Annotations Every Day - Written by T Campbell & Flo Kahn - Illustrated by John & Jason Waltrip
Guilded Age
The Saga of the Working Class Adventurer – New comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!
Novae
KaiJu
A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
Sakana
Mad Rupert
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Monster's Garden
Ash G.
Champion pit fighter Kilo Monster was content to spend the rest of his days tending to his quiet garden alone... until he met a curious robot girl and her human family.
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
The Messenger
indui
In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
Angel's Orchard
Harry Bogosian
After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Three Panel Soul
Matt Boyd, Ian McConville
It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
Lies Within
Lacey
Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
Heroes of Thantopolis
Izzy Strontium Hall
A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
The Weave
Rennie Kingsley
A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
The Golden Boar
Magnolia Porter Siddell
A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Ozzie the Vampire
Eric Lide
Ozzie and her best friend Kimmy are your average everyday normal art students – except one is an immortal vampire with superpowers and the other possesses a magic talking grimoire. Also they have to save their town from a demonic invasion.
Peritale
Mari Costa
A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
Freakshow
Scotty
A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
Little Tiny Things
Clover
What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Edison Rex
Chris Roberson
The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Augustine
Winter Jay Kiakas, Windy
August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
Guilded Age is co-written by T Campbell & Flo Kahn, and illustrated by John Waltrip. Site design by Samantha Kyle. Fonts by Blambot.com.
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Privacy Policy
Guilded Age does not claim ownership of any of the corporate branding that appears in this comic, nor does it claim any affiliation, partnership, or endorsement of any kind.
They are used strictly as an artistic choice for the set dressing of the comic.
They are used strictly as an artistic choice for the set dressing of the comic.
Ho. Ly. Shit. That’s quite the bombshell to drop. The berserker curse exists cause Byron’s player wanted a really cool but tragic backstory?
Basically, you come to the table with the backstory for your PC. Your GM raises his eyebrows, unconvinced by some backstory. Since you insist, the GM goes with “all right, throw it in”. Since you annoyed him, your GM will end up deconstructing every little detail of your PC backstory and rubbing it in your face.
Unconvinced by some backstory details
Now I realize that Brother Homon is actually the worse kind of NPC, he’s the dreaded GMPC.
You win a free reroll (I can hardly award internets, but I’ll use what I can)
certificate attached:
http://www.d20monkey.com/comic/holiday-break-2015/
The Marty Sue, dread curse of the gaming table… and sign that you need a new DM. I wonder if our protagonists can help with that…
When we saw the interviews with the Five before they went in the tanks, I wondered if this would be a story about what role-playing means to us. You could see that each of the Five had some particular interest they wanted to explore, in depth.
Incidentally, when I create a character, I often give them a backstory that involve parents who are alive and well and more or less supportive of the character. It confuses the heck out of people.
It’s the greatest when a character decides completely of their own volition to do whatever adventurer thing it is they do. Especially in the face of loving parents. “We’ll support you in anything, you’re such a great child.” “Nobody in this town understands me!!!”
For some reason that reminds me of Little Britain, specifically the wee town of Llandewi Breffi.
I love when players do that. It gives me murder fodder for the big bad.
“By the way, the worst thing cursing your world came about because your hubby needed a tragic backstory.”
That’s about as bad as someone pulling the drama tag.
The drama tag for this story got pulled a LONG time ago.
That’s about how RP tends to go…
“You’d think that the worst cursing would have been in Frigg’s backstory. But no, it was Byron.”
+1 =)
I AM YOUR GOD, AND MY NAME IS NOT WALT DISNEY.
HR’s expression in the second panel is creeping me out, precisely because it looks so benign, maybe even kindly, on the surface, as though he thinks he’s being a benevolent god by telling her this.
*second-last panel
I would vote for him to be President.
In a way, he thinks he is. He did make a fun and wonderful thing, after all! Thousands of lives, wonderful vistas, love, joy, families, all these things started with him…just…there are some…bugs, in the system. and, well, the whole war thing, but that’s there to keep things interesting, is all! who wants a boring story, anyways?
Seems like a classic example of Tragic Byrony.
There’s nothing in this game that can’t be solved with fire and Byron.
So it was “Byron’s” fault then eh. Interesting.
fault is kind of a strong word. I’m fairly certain that Byron didn’t anticipate that the NPCs in the game would turn out to be real people with lives of their own.
Just shoot the crazy guy, Syr’nj. I know your first instinct is to gather information, but you’ll be better off for it.
I second the motion.
All in favor, say ‘Aye’.
Eye
Aye
Wait, why does it sound like the Five, their Sepia Selves, were in on HR’s evil scheme?
“We get to be campaign writers? Sign us up!” Of course, they’re less campaign writers and more Cortez’s first wave of destroyers of civilization, but eh, six a one.
Well, they had to be in on it to some extent. It’s not like he kidnapped them and put them in those tanks.
But how much influence on actual world-building they’d get to have, I don’t think even HR knew that.
I think their consciousnesses are stuck in the tanks. He may even have tried to remove them, only to find them bound to the game. He might even be trying to kill them to get them *out*.
I think it was mentioned earlier on, when it seemed HR was just covering an experiment that had gone wrong rather than going full-blown villain, that they’d tried to extract the Five and failed. The impression I had at the time was that there were signs pulling them out might kill them – but it might also be that once they were in, pulling them out would do too much damage to the project.
The world-building magic is clearly interactive.
HR is making things out as if Arkerra was entirely written and created as a computer game, but it makes one wonder- even with the de-rezzing/deleting stuff of Cyberia, with 5 volunteer players VR-locked in life-support tubes- if HR might actually be wrong and Arkerra was a real world on its own and he was simply some sort of magical invader tapping into it.
After all, even he doesn’t understand the magick he uses. Remember: “I keep adding two plus two and getting Orange.” http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-12-page-19/
It’s an idea I’ve come across before – somebody creates a fictional world, a lot of other people become invested in that world, and then that world comes to life and starts existing in its own right as a parallel universe. The creator (or co-creators as the case may be) retain some ability to control events through their writing (or whatever)… but on the other hand, is the world expressing control over the creator by influencing their writing?
The Five do appear to have had privileges to have world-influencing backstories most players don’t – Syr’Nj herself, for instance, is a) a race that probably wasn’t available to players before the wood elf expansion, and b) she got to be royalty of that race. It’s possible that the wood elves simply didn’t exist in the game before her player got podded. I’d be willing to bet Frigg’s player is responsible for the Sisterhood, too, and Gravedust may be responsible for dwarves just as Syr’Nj is for wood elves.
HR seems to be aiming to get creator privileges while actually living inside the universe… a position that does effectively make him godlike. However, it might prove that now that he no longer has code access in Sepiaworld, he’s lost those creator privileges. He’s written himself in with a lot of powers, but I have a suspicion that he’ll find out that he doesn’t actually have the control he thinks he does.
Or maybe giving him back those privilges is what Carrol is meant to work on before she gets in?
I predict a “the cake is a lie” moment for Carol.
Specifically the Caroline kind.
I doubt dwarves were invented by Gravedust, considering they’re an integral part of the Savage Races, though he was able to bend the rules by “faction-changing” without the requisite race change as well. Syr’Nj was able to play a Wood Elf despite them not being available yet. (though Shit Elves seem to have been, since I think E-Merl is just a Shit Elf played as a half-elf. There’s plenty of half-things running around on RP realms as it is)
The Cult probably existed at the beginning of the game, but it was Byron’s player that invented the berserking curse. Since he was plugged in, though, it became a “reality” applied to the cultists. First they were just annoying mobs to murder in quests. Nameless, faceless, etc. Then berserking came into the game, Brother Tom started using it against the infected and then started infecting people, now it’s the Big Thing of the Expansion.
Example, for the first two years or so, the (mindless) undead, Cult of the Damned, etc. were all just quest mobs/backstory in World of Warcraft (emphasis the MMO, not the previous games) that otherwise didn’t mean anything. Then came Naxxramas and they were the big bads. Everyone forgot about them for a while during BC, then they were THE expac, not just a new raid.
Maybe not the Dwaves themselves, but WHO the Dwarves are? Like, obviously they were always planned to be in the game, but Gravedust wrote their history: The place mystics have in their society, and the attitudes and past of the society. He’s why the Dwarves are aligned with who they are, when traditionally they are on the “Good” side.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Gravedust created a new character class, though.
I’d kind of like to see a line by line result of the system ai reading his backstory.
“Gravedust is part of Savasi mystics.”
*computer builds a temple, inhabits it with other mystics, and their acolytes, social customs, etc.*
“This order is based around balancing the living and the dead, and helping souls to pass on.”
*computer adds ghosts, spirits, souls , mythology about all of that. Side add – new character class*
“His order is dying out.”
*computer…pauses…tries to look up “dying out,” only finds the components…looks at all the past work, get’s cranky, and re-stages the murder of all the padawan at the jedi temple, before taking a meteor hammer to the Savasi religious sites. [damn meatbags]*
Truly, this is worthy of a Vexxarr and Carl moment (vexxarr.com).
I wholly approve. :D
I’ve been thinking that Gravedust created just the mystics with his backstory(and all the repercussions of that being a fact). The dwarves would have had a big enough place in the game already with their gripes about their mountain I’d think that it’s maybe unlikely his character was the source of dwarves in the game at all. The Five definitely rewrite code everywhere they go though.
I’m not sure about that. It’s been a while, but I recall Gravedust being surprised that the Savosi had joined the World Rebellion, suggesting that it was recent enough to have happened after launch. It’s possible that the Savosi were created by Gravedust, and then they got assigned to the World Rebellion to balance against the sky and wood elves that were coming in for the Gastonian alliance faction.
It’s also possible, though, that Gravedust’s player knew this, but specified that Gravedust himself wasn’t aware.
That theory has been put forth before, and it still seems unpalatable to me. From a storytelling perspective, it’s sooo much more effective to have a user-generated world spinning out of (its creator’s) control and calving off into a different plane of existence, than to just have it be another plane right from the off and the supposed Demiurge just clumsily tapping into it a little.
While the former is somewhat plausible, the latter makes for a much better story.
Life, uh, finds a way.
Consider the worlds the Dark Powers craft when they punish a Darklord.
There was at least one novel suggesting that the world exists already, yet is “empty” until it picks its victim.
That would be sort of a compromise between the two.
When Worlds Collide
The hovertext has a Russian accent.
Thanks, I read it again, and true, it sounded in my head with a Russian accent.
A no-prize for both of you.
Oh my god, it’s Stan Lee!
Can I get your autograph?
“Funny strange, or funny ha-ha?”
“Both work, don’t you think?” ::hoses her with purple-black nastiness::
*adds Ghostbuster DLC*
::Syr’Nj counter-hoses with purple-white nastiness::
Did HR go in just to try to wake them up? Why else would he be telling her these things? It’d also explain why he’s trying to kill everyone. I think he’s wrong though. He simply merged worlds–not made any. He is about to be let down big time when he realizes he isn’t a god, but a simply traveler.
he’s a trespasser, actually, since he doesn’t believe that this world is real. Everyone else KNOWS it’s real.
He’s a weak god. His creation has escaped his influence.
Usually the GM doesn’t manifest until the very end…. you know… Pizza delivery time.
She… actually considered the possibility? Well, shit, I was just joking. :D
So is Frigg the only reason the Order of the Bloodshot Eye exist? Is Syr’nj/Gravedust/Best the only reason some third example exists?
Gravedust is probably the only reason the dwarven race is a political mess.
So…god is a middle aged manager guy with a moustache.
This explains so much.
She’s going to murder the shit out of him for that comment.
Well I imagine she will give it her very best attempt at least.
One does not simply murder the shit out of the demigod of life and death.
….Huh.
And appropriate avatar strikes again.