Hopefully. I'm finishing up my doctoral dissertation (in visual media studies, focus on comics and graphic novels - I love my life) this summer, but I'll be making further additions to EA Alchera and hope to get a draft of MA Alchera out.
I also want to make a map from a hand-drawn original (sepia ink on light-brown recycled paper), e.g., to look like an old map.
Thank you BandarLover and HoneyBadger for the complements on my sprites: I've been sketching in a semi-disciplined way for years (part of my study of comics, line art, and printmaking), but Alchera gave me an excuse to force myself to learn to use GIMP (how's that for a convoluted phrase?). Burnsaber's tutorial was REALLY helpful.
BTW, HoneyBadger, I was reading the thread on Stardock's forthcoming Elemental, and I liked what you had to say about fantasy's black-and-white morality v.s. the complexity of myth, but I have a further argument to make:
"Fantasy" as we know it today is heavily indebted to Tolkein, who drew on myth and folklore, as is directly responsible for adding absolute supernatural good and evil into the mix. I don't think Tolkien was intentionally "colonialist" in his writing, but I do think that the legacy of European, and perhaps especially British, colonial rule has been and still is part of "generic" and/or "High" fantasy.
Fantasy is a bit like the jungle king/queen genre, e.g. Tarzan (though there were many others), except that its assumptions have remained largely unquestioned
because it is "fantasy" and thus not "real." (As if James Bond or Tarzan are any more real than Aragorn or Samwise) In Fantasy, Orcs are inherently evil and inferior - and therefore it is OK to exterminate them... if we accept that assumption - and with it, the idea than an intelligent (or sentient, or language-using) race can be inherently evil (an idea that strikes me as either childish or chilling).
I wrote
an article about this for Gameology, in terms of a campaign for
Battle for Wesnoth which deals with slavery and makes Wesnoth's "High Fantasy" setting morally complex.
(I should note that I love The Lord of the Rings - but that doesn't keep me from picking it apart: the "normal" bit of me can simply enjoy something even as the obsessive academic tears it to shreds.)
...sorry, everyone - I didn't mean to turn this into a rant.
Re: EA Alchera: Aborigine and Maori-inspired Nation
Hybrid Mode
