Part Two of The Judging Wood is now available for your perusal. One of the interesting things about having worked with Steve Hamaker as opposed to handling the colors in-house like normal is that his choices would not have been our choices. If we pull somebody in, though, we actually want to collaborate with them; it's not a straight up work for hire thing. I'm fairly certain the Owl here wouldn't have had dark feathers - I believe Grib was thinking of a snowy owl - and blonde hair with wildflower streaks weren't in the cards, either. We tend to use a more grim palette in general. This is a cool way to think of the Eyrewood.

It can be found right at this link! There'll be stuff there all weekend basically - including Sunday's Acquisitions Incorporated adventure, live at 1:30 Eastern Time - so give it a whirl.

Tycho mentions being inspired by a doodle in my sketchbook. This is the one he's talking about.

Professionals have a tendency to talk about weather in these sweeping, biblical terms. I had every reason to believe that I was walking into a situation like that in The Thing, a mostly inescapable ice hell, minus the super gross spider head thing. I guess I don't wanna jinx it or whatever, but jeez. There are piles of snow, old snow but it's melting. That's creating its own problems, particularly if you have an old roof, but I was expecting some Fortress of Solitude type shit and it ain't that.

Harmonix just announced Rock Band 4 this morning which is awesome. You can hit their site to read all the details. Tycho and I have always loved the folks over at Harmonix and I'm really excited to say that I got to design a guitar for the new game.

Like the comic says, PAX East is a big step for us in terms of testing Thornwatch. Previously we have run the game ourselves or trained Judges ahead of time so they could run it for folks. This time we're just giving people a box of pieces and a few pages of rules. Starting at 8:00pm in Tabletop on Friday and Saturday night we will be doing unguided playtests. If you'd like to play, watch or just see me go crazy, please come on down. We will also have a Thornwatch panel on Saturday at 1:00pm in the Dragonfly theater. Sadly this is not a "streaming theater" so there will be no Twitch broadcast.

It's all true, actually; the new Thornwatch playtest is completely hands free. Well, hands free for us. You will probably need your hands to roll dice, move characters around, or to physically strike allies who miss vital rolls - preferably with a gnarled old cane. Every other playtest he's ever done has been rigorously controlled, with hypnotically conditioned gamemasters whose subconscious programming ensures an optimal experience every time. Every couple months this process gives him an opportunity to feel terrified in a completely new way.

I know that usually Gabriel does these, but he is drawing a comic at the moment, and it's got every limb of his operating at 100% capacity. Here's the banner:

Apparently, Boston is being reverse terraformed. Initially I avoided looking for weather related information altogether, because I had been told that snow was a social construct and I didn't want to reify it. But pictures of the town I have tilled up in my hesitant online searches are indistinguishable from Hoth, except for the super old woman shoveling her own walk all the way out to the fucking street, in the manner of a boss.

Because I'm still new to Monster Hunter, there's a lot I don't know. I could absolutely look for a FAQ and solve all this stuff immediately, like watching a Raid video, and then I could go in and try to emulate another person's valor. When I hit a true wall - as opposed to being momentarily inconvenienced by my ineptitude - maybe I'll hit it up. But not yet. I haven't felt like this in a very, very long time.

Don't forget that KATIE RICE, winner of STRIP SEARCH and creator of CAMP WEEDONWANTCHA, is running a Kickstarter to get the first volume of Camp Weedonwantcha printed up. She's probably over in her office worrying about it, right now. Let's see what we can do about that.

I should hit up Reddit maybe, but I am fairly certain my co-conspirator is the only person willing to go on record as saying that The Order: 1886 is anything approaching a videogame. He wants me to play it very much, presumably so that I can join his very exclusive cult, but I watched a few YouTube clips and it seems like you don't hack monsters apart and then make hats and weapons out of their guts and white bones. And that's all I care about right now. So I'll have to get back to him on that.

I finished the Order: 1886 yesterday and I actually really liked the game. All told I think it took me about eight hours which is certainly on the short side but not criminally so. I tend to play games for the art more than the story and the Order is jam packed with beautiful art and smart design. The world they have rendered in this game is so incredible I can’t wait to play another game in the setting. The Order: 1886 feels like the first movie in a trilogy to me. This is the origin story and the character we are left with at the end of the game is one I want to play as.

We have to entertain, at least for a moment, the idea that he just wanted to draw Samus Aran. But he had also played Pokemon Shuffle in this new era of torrid, Nintendo lust inaugurated by the refresh to the 3DS hardware, and he was surprised to see the more or less "traditional" F2P grotesqueries on display.