first 5 faceless emojis are how your summers gonna go

So our last CoS session, Nil thought he would take us fishing as a way to relax after Sy was revived from being killed by Strahd. Nil then got swallowed by a giant frog and we had to go rescue him. Dorian was not impressed. This image then came to me in a vision.

I was having fun with the tgt memes and also made one for our D&D group's Ghosts of Saltmarsh party:

Joshua "why won't my friends let me tell them all about the horrors" Hawthorne, everybody

JUST A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME LEFT TO

MAKE YOUR BOOPS COUNT

For every boop I receive, I will give EACH of them a boop.

That's right, each boop you give to this blog translates to THREE pig boops. COUNT 'EM, THREE.

THAT'S TRIPLE THE BOOPS

DON'T DELAY ON THIS OFFER TO TRIPLE YOUR BOOPS RIGHT NOW

I sure forgot to post about this, but I painstakingly made the Curse of Strahd party in Hero Forge and had standee minis made of them for my players

Two of my friends came to visit from the US this past week and since our Strahd night had three of the four players physically prese t, I had a whole setup for our table and revealed these little guys and sent three of them off to their new homes. That Strahd session was SO FUN for a whole lot of reasons hehehe

I'm incredibly fascinated by the relationship between humans and dogs, so, recognizing that the animal in the photo is very much not a wolf, I looked up the photo to see if the dog might be related to of one of the many extinct pre-contact dog breeds. But it turns out that neither the dog nor the man is Native American. This image was actually taken in 1901 in eastern Siberia!

You can find the original image in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, where another pair of dogs is visible to the left (one of which is very obviously a domesticated dog based on its coloration).

The photo shows a member of the Yukaghir culture in eastern Siberia- I don't know a lot about them myself, but there is some great information available online from Dr. Irina Nikolaeva, a linguist who has studied the two surviving Yukaghir languages.

The dogs pictured are part of a Russian and Nordic dog group known as laikas, which includes familiar breeds such as the Siberian Husky and the Samoyed- though these would have been a landrace specific to that region.

One of the earliest photos showing a Native American with a wolf - unlike the myths created about wolves by settlers, Indians maintained a close and respectful relationship with wolves.

I finally sat down and decided on the wondrous form Joshua (College of Glamour bard) takes when using his class features. He decided to take the "Golden Songbird" title to its extreme! I had fun finding the balance between spectacular and frightening...not that Joshua wasn't already intimidatingly gorgeous before lol. When he brings it out, the area around him actually gets slightly darker, while he stays lit up by natural light, creating the illusion that he's glowing while drawing you into another world where he is in command.

[[WIP]]

[Gently holds my OC's face] GOD I missed you...!!

I swear it was only partly because I was obsessed with playing Baldur's Gate 3 that I hadn't been working on Symphony of the Damned😅 (okay...maybe it was mostly not just partly...but can you blame me!?) Anyway my health has been a lot better lately and that means I can finally do more of what I love...drawing comics!!

It's been a long time since I've Tales posted, but I recently saw a complaint about how shitposters playing up the "bad at cooking" characters' kitchen failures does the characters a disservice because it ignores the actual reason they're bad at cooking (i.e. Raine's scientific mind is willing to experiment with flavours that shouldn't be paired, Flynn has a poor sense of taste and heavily overseasons the food, Natalia has never cooked before and doesn't know how to follow a basic recipe, etc.) and dramatizes them as making blunders that they would never canonically make given the reasons behind their cooking problem.

As a fanfiction writer, I agree that it's important to understand the "why" behind characters' common traits so that you can write them accordingly. It's honestly really rewarding to get into these kinds of nuances, because it fleshes out not only the character but their relationships and interactions with others.

As a shitposter,

they are going to set fire to your kitchen and give you dysentery and there is nothing you can do about it

I finally filled out this chart of the current party in my Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign. It’s so much fun to take their incredible interactions and put them “on paper” like this- I really love my players and the dynamics they’ve created.

Truly, a family can be four disaster men and their adopted kobold child.

(The original source with blanks can be found HERE.)

I watched When Harry Met Sally yesterday so now I'm curious how everyone's parents met. Any and all stories are welcome!

I drew this a couple weeks ago based on that tiktok of the cat hiding under its dog buddy… this is titled “TFW You’re In A Threesome With A Pair Of Druids.” Cinaed and Carden would enjoy cuddling in wild shape. This is Alasdair’s life now.

From August-

I was really determined to learn digital watercolors, and a few failed attempts led to this piece of Alasdair and Carden (D&D characters) that I thought was a success. Maybe I’ll get back to this style someday, for the right project.

Not exactly a 2023 original, but back in July I took a relationship chart I’d made the previous year for our Curse of Strahd party and redrew it, updating and adding some new NPC companions we’d recruited since then. This is the relationship chart as of last session…… look out, Strahd. Just because the bard is in love with the fighter doesn’t mean he isn’t also coming for your “fiancé” too.

From May-

Cinaed and Sylras, beloved party members from our Curse of Strahd campaign, made a surprise appearance as NPCs in my Ghosts of Saltmarsh! A pair of siblings traveling the world on an educational tour, their grandmother suggested that they pay a visit to their father’s cousin who runs a mining operation down in Saltmarsh- and Manistrad Copperlocks was not happy to be stuck with a pair of troublemaking “kids” to deal with on top of the council drama surrounding Gellan Primewater. So, of course, the party was called in to escort them around town and keep them out of trouble. The former? Easy. The latter? Well…

This was an image I made for Saltmarsh, since it takes place 5 years after our CoS campaign. They’re so grown-up, and yet still so very them.

From March-

When I was working on NPC designs for my Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, I decided I wanted to make Anders Solmor not only very pretty, but also fashion savvy, so eventually I literally made him into a dress-up doll. Between running a successful fishing and merchant fleet, being active in local politics, and dating the new town paladin, a man has to look his best.