Chuubo!

Three!  Spheres!  Cataclysm!

A very quick sketch of Entropy II, Magister, King of the Evil World and the Principal of Horizon’s School, by the Grace of Heaven and the Light, in his casual wear.

These are a couple of pictures I drew several (holy crap years ago.  Sticking them on Tumblr to share them with an associate.

I was in an Exalted phase at the time so I did a bit of Homestuck/Exalted fanart.  That's John Egbert as the Unconquered Sun and Dave Strider as Ligier, the Green Sun, Fetich Soul of Malfeas.  I tried to do a Jade(As the Maidens) and a Rose (As one of the Deathlords) but couldn't quite get things working...  

I think the John is my favorite.  Lil' Cal Malfeas is a bit hard to decipher.

Journey to the Outside - Characters

Prepare to go on a great quest to the ends of Creation and well, well beyond. Before you know what to pack for such a quest, though, you need to figure out just who you are! So, are you...

❀ The Light Seeker, Tripp Tanaka, if you want

✶ to be the sort of person who tends to fall headfirst into trouble

✶ to make friends out of enemies

✶ to be sort of naive and embarrassing

✶ to have a mission to find a great treasure

(or are you the Rider girl variant, Susan Numidia, instead?)

❀ The Peerless Spirit, Sonya Hou, if you want

✶ to be an impossibly skilled nature god

✶ to be a reluctant hero and a bit of a jerk

✶ to climb a ladder to heaven and face what doth dwell therein

(or are you the cyborg variant, SWk-2456, instead?)

❀ The Vice Magus, Roderick Titov, if you want

✶ to be something of a comic relief

✶ to use weird and scary magic to get what you want

✶ to decide the fate of whole worlds despite being wildly unqualified

(or are you the girl variant, Zoey Titova, instead? Or maybe you're Colbrand, the False Light?)

❀ The Granite Knight, Oboliu Waite, if you want

✶ to be steadfast even in the face of terrible things

✶ to labor under a terrible enchantment

✶ to get things done when your companions are always faffing about

✶ to be asked to sacrifice your life to remove a great darkness from the world

(or are you the boy variant, Dace Lillimut, instead?)

❀ The Servant Prince, Julian Lungren, if you want

✶ to change into a bunch of shapes but especially an enormous dragon!

✶ to quest to regain your honor and impress your family

✶ to put someone else's needs before your own

✶ I did mention becoming a dragon, right?

(or are you the girl variant, Yurian Lopez, instead?)

Or come and be . . .

❀ The HG, or "Hollyhock God," if you want

✶ to focus on describing the world rather than being attached to any particular character

✶ to play the game, and nobody else is being the HG, so you had better!

✶ to be able to just say that things happen and they do, and

✶ to help pull together a story from the things characters do,

And, finally, here's a Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Doodle I did.

  An Octopus Singer, a Fortitude Rat, a few Octopus sketches, and a Horizon Ghost (the ghost I am the least happy with....).  

Luke Skywalker in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

Today I was posting on a thread in RPG.net about using Canon Characters and Franchise Settings when, quite unexpectedly, I wrote this lengthy explanation of how Luke Skywalker would work as a Chuubo Main Character if Star Wars were a GMD-style campaign rather than a movie series.

I'm actually pretty happy with it, so I'm gonna put it here so I don't lose it.

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Let's imagine Star Wars wasn't a movie but a game like Chuubo.  You'd get a character playbook that says:

"Your name is Luke Skywalker, you're an orphan farm boy with a grand destiny to become a Jedi Knight!  OR you could be:

Lulu Skywalker, an orphan farm GIRL with a grand destiny to become a Jedi Knight!

Lu'twach Skeewakka, an orphan wookie with a grand destiny to become a Jedi Knight!

Luke Amida, an orphan farm boy with a grand destiny to become an Ace Rebel Pilot!

Luke Skrontmeer, an orphan farm boy with a grand destiny that he's not sure of!

You'd get a list of generic but customizable starting Quests -- A Basic Quest that relates to being a farm boy out of your element; a Side Quest about befriending some droids, a Storyline Quest about being drawn off the farm and discovering a Wise Mentor.

You'd also get a generic Quest Set for someone on your Knightly path.  A very VERY quick Knight Arc Luke Quest set would be...

The Legendary Deeds of Luke Skywalker...

Knight 1:  Greater Things (Where you find a Mentor and are exposed to a new problem)

Knight 2:  The Dark Side (Where you discover your flaw and stumble because of it)

Knight 3:  Losing Things (Where you lose a mentor/lose faith/lose a hand)

And then the two optional:

Knight 4:  Get Back on the Horse (Where you get back into the path of Destiny)

Knight 5:  Balance (Where you face an Unbalanced Rival (a Walker in Darkness; like you but failing in their Vice) and defeat/befriend/mitigate them by your own control of your Vice)

Finally, you'd get some glimpses as to how this Quest Set can be arranged into Arcs that can be built into a campaign:

The Balance Arcs

Arc 1:  Luke Skywalker, A New Hope (Where the Jedi Knight finds that he is the only hope to keep the Rebellion from collapsing to the Evil Empire)

Arc 2:  Luke Skywalker, Among the Clouds (Where the Jedi Knight is Betrayed and Learns a Secret About His Past)

Arc 3:  Luke Skywalker, A Very Personal War (Where the Jedi Knight Must Find a Way to Bring a Star-Spanning War to a Close)

Arc 4+5:  Luke Skywalker, the Extended Universe (Where Other Things Happen - because I don't know the EU and can't really figure another whole Luke-centric Knight Arc out of the original trilogy)

So, if you lived in a world where Star Wars didn't exist but the Chuubo Star Wars game did, you could (By combining the Jedi Knight with the Smuggler, the Machine Conscience, the Rebel Noble, and (heck, maybe) the Treacherous Prince) approximate the entire plot of Star Wars just by going through those Arcs...  but you could also end up somewhere else entirely!  You'd have a general road map to a type of story without ever actually revealing more than a few landmarks of the story underneath.

Journey to the Outside

And the angel of the sun did fall. She fell, down, down, from the sky, and into the emptiness beyond the world, beyond the things that were good and real, out where only false and nonexistent things might live.

And then they knew what it was to know darkness, to know meaninglessness, to lose all hope. The world, the whole and breadth of it, knew what it was like to be without a sun.

But at the same time...

...and, perhaps, this was most surprising of all...

At the same time and for the first time, the emptiness beyond knew what it was to have a sun.

And the whole of it changed.

--- Journey to the Outside, a fan campaign for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

So, I've been working, off-and-on, for a while on an idea I've had to do a Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Epic Adventure campaign in the style of Journey to the West. I'm almost ready to get started running it, so I thought I'd share the stuff I've got so far. Instead of actually creating the mechanics for the characters, I'm giving descriptions and allowing the players to choose their Arcs on their own. I'll probably write up, at least, the starting Quests for each character, eventually, but I haven't gotten there yet. So far it's mostly just a list of characters and a bit of description for each one, and their variants.

Introduction

Jade Irinka is dead. The sun has fallen into the Outside and the world is reeling under a strange and alien sky. Each day a ball of blazing gas rises and sets, casting shadows and helping the plants to grow. But it is not the sun - and in their bones, the people of Town know it.

It is a mournful thing to live in a fallen world.

But there is hope. Or, rather, there is a chance for hope. Hope exists, but someone has to venture out into the Outside and get it. Someone has to go on a journey to save the world. And not just anybody: gods and monsters and villains… and also just some guy.

It sounds like it will be an Epic Adventure, doesn’t it?

Sidebar: Conventions

This campaign is an Epic Fantasy game featuring THREE Conventions, manifesting as level 2 Afflictions:

The stage may be small but audience is great

You are well known wherever you go

And

There’s always a place to stay when the weather gets bad

The most intriguing part? We ALREADY have a Best Friend! Who IS this guy?

Over on RPG.net, I’m in a PbP game of the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (an RPG by jennamoran) campaign Glass Maker’s Dragon (I play Natalie Coutourier, the Vampire Prodigy) [You’ll need to have an RPG.net account to click that link].

The game is being HGed by the...

The Light Seeker

Academics Skill: Scholarly Sports Skill: Clumsy Favorite Foods: Rice Balls, Sugar Cereal Blood Type: O Animal: Rabbit Age: 15 An Interesting Fact About You: You’ve never been further from home than School. Not even to Fortitude! Character Description ❀ You're just a simple kid, living in the Walking Fields. You like going to school, playing football with your friends that live down the lane, reading books, and listening to radio dramas on the wireless. Your parents farm strawberries for a living, shipping them to Fortitude where they are made into jam. You've never been very good at farming,but your dad doesn't mind, he has another son and two daughters to help him with the fields. You're a bit hapless and clumsy, the kid who tends to lose things, including himself, at the drop of a hat… which you lost. People say that you're unlucky, but you always seem to make it out okay. ❀ In your heart, you dream of being a great hero, traveling out of Town on a ship to explore the far shores of Big Lake or setting out to the edges of the Walking Fields and beyond. But those are just daydreams. In real life, you've never been further from home than School. You've never even gone on a trip to Fortitude! You have visited Arcadia (awesome!) and Old Molder (spooky!) but never for long. You tell yourself that one day you'll have your adventure. It turns out, your lucky day is coming up! ❀ Your next door neighbor is Ms. Kseniya, a sad-looking jotun lady who likes to sit alone on her porch and watch the storms come in. She always waves when she sees you, but she doesn't smile much. On summer nights you and your friends visit her and she tells giant stories from the time before people came to Town. You can tell she enjoys the company, she tries to teach you some of the Old Words that the Jotun know,though you usually don't have much luck. Once she taught you a charm to keep away hydras; it has always proven effective! Sidebar: Shake it Up! For an atypical Light Seeker experience, pick 0-3 of the following: ❀ Instead of Tripp, you can be Susan Numidia, a Rider girl. ❀ Instead of being strawberry farmers, your parents could be… ✶ … woodcutters. ✶ … cattle ranchers. ✶ … retired pirates. ✶ … ex-soldiers. ✶ … dead.

❀ Instead of living next door to Kseniya, your mentor is… ✶ … Ms. Numidia, your aunt, who teaches you the art of hiding who you are. ✶ … Mr. Calazas, a former masked wrestler, who teaches you his patented leg holds. ✶ … Mr. Carneleon, the mailman, who teaches you about origami and the value of a hand-delivered letter. ✶ … The Headmaster of the Bleak Academy, who, against your will, teaches you things you should not ever have to know.

Sidebar: Playing Susan Numidia You’re not just an ordinary boy living on your parents’ farm… you’re an ordinary Rider girl living on your parents’ farm. Besides having eyes of night and falling stars and… well… you know… you’re different from Tripp in a few ways. You’re a bit grumpier than Tripp. You’re bored with the Walking Fields and with your parents’ peaceful rural life. You have a feeling in your heart that you have a destiny out in the Outside. It’s where you’re from, even if you’ve never even seen the Outside. You’re still going to find yourself falling into trouble, but you’re going to be pretty annoyed by it. Your mentor is probably your aunt Bogud, a Rider witch who tells you stories of the Not and the Old War and teaches you the Outsider secrets of hiding who and what you are. ❀ Susan usually has the Magical Skill Changeling instead of the Jotun Cantrips skill. That’s not necessarily true, it depends on your mentor, but usually Tripp is all about weird ancient magics he only sort of controls and Susan is more focused on strange Bleak subterfuges.

A Fortitude Rat from the upcoming Tabletop RPG "Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine" by Jenna Moran.  This, specifically, is my character Remy Chiaroscuro, an Ace/Creature of Fable from an RPG.net game.

See the Kickstarter here:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1710667762/the-chuubos-marvelous-wish-granting-engine-rpg