[Announcement] Introducing Newest ISC Staffer Luna! + A Riff-Collab (Fallout:NV/Kenshi).
Quite some time back, one of the host-read episodes I did for Inner-Strength Check Podcast was a text-based interview with a good international friend of mine, Luna.
It’s been a longstanding wish of mine to have more folks on the podcast purely to talk shop about/school me on hobbies, lore and topics in general that people have a deep-seated interest in/passion for.
(Side Note: Yes that includes you! Go on, suggest something. We’ve got a comments-section below, socials and an email. I’d love to chat, or if you’re a bit gun-shy there, some words. Go fer it!)
For Episode [X], my wish was granted. Look, I’ve played Dark Souls and certainly, certainly sucked at it, sure.
One aspect of the series done quite well, from Demon’s Souls to Bloodborne and the beyond, is the oblique and veiled nature of the lore/worldbuilding. It’s executed in a way which invites you to dive deeper if you’d like, but won’t hamper enjoyment of the game if you don’t. A worldbuilding modus operandi often missed in todays’ down-your-throat, death by map markers style of introducing settings.
Anyhow, as a casual enjoyer of this series at best, Luna offered an opportunity via the blog to discuss subject matter she’s quite well-versed in as a series fan/enjoyer of lore and worldbuilding generally.
Enter Luna to discuss said lore, give perspectives on the Dark Souls fandom community (i.e. those invested past merely playing the titles - artists, forums, etc) and third-party creators etc.
She went one better and graciously provided us a link to her homebrewed TTRPG based on Dark Souls, too! I haven’t had the opportunity to playtest, but as you’ll see in the interview there was a lot of thought around balancing verisimilitude with transitioning to tabletop mechanics. Per’aps that’s something for myself/others in the team to tee up in future? I could always throw Elodie under the bus and make her do it, but I like our arty RPG designer friend too much to go dictatorial. Hi Elodie!
You can check out the audio/text versions of the interview (with lots of scrumptious community DS art) and a link to Luna’s RPG adaptation via this dang ol’ hyperlinked text right here, man:
Since that time, with us sharing some Discord space together, Luna has also posted some really awesome and prosaic, poetic styled creative writing online. Additionally, she’s had some great thoughts in gaming channels about different titles, often giving enough substance and rationale to warrant being preserved somewhere less temporal and chaotic.
Somewhere like a blog, y’know.
Oh wait - hold up. I have one of those!
Further discussions were had and, if you’re a long-term follower of ours you’ll know a common lament of mine is just the lack of time and capacity I have to branch out into more worldbuilding/tabletop/gaming/hobbyist coverage. Well, turns out that’s a snug shoe Luna has offered to fit, and I welcome her to our team as our furthest-abroad member.
Do I get to call her a foreign correspondent to make us sound more official and smart, or something?
And what better way to introduce Luna into the ISC-fold by us collaborating on a creative work together.
See below for a short creative-writing piece from each of us, based on gaming titles we love in Fallout: New Vegas and Kenshi, respectively.
Spoiler: Hers is better.
If you’d like to see more of this style on the blog, let her/us know - not only will both of us be more than happy to oblige such a request, it’s likely that both pieces below will form part of a continuing narrative series on both our parts.
Take it away, Luna:
Recording On A Cracked Holotape.
Writer: Luna
[Editor’s Note: Featured artworks in Luna’s Riff all care of the talented Deimos Art. Check the captions for links to the artists’ site/portfolio if you’re interested in purchasing high-res digital/physical copies! Artist links available bottom of article].
The sun shone radiant over cracked, broken clay.
Dusty blue skies overhead were tinged gold with the last shades of dawn clinging to the mountains of the west. A scrap of broken glass crunched under a thick, heavy boot.
The wind howled and hissed with shifting sand as I gripped my rifle tighter to my chest, glaring through the silt and unnatural haze from behind red-tinted glass.
“ED-E? Anything on Sensors?”
An array of clicks, whirrs and beeps resounded negatively from my companion, floating beside me like Sputnik had over Earth three hundred and fifty years before.
“Good. We break north, I want to avoid the Searchlight zone.”
I idly thumbed the dial on my Pip-Boy, tuning the little knobs until a smooth, dulcet voice rang out from the speaker…
[“This is Mister New Vegas, Signing off…”]
The idle strumming of a guitar hummed with me as I trudged north, pausing once the dust settled to blow the dirt out of the crevices of my gun, heavy and covered in blinking lights.
The bakelite-turned-steel grip was snug in my hand, the boreless barrel sweeping the sand ahead of me in wide arcs, pausing a moment as something chitinous and large wriggled its way out of the dunes.
Tsheew-Tsheew-Click
Laser fire rang out, the dinner-plate head of the great soldier reduced to a smouldering crater, the body still half buried.
“Nice shot, Ed. We’ll make the Mormon Fort by noon, should be.”
‘You Feel A Little Woozy’ - Link to print/digital purchase via artist site
The ranger outfit jostled a bit about my shoulders as I knelt down, plucking a few crystallized remnants of the ant’s nectar from its severed jaw, wrapping them in paper and twine. Annoying to get, this stuff, but well worth the hundred caps for how light it was. Ambassador Crocker’d have my ear if he knew I was supplying it into the strip, all bluster about “The NCR’s Image in Freeside” and “The good of the Republic” etc, but he knew better than to look too far into it. I’d stepped on enough burned, tattered red flags in the past year for a little tirade to change my story.
It’d been four months since the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. Scattered Legion raiding parties still snuck over the Colorado in the dead of night from time-to-time, but they never usually made it very far. Some were found half buried in a landslide’s worth of rubble, some with seven or eight laser marks burned into their rough-shod padded armor, but very few found alive. Not that leaving ‘em alive would have meant much, given the whole “legion of dishonor” thing that’d been going on with em. Any poor bastard I'd leave behind turned their machete on themselves.
History. Is this how they write it? A trampled flag here, a painting there, some prick with a recharger rifle and a bitter streak of survival all at its center? I’d washed enough blood down the river to give a deathclaw nightmares, and it still never seemed like enough. Old World books always wrote about war as start and stop, flashpoints and big endings. The battle was over. The war ended.
But if it was so easily done with, why did I still have to put the thumb of god down on a fresh batch of soldiers every few weeks? Posterity? It wasn’t like they cared enough about the fuckers to write their names down somewhere. Written in the sand in the merciless desert wind, any mark left washed away smooth by time. The axe is supposed to forget, but use it enough and it’ll still chip and crack.
I was tired of being an axe. Every fight, every battle, it always ended in someone dead, and nothing learned. Names. Faces. Hope. Washed away down the river, with so much blood.
War never changes.
We must change.
‘Dam Nation’ - Link to digital/physical print purchase, via artist website
STOBE’s garden.
Writer: Brady Irwin
[Editor’s Note: the below images are all screenshots from a playthrough of Kenshi from myself - see below for links relating to developer LoFi Games. Show ‘em some support!]
‘24 days’, Tomei grunted as he heaved another swing of his electrified musculature, hewing yet another wedge of earthen stone from the crude, primitive pile.
The splendid corpse of their beloved behemoth did little to enlighten the Skeleton’s dour spirits.
Magrudergrind lay in the matted-straw/frayed cloth sleeping-bag currently acting as a poor substitute for a mechanical Skeleton Repair Bed. True to form, there was no response.
Tomei thought them pathetic creatures, these recent compatriots in survival. Bonded by desolation and trauma, similar to his own kin.
In the same automated breath, Tom recognised the significant hazards and logistical upheaval (not to mention death) that had been the prices paid prior, present and ongoing per their recent relocation from Grey Desert Waystation’s… relative safety.
Catlon’s Nuts - they’re inherently braver than any foolhardy brigand, malfunctioning Skeletal Thrall or nightmarish Beak Thing that’d been encountered on such a journey. So far, anyway.
Meek? Surely. Comprised primarily of the sand-blasted continents’ weakest physical humanoids, it was a constant wonder to the mechanical element within this troupe how any or even all of them weren’t already a sea of limbless torsos. They were to Stobe’s Garden and indeed the greater landmass, as a gnat is to a swiftly descending boot. Or a hard, calloused-hand slap.
There was some spurious theological data archives in Tom’s internal disk-drive, corrupted and weathered by time and rust, indicating prophetic paranoia from The Holy Nation and Okran himself about the Hives overrunning Kenshi and indeed the planet proper.
Overpopulation, I believed one of the Phoenixes had claimed. All bullshit, of course.
That in mind - Princess Sand Berry had certainly, definitely, absolutely misjudged and miscalculated the Hive’s readiness for expansion into the south-east corner.
Forget gargantuan whirring quadrupeds and other Old Machines, forget violence-drunkened Bloodraiders. Forget the swarms of Iron Hounds and their gears pasted with so much cartilege, blood and sinew.
Shit was real out here.
The population expansion estimate data was something both Tomei and Barkara had incessantly insisted upon Sand Berry to no avail. Oh, sorry - Princess Sand Berry. She was mindful of word from the Tech Hunters’ watering-hole about increased frequency and size of squads ranging from aforementioned banditry and mechanical spooks to completely new and unforseen horrors.
Three weeks of consistent, day-and0night rotations between combat training and actual combat proper had armoured her conviction. Tom admired that, foolhardy as it was.
If only he could transmit the visual image to her now, though. She’d pack that research bench up, burn the ancient science books and head to the dust-caked mines of Rebirth herself if she knew the fate the rest of us were awaited down here.
A life of slavery would surely pale in comparison to this as a daily prospect:
Local curs, mutts and humanoid mongrels had lifted their skinny olfactory receptors impressively quickly. Unsurprising - it’d take an organic severe sensory incapacitation not to have noticed the pathetic burgeoning camp emerging by the behemoth’s feet.
Weeks of training in the arts of subtle movement, of hauling, labouring and general improvement of physique. The rotunda on the Waystation towers’ third floor, complete with every manner of skill-acquisition from martial arts to the serpentine craft of assassins.
Turns out even those worthy opponents would be little to no preparation for surging hordes of Skeletons draped in peeled human flesh (the Skin Bandits) nor their equally deluded humanoid counterpart who literally believe themselves to be machine (Skeleton Bandits). In both cases, mercy was unrelenting, and it was all we could do, Barkarra and I, to watch comrades carted off to an unseen tower, pained by the knowledge one of the Skin Bandits would likely be back wearing their peeled epidermis.
Disgusting. Foul.
Some twenty of us had set out, initially.
The missive from Berry was that our unguided journey acted as the first true ‘test’.
The perennial excuse from orator to layman - ‘it’s a spiritual pilgrimage!’. Yeah, ‘cause a huge portion of these lands weren’t under the thumb of racist, xenophobic cruelty via similar ideological excuses.
I genuinely do not perceive Ms. Berry to be a coward, mind. Perhaps just a little too hyperfixated on research as a priority right now.
But this…?! This is folly.
Perhaps a reroute to Venge would be more profitable. Take in only fellow Skeletons, Hivers only during such time as training and combat proved them nigh-infallible against all these putrid swarms of wretched… imitators.
No.
It’s a logical line of programming to follow, but ultimately an amoral one.
He sighed, a cathartic act shared by both machine and man it seemed.
Tomei never knew if he would see Sand again.
He knew damn sure enough that Barkara, Magrudergrind, the Process Tankers, Buttergoat and himself were more than surely doomed. Severely so. No offence to the remaining accoutrement but… a badly-beaten Skeleton on the verge of death, a partly-limbless Hiver and a few pets?!
We could have the greatest Meitou blades in existence by our sides - we also couldn’t survive sheer mathematical volume.
This place is teeming with antagonism. Swarming with it.
Pessimistic encoding and retrieval aside, Tom couldn’t suppress a cognition-process that entertained a wry, awkward smile from the clank of his mainly expressionless jowls.
You can’t suppress humanoid hubris, need for adventure or worst of all - a will to power. Even if it meant the death of yourself and everyone around you.
Suddenly - sharp clanking and whirring to stir me from my bored, miserable reverie.
‘Wonder how the ‘Princess’ is going right about now?’, Barkara chimed sarcastically.
Pfsh. Chuckle. No way he just said that right now.
Tomei dropped his pickaxe and all semblance of cyborg origin with it, engaging in that primal, dangerous aspect of his core processing.
At an extremely likely risk of inviting more fake-skeleton-people or fake-people-skeletons back in to finish the grisly job of dismemberment - Tomei hollered a clanking, warbling, maddened laugh.
One that reverberated around the canyon’s edges, punctuated only by one other sound in the stillness.
That is, of course, the coarse moaning of the soon-to-be-dead.
Stobe’s Garden - our folly.