I do #blog. My blog, #Doomslakers, has been around since 2014. I'm not consistent, but I've never stopped and I probably won't.
One thing I'd like to do is maybe move it to my website, but I'd have to learn how to do it and I don't have the spoons right now.
doomslakers.blogspot.com/2025/07/rand...
Color drawing of two-headed baboon demon (Demogorgon) holding a spellbound cleric he's about to eat. Did this for a Gary Con GM shirt.
Black and white drawing of a voluptuous, lovely, plump witchy vampire stepping out of her spider-webbed coffin. There's a black cat. I really like this one. Her name is Jubella Equinox.
BW ink drawing of a bearded warrior man with a big winged helm and big sword. Lots of images of swords and skulls. This drawing was inspired by Jennell Jaquays' classic drawing of Kos the God of Dooms from Deities and Demigods.
Ink and marker drawing of Smurfette standing on the beheaded corpse of Gargamel. Papa Smurf lies next to her like those women in classic sword and sorcery paintings. She's got a chainmail vest and a winged helmet. Azreal is on a shelf behind them licking his paws. There's a skull with glasses... the skull of Brainy Smurf!?
I draw a lot. #Sci-fi, #fantasy, #comics, #pinup art, #weirdo. Whatever I want, dammit. And I make #TTRPG stuff. #ThePool, #BlackPuddingZine, #Supercalla, #GOZR, #Doomslakers blog. That's a lot of hashtags!
Drawing of red devil holding a skull asking "who are you?" It is Zarp.
#TTRPG Death is fun in some games, but not necessary in all games. Even high risk adventure games. In #GOZR, you can choose if your PC dies or not. If you don't die, you are debased. You lose something, you are weakened. A fate worst than death for some gamers! I'm keeping this rule for #Doomslakers
Ink drawing of multiple adventurers in a dungeon battling two dragons with some troglodytes chasing behind them. Appears to be a cleric or wizard, a wizard, an elf warrior, a fighter, and a dwarf. All of these characters are based on the ones from the Basic and Expert D&D sets.
Before I settled on Black Pudding, I was going to call the zine Doomslakers. I completely forgot this. I was digging through archives and found this cover from August 2016.
#BlackPuddingZine #Doomslakers
a goblin drawing. holding spear shaped like a moon and shield with moon. Standing in snow.
Goblins are humanoid hobs spawned from filth. They travel in cliques. Here are six goblin cliques.
1: Fisher
2: Red Hand
3: Big Book
4: Bone Knife
5: Salt Lick
6: Underhill
#Doomslakers #Goblin
Cover of The Pool: a role-playing game by James V. West. Drawing of 3 six sided dice all showing 1 pip each.
I favor player-facing game mechanics. I designed GOZR that way, and #Doomslakers is that way too. And I chalked it up to the influence of Into the Odd and The Black Hack on my brain. But I designed #ThePool in 2000 and all the dice rolling is done by the players in that one. Oh how we forget.
A black d6 die with big fat white numbers on it so my old eyes can easily see. I need more of these. Fuck pips.
Ah, god dammit, I might have just changed #Doomslakers to a d6 pool system. Fuck's sake. I must have some kind of mental malfunction.
No, no. I'm quite positive I do. But at least I'm vertical and creative. I got that... at least.
Drawing of wizard or priest looking at a book with a weird doglike gargoyle next to them.
#Doomslakers is an adventure game. You are agents of an adventuring company in a corrupt city. Every adventure is a job you accepted. There's room to explore the moral landscape here. Or just do the jobs. I would like to create multiple adventures to support the game. But I'm still very early here.
Arthur clenched fist meme "Congrats, I'm happy for you"
Current thinking: Luck Points (metacurrency) and Hit Points = same thing. You spend Luck to do cool shit, but you also have to spend it to absorb damage or else you die or something. Running out of Luck is bad.
For the moment, this resolves a lot of my angst.
#Doomslakers #TTRPG
Wow. The moment I thought it would be a good idea to not use Hit Points in #Doomslakers #TTRPG I hit one of those "brick walls". Got lots of ideas. Been churning through them over and over. Conflicting wants/needs causing friction. Just part of the process. A mountain to climb. A bone to chew.
Beefy barbarian ink drawing, bloody sword, long black hair... yeah it's basically Conan. This was the image from Black Pudding #1, Sinewy Barbarian character class. Doomslakers is not based on D&D, so there are not classes. But I am 100% borrowing Troika's treatment of Backgrounds instead. So this guy shows up as a Background you can pick.
#GameDesign! Working on #Doomslakers, the #BlackPuddingZine #TTRPG... kept going round and round about hit points and damage. Decided to experiment. I removed HP entirely. And haven't mentioned damage. Have a notion about how it will work... is "raw dogging" apropos to this ill-fated idea?
Struggling with this in #Doomslakers. Every PC starts entirely ready to go, competent, able. But there is room for growth. So finding a nice way to keep that growth within bounds but also keep it freeing is hard. You have to trust people to play it in good faith, ultimately.
But honestly the only reason I'm posting this is because I was working on #Doomslakers and figuring out how I'm going to handle money and resources. So far I'm on the fence about it, which is not a compelling way to design a game. So I'm rethinking this aspect. 4/4
Rewriting some #GOZR spells for #Doomslakers. Silent Sentinel is a spell that creates a mindless guard for the night. Now it has a bittersweet element: If you crit, the sentinel gains sentience. But it still turns to dust at daybreak. The RP possibilities! I love making things up.
d66 BACKGROUND 11 Adventurer 12 Alien 13 Arcazian Wizard 14 Black Knight 15 Blind Guardian 16 Boola 21 Botten 22 Burglar 23 Chainmail Chick 24 Cottage Witch 25 Death Witch 26 Demodyne 31 Eyeball 32 Feral Knight 33 Goblin 34 Keeper 35 Kithix 36 Lazy Wizard 41 Lizz 42 Lucky Bastard 43 Medusa 44 Norg Wanderer 45 Orbi 46 Rat Bastard 51 Raven Heart 52 Rock Hardy 53 Seasoned Veteran 54 Shield Maiden 55 Sinewy Barbarian 56 Skeleton Warrior 61 Star Wizard 62 Summoner 63 Sword Slinger 64 Tower Wizard 65 Wee Savage 66 Werewolf Hunter
Here's the list of backgrounds for #Doomslakers, as it stands. Not final yet. There are 2 bastards on here, which is ok by me. But we'll see.
The astute #BlackPuddingZine aficionado will recognize most of these as classes from the zine.
#TTRPG
Black and gray in sketch of an angular female face
#Sketch #ArtSky
I haven't been sketching or doodling as much lately. It is mostly because I've been working on #Doomslakers, but there are other reasons. The inspirations come and go. I have anxiety about the world and my kids' future in it. We are all going through a struggle right now, I know.
Make a revision. I really wanted to put a figure in it and forgot to do it. Now it has a cool assassin climbing around that giant fixed pulley/sheave thing. #Doomslakers
Cityscape in gray and black. Weird fantasy city.
Here's a cityscape of Seapath. I drew it on the cover of a little cheap sketchbook. See how the grays get lighter from left to right? I'm using a brush pen with gray ink. As the tip loses ink, the tone lightens up. I thought that was a cool effect. #sketch #Cityscape #Doomslakers
One of my goals with #Doomslakers is to actually include adventures in the main book (gasp!! the hell you say?!) and publish extra adventures as well.
It's a goal. We'll see how it plays out. I can see it in my mind's eye but my mind is a lunatic.
BW drawing of a city scene with a tall spire and castle on top
BW city drawing, wide. Lots of weird shaped buildings. Tall, conical, pointy, spires.
The city of Seapath is at the heart of the #Doomslakers #TTRPG. Though the whole world of #Yria is discussed and implied, the game is set in Seapath. Check out #BlackPuddingZine issue 7 for the gazetteer.
Ink drawing of a wall of undead coming down on some poor shmucks with a bow, pick axe, and nothing. One is running in terror. This was the cover to one of Goodman Games' tournament modules years ago.
Working on #Doomslakers. Think I'll call hirelings "gillies". Fun word, no negative vibes I can detect. Not racial or nasty.
Was thinking of stealing "grogs" from Ars Magica, because it's a great word. But gillies is just as great.
Unless someone teaches me it is a malicious slur I'm unaware of.
Ink drawing of a knight in black armor with skull on chest and big sword. Below it is "Level XP Title HD"
From issue 1 of #BlackPuddingZine, the Black Knight. I recently converted most of the classes from BP to the #Doomslakers game system. Fired up right now to work on this game. I hope I can see it through to a complete game before losing steam. Got a slot coming up in my group to run it. #TTRPG
Boola old school character class from Black Pudding 5. LOTS of text. But basically she's a kind of den mother to animals who lives in the woods. She is nimble and can learn secrets from animals.
#Doomslakers I'm in the middle of converting most of the #BlackPuddingZine character classes to the new game format. I left many of them out of the roster because they don't line up very well with games I actually run. But the Boola is going in. I just like her. Non-combat, animal-loving, weird.
Pic of both volumes of Black Pudding Heavy Helping, in hardback. These each collect 4 issues of the zine + extras, arranged into categories.
Working on #Doomslakers, the Black Pudding #TTRPG, which is divorced from D&D. But I keep slipping into old habits of language and assumption, such as feeling the need to state things like a monster's attack as an "action". But I don't need to do that. This game isn't structured quite like that. 1/3
Color doodle of a wizard in a striped hat. "After all... I am a wizard. Don't forget that shit."
Converting all the #GOZR spells to the new #Doomslakers book and boy do I have a lot of utility spells and spells that break shit. Doors and locks don't stand a chance with a Doomslakers wizard around.
"Wormhole is filled with perilous caverns." Ink drawing of a cavern that is also a gaping mouth with a big tongue and bad teeth.
Enter the wormhole!
#Doomslakers #Yria #Monster
#WeirdoArt
Drawing of a sword with "Doomslakers" on the blade.
Working on #Doomslakers and embracing tropes I resisted in the past. Not only d20 vs. target, but also #Skills. Not since I played GURPS years ago have I actually liked the idea of skills. But they work for me in this context, which is the point of designing a game you actually want to play.
Bw drawing of skeletal robot with sword. d6 table of Style/Appearance. 1. Tattered, crude, rough. 2. Tall, lithe, delicate. 3. Solid, smooth, elegant. 4. Practical, logical, efficient. 5. Lumbering, direct. 6. Warm, charming, odd.
Working on this #Doomslakers game, I keep stripping things away. My criteria is "what would I use?" and "what do I like?". And it does come down to barebones die vs. number with conditional mods + player facing risk resources. And color. Tons of color. #TTRPG #GameDesign
Digital painting. Desert with big yellow sun. Figures in foreground with sword and a strange lizard pet. Background is a big opulent city seemingly made of sandstone and glass with towers and round forms. This was the cover of Million-Colored Sun by Hex Games.
Bw ink drawing. Fantasy tavern scene with many figures mingling. Barbarians, bunnies, wrestlers, puddings, chainmail chicks, etc. All the characters on this drawing appear in issues of Black Pudding zine.
Color digital drawing of a beat up robot in a tattered cloak holding a big honkin' rocket gun.
Circular digital drawing of a wizard. He's in an office chair, from behind. He's bald. He's using a magic spell (Bigby's Hand or something) to get doritos chips out of a bag. His computer is an old Tandy style "compy". Cobwebs. AD&D books on shelf. Funko Pop Gary Gygax. Rust monster toy. This was drawn for Gary Con.
I draw a lot of silly fun stuff, and sometimes rude bad stuff, and sometimes I do it on commission and often I don't. Depends on my mood. I also do #comics and I make #TTRPG stuff. #ThePool #GOZR #BlackPuddingZine #Doomslakers
Be well and do what you can to make the world better.
