Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 15

Tinkering with Inkarnate — Standing Stone

I haven’t had as much time to use with Inkarnate lately, but I’m still tinkering with it here or there. Something I decided to try recently is creating some non-map art.

This is something I’d seen others do — creating landscapes and the like using Inkarnate’s assets. Obviously this isn’t what the toolset is designed for, so it’s a bit limited in what you can do, but I’ve still seen some pretty impressive pieces made with it.

I don’t quite have the talent for that, but I think it still turned out okay all things considered:

Song of the Month: Metric, London Halflife

Some people find winter depressing, but for me, spring is when my mood tends to really bottom out. The warmer weather makes my insomnia even worse, and the rain and the gloom wear me down.

This in turn makes me turn to gloomy music. Well, slightly more than usual, anyway. And few do that better than Metric.

London Halflife is one of my all-time favourites from them, or really any band. It’s one of only two songs I’ve ever listened to on repeat (the other being Live It Out, also by Metric).

Introducing Demonic Bloodline for Fifth Edition

My latest release on Dungeon Masters Guild is Demonic Bloodline, a chaotic and destructive new sorcerer subclass.

Demonic Bloodline sorcerers struggle eternally against the demonic fury in their hearts. This fury can be unleashed to grant them incredible power, but if used too often, it risks overwhelming them, consuming them from within.

It’s a high risk, high reward build that can be used to cause great harm to enemies, as well as harvest their life energy to sustain yourself, but it comes at a price. Many of your abilities deal your Demonic Fury damage to yourself, or even to your allies, as the price of maintaining them, rolling poorly with them, or using them too often.

Demonic Bloodline sorcerers also develop an iron will from the lifelong struggle to contain the rage of their blood, granting them the ability to turn failure into success on many crucial saving throws.

Demonic Bloodline also includes three new Abyssal magic items, featuring item cards by Eventyr Games.

And don’t forget to check out other DMs Guild I’ve worked on, including Valorie Goodwin’s Book of Heart.

Songs of the Month: Monowhales and JJ Wilde

I’ve neglected my blog so much lately I didn’t even do a Song of the Month for February. To make up for that, I’ll be posting two for March, both local talent.

First we have Toronto’s own Monowhales, whom I’ve featured before, with Out With the Old:

Second, we head to Kitchener with JJ Wilde’s Mercy:

Honestly, with how much JJ Wilde’s been blowing up (at least in my neck of the woods), I’m not sure if she needs the help, but with a voice like that, she certainly deserves the recognition.

Pacific Rim: The Black Is Solid Gold

I emerge from my blogging hiatus because I have something nerdly I need to gush about, and I just can’t keep it in.

Pacific Rim is a franchise I want to like more than I do. The fantasy of giant robots punching alien kaiju appeals intensely to my inner six year old boy, but the films somehow never managed to be as fun as that premise should be. They’re decent time-wasters, but largely forgettable.

I’m also not a big anime guy, so when I saw Netflix had produced a Pacific Rim anime, my reaction wasn’t exactly feverish excitement. But there really isn’t a lot to watch right now (I’ve been watching Resident Evil let’s plays on YouTube for lack of anything more interesting), so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The first episode of Pacific Rim: The Black is a bit shakey, but it showed enough potential for me to try another episode. It was then that the show really took off, and my low expectations were completely shattered. This show turned out to be incredibly good.

The Black takes place in the ruins of Australia after the events of both films (though prior knowledge of the films isn’t really required). The continent has been abandoned and left to the kaiju, but pockets of survivors remain.

Among these survivors are teenagers Taylor and Hailey, children of jaeger pilots who left to find help but never returned. Early on, they discover an abandoned jaeger, and… y’know, shenanigans ensue.

In a lot of ways, the arc of the show follows what you’d expect, but there’s enough surprises and twists to keep things interesting, and it’s in the execution of the show’s concepts more so than the concepts themselves where The Black really shines.

Going in, I saw that all the main characters were kids and assumed this was going to be a very sugar-coated, family friendly series.

It is not. The Black is a very intense, dark, and often brutal story that does not pull its punches.

But what really makes it special is that The Black doesn’t fall into the trap so much grimdark media does these days. It’s not all horrible, all the time. It’s not a show where every character is an unlikable monster. The challenges faced by the characters may be harrowing, but the characters themselves are good people who are worth cheering for.

The Black hits the exact tone I want in fiction. It’s dark, but it’s not cynical.

Not much else I can say without spoilers, but I will mention that I love how this show handles issues of abuse and PTSD. There’s some fantastic character work in this series.

My one major frustration with The Black is it’s yet another example of TV seasons becoming ever shorter. Seriously, seven twenty-minute episodes isn’t a TV season; it’s a movie with a bunch of credit sequences jammed into the middle.

I will say, though, that as much as I’m hungry for more of this show, its quality doesn’t really suffer from the shortness of the season, unlike most shows these days. They somehow managed to cram an incredible amount of plot, action, and character development into very little time without it feeling rushed.

I’m just glad season two is on the way. I’m struggling to even remember the last time a new show impressed me this much.

I haven’t been doing numbered reviews as much lately, but this is definitely 9/10 territory. There are a few weird choices here or there, and the short season is disappointing, but there’s so much to love that faults like that are easily overlooked.

Blog Revamp + Valory Goodwin’s Book of Heart Now on DM’s Guild

Good news, everyone: I’ve done a minor revamp of Superior Realities interface to make things a bit more relevant to my current endeavours. Most notably, there is now a “My RPGs” page to go with the My Writing page, showcasing my published tabletop game projects.

It’s a little spartan right now, but I can tell you there will be more there before too long.

On that note, I can also announce another newly released Fifth Edition product I’ve contributed to. Valory Goodwin’s Book of Heart is now available on Dungeon Master’s Guild!

The Book of Heart is a collection of player options focused on positivity, love, heroism, and all things good. It includes role-play guides, feats, magic items, and at least one new subclass for every official Fifth Edition class.

We made an effort to present a diverse interpretation of “good” to fit any taste. The subclasses range from the light-hearted and fun, like the Toymaker artificer, to grittier interpretations of heroism, like the Path of the Revolutionary for barbarians. Whether you want warmth and cuddles or a more pragmatic take on do-gooding, the Book of Heart has options for you.

For my part, I contributed at least a little bit to every area of the book, but the lion’s share of my work was in the realm of subclasses, where I submitted four:

College of Recovery: Heal the emotional traumas of your companions with this bard college inspired by dialectical behaviour therapy and other real world therapeutic practices. I even consulted with my counselor to ensure I was representing therapy accurately.Circle of the Forgotten: Unleash the hidden potential of nature’s most humble creatures and become one with the swarm with my most experimental 5E subclass to date.The Honored Fallen: Seek eternal glory through deeds of valor and self-sacrifice with this warlock patron inspired by Norse mythology.Oath of Truth: Uncover universal truth and cut through the lies of evil with this rational, scientifically minded paladin oath.

10% of all profits from the Book of Heart go to Doctors Without Borders, so you can feel like a hero outside the game, too.

Song of the Month: Efflo, Reincarnation

As always, I am happy to signal boost any new songs from the excellent Efflo.

Dungeon in a Box: Queen of the Rotting Jungle + General Update

I must once again apologize for my lack of posts lately. I’ve just been really struggling to find the spoons to blog these days, especially given all else that I’ve got going on. I would like to return to a regular posting schedule at some point, but I’m not sure when that will be.

However, it did occur to me that enough time has passed that I can now share some pics of my contributor’s copy of my first Dungeon in a Box adventure, Queen of the Rotting Jungle. (Click for full size — my apologies for the low quality mobile shots.)

A Fifth Edition compatible adventure for third level characters, Queen of the Rotting Jungle continues year three’s Voyage of Fallen Star storyline. In this adventure, the party tracks the latest shard of the Fallen Star to the exotic jungle island of Mahna Kio, only to find it overrun by foul plant growth.

To find the shard, the party must form an alliance with the Oahtu, a local race of tiny yet intelligent insects, shrink themselves down to the diminutive scale of the Oahtu, and brave the dangers of the jungle at insect scale.

Like all DiaB adventure boxes, Queen of the Rotting Jungle includes custom 3D minis, 2D Skinny Minis, maps, legacy cards, 3D terrain, and more.

If you subscribe, you will also get access to a libray of Wondrous One Shots separate from the main storyline, including another adventure by yours truly, Treasures of the Savage Lord.

There’s more on the way, too. The Voyage of the Fallen Star storyline includes a full year of monthly adventures, and another written by me should be launching soon. I’m also currently in the process of writing a second Wondrous One Shot.

Meanwhile, outside of the realm of Dungeon in a Box but still in the world of Fifth Edition, there should be another big release involving my work sometime in the next couple of weeks. And don’t forget to check out my Arrow Knight bundle for paladins on Dungeon Masters Guild.

Song of the Month: Dayglow, Can I Call You Tonight?

As I grow older and become set in my ways, I find it’s becoming rarer that I discover new music I like (that isn’t from artists I already follow, anyway). That’s what makes it surprising that in the last few weeks I’ve discovered several songs I like from several different bands I hadn’t heard of before.

Picking one was a tough call, but I decided to go with Dayglow’s delightfully melancholic Can I Call you Tonight?

Song of the Month: Metric, Lie Lie Lie

Considering how much an angry tangerine has been denying reality lately, this seemed like a good choice.

That and I was having trouble coming up with a song for this month, and this happened to pop up on my MP3 player.