Good Goldenagers!

Happy Force of July, everyone.

Over the last two weeks, I've returned to the main book, Our Golden Age.

I needed to work on a piece of art to switch from editing textboxes, pushing pixels, aligning squirrels, pruning widows, and harvesting orphans, and other terrible layout tasks ... back to, well, creatin'.

Way back in 2023 or so I took a shortcut with the introductory adventure in Our Golden Age. I reused an older piece of art, the Ministry Pyramid, to stand in for the Castle ("castle") in that adventure.

The piece is perfectly fine, but ... it doesn't fit perfectly.

However, I'd put off returning to it, because I knew what it would involve. It would involve days and days of drawing, simply because making a piece of this sort takes a long time.

Well, I pulled up the Our Golden Age file and reviewed it, checked what needs to be done (a bit of writing, a lot of layout and editing) ... and then stopped on this piece again.

Fine, here goes I thought to myself.

I exported a nice big 600 dpi spread, tossed it into procreate and sketched out what I had in mind. Along with space for the middle of the spread in the middle.

I thought I'd take 2–3 days on this piece ...

In the event, the full piece took me about 9 days of drawing to finish. Drawing these kind of wimmelbilds takes a long time, more so if I'm working digitally, and I can only draw for so long at a stretch before my body and brain give up. Now, once upon a time, I would pick up and draw more in the evening ... but these days those are claimed by others.

A couple of times I felt like a complete fool. Why. Why had I done this to myself?

But then I also thought ... well ... this adventure deserves to have a nice piece. It's set up as a skeleton adventure framework that introduces the setting and invites the referee and the players to invent together. It needs a piece of art to tether things together ... that's why.

At least that's what I said to myself.

I've also attached the Castle of Living Stone in full resolution for you to enjoy (see attachments).

I also decided to redo the introduction page from a dry "what this book is about" spread to something that takes proper advantage of the Face of the MKR:

And relegates the introduction to the next page ... so you get to imagine the kinds of adventures you'll run and how the book looks before ... y'know ... I blather about what the book is about.

Anyhow, now that the seal on the second book is cracked and painted over, it's time to tackle that. The next update will either be ... one more of the introductory adventures or the laid out six lands core of the book. One or the other.

Now I have to hurry up and hit send on this update.

Take care, and enjoy your July weather.

—Luka,
Seoul