#not content

First week together vs one year married

I find it very funny that the clothes available are so normal compared to their usual outfits. If I dress Asmo like that, he'll kick me out of the house.😂😂😂

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People have lived and thrived outside of the law for as long as there has been law.

Fuckheads in white collars screaming false science and passing laws can be as small as you make them.

Tenna:

I'm going with the "Tenna was a family-friendly variety TV show host in the underground in the days before Mettaton" variant. The royal family loved the show and even got Tenna to do in-person live performances for the kids' birthday parties a few times. Nowadays, Flowey feels about Tenna the same embarrassed disdain that me and my friends felt about Barney the Dinosaur in the 2nd grade.

Spamton:

Spamton delivered paper mail, mostly letters and official notices. He was well-regarded by most. But when Undernet, phone correspondence, and Email became more common, paper royal notices and letters became less so, leaving Spamton with less work. He started advertising a willingness to distribute more types of messages to the masses, but the only ones who took him up on the offer were those who wanted to send out what we would generally consider junk mail. That became what he was associated with, and that's when his reputation started to go downhill. Lots of monsters got rid of their mailboxes and stopped accepting mail that wasn't hand-delivered by the person who wrote it. Sans and Papyrus are sort of seen as weirdos for still having mailboxes. (I think that's plausible? I think you don't see any mailboxes besides those two, or if you do it's pretty uncommon? If I'm wrong please correct me)

Other Character Relationships:

Based on Gerson's "Undyne-beat-up-the-mailman" aside, I like the idea that Spamton was the mailman in question. It was back when things were just starting to fall apart, so Spamton was very unamused and unwilling to humor her. Nowadays, whenever someone mentions Captain Undyne around him, he brags that he was her first teacher and probably the one who should get the credit for her ascent.

The two of them consider their garbage store a worthy rival to Bratty and Catty's enterprise. Bratty and Catty briefly mention seeing "some weird old guys totally glaring at them" but otherwise have no idea who these losers are.

If asked, Tenna will go on and on about how violent and sensationalist and trashy Mettaton's TV program is, nothing like the quality and appropriate TV of his time. Spamton concurs that Mettaton is style-over-substance and emblematic of everything that is wrong with modern technology. (They both are secretly convinced that the other has a crush on Mettaton and are very insecure about this)

Various Tidbits:

I really like the quirk of Spamton phrasing all of his dialogue in letter format, it makes for good art, but it feels too cumbersome for me to write so, for my fics, instead my concept is that he has verbal inserts like DR Spamton, but they're phrases from mail. Mostly junk mail, but he also occasionally quotes old letters. He does like using letter format whenever he leaves a note for anyone, though.

Spamton exclusively calls human souls "heart-shaped objects." I don't know for complete certain why, but for some reason he doesn't like calling them souls. Maybe it's a fringe religious belief that human souls are fundamentally different than monster souls to the point where the word "soul" is incorrect? It's mostly just a particular quirk of his phrasing.

Back in his earlier days, Spamton did have it in his head that it might be nice to kill a human and get their heart-shaped object, becoming big and relevant. However, around when he met Tenna, he decided it wouldn't be worth it to lose himself. Tenna, with his fond memories of the original fallen human, would never want to kill a human, though he feels conflicted that that pits him against King Asgore's apparent wishes. The two of them do fight the human, but it's very clearly just to keep them hostage while they advertise their store at them.

When it comes to the fantasy and sci-fi genres, art has always been a large part of what really draws me in sells the experience for me. My first TTRPG was 3e D&D and I remember staring at this fantastic art that I'd never really seen before because up until then I'd been into stuff like dragon ball Z and marvel which were decided different, and it really sold me on the idea that the game was different than anything I'd played with before. The art of Wayne Reynolds and Todd Lockwood really made my introduction to D&D what it was, and I've found that I've felt similarly about a lot of games that I've played which is why I'm so fascinated with just how the visual aesthetic can change how we view a piece of media.

Let's use the OSR movement as our prime example of what I'm talking about here. More than just mechanics, OSR games are attempting to sell a very specific experience, and part of that experience is the art. Would DCC be what it is without the art of Doug Kovacs and Peter Mullen? If the book was reduced down to text, how differently would we interact with it? Because the games that systems like OSE and DCC and Shadowdark and any number of other OSR games are trying to emulate were colored by the works of great artists like Erol Otus and Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley they look a very specific way and that helps us to more quickly know how we're supposed to interact with them, like a visual language. How does changing the visual language affect the game then?

If we're working under the visual language presumption, then art kinda signposts important elements of a system to prime us for what the system is trying to accomplish. Think of this like pre-loading data for a video game you've pre-ordered so that you can more easily finish the download on launch day. If you know how to speak the visual language of a genre, then just seeing the art can tell you that the game will probably lean more rules-light with room given for the DM to make rulings, success will be found through player skill rather than character skills, and it will be dangerous but largely fair. That's a lot to be able to impart on a reader with just a glance, so in changing that visual language I think there needs to be an attempt made to impart knowledge of those core concepts in another way. In my case, I've been pondering how one might marry art styles in such a way as to keep that visual language alive but also make the experience feel fresh. Right now, I'm really liking the idea of fantasy pixel art.

I've spent a great deal of time on developing a style of pixel art that I quite like, and am considering how fitting it would be for a TTRPG. I've seen a couple systems that lean into the pixel art style, but none of them have ever taken themselves very seriously so is it a novel idea, or just a bad one? These are screenshots from one of my video game projects but kinda illustrate what I have in mind.

I am merely going off small clips and wiki pages for content which I can try to keep doing but I feel I'm missing out😅

Thanks y'all!