Six Year Anniversary
Hey ho, Guildies! It’s Labor Day, and that marks the 6th Anniversary of Guilded Age!
As per our typical celebration, we are holding Ask Us Anything here in the comments until the next update day! Any old question you got for Team GA, just fire away!
Thanks for reading with us all this time, and participating in our experiments and wacky shenanigans in the realm of wizards and elves and shit. Stay tuned to this space, because we’ve got a LOT of conventions coming up!
Also: WHO’S PLAYING METAL GEAR SOLID V, OH MY GOD IT IS KIND OF THE BEST?
A shark with arm buoys? that’s either redundant or ironic, I’m not sure which.
I just find it hilarious.
This. Plus, it’s kinda adorable at the same time. :D
He’s a land-shark. You don’t expect sea-sharks to be very good on land, I think it’s fair that land-sharks might not be very good in the sea.
very good point.
But he has gills. He doesn’t have to worry about drowning.
Exactly. You don’t expect it, which is how they take you by surprise!
To be fair… Nobody expects the Landshark Inquisition! :I
Must be his BMI – with all that muscle mass, and no body fat, he’d only be able to walk along the ocean floor. (Even more undignified than water wings to a shark)
Have you tried to eat and swim at the same time ?
EVERY shark has them, they hide them until needed (they think it is a bit embarrassing).
If there is a camrea team nearby, they do not use them, of course.
You know about shark feeding frenzies ?
Not being able to use knive and fork properly makes them MAD.
Landsharks don’t know how to swim?
Yeah we need to know, can HAMMERHEAD swim in canon?
Well, they ARE called “land” sharks after all…
They really, really don’t care for the water.
Culturally or biologically?
For Land Sharks, that distinction is irrelevant.
Speedos, hyes!
The champion of the fuzzy beach goers.
Hooray for beefcake!
But *fuzzy* beef should be avoided…Especially if it’s a bluish or greenish kind of fuzz.
If you don’t happen to have a cast-iron stomach, or indiscriminatory digestion, expect to get very ill.
God I love the look on Hammerhead’s face. Landshark indeed.
I am playing MGS:V. I am bad at it up until I say “fuck it” and just gun everyone down, but I am playing it nonetheless.
Same, kinda. I have a handful of S-rank sneaking scores, often saddled with the Octopus rank, because sneaking up and grabbing is my go to move.
Grats on six years! How does it feel to have progressed this far?
It’s weird. We’ve shifted out plans so often that we’re closer to the end but doesn’t feel like it? I dunno man, I’ve never worked on a single project for this long.
I’m stoked you’ve done so much. I stumbled across this when it had 3-4 chapters. I lost it when my compy committed seppuku, and just found it again recently. So I’ve caught up from the beginning in about a week..and I love it! It’s been a ton of fun, a great story, and I can’t wait for more. Thanks!
You wrote achieVment instead of achievement – small typo.
Fixto.
Also inside this edition of AI:
AURAUGU’S SCANDALOUS PAST – “I WAS HEAVY INTO DOGFIGHTING”
STYLE COUNCIL: PENK BETTER OFF WITHOUT DORKY HELMET
OFFENDED! COUNTLESS ARMS MEMBERS RESENT SCIENTOLOGY BEING LABELED “CULT”
Aaaand … that’s all I can think of this late.
So, question. I initially thought that most of the possessed people in the village slaughter were actually alive when possessed (though wounded, ’cause that’s how the demons gained entry). Then when they were shot up with the treatment by Syr and the medics, they should have regained their sanity – only most ended up being dead. Astoria was one I expected to be still living, like Bragga was. I was surprised that she (indeed, that most everyone in the melee) died. Did they die of their original entry cuts or were they mostly mortally wounded during the ensuing demonic battle?
11 DWARVEN TIPS TO GAIN MUSCLE AND KEEP YOUR GIRLISH FIGURE
Mostly the ensuing damage taken from battle, yes.
Greetings, creative crew! Given the change in the daily to the thrice-weekly schedule, how much longer do you envision the series running?
About two years more I think?
I have a question. since this is a MMO, are any of the characters we see NPC’s? are the savage races a seperate faction, or are they all NPC’s? or is this one of those massive games like EVE where people can become merchants and leaders of nations and such?
It seems to be more like WoW than anything else – Gastonia is the Alliance, the Savage Races are the Horde, there’s definitely PVP between the two factions but it’s unclear whether players of the same faction can PVP outside of dueling/arenas. I’d assume the faction leaders to be NPCs, though I don’t think we’ve really been told how Syr’Nj’s current political position (or Penk’s, for that matter) is explained to the normal players. Or if the general population even knows about it.
I’m guessing because it seems to be taking place in the RP intensive server, that certain latitudes are given for characters (especially somebody that’s been there since the game’s debut) or that Sepiaworld people just don’t see more then a blurb on somebody’s personal profile. Syr’nj is roleplaying somebody who made it that far on their personal storyline in the guild. Other guildmembers don’t necessarily see her go into the the places of power, heck, for all we know, the heads of houses are a singular background text: Some messenger pops up and says “Heads of houses have declared that… etc.”
I probably don’t have it completely right, I’m sure, but we know the avatars act independent of their Sepiaworld drivers, so anything that might raise questions we can assume is either not seen by them or is displayed to them differently.
The vast majority of characters in this comic would classified as NPCs.
Um… which characters are huggers, and which aren’t?
I think I can say with confidence that everyone who is a hugger has hugged by now.
I don’t know if this is a question, but this has been bugging me since I started reading and I haven’t seen it confirmed anywhere: the name “Payet Best” is an homage to “Pete Best,” the so-called fifth Beatle, yes?
Yep!
Metal Gear?!?
A HIND D??
Shape-memory alloy?!
Congratulations on 6 years! GA’s been on my reading list since pretty close to the beginning, I love watching it all play out.
Are there any plans to introduce the Winter Elves that you can talk about? Syr’nj suggested in an Ask an Adventurer that they wouldn’t make contact with the rest of the world unless things looked apocalyptic, and, well, things are looking pretty apocalyptic recently.
Also, unrelated, are we ever getting Demon Hunters as a playable class? Player housing? Legendary artifact weapons?
Yes, we will meet the winter elves. Look forward to it, I know I am.
Demon Hunters in Ackerman are largely crackpots and ultimately anti cultist vigilantes. They are very few, if there could even be enough to organize. There really haven’t been ant legitimate demon threats in Arkerra… Until now, I guess.
Player housing and legendary artifact weapons to be patched in on a later date.
Where is Ackerman? And what criteria do ants use to determine whether a potential demon threat is legitimate?
Arkerra. What the fuck, phone.
Will there be a Winter Elf named Otra?
We shall see!
What is that on Goblaurence’s tummy? Some kind of fancy suncatcher? Some kind of fancy ashtray?
Mug of Generic Alcoholic Beverage. Goblin-style. Good at degreasin’ engines and killin’ brain cells.
Pretty much this, yeah.
Also good at smashing in the head of the goblin who tried to swipe it from you.
If you stick your thumb over the top of the mug, the shading is such that it looks like part of the background, and Goblaurence gets a sleek hourglass figure.
How do the bird-people maintain attitude and orientation in the air, with legs on the scale of a human’s held straight out behind bringing center of mass significantly rearward of their wings, and no tail surfaces of any kind?
I am, unfortunately, not an Ornithologist.
The answer is, of course, that Arkerra doesn’t run on RealWorld physics, it runs on digital code. So… just imagine the shock if Rana, say, was somehow transported to Sepiaworld, and discovered that he can’t fly under his own power..!
Maybe they’re still all hollow-boney.
The world may never know.
Natural Magic. It’s a magical world. What physics can’t do on their own is supplemented.
These guys! Anxious HAMMERHEAD is killing me. XD
Question: How does Caneghem pronounce his name? I keep shifting between “Can-AIM” (for funsies) and “CAN-egg-em” (for realsies), but there’s a lot of other plausible alternatives.
Can-Egg-Em is the true pronunciation but hey: you do you.
+1. Stresses on the first and last syllables.
How much is left of the adventurer’s guild after the events of , and how many of the survivors are infected with berserker demons, which I will henceforth refer to as “beemons” and there’s nothing you can do about it?
I forgot the name of the lumber town. >.>
Barter Town
Bullsh**t.
No, Pig sh**t. The lights, the motors, the vehicles, all run by a high powered gas called methane. And methane cometh from pig sh**t.
Politically, or physically? Adventurers continue to be a substantial part of Arkerra’s population (otherwise, Hurricane Entertainment would REALLY have some tough questions to face from game journalists). But as we’ve seen, Bedard and others have exploited the berserker outbreak to call the idea of an adventurer’s guild back into question.
Either way, we’ll be delivering some hard answers on this sooner than later in the comic.
To the authors and creators: Who is your favorite Guild member, and who is your favorite member of the World’s Rebellion?
I try not to play favorites, in general. Every character should be my favorite in the moment that I’m putting words in their mouths. That said, I feel like Syr’Nj is our most original and versatile hero and am very proud to be working with her. World’s Rebellion… see above, but Auraugu is tremendous fun for me.
I, too, refuse to play favorites, but the ones I think I have most fun writing are Scipio and Goblaurence.
Super surprising, I know.
I am 100 percent shocked that it’s not Frigg. She just seems to have some of the greatest moments and lines. All the characters are pretty great, though.
Are there non-demon-possessed zombies, liches, vampires or other examples of what fantasy has coached us to think of as traditional undead creatures in Arkerra?
We’ve dropped the occasional reference to such necromancy and its results. I would say that they’re quite rare and feared out of proportion to their power: the threats we’ve seen on-panel by now are the ones to watch out for.
Yeah, largely the answer is “No.”
Necromancy as it exists today is only in the hand of the one remaining mystic, basically, and it’s hard to even call that necromancy since it’s so much more a shamanistic experience (calling spirits v. raising dead).
Any legitimate necromancers or liches were wiped out long ago in crusades and other wars.
And I just don’t write stories that have vampires in them on general fucking principle.
That’s a nice piece of general in-game lore! Background information in fictional settings (be it games, books, movies, or other media) is always one of my favorite things to discover, so thank you for the insight. :)
[ Also, it’s nice to hear that someone else isn’t gaga over vampires, at least in some respect. I’ve never liked the idea, in concept or execution (though the protagonist of the TV show “Forever Knight” at least gave me pause to appreciate a possible redemption storyline), but certainly the past 25+ years of market saturation has degraded my low opinion of them well past the point of irritation and even beyond the realm of aggravated loathing. I’ll be especially glad when the “sparkly” rendition fades into obscurity. ;) ]
Back on topic (more or less)…I really enjoy the comic (graphic novel?) and have been reading it regularly since sometime before the air pirates chapter (loved the nod to one of my favorite “Tailspin” characters), so I guess that makes me a longtime reader by now. Originally it was the unique art style that caught my eye, but the story & characters are what make the art more than just great pictures.
The real question though is this: when’s the PnP version (or SP cRPG?) of Guilded Age going into production? :D
I think the only real Vampire character I’ve ever appreciated was Cassidy in Preacher? He seemed like a very realistic take on the affliction.
The Pen & Paper will come out probably never because time is not a thing I have in my life.
I’ll have to check out Cassidy then. I don’t like vampires, but redemption stories are good.
The PnP thing was a joke, but I have to admit, it would be cool to wander around Akerra in some fashion or another. :)
What would you consider your greatest obstacle in writing this comic up to now, be it in the writing or issues surrounding getting the comic itself out? To be more specific, was there ever a time where you really just had an issue with something and it took the crew putting their heads together to over come it?
There is no big secret about which members of the team have the biggest creative conflicts: it’s me and Phil. John, Jason and Erica have always been pretty accommodating. I think Chapters 23 and 30 were the biggest cases where Phil and I had conflicting ideas about how the whole story should go, and really had to thrash those out a lot, much later in the process than we would have preferred.
The pressure.
We have built up such a huge, sprawling story with so many characters and universes all intertwined into one. That was on purpose, of course.
But I never predicted how hard it would be to make sure everything we publish is “just right.”
The other big obstacle is the fact that I don’t profit from this venture and, largely, never have. But we’re fixing that before the fall is over.
Carol seemed mightily confused at H.R.’s expectation that she’d be his holy wife. What were *her* goals here, beyond bringing everyone into Arkerra and crushing on her boss, or his ideals?
Carol has been in reactive mode for some time. HR has always been the one with the vision: in their early relationship, she found it fulfilling just to help him reach his goals and keep his enterprises together. More recently, he’s been emotionally whipsawing so wildly that it’s all Carol can do to keep him, his company, and the remaining shreds of her own safety from falling apart.
(Mad props to Phil and John, who did this one more or less without me.)
I’m sorry. I would’ve included you more if I didn’t save the joke-writing on this one ’til the last minute.
I blame Metal Gear Solid V.
Out of curiosity, did you have this La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo style shadow government idea back in the early issues when those adventures were happening, or did you add that in later?
As we indicated in the flashback, we showed a few key members of this shadow group way back in Chapter 5, so yep: Always part of the plan.
Man, I gotta give mad props to that right there. That’s some forward thinking!
Have you changed the final destination point of GA since the beginning, or just the mechanism for getting to the end point? Did you find that as the story developed certain characters that you thought would be peripheral ended up becoming more significant?
The final destination has more or less always been the same, for as clearly as we have defined it in our minds at this stage of the story. There’s a lot of it that’s set in stone, but a lot of it remains fluid on the basis of “Well, what if we change our mind about some things before we get there?”
Yeah, I think the best example of a peripheral character we didn’t quite expect to make it to the main roster is Sundar. We just kept finding new uses for him and then I just fell in love with what we’ve been doing with him.
It would be hard to imagine GA without Sundar at this point.
So, Considering the clock is ticking towards the end of the comic, do you guys know what you plan to do once it is over? Will there be a new comic, or will most of you go your separate ways?
What a loaded question!
On paper, we are planning to continue to work together on some sort of comic. But we have agreed that if we do work together again, it will be:
A) A shit ton less ambitious in sheer scale and volume.
and
B) Something that’s more T’s baby than mine.
When we did our first collaboration, Sketchies, it was mostly T’s concept at inception. He brought me in because we, at first, wanted to make a TV show (and I was in film school at the time so that was SORT OF my skillset). Eventually it became a comic instead, of course, but it was still something more in his field of knowledge and expertise (Academia, Comics History, Teen/Young Adult Enemble).
When we started our second collaboration, Guilded Age, T basically came to me and said “Phil, I want to sell out. Let’s do a WoW parody comic.” Again, that was my area of expertise since I was playing it as a second job at the time. I tried to get T to play it so he understood the medium of MMORPG. He put like two hours into a single character and went “OK I get it now,” and I’ve been rolling my eyes ever since. Even so, I said that we should do a mostly original concept so if we are ever lucky enough to sell the rights to a big time game studio, we can. But he and I will both tell you that GA is a bit more my baby than T’s.
So, it only makes sense to me that should we collaborate again, it’ll be mostly his thing.
Or we’ll work on separate projects! It’s complicated. We can rely on each other to deliver good script but our sensibilities in a lot of things are beginning to grow differently, as is only natural between any collaborators.
We will probably make a firm decision on this about 1 year until this comic’s conclusion, because that’s when we’ll have to start promoting the next thing.
1) What, if any, is Auraugu’s gender? I keep remembering a comic (the chapter with the Kraken) where Auraugu tells someone “I am not a MAN!”, yet it seems to me folks assume Auraugu is male. What’s the canon? For that matter, what did Auraugu mean? Did Auraugu just mean “I am not (hu)man”?
2) What are the favorite Pokemon of characters that weren’t covered in that Saturday comic? EG I’m almost certain HR’s favorite is Arceus, although perhaps it’s Mewtwo?
The first question I believe was covered in the comments of that particular page. He just meant human. He’s… also lacking mammary glands.