After the pause

Long time no see. I've been consumed by a return to ARK after a few years away from it, had a good time, that Stargate mod is absolutely sick. Messaged a guy on Fiverr about making a custom creature mod but he has 11 jobs in queue so he hasn't exactly been very communicative.

In a related vein, I've commissioned the first official piece of Southern Reaches art, absolutely giddy to share it with everyone when it's finalised. The artist I've been working with, Joe N. Brown, has been really communicative, providing plenty of ideas and enthusiasm, asking me questions I hadn't even considered originally. I received the first compositional draft this morning and I'm very excited for the final version. He'd asked for an idea of the tone of the setting and I gave a kind of extended elevator pitch which is as follows: "As for tone, well the area has been under magical quarantine for several hundred years, think of it as a fantasy version of the Zone of Alienation from STALKER, there's the leftovers of civilization but much of what has survived is twisted and strange. The remnants and ruins of 3 different civilizations are what players are digging through. Stuff like the vambrace are from a group that used mysterious programmable blood to alter their bodies and create tools, another enslaved a newly formed god their society developed to power and connect their technology as a kind of divine AI, and the third group mass collected souls before "washing" them to create warforged and machine spirits to run their magical devices." His art can be found here: https://joenbrownart.com/

Additionally, I've done 2 more short wiki entries. The first, Starfall, relates to a dark, silver tower reaching into the heavens, it's name derived from a propensity for falling stars. Related to the 3rd and final precursor society, and by extension the Soul Forge aka Tower of the Singularity, it acts as an antenna of sorts, collecting souls as they attempt to leave the Material, preparing them to be "washed" for recycling. The obvious connection to the Forge is a similar illusion with the tower being visible from a greater distance than physically expected. Both this and my conversation with Joe are helping set the foundations for the soul manipulation society.
The other entry is for Exen, She of Nothing, a goddess cast down into the Material after she betrayed either her portfolio or pantheon so egregiously that the other gods of the Old Pantheon set aside their differences to bind her to the mortal realm. Written to be a kind of inverse of Talos/Tiber Septim from Elder Scrolls, she's reluctant to embrace her divinity, with a group fighting to elevate her. So far Exen is the most fleshed out of the Spirits domain, though this is hardly a priority for me, these entries are purely just a case of "This might be cool..." and aren't to be prescriptive in the slightest.

But before I go, in my previous entry (I think) I mentioned a Reddit post about a team's successful publishing deal for their neolithic 5e setting, well this post reminds me I was going to back a Kickstarter for The Traveller's Guide to the Toxic Seas, a fellow DM turning his ideas into a coherent setting. Much like that project I'd like to reserve a crowdfunding campaign as a means to add additional art to the book, having the vast majority of content written before taking it public. Anyway, back to Rimworld, maybe I can find some more weird inspiration there.