut pilot their airship back there to pick up DANAI and Wandering Ina, both in the Venusian glider body.

DANAI-δ, DANAI's delta fork in Cloud Nine's mesh network, masked an airlock from the security systems so DANAI/Ina could jump off the aerostat and onto their airship. (Cable had rolled critical success for airship piloting and was expertly flying the ship, cloaked in Venusian clouds.) Suddenly, DANAI/Ina was/were interrupted by the inner airlock door opening. It hid by jumping off the airlock's external platform and hanging on to its edge.

It was Dario Silvestri from the factory who was enjoying a bit of recreational drug Alpha. DANAI/Ina used its electronic rope to grapple Silvestri, then used a Zap round from a coilgun to blow a whole quarter of his head off. (It was a mistake. Honest. A Zap round usually stuns. But not just at so close a range.) DANAI/Ina pried off Silvestri's cortical stack from his exposed spine and glided off the aerostat.

However, it wasn't used to the morph and air thermals blew it off course. Thankfully, Cable's awesome piloting skills allowed him to match DANAI/Ina's erratic fall and for the second time caught a morph falling off an aerostat.

Then they returned to Octavia, the largest aerostat in the skies of Venus where they considered their next move.

First they decided to open a physical office on Venus, and thought the Parvarti aerostat would be a good place to be. They sent word to Wandering Kid and Dexter Morgan (the PCs with absent players) to begin moving their stuff from the current office on the Gerlach habitat in space to Parvarti, but leave a barebones office presence back on Gerlach.

Secondly, DANAI wanted a new morph. After much deliberation, the team spent credits to custom design a brand new morph for it. The new morph is basically, two human-looking hands (synthmorph) connected with a cord of 10 meter-long electronic rope, fitted with a cyberbrain with mesh insert, cortical stack, voicebox, sensory equipment on its knuckles, lidar, grip pads, skinlink, eelware and chameleon skin. It would be able to function as an extra set of hands if wound around another person, or be a thrown weapon that would be able to stun an enemy with its eelware, or creep up to an enemy to inject a drug into him or her. We also purchased two skillsofts in Unarmed Combat and Infiltration. Its initial WOUND THRESHOLD is 5 and DURABILITY 25.

We called it the "Janet" morph. 

And now there exists a character in our Eclipse Phase game that looks like this:

Which i think is pretty freaking awesome.

Wait a second. Whatever happened to Danai-δ?

To be continued next time on "Eclipse Phase: Clouds of the Morning Star".

60 Months (a.k.a. the Fifth Birthday)

The girl is five years old now! A whole half decade! 60 months! 1826 days! Wheee! Happy birthday, beautiful!

* Mouse over the pictures for captions

Moment of Faith

Note: This short story is slightly edited from a 1500 word assignment for Professional Writing 1: Core Competency submitted on July 14. I thought it would be prudent not to throw around too many (or too funky) posthuman science fiction concepts in this story, just in case the tutor would be unable grok it.

The Egocapture pistol's smartlink had confirmed this criminal act. So Faith fired at the distressed Olafsson. Transferring an Ego from one shell to another takes hours of scanning a neural scanning, slowly transferring exabytes of data from the old brain to the new. Criminals, however, were not given the luxury of time.

Blixus - With Stats!

Among the many entertaining obstacles you could use as challenges for players of the Star Wars RPG are creatures. Defeating a critter is a natural Star Wars storytelling element, as can be seen in the movies. A host of new and original creatures had been created in the Star Wars The Clone Wars animated series, such as mastiff phalones, skalders, rupings and gutkurrs. Most have not had official roleplaying stats to them for gamemasters to use.

However, here are my home-made stats of the blixus, a cephalopod with huge, flailing tentacles, a crab-like shell and and a ravenous maw as it appeared in the fourth season episode "Kidnapped".

A fun fact: the blixus first appeared in the Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars The Clone Wars #2 "Slave Traders of Zygerria" written by Henry Gilroy. This story arc was adapted into the three-episode Zygerrian slavers arc of which "Kidnapped" was the first.

Here are D6 and Edge of the Empire stats for the blixus. Also, let's assume these stats are for the "blue-speckled, yellow-bellied blixus" that originate from the Tingel Arm and are now widespread on a thousand other systems in the Outer Rim Territories. When the official blixus stats are eventually published, they would not supercede this subspecies of the creature

Eclipse Phase: A Hidden Industry

GOKL's Eclipse Phase "Clouds of the Morning Star" story arc (gamemastered by Ivan) continues from the previous session. Wandering Ina (played by Andrew) and DANAI (played by Darren) - both in a single Venusian glider morph - continued their investigation of a massive ego theft ring that may have passed through the Cloud Nine aerostat - a floating city in the skies of Venus. Meanwhile, Cable and Hokusai (played by me) manned their newly purchased airship, hidden in the clouds out of sight from Cloud Nine.

Since Kai was unable to make it, this session had three player characters, but with two of them inhabiting one body, which was a great concept in roleplaying.

The Setup

It was time Hokusai delivered more weapons and gear by sneaking onto Cloud Nine. DANAI/Ina had managed to hack into Cloud Nine's aerostat administration network and gave themselves Security-level permissions in the system. Employing The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down gambit, Ina saved 30 minutes of video footage in all security cameras and wrote a script that would override the camera feed with the looped captured footage where and when required.

DANAI/Ina upgraded their user permission to Admin-level in the system and discovered that the hypercorp that leased the unmarked commercial and manufacturing spaces was Yamaha-Pacifica, producer of habitat machinery. Digging deeper, they discovered that the faces behind the hypercorp had tie to the Night Cartel crime syndicate.

DANAI also peeled off a Delta Fork of its ego - named DANAI-δ - to be implanted in the security system and would take over sousveillance operation when required. They created a faux Mesh ID that would be tagged on Hokusai when he arrived aboard. Then they suppressed the external security camera as Cable drove the airship from below toward a low-security airlock. (Cable might have seen spiral shapes in the Venusian clouds as he piloted the ship, but there has been no confirmation.)

Westward Art: Sneak Attack

Recently, I was assigned to draw a vertical "sneak attack" scene for Wicked North Games' upcoming Westward RPG. The scene involved a dark-clad assassin about to attack a nervous looking gentleman in the city streets at night. The final artwork is displayed above.

Below are some process artwork for the piece. The first image shows three black and white sketches / studies. #1 is the original sketch where the assassin was changed into the verson in #2 because she did not convey enough physical steampunk tropes. It's quite difficult to design a skin-tight assassin's garb, because most steampunk costumes are loose and puffed up in parts. After #2 was approved, I created a grayscale study in the form of #3 to see how light will play off the characters, objects and building.

A Bunch of Boys Bled on Boulders By the Beach

by Khairul Hisham

Note: This essay is slightly edited from a 1000 word assignment for Professional Writing 1: Core Competency submitted last Sunday June 30. The story is a composite of several experiences I had as a teenager. Not sure if the right people as mentioned were present for the bulk of this story. If you're reading this and you were there but I didn't mention you, let me know. Not you, Ming Fang. You pipe down.

The cerulean sky had not the slightest taint of cloud above us as we dismounted our bicycles upon our arrival at Teluk Batik beach. I don't recall whose idea it was but it was the consensus among the four of us that we would walk the trail over the hills to Teluk Rubiah beach and then headed back to Teluk Batik by way of the shore. Ming Fang adjusted his glasses and excitedly said, “It would just be us walking over rocks between stretches of isolated beaches between here are there. It shouldn't take more than an hour.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said, and as usual I was always up for good ideas.

And so Tsing, Woon Seong, Yu Hoe, Khoots, Ming Fang and I began our journey, leaving the bustling weekend holiday activity of Teluk Batik and its visitors behind us.

We had hiked to Teluk Rubiah before. Shoulder to shoulder, we travelled to the southern inland corner of the beach where the gravel road turned into a red dirt path that led into and over the hills.

Rafe's 18 Month Birthday

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

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Westward RPG: Brawling

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

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

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

Note: Mouse over the pictures for captions

Star Wars Living Card Game and Not Dying

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

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

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.

Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Rafe's 17 Month Birthday

And so, another month has passed by and the little guy is now 17 months old. He'll be a year and a half soon! Wheeee!

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Bye Tim

Tim the Turtle had grown too big to reside in its tank. And there is no surplus space in the house for a bigger tank. Which meant it was time to say goodbye to Tim.

Thankfully we had the foresight to scout for release locations in the city beforehand and had already decided on the lake at Ampang Hilir Park.

The lake was large for a body of water mere kilometres away from the Kuala Lumpur City Centre. It shot to the top of the list of release locations because it was big and had a sizable population of red-eared sliders (and assorted fish) within its waters. We also hoped Tim would find a girlfriend some day. Or a boyfriend. We never really determined if Tim was a male or a female. If Tim was female, its name would have been a contraction of "Timah".

Savage Worlds: Weekend Warriors Playtest

Jerry Blakemore came over to the house all the way from Texas to playtest 12 to Midnight's new Savage Worlds game Weekend Warriors! (Not really, he was on vacation, and I just happened to be in his path.)

Although I've bought the Savage Worlds Explorer Edtion from Amazon.com seven thousand years ago, I've never had the opportunity to run or play any games with it. So, this was my first time rolling dice for Savage Worlds.

After picking Jerry up at his hotel, we then headed back to Pandan Indah to Irfan's school extraction. Then, we had lunch at Galaxy Ampang where many different types of nasi goreng died for us. In the meantime, we regaled each other with a myriad of gaming war stories.