Annotated 18-1
I heard from Phil recently: he’s working on a new game system with a younger protege. Which is kind of cycle-of-life, because he’s eleven years younger than me, and I was kinda his mentor when we worked on Sketchies. He says, “I think Guilded Age maybe taught me that what I actually do want to do is make games. Which, honestly, should have been obvious because my entire method of coming at GA was envisioning it as a game that exists.”
As I’ve already mentioned, this would be more and more of a bone of contention between us as time went on: whenever there was a conflict between making Kingdoms of Arkerra a game with functional mechanics and making Arkerra a real world of incalculable complexity, I pushed for the latter. But this scene shows how those sensibilities can mesh: I took first crack at it and Phil reworked the dialogue without changing much of the action.
I’m a little sorry we revised out Gravedust explaining that the souls of the dead, not just a trail of their bodies, had prepared him to face Auraugu, but we were already feeling the pressure to move things along.
GRAVEDUST: Surrender or die, thief. Make your choice quickly.
BANDIT (mostly unconscious): I ch’se s’rr’nd’r…
Possibly my favorite alt text of the series.
Hold on a sec… Does Iver know that Gravedust is alive at this point? Wasn’t the last time they saw each other the time Iver posioned him?
Yes, it was. The short, in-universe explanation is that after Byron came back from seeming death, Harky sent the occasional scout to that gravesite to make sure those adventurers were well and truly dead. And sure enough, one day one of those scouts reported the gravesites were dug up and empty. News reached Harky’s allies from there.
Little Geezer and Tiny Somersaulter are still two of my favorite slurs in this entire comic.
Are we sure they count as slurs? I read them as terms of respect for Auragu’s enemies.
Kudos to Gravedust for shooting him first and then telling him his time is up. He’s obviously read the Evil Overlord List.
The idea of and subsequent push for functional game mechanics makes sense for a lot of the series. It would help with the “Is it all real or just a game?” aspect I feel like you two were going for. But HR gave you an out when describing how the Five kind of break things around them and go beyond the normal bounds of how things work. Even later with his increasing mucking about things should have become even more broken and unpredictable. Kind of like a game forcing in patches that aren’t fully tested.
Agreed. I like how it turned out, because sometimes there was a clearly functional mechanics, but then other times… the lines blurred. It kept me guessing. And with the idea of the Five “breaking” what was expected of the game’s performance, it seemed totally on par for things to act more real and uncontrolled beyond what HR was trying to program into it.
Auraugu had to work very hard to make me dislike him. This scene was where he worked the hardest. He kind of lost it after this.