Category Archives: Journal

This is me rambling about me, mostly. Current stuff: home, family, my head’s on fire… that kind of thing. This also includes everything imported from LiveJournal.

FanX Typecast RPG Report: SO MUCH FUN

I don’t know if video exists¹ beyond this short clip from Brian McClellan’s phone, but for four hours on Thursday I role-played as a bard, while loosely interpreting the game on an overhead projector.

It was a blast. Odrak The Bard fails successive survival and constitution checks on his trip through the swamp. The berries were not supposed to go in his mouth, but they did.

It was also terrifying.

No preliminary sketches, no templates, no “undo” function—I drew on paper, with markers, and we put all the art up for quick sale, proceeds going to the UCASA charity. For just $2.00 audience members could grab one of my sketches AND drop a suggestion in the jar, assigning an action to an NPC named Gallant.

Gallant was a dog. I decided it would be fun if Gallant was that rare, hardy breed commonly known as a were-poodle. It was a risky decision, and during the course of the evening Gallant looked more and more like a demonic sheep².

None of the pictures of Gallant stayed on the table long enough for me to capture them with my phone. One particularly memorable sketch featured Gallant, airborne, urinating on the paladin’s sword. Per the audience’s suggestion, of course. That’s not a thing I’d just DRAW³.

The Typecast RPG Newsletter has lots of pictures in it, and will have many, many more as the game continues. Subscribe here!


¹ If you were there, and have video, send it to @TypecastRPG on Twitter or Instagram so we can share with the world.
² In the future I’ll be grabbing reference art for poodles AND sheep before starting, to make it easier to (HA!) tell the sheep from the fluffy, fluffy wolves.
³ Then again, I did draw a nude-but-for-boxers tiefling sprawled all come-hithery on a petal-dusted bed, so perhaps my standards for these things are lower than any of us thought.

TypecastRPG, Tonight!

Watch me tonight at 9pm Eastern on Twitch

Tonight’s episode is the next installment of the Gods of Vaeron story, using the D&D 5e ruleset. Dan Wells is our Dungeon Master, and the players will be Natasha Ence, Mari Murdock, Charlie Holmberg, Ethan Sproat, and Howard Tayler (←me).

I’ve been experimenting a bit with sketch cards during the game sessions. It’s possible we’ll have our art cam up and running tonight. Eventually these cards will be giveaways for our Twitch subscribers. It’s possible we’ll figure THAT out tonight, too, and start putting things in the mail!

Nineteen Years

Today, June 12th, 2019, marks the 19th anniversary of Schlock Mercenary on the web. The comic has updated daily, every day, without fail, for nineteen years now. Not because I’m a machine, but because I plan ahead, and have always had smarter people than myself handling the automation.

Still, nineteen years. That window is large enough for there to be people who began reading the comic when they had no children, and who are now grandparents.

I don’t think that’s likely, because the starting audience was not large, but that’s what nineteen years looks like.