IOTHERA, &c.

commission for @wrrdbrrd of valentina zavarova

commission for @maxine-tarnow of perpetua chaugh

i designed a d&d-ified version of tsuruko (of titanic rp fame) as a tiefling artificer for our forgotten-realms-but-in-the-1920s d&d campaign. and also her robot, because i specced her into the robot-friend subclass of artificer

she was the sixth officer of the S.S. Hesperides, a small and slightly rickety liner on the sword coast-kara-tur run which foundered when it fell into a strange oceanic netherworld. as a junior officer, she was put in charge of the single lifeboat that was successfully launched before the ship's hull was torn apart. after seeing the handful of survivors in her care to safety, she's looking for a new berth on a new ship to explore the mysterious seas she washed ashore from

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For the first time in quite a while, I'm open for commissions! Get 'em while they're hot! (or something like that)

I am in control of my emotions! Control of my em- I am an officer- an officer- my duty- my duty-

-Spock, Star Trek, S1E4, The Naked Time

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.

-The Sympathizer, Nguyễn Thanh Việt

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

-John von Neumann

i drew my shadowrun character and also all of my shadowrun character's Stuff, because i always like it when ttrpgs just let your character accrue dozens of extremely specific items. the end result is basically 'what if my #the aesthetic' tag was an elf decker'. so here's Dead Key, and also Dead Key's car. it's a ford americar that sucks. she named it 'steve'.

The daughter of some middle-management types at Xiao Technologies, Victoria Tsang Yuen Kai's early life was dull, uneventful, but more or less comfortable. Things began to change when Renraku, keen to get a foot in the door in Hong Kong, enacted its hostile takeover of Xiao. Slowly-- slowly-- but surely, the family's position began to deteriorate as Renraku employees were favored over Xiao's leftovers. The elven Tsang family was particularly vulnerable; Renraku was notoriously hard-nosed regarding non-human metatypes. Still, the family hoped their daughter's technical aptitude, sufficiently nurtured, would be enough to maintain the family's fragile prosperity. To this end, she was sent to a corporate university to acquire the skills-- and make the connections-- for a career in one of Renraku's various Matrix projects. The connections she made, however, were political-- and increasingly radical. She eventually became part of a hacktivist collective of idealist deckers vaguely associated with Hong Kong's pro-democracy 9x9 movement. The collective tried to build a little digital utopia in the Matrix. Security was a priority; a hotbed of anti-coporate activists seemed a natural target for the corporations that control the grid. They were well-fortified against any cyberattack-- but were extremely vulnerable to a physical one. No firewall in the world can prevent a corporate operative from kicking your door down and shooting you in the head. Such was the fate of every single member of Victoria's collective-- aside from Victoria herself. Her parents used the very last of their influence with Xiao-Renraku to protect her and have her smuggled out of Hong Kong. Wracked by survivor's guilt, her idealistic opposition to corporations now tempered by a deep-seated grudge, she eventually washed up in Seattle, SIN burned and working as a shadowrunner under the handle Dead Key.

as a bonus i also did a little shadowrun returns/dragonfall/hong kong-sized portrait of her:

even though it's only june i'm already figuring out what 2026's bespoke titanic lesbian is going to be like

it's that time of year again-- time for me to create a bespoke edwardian lady to put onto the rms titanic and see whether the capricious gods of the sea decree that she lives or dies

i drew my character from a star trek adventures game @wrrdbrrd is running, captain koria tel

the elevator pitch for her is that she was a very cautious, by-the-book, model starfleet officer who was joined with the hot-headed and free-wheeling tel symbiont when she was already in her forties-- circumstances made possible in the aftermath of the dominion war, when the trill symbiosis commission was forced to look outside the narrow confines of the initiate program for prospective hosts following the death of a disproportionate number of joined trill in the war