it’s ready…
some 10+ years of collective work in this book before me… softcover of course, but a quality time i know this’ll give one day. my first indie ttrpg, i welcome myself proper to the wonderously horrific land of Mortasheen!
i’ve just been flipping through the random pages at my own leisure so far, reading up on the monsters and world and things and no closer to understanding the game’s technical gameplay ‘language’… in due time though, i will.
here’s some of the personal standouts i found among this book’s pages, below the cut for spoiler reasons if anyone cares about that. this is also just gonna be a long read so strap in.
Continue? yes. Again though, big-ish spoilers.
Maladirge is a fine monster itself, and judging from its presence in marketing material among one of the “mascot mon”? I can’t get over its expression though. I look at this and I just hear that one snippet of ‘freeform jazz’ as Patrick instructs Squarepants on how to testosterone.
Doomboros is a classically devilish monster, this hunched, gaunt figure weighed down by its own gargantuan horns… but it’s scared. Scared of the smallest bugs, birds and mice, to say nothing of other monsters or, heaven-forbid, people. And of course it projects this immense terror onto the monsters around it through the psychic waves of the brains stored within its horns.
Pushed to its limit or sensing one of the few it feels safe around in mortal peril, it will forget its fear and enter a mad frenzy. A quaint monster and another one from the old archives I’m glad to see here.
One design “rule” I remember hearing about Mortasheen’s monsters is that each one should be interesting in the way that you can imagine them being the stars of their own horror film. Annihilgator brought this piece of trivia to mind as soon as I saw it. Something like this could easily be the face of a bad-CGI DVD or the memorable capstoning boss of a level or entire game. Mortasheen of course demands a higher bar be met.
It’s a pretty traditional design as far as Mortasheen’s concerned, being big, scary and toothy and similarly not offering that much besides raw, primal power, but I suppose every setting needs a big scaly powerhouse and this is a fantastic depiction of one.
Not a monster, but the ringleader and dean of a Mentalist psinet and college. I suppose these kinds of influencer characters are more common in media now than ever, but I’ll always give props if I can imagine myself being among their fanbase and @poppygweasel is likable enough.
Hostess of a truly gargantuan mental… I guess the equivalent of a whole website? She’s the dean of the Infinite Interneural Wonderworld and entertainer of many, pstreaming various skits, comedies, dramas and glorious combat daily… I plan on being a Geneticist myself, but she wouldn’t be a bad role model.
Apparently I didn’t have too much left to go in the first post, this is the last one I’ll speak of for now… When I heard we’d be getting a new legendary Boo Man, I was a bit skeptical? But seeing her myself, she’s hit it out of the park.
Weap I believe is based on classical princesses, with the dress, the pointed hat and trailing feather(? is that what that’s called?) at its end. But she also brings to mind types of flowers and mourning gowns, befitting her state of perpetual sorrow both experienced and inflicted. Just splendid character design.
Fittingly for her “princess in a castle” theming is the only truly consistent companionship she has, with the above-mentioned Withern.
…
I’ll find more things to say about this game as I scrutinize its lore and world and inhabitants and actually study what all these funky words do, but i suppose this was my own “first pass” of the book as I tend to do with these. Splendid stuff courtesy of Bogleech and their gallant team, here’s hoping this becomes a mainstay, though i know it’ll be within my own collection and heart.
Please look into getting this book yourself if you have any interest at all in weird, wonderful and spectacular creature design or worldbuilding. It’s practically Wojcik’s life’s work at this point and, I believe, a 350-something page testament to the overlooked, “yucky” creative beauty of nature, the fiction that ponders impossible… and of what’s been lost, and what might be left to lose from our blue planet.
