Funded! (Also, Meet the Oni)
about 6 years ago
– Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 07:31:38 PM
We’re funded in less than a day! My general paranoia kept me from assuming that we’d succeed, but we’ve now raised enough to definitely be able to publish Twilight Tales. Now we just need to see what stretch goals we can hit, and we’re well on our way to the first one, a “Kappa and Oni’s Excellent Adventure” adventure scenario by T.S. Luikart. I pretty much just told him “We made this art, please make a scenario to go with it so it isn't just a goofy piece of art,” so I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.
Time to introduce another mononoke! This time it’s the oni, represented by Towa Douji:
While you could always make boy characters in Golden Sky Stories, the signature henge in the rulebook are all girls. Towa Douji is the first male GSS signature character, though not the last. Oni are a type of ogre from Japanese folklore, noted for their red or blue skin, horns, and in some cases single or triple eyes. You might know of them from anime interpretations like Lum in Urusei Yatsura or the two who appear in hell/the Home For Infinite Losers in Dragon Ball Z. Mythological oni are typically huge and muscular, so in terms of his physique, Towa Douji is playing against type, even if he has a pretty oni-like personality, in a friendly, GSS-compatible kind of way. He hides his true feelings (poorly) behind a mask of bluster, but he means well and genuinely wants to make friends.
Oni have powers that let them show off their great strength, and weaknesses that can make them aggressive and socially inept. You can reskin the oni to be any number of creatures that are physically strong but lacking in subtlety, whether oni variants like the thunder gods and Niou, or simply using those stats to make a bear henge.
Off Like a Rocket (Mostly)!
about 6 years ago
– Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 07:22:46 AM
We're nearly a third of the way towards our $6,000 goal in less than an hour, which is pretty incredible! Once again we're deeply grateful for your support of this wonderful game.
Now for a little bit of awkward news. Somehow I'm not surprised that an issue popped up right after we launched the Kickstarter, but here we are. Basically, I messed up when I set up the shipping costs for the Longtime Resident level (which of course is the basic one to get a physical Twilight Tales book, and thus easily the most important for this Kickstarter) so that the "Rest of the World" shipping charge of $22 (which believe me, I wish we didn't have to charge for overseas shipping) also applies to the U.S. I've contacted Kickstarter's support, but they're closed for the day, so in the meantime I set up a "Longtime Resident (Fixed)" pledge level with the correct shipping options. If you live in the U.S. and you were put off by the $22, there's a corrected option now, and if you decided to pledge anyway, please go ahead and change your pledge and save yourself the $22.
Anyway, so that I don't spend this whole post kicking myself, I'm going to go ahead and do the first of a series of posts talking about the five types of mononoke included in the book.
First up are the michinoke, represented by Onbu:
Michinoke are "road monsters," creatures that people encounter while traveling on roads and other paths. They come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, including the karakasa obake (a strange creature that looks like a bamboo umbrella with a single leg coming out the bottom) and rokurokubi (who look like girls with very long necks). While they do greatly enjoy scaring people--and have several Powers that help them do so--they also tend to be a bit lonely, being creatures that wander dark roads by themselves. As you'll learn from the intro comic in Twilight Tales, Onbu really just wants to make friends, particularly friends who will give her piggyback rides.
Michinoke account for some of the most charmingly weird youkai in Japanese folklore, and while they're perhaps even more whimsical than usual, they fit into the same general archetype of creatures that lead travelers astray as the will-o-the-wisp. While they have a lot of powers that can get someone lost, they also have the Safe Path power that can guide someone just where they need to go.
