Ahoy Mythopoeians! 

Happy New Year! I'm a little bit tardy on my January post but here I am! Since starting to blog in January I've been trying to crank out about a post a month just to jot down random thoughts and to keep people afloat as to what we're up to. Here's to continuing blogging in 2021! 

I thought today might be a good time to go over some things I've been enjoying for the past couple of months. These are all just things I've been consuming and enjoying lately, and my thoughts about why. 

​Here we go! 
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Up first in comics is the Italian pulp horror classic Dylan Dog. Created in the 80's, Dylan Dog follows the eponymous paranormal investigator as he tackles on all matter of strange cases, crimes, and personal entanglements. The Long Goodbye finds Dylan Dog reunited with a childhood flame with a strange past. 

What I love about Dylan Dog is its mastery of pacing. Each page (usually between 4-6 panels) moves the story forward at a brisk pace, unfolding a romance mystery steeped in pulp tradition - old flames, flashbacks, and of course new clues! 

This particular story tells a bittersweet tale of young love, regret, and choices not made. It hit hard in the feels and legitimately made me long for something I can't quite put into words. It's a fantastic comic and one I recommend with full enthusiasm. 
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Dylan Dog is published by Epicenter Comics​ in the United States, and is in wide syndication all over the world. 

The Crown is a dramatization of the British royal family during Queen Elizabeth II's reign, from her ascendancy following her father King George VI's death up to Princess Diana and Prince Charle's troubled marriage through the early 90's in the current season four. 

I'm a sucker for palace intrigue. Throw me some elaborate costumes and whispers of betrayal and I'm all in. The Crown takes the genre to another level - in terms of storytelling, staging, and dramatization. I'm not sure how true to life the show is, but I can say that watching it feels like watching history. 

The Crown is about as well written of a show currently out there. There's been multiple times while watching where I've audibly muttered to myself "what a scene," especially during the teaser intros. This may sound slightly snooty, but the Crown feels like one of the paradigms of dramatic writing that will be cited, referenced, and drawn from for years to come. I'm willing to bet that much like the historical plays of Bill the Bard, this is a show that will transcend its own time. 

The Crown is executive produced by Peter Morgan and distributed by Netflix. 

I'm sure Cyberpunk 2077 needs no introduction, but I personally just completed my first campaign of the game, going through two of the available endings. I didn't really follow the game through its development cycle and am uninterested in the ensuing drama that the hype / disappointment cycle has fed. 

Cyberpunk 2077 explores themes and motifs that have really matured for me personally over the past couple of years. I'm a newcomer to cyberpunk as a genre, but the events of the global pandemic and political turmoil have really put into focus the themes that the aesthetic explores: transhuman consciousness, corporate megastates, & environmental disaster. 

God is Man and Man is God. 

Without going into spoilers, one aspect of video games that is fascinating to me is that as the medium matures, so too does the exploration of melancholy and/or bittersweet endings. That does tend to lead to a bit of cognitive dissonance as the narrative arcs of these games - The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, Almost Human, to name a few - has to ultimately reconcile with the presented gameplay. So games do this better than others; in The Last of Us, you play a hardened post apocalyptic murderer, and the game leans fully into a bone chilling exploration of what that really means.

Other games struggle; Red Dead Redemption often has you mowing down armies of cowboys only for characters to be laid low during the cut scenes. What Cyberpunk does very well is make it feel like you are but a cog in mechanisms beyond your control. However strong you are, you are but one person grasping at things beyond your reach. That, more than anything, coalesced what the genre expectations of cyberpunk are and has my brain abuzzing about the psychological and philosophical ramifications therein. 

I'm looking forward to playing this game again when all of the various bugs and features are patched over. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is developed and published by CD Projekt Red. 

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Ahoy Mythopoeians! 

Can you believe it? We now find ourselves at the end of the longest year in memory. 2020 has been one for the history books, but we're not going to get into all of that again. Instead, I'd like to spend some time to talk about our year here at Mythopoeia; how we set goals back in January wound back to us in unpredictable and wonderful ways. 

Vince and I have had RPGs on our to-do list for a while now, going way back to 2015 when Josephe Vandel introduced us to the Blades in the Dark ruleset. At the time I was about two years removed from my last RPG experience - Pathfinder 1E. I distinctly remember the reason why I had to stop - the time and energy spent Game Mastering was drawing straight from the same well as our other creative endeavors. There was simply no way I would be able to do both without one suffering. Given that we had just been funded to make a comic, it made the most sense to me to drop the hobby to embrace the profession. 

Reading Blades in the Dark changed all that. I missed the wave of Powered by the Apocalypse a couple of years prior, so Blades was the first time I was exposed to the concept of narrative dice - a system of rules that supports improvisational play designed to drive the story forward, easing the preparatory burden of the Game Master. 

I didn't understand everything I read at first, but I knew the rules in front of me were a gamechanger. My years steeped in the hobby told me as such. The problem was it was almost impossible to find a game! Finding people to play RPGs with is tricky at the best of times. We often engage and agree in search of some platonic ideal informed by nostalgic memories from childhood, and the reality is the heights of the hobby are rarely achieved. We chase the dragon because we know how good these games can be, but we often play in spite of the drudgery of how they sometimes unfold. 

In 2015, I had no idea where to look for people to play indie RPGs in Los Angeles. I tried Meet Up, online groups, and Google Plus - all to no avail. I knew intuitively it would take playing these games to understand the complexities of the mechanisms laid before me, but had no way to find a game.

And so it went for a couple of more years. On and off we would pick back up the Skies of Fire RPG, a hack of Blades in the Dark, only to bang our head in frustration at trying to retro engineer something we poorly understood. Fits and spurts, fits and spurts until January 2020.

At the beginning of the year, we made it a goal to make RPGs part of Mythopoeia in a big way. We started out with two full revisions of Skies of Fire before jumping into the hobby full force. I found and began attending Story Games Glendale, a local Meet Up group, along with the Blades in the Dark Discord and a handful of other online communities. 

My personal playtime skyrocketed exponentially. I played all sorts of games with all kinds of people. Over the next six months Vince and I wrote and published over 12 different games - most of them small, but each improving our understanding of the medium as a whole. 

What a year it's been. Good times. Still going. We have a game to publish now, and a whole lot of things ahead of us. Here's to persistence and making plans. The road is winding but intentionality leads to opportunity. 

Cheers,

​Ray 

Happy November Mythopoeians! 

It's election day and the world is on edge. What will the results of tonight bring? A turning of a page? More turmoil and political unrest? The world waits with baited breath and watches as the fate of America's democracy unfurls before us.

October was a very fruitful month for Mythopoeia, culminating in our first outside published work and largest crowdfunding campaign yet. We are very blessed to have found favor and some modicum of fortune during these trying times and it's not something we take for granted. 

Today I'd like to talk a little bit more about systems by making a couple of observations. 

When the United States decided to reboot their system of government in 1790, the founding fathers came up with a cutting edge means of participation predicated on the principles of separation of powers and federalism. The Constitution became a model for law all across the western world and is arguably the country's greatest export next to cinema and corn dogs. 

As an American, we're taught to revere the Constitution and it's elegance. The nasty bits, like Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, are brusquely and briefly mentioned while items like the Bill of Rights are enshrined as reasons why our system of governance is superior to all others in the world. 

Systems are means of function predicated on consensus. As a game company, we understand that the strengths and weaknesses of any given system cannot be fully understood until tested by a critical mass of users.


Example 1: League of Legends

In 2012, Riot Games implemented a system called Honor, whereby players could honor their opponents to reward them a form of virtual currency. The idea was to encourage positive behavior and mitigate toxicity. And it worked! For a time. 

Pandemic is fun but suffers from a syndrome called "quarterbacking" in which one or more players can become too dominant and dictate moves to other players during their turn in service of achieving the win condition.

With enough experience, the game can be more or less solved even on the hardest of difficulties, with only small bits of randomization inserting chance as a variable. This is a common problem amongst board games, and indeed games writ large. For the first several playthroughs, players are unfamiliar with the rules of the system and tend to make unoptimized moves. That in turn allows a greater variance in outcomes, which often leads to a perception of enjoyment or fun. 

As players become more familiar with the system, they tend towards optimization. If a game is easily solvable, the perceived enjoyment goes down for a large percentage of the userbase. How many times have you played a game that you enjoyed the first couple of runs, but by the fourth or fifth time it feels repetitive and like you're going through the motions? I certainly have felt that sensation with Pandemic and a whole lot of other experiences. Tabletop games can somewhat mitigate that experience because they are for the most part in person experiences that require a large amount of commitment to begin, and so the total expected playtime per player numbers maybe in the dozens of hours as opposed to say the hundreds with an online experience. 

The less familiar you are with a system, the less likely you are to recognize its boundaries and points of exploitation.

Example 3: Mitch McConnell 

So that brings me to one of my least favorite people in the world, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Over the course of his tenure, Mitch McConnell has done more to exploit the weaknesses in the American system of government than any other individual.

During the Obama years, he was largely responsible for the 'do-nothing' strategy of Congress that has in many ways led us to our current political situation. Instead of choosing to compromise and work with the opposition, he led Congress to a a virtual standstill from 2010 that is still ongoing to this day. The only significant legislation that has passed in the ensuing years was a major tax bill in 2017 when the Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislative and the executive; and the rushed CARES Act bill that saw huge corporations gobble up billions of dollars before a second wave of funding enabled small businesses like ours access to government aide. 

Outside of those two pieces of legislation, Congress has done almost nothing. For ten years.

In addition, McConnell blatantly ignored the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution by refusing to hear the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland. 

Within the confines of our grand system of governance - the sacred United States Constitution, Mitch McConnell has found unprecedented ways to manipulate, obfuscate, and grind the wheels of governance to a halt. 

Given enough time and/or users, flaws and exploits will be found within every system.

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Games have the privilege to constantly update their systems, either in the form of patches for digital content or new editions for tabletop games. Unfortunately, updating a system of government is much harder. There are only two means to do so, both beginning with the letter "R." 

If we don't do one, we will eventually beget the other. That is what history tells us. That is what the youth increasingly speak about openly as an inevitability. 

These are dark times. I don't like to talk openly about politics, not on a platform of  creativity and commerce. But if we don't speak now, we will eventually be silenced later. That is what history tells us. That is the lesson we should have learned. 

So let the record show.

​We Mythopoeians choose to speak.

Ray ​

​Here's  anupdate on where we're at with Glow.

It's with a mix of pride and a tinge of sadness that we are announcing that as of Issue #5, artists Anny Maulina and Dia Ja have both officially moved on from Glow. 

It's definitely a little bittersweet, but we knew this day would eventually come. We're happy to have been a small part of their journeys and this is not goodbye forever! We're still in touch with both of them and plan on collaborating on different projects on the future - in fact, we're already working on one of those behind the scenes now. Hopefully we can announce that one soon! 
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Vinsensius Suriantoo previously helped us develop our upcoming dog fairy tale Sansha and Blanco. He's a monster of perspective and warm expressions. We're honored to have him work on Glow.

Zie Fauzi is a man with many talents, one of which is toy design! In fact, he actually designed the chibi vinyls above. We saw a lot of potential in Zie's portfolio and so far through about twenty pages of sequentials he's just gotten better and better. ​

We're  also super excited to introduce concept artist Arief Russanto to the team! 

Arief has been helping us flesh out maps of the world and Arkadis, the next major location of the story. He's a talented sequential artist in his own right and will for sure be contributing on that end for Glow in the future. For now, check out his sweet maps which are currently being colored! 

So here's where we're at with the next few issues:

• Issue #5 is completely inked, ready to be colored.
• Issue #6 has one last sequence to be inked, about 6 pages
• Issue #7 is completely written with the first 4 pages being worked on this month.
• Issue #8 is still being drafted, about 60% done with the first draft. 

Our plan going forward with Glow is to release a campaign every two issues instead of every issue going forward. My personal goal is to have up to issue #12 written by the end of the year. Two months to go - we'll see what happens! 

For the Glow: Book 1 Kickstarter, we are still tentatively planning on launching sometime in November, but our timeframe is narrowly shrinking. An opportunity to publish another project, The Wildsea, came up in September, and was time-sensitive. I've been building out both Kickstarters including the campaign design, merch, and production for both, but honestly I don't know if I'm going to make it. It's a lot of work and I'm grinding everyday but there's still so many things that have to be done. 

If, for any reason, Glow Book 1 is delayed, we'll probably launch the campaign in January of the new year. We'll still be continuing the work behind the scenes with manufacturing and merch, so it's sort of a matter of how much of the public facing stuff we want done before launching. Gut says more rather than less. 

​Finally, I want to let everyone know that Vince is currently taking a sabbatical from the company due to his health. He's burned out and his well-being is suffering as a result. He's going to take at least the rest of the year on the sidelines of Mythopoeia to get better. Please, if you can, send good vibes his way. 

2020 has been really hard. Hopefully the worst is behind us. Fingers crossed. 
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- Ray ​