Astaraye: Fabulous Fusilier

Yikes, its nearly been a month again since I posted last, I am getting lazy.

Anyway, here’s another new sketch of Astaraye, previously seen in her heroic form here, and now 550% more fabulous:

Well, see, recently in our third D&D 4th ed campaign in my setting Retoria, everyone finally reached Paragon. In Raye’s case, this has meant her becoming a Verunan Azure Fusilier. I then realised, after the fact, that their uniform on her would make her look hilariously fabulous, so I had to draw it. I even gave her the classic Lelouch/Zero pose and a Phoenix Feather in her Tricorn Hat to add to the fabulous factor already made pretty high by the double capes and uniform in general (however, she has dropped the long sleeves once worn by her sponsor, the pirate queen Lilliana LuGunther Veruna, in her youth).

Anyway, here’s the wallpaper crop:

In other news; I started a community succession game in Dwarf Fortress called Lakebones, the topic for which can be reached at Bay12 here. There is still space for about 3-5 supervisors and any number of migrants if you wish to join in. Don’t know what Dwarf Fortress is? It’s a hyper-real simulationist roguelike with the eventual goal of being to create and interact with everything in a fully proceedurally generated world. At the moment, the highlight is its Fortress Mode, but the Adventurer Mode part of it is certainly gaining in momentum. You can read about it at the Wiki here.

As for Aniventure Shimaihen, its still making good progress, and at current projections I should get it out before the New Year, though theres a growing chance I’ll have to slightly overshoot that and release in January 2013. At the moment, the bestiary is clogging me down a bit, and I may restructure it to be more lightweight (which, if I follow the idea I currently have means fewer creatures, but still about 80, rather than the original proposed 120~ish). In more positive light, the massive errata section is nearly done, and the mutations/create your own race section has basically been complete for some time; so I’d say its about 85% complete at this time, clocking in at around 120 A4 pages right now.

I’m also working on a companion Microsoft Excel character sheet for it with several (wonderfully complex) autocalculating features that I’ll release the full version of here at the same time as I let Shimaihen out. For now though, you can check out this Early Alpha Version 1A that has most of the complex bits done for the first page.

I’ll also get around to looking at the next anime season soon, probably posting the preview mid-December if I can manage it.

Lots of bits and bobs, eh? I guess that happens if you leave posting for a month! Anyway, stay tuned, thats all for now!

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HDD Divinity: The NepNep Solution

I have no idea what I was smoking when I decided upon that title. The subtitle sounds like it was ripped from some terrible Robert Ludlum novel, but alas… Anyway, yet another sketch-a-licious post today, covering, as you may have guessed, Neptune from Hyperdimensional Neptunia, everyone’s favourite anthropomorphised non-existent next-gen SEGA console that may have been competing in the fifth console generation vs. the 360, Wii and PS3 had SEGA not basically gone bust over the Dreamcast and been bought out by Nintendo. Here she is:

If you’ve not heard of/played the game, then to clarify, the left hand girl form (‘Neptune’) is her regular appearance, and the right hand (‘Purple Heart’) is what she transforms into as part of her HDD Divinity, so yeah, they’re the same girl, though Nep in particular seems to get a huge age/bosom UP from the process (which I always found funny, actually).

All of the consoles of said generation are represented with girls in a similar fashion in these games. Though, that said, the first game has a snore-worthy battle system that is frankly verging on terrible, though it has an amusing console wars plotline going on. The second game, MK2, lost a bit on the story department, but vastly improved the battle system and added in girls for the various handhelds (PSP, the DS twins, and Nepgear). The third is shaping up to hopefully combine the best of both of the prior ones.

Anyway, to speak of the sketch, I’m generally very happy with how it turned out, though I have to say their wonderfully chaotic and messy hair gave me alot of troubles to get it looking right! I spent a long time tweaking various parts, and as you can guess, ran out of dedication before I could fill in a background, especially as I came to the conclusion that I could do this electronically for the wallpaper version and in this case have it look even better, which I think I did. See for yourself:

Interestingly enough, Smart Blur/Posterization came into use again with this, though with different settings to Itsuki; and this time it was given a few extra blending options afterwards. I also colourized the N Logo, as the purple-ness didn’t come out too well when scanned. You can spot a few added binary streams I put in as extra layers too if you look closely. Cleaning the sketch and adding its transparency was a bit of a nightmare for some reason this time, but I think it was worth the effort.

Also, funnily enough I realised after completing the wallpaper that Neptune’s hoodie-dress outfit is her one from the original two games, whilst her Heart bodysuit is actually her revised one from the new third game (Neptunia Victory). Since her transformed form is pulling the original and beckoning (to the future?) its also ended up making an interesting (if entirely and hilariously accidental) statement about the progress of the series in general.

Anyways, stay tuned.

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Ladies of the Charm Society

Just another minor sketch post today. As per usual, once the new season starts in earnest, I’ll probably do a quick summary around the two week mark, but until then, here’s the ladies of Ukushima Gakuen’s resident Charm Society:

As per usual, click to see it full (huge) size.

Clockwise from the top, we have Itsuki Nono, Alice Wakamiya, Katsu Kazetsubaki, and Ana Kikazuchi. They are indeed from the same Ukushima campaign setting that this Aya picture is from. This is my current Aniventure campaign, an utterly insane school based gig loaded with references from other campaigns I’ve run in the past. These ladies are the unfortunate “victims” of one Ryuji Ichimoto, a notorious player and master of charm, whom I played in one of my friends campaigns. As he’s been thrown into a school setting, his natural first action is create his own school society that basically has no purpose except to provide members for his “harem”. 😀

However, as one of my players recently discovered, these ladies have actually formed a secret alliance behind the scenes to boycott his advances and protect other innocent girls from the madness of his charm powers. Of course, they conduct this sabotage through the medium of girlish squabbling and making his life hell. Poor guy.

All of them were given quite bemusing ticks and stereotypes that has made them fun NPCs for me to use. Itsuki is also a pilot in the Skydiving and Aeronautics Research society. She loves to troll the others, and with her exceptionally perverse mindset and bombshell figure, finds that rather easy. She was also blackmailed by the student council to spy on societies in exchange for treatment for her brother who has Leukemia (which she personally acknowledges as a cliche sob-story!).

Alice was the most recent recruit, who has not been integrated into the ‘circle’ as of yet, and is the one that bluescreens or shuts down in moments of social contact (running off and hiding three times in the beach episode). Given the fact that she’s cursed with being as cute as a button, and she looks like a fairytale heroine, this can be problematic at the best of times…

Katsu, somewhat broken by her failures with Ryuji, has turned to appreciating the finer side of the female form herself, and in the bargain, how it looks in her wide and extensive wardrobe of cosplay outfits. None are safe from being dressed up when she goes into one of her moods. Despite her questionable tastes, she is also the smart one with exceptional grades.

Finally, Ana has earned the schoolwide title of ‘The Iron Chef’. Not neccessarily just down to her prestigious cooking talents, but rather because she always seems to be swathed in various iron cookware. Some of it is in pocket dimensions, but even so, glomp her at your peril. She’s also the token ‘forehead’ girl of the group and seems to blush whenever anyone talks about frying pans…

I’m trying some wallpaper concepts, but I’ve got nothing to add at the moment. Perhaps I’ll update this post later, but for now I just wanted to get the base sketch out there.

Anyway, enjoy, and cya soon.

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Another DCSS spreadsheet update… and Longcat’s!!

Yet again, just a tiny little post, updating the spreadsheet once more.

After request for what other features that were wanted on the Crawl forums, spells seemed to be next choice. This took alot of work, as there 134 spells in Crawl that I had to chronicle (no kidding!), so here we are, 20 days later.

Check it out:
Spells are organised by Level, and then alphabetically. Notes are compiled mostly from personal experience and the Knowledge Bots. Each spell has all of its related skill groups, which books it is in, and the backgrounds that start with it (if applicable). A few tweaks were also made the base sheet to correct a couple of errors.

Get the New Version HERE!

Also today, I was dicking around making a new version of the eternal Longcat vs. Tacgnol wallpaper that I made way back in 2010. The old version can be found here. Here it is:
Tokyo is under attack once more! The main improvements are mostly to Tacgnol, who got some much better purple lightning and is being futilely attacked by a wing of F-22’s now. Different panorama, too, now the Tokyo Tower is up in flames!!!

I’ll admit that Longcat was mostly just cut and pasted across. He was pretty good before. Tacgnol now seems to be winning in this picture. And it seems that neither can aim correctly, still. 😀

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And here we go again…

I think I’m beyond excuses… another month, another post. I imagine its going to stay this way for the near-future since I seem to have so little time to give to blogging at the moment.

For one, I’ve been distracted by Xenoblade Chronicles of late. Damn good game. Add to that the fact that I have a new epic Space Opera campaign for Aniventure to be planning for, now titled Homura no Tengoku (Flame of Heaven) which I’m rather excited about. So yeah, I’m consumed by stuff to do already.

However, I will definately attempt to push out an Anime Preview as per usual, so don’t worry about that.

Oh, and as a side note, I’ve finally started typing up the supplement for Aniventure. This was previously titled ‘Magic & Mayhem’ or something dross like that but its gained a new title for now of “Aniventure Shimaihen” (lit. Companion Volume) since that is really what its going to be, with a bestiary of fantastic Japanese mythical beasts, a crapton of new powers, rules, archetypes, a new race and mutation system and more besides. Given the amount of content here, I don’t think you need to hold your breath in waiting for it. Its very much at the early stages still.

Additionally, I’m quite happy with the current beta of The Enemy Within, its polished enough and relatively bug-less, something that rarely happens, so I find it quite likely I’ll actually meet my crazy New Years goal of getting a 0.8 version of it out this year, even if its not as comprehensive as I would have hoped. But comprehensive can be shot for what I care, because a bug-free version is a hard thing to get done.

Right, so I’ve nattered about alot of positive progress in things other than blogging, so, as you know, that means I have to proceed to dump some artwork needlessly. 😀

Today, I’m giving an unholy trinity of lovely ladies, two of which are also in widescreen wallpaper size for your desktop enjoyment.

As always, click on them to get full sized! Lets begin!

Yep, its an Ilyana, whom I’m ever obsessed and fanboyish about, sporting a customised outfit with a propensity for excessive bolt symbols. I like to think my Dungeon Crawl version of her looks a bit like this. She mostly retains her standard colour scheme from Fire Emblem, mind you.

Interestingly, this was a sketch I originally did the outline draft for ages ago, but I was really unhappy with it, as I could tell I’d done something wrong but couldn’t place my finger on it. Anyway, it laid dormant until I came back to it just yesterday, where I promptly understood exactly how to fix it in a sudden revelation. Moved her head around, readjusted the arms, made the cape more billowy, and actually went on and coloured it.

I have to say she has larger eyes than usual for me. I typically attempt to veer away from the extreme end of anime eyes, and keep a semi-realistic shape. Still, for some reason, it works for her, so I kept it. She also somehow manages to make teal look like a fashionable colour. 😀

But, considering it was pretty much a disaster previously, a page I tried to ignore on my pad, the fact that I saved it moderately well is something I’m pretty chuffed about.

Anyhow, lets keep it up…
You may kiss her hand. Hurry up, don’t breach ettiquette! This is the Duchess-Apparent of Draskalmourie, the delectable Susie Drayke. Also probably known as Scourge of the Frozen North to certain members of my party in my long running Dungeons & Dragons. She has spent nearly all of the campaign chasing Darien Silverscale, the Prince of Silesia, until quite recently. Her obsessive antics have always been a pet favourite of mine, though for the characters, one of my PC’s whom is also interested in him also suffers tremendously, especially when they accidently went into an alternate timeline where the two Drakahn were married.

As a Drayke, she has a set of red eyes and a green tail, though since this is a head & shoulders, her tail is not visible here (check out other Drakahn if you like). Drakahn noble houses are very strict on their colourations, as veering away from the colours suggest the child is actually a bastard. Sapphire or Red eyes are prestigious, as they suggest a greater connection to their divine dragon ancestors; with the Great Sapphire Dragon God Rahlyah and the Golden Demi-Dragon God Dyia respectively. There are also other demigod dragons: Revynne, Arawne, and Zephyris, and all the noble houses can trace lineage and colours back to one of the five somehow.

I think thats enough Drakahn sociology. As for the actual sketch, this is one of my favourites. It was a new experiment in doing a haughty kind of pose and also the first time I’ve attempted a paper-fan. In case you were wondering, she is wearing a court dress, so her skirts, if it were to be present on the picture, would be the huge kind! 😀

Here’s the final one (which is not wallpaper sized, sorry):
Heh, its Carlie, making a re-appearance at last. I originally put up a sketch of her as one of my very first posts on the blog back in the dark ages of 2008, and gave her an update in this post in 2009. As noted in both those posts, Carlie is from Seiken Densetsu III, which I actually haven’t played in a while now, but remains one of my all time favourite SNES games.

Anyway, I figured it was about time to give her a nice update into the twenty-elevensies. I think I’ve improved just a little bit since her last incarnation, though at the time I no doubt thought it was teh sh*t and all that. Since she’s an elvish high priestess, I didn’t spare any effort on the weave bits, which took quite awhile. Embellished leather armour is actually hard to do, I think. Also spent ages getting her curls to look nice (like Jeanette’s) but I’m glad of the effort. Not sure about the rod thing; this was originally meant to be a flail (as Carlie uses) but I couldn’t get it to work and it still looks a bit dodgy, but I had got to point where I didn’t want to redraw her hand again, so she had to be grasping something. Oh well, still like the piece in general.

I guess, at some point, I need to also give the Romancing SaGa girls a new rendition! (actually I already did a Sara from SD3, but I can’t find her to scan her in… so that’ll have to wait)

That’s the end of this post for… WAIT! Nearly forgot! HAVE AN ALICE!!

Yessiree, Detarame recently broke 225K. I entirely missed 200K, hence the arbitrary selection of 225, but whatever. Thankyou for visiting me and being excited about the random crap I generate, and I apologise for my consistant lack of postingage, but what can you do, eh? It was fitting for Alice to be here, I think, since Marisa celebrated 100K quite awhile back.

Anyway, that is really it. Stay Tuned!

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More Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Junk

Yay, I’m back yet again. Stone Soup just keeps taking away all of my time (especially lunchbreaks!). Well, that and the fact that I just bought a 3DS, means I’ve had very little in terms of spare time as late remaining to dedicate to blogging (le sigh…).

Anyways, this time I’m putting up a Microsoft Excel Sheet that summarises alot of what I’ve learnt over the past few weeks of playing. It includes the following awesomely handy stuff:

Races, with base stats, XP Rates, and features all in nice handy charts. This gives an even better and more detailed version of what I’ve previously posted, all downloadable for easy reference.

Backgrounds, with Stat bonuses, equipments given, and biased comments about their usefulness from me.

Religions, including what each god likes, the benefits offered, and more biased reviews from myself. This is a slightly expanded (and corrected/updated thanks to the people at the Stone Soup Forums) version of the image table I did in a previous post.

Click Me to Download the XLS File.

You’ll obviously need a copy of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice or other alternative. It is made in Excel 2003, so newer excels might run it through their converters and all the schizkabang.

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Also this week, a further updated graphics mod; with more options still. Now includes options for:

Alice Margatroid & Flandre Scarlet from Touhou

Several things also improved:

Much better version of Ilyana costume!

Improved Drakahn!

As well as several other fixes, more clothes in general and suchlike.

Get this updated File HERE

Again, you need to put it in:
X:\Program Files\Crawl\dat\tiles
Where X is your drive; and assuming you used the default path; but regardless, it’ll go in the dat\tiles\ directory wherever it is.

That’s all for today. I might get around to a midseason anime post soon, though that’s already slightly late!

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