What was this about me thinking I wasn't up for any art challenges this month but I found one that looked fun and I jumped into it into an over-complicated way? It's time for another art challenge with extra stories for the Magical Renegades lore!
This spin-off, Roll for It!, began on the 2nd. On the 1st I was still exhausted and that made me feel demoralized from starting an art challenge along with knowing that I still needed to juggle multiple projects with it.
On the 2nd I still didn't feel sure that I could do an art challenge unless I kept it simple, but I still looked through the art challenge tag on Mastodon looking for challenges boosting some of them. There were a lot that were tempting, but I found one that inspired me to try, despite having complicated ideas for a spin-off story that's definitely not keeping the challenge simple!
The stories are on Magical Renegades 90's Resort: Magical Renegades - Roll for It!
This is the one I found that inspired this spin-off! In this one, roll 20-sided dice for each of the columns to get the prompts and put them together. I don't have any dice for the physical experience of rolling for each of these prompts from the lists so I used RNG.
When I started planning this I wanted to have the setting be a tabletop gaming night between some of the characters and each of the drawings illustrated some of the events in the game, but an MMO setting was easier to include more characters and situations.
Prompts rolled: 2 (Comedy), 4 (Cleric), 9 (Gesture), 18 (Toy), 8 (Delicate)
This led to an idea of Felicity as the Cleric character and her party needed to buy a rare and enchanted toy as an important item for a side quest. When she gestured towards the toy, which is behind a glass display case with warnings, the shopkeeper warned her to not hold the hammer, which is a weapon a lot of clerics have been depicted wielding. The shopkeeper claimed this toy has 1000 moving parts and is so delicate that buyers need to be careful with how they gesture!
Prompts rolled:7 (Horror), 2 (Aristocrat), 20 (Walk), 17 (Tool), 1 (Angry)
The idea for this one came immediately! Chelsea is angry that she was tasked with going through a graveyard to rob one of the graves for a tool that her party needed for another side quest. It's one that she feels like is beneath her even though she'd only be doing this in-game, but it's also a high-stakes quest; it can only be done at night and only by one person from a party, so there's no backup!
Some of the party also needed to stay behind to protect the cursed doll they bought. Chelsea would obviously want to play as an aristocrat in this MMO, but that doesn't save her from this quest!
This is also a grayscale drawing like the first one but with more focus on the background for the horror atmosphere.
Prompts rolled: 17 (Supernatural), 6 (Gangster), 1 (Attack), 13 (Satchel), 7 (Dark)
A direct continuation of the previous entry, Chelsea got ambushed in the graveyard!
When I got this roll, I originally got 17 (Soft) for the last column but since I didn't have enough ideas. I considered that someone could've been intentionally holding back against another character in a fight but it was hard to think who'd do that who could fit the "supernatural gangster" category. I re-rolled that one and got 7 for Dark, which led to this drawing being an immediate follow-up to the last!
The ghostly gangster is played by Ainslie, who is a player in a different party and who may be a different faction so they're competitors. I'm making up a lot of the rules of this MMO in the story on the spot, based on the stories I've written for the prompts I rolled.
There might be at least two major opposing factions that players can play as in this MMO. What they are is still to be decided and later entries might help with that, but this story shows the consequences of losing battles. This was also hinted at in the previous story when it was mentioned Chelsea didn't have her digging gloves and lost her magical weapon; players can lose items when they survive, but lose battles.
Ainslie and her party were struggling too. The gangster player class is similar to the pirate player class in bonuses and penalties; they can bribe their way out of some situations and even bypass some side quest requirements with bribes (something the aristocrat class should also seem capable of, but they might get too OP because they already have dice rolls that are more likely to be skewed in their favor), but they get expensive and don't always work here!
If this story is canon, this confirms that she was still around as of the end of the second timeline! Ghosts usually only stay as long as they have unfinished business. She was introduced in episode 26 of Anathema to Commonsense as one of the Magical Renegades team members. For her, staying with the Magical Renegades was part of her unfinished business and it could still be; in chapter 6 of Extra! Chronicles it was ambiguous whether anyone from the Magical Renegades in the 1880's was still around as of the late 2010's of the second timeline, but late in the second timeline Ainslie could've also became interested in this MMO!
I also considered Ainslie for the role which could be foreshadowing to them being in opposing factions in ATC.
She had an advantage as a ghost of being able to control parts of the graveyard, but attacked using her satchel since she lost her weapons and didn't have enough magic to cast spells; it's desperation since her player character lost money, her main weapon and she's trying to recoup her team's losses; Chelsea pities Ainslie for this and her party shows up... Chelsea is still in shock that the ghost she fought looks like she could be her ancestor (little did she know, she was right!)
This chapter also shows off the dice roll mechanics when Alfbern tries to steal from the undead soldiers. I used RNG from 1-20 to roll for some parts of this story. The character classes can have advantages or disadvantages that affect their dice rolls. Poor Felicity. Her cleric bonus helped but her dice roll could've been more favorable.
The enemies got a maximum dice roll against her, or would've been the maximum without their disadvantage, but it was still plenty! Player class advantages can't make up for unfavorable dice rolls!
Katt was at a disadvantage against the undead and graveyard settings which weakened her dice roll when she fought, but she was lucky to get a high enough roll to make up for it that time!
Her line of not letting Felicity's hard work get wasted suggests that if your player character dies, they get deleted and the player has to start over! Felicity's remark about no one getting killed at least is a reference to the stakes in the first arc of Sword Art Online!
Prompts rolled:5 (High fantasy), 5 (Farmer), 11 (Jump), 1 (Book), 7 (Dark) -- What immediately came to mind with these prompts is a farmer character holding a book while jumping over an obstacle while there was a threat associated with the high fantasy genre in the background the character is running away from.
The high fantasy and farmer prompts inspired me to include shoutouts to Runescape and Melvor Idle! 😂 They aren't very noticeable in grayscale, but Katt's outfit is based off of the farmer's outfit from Old School Runescape, and the farming gloves and being able to wield a rake as a weapon are from Melvor Idle.
I chose Katt to play as the farmer for her party. She can joke about being their farm Katt, but she found herself in a dangerous situation! She completed a dungeon run to get a rare book but here she approached a cliff and had to jump over it to get to the other side to return to her party!
She's either very strong that she can wield a weak weapon effectively, or the rake is a lot stronger in this MMO!
Prompts rolled: 9 (Military) 20 (Tank) 16 (Shout) 4 (Food) 6 (Cool)
This is a WIP of the scene. This is the lineart showing Alfbern, Monica and Claudia preparing for a food fight! Monica is taking the lead and her character is dressed as a knight in the "tank" role. Earlier chapters mentioned that Alfbern's character is in the pirate class and Claudia's is in the artist class so they were included in this drawing to show them!
A mess hall will be in the background of the finished drawing.
The finished version! This took a lot of extra time to finish because of the extra steps filling in the shades and half-tones but I like how it turned out. The story to go with this drawing is still in-progress and the setup I'm planning is that the players weren't allowed to use their own weapons but have to defend the mess hall!
Prompts rolled:15 (Steampunk), 1 (Alien), 8 (Fly), 15 (Staff), 14 (Nostalgic) -- Paige is playing as a steampunk-style alien and is flying, holding her staff after it was just repaired at a shop and thinks nostalgically about how many enemies she defeated with this weapon... This was originally posted as a WIP with just the line art, and this was made in MacPaint, which Paige would definitely be nostalgic for!
It's hard to see from the angle but she has a jetpack! The alien player class in this story/MMO can fulfill player's wishes of having a jetpack, in an MMO at least! This player class has the advantage of being able to fly without an airship, but the player has to control the flight trajectory and speed and make sure not to crash! A lot of risk, but a lot of potential reward!
Prompts rolled:9 (Military), 9 (Knight), 14 (Ride), 18 (Toy), 10 (Festive) -- Santana is playing as a knight and was one of the participants in the fight from scene 5. If there's customizability in this setting, he'd chose an armor set that's spiky or has a skeleton motif; I tried to include some skeleton motif elements in the design. When I planned this scene, a character would be dressed as a knight and riding a toy horse in a celebratory parade and I liked the contrast between Santana and his armor design with the toy horse design 😆
This drawing might be a WIP, but I was thinking over whether to leave this and later scenes for this challenge as line art or whether to still shade them 🤔
He's serious a lot because of his job, and what he's had to put up with for millennia, but even he likes this MMO! He might've played sessions of it between his duties at Minions of Nemesis, or after work.
In between duties he might be playing this game on company time, which might be a good way for him to annoy Teasel and Deathmaster. This is more lore I should be adding to the Magical Renegades lore page, and the character bios I keep forgetting about!
Deathmaster is the MON's leader, Santana is the second in-command but the head bureaucrat who wants to reform the MON, and Teasel is the third in-command who wants to become the leader and MON larger and more corrupt than ever! This is why Santana and Teasel have a mutual distrust of each other, but reluctantly work together at times to avoid the MON to focus on the key goal of recovering the Nemesis anti-superweapon, and to keep the MON from potentially destroying itself in an internal power struggle.
Unfortunately I lost steam on this art challenge and the spin-off story that I started for it after the 7th drawing.😩 It wasn’t from a lack of ideas for the prompts; it was pretty easy putting the 5 prompts for each drawing together. Writing the story to go with them usually wasn’t that hard either. I came up with ideas based on the prompts and how the characters in the scenes would interact.
It was fun drawing these scenarios and having some characters play as the type of character that was expected of them. Chelsea playing as an aristocrat was predictable and in-character for her showing that her attitude extends even into the multiplayer games she plays. Others played as different types of characters that were unexpected like Katt playing as a farmer and Alfbern, who is one of the more lawful characters, playing as a pirate which made for some fun what-if scenarios.
I think the problem again was that I overcomplicated this challenge, but I expected this to happen again. Writing stories to go with Magical Renegades drawings in art challenges slows down how many drawings I can make in a month-long art challenge, but I accept this trade-off each time I try because the drawings and the stories to go with them help build onto the lore.
Because the webtoon update schedule is slow, it’d be a long time before some characters will get to appear again in it, so these extra stories are another opportunity for them to appear and get some focus.
However this challenge was extra difficult because I also had to think over details about the MMO that the drawings took place in-universe and had to plan some of that out before I could continue with the stories. I also had to think over whether this spin-off was going to be canon; making it canon was the more difficult option but was the one I lean towards.
By making it fit within canon, it fit best between 2016-2018 in the second timeline. It had to be 2018 at the latest because that was when the time travel incident happened that led to the creation of the third timeline. I chose 2018 for that year and kept it even with the webtoon reboot because that was the year I started these story-based art challenges.
I had to limit who could appear unless a character from the 19th century had a justifiable reason for remaining in the 21st century, whether as a ghost or because they managed to live beyond the human lifespan.
It’s silly that a lot of the characters also know each other on this MMO, but I liked building onto their interactions. Chelsea, Claudia, Monica, Felicity and Katt were all on the same team, and knew each other through that game if they hadn’t met before, but in the third timeline of Anathema to Commonsense, they’d be split between opposing groups! Chelsea, Claudia and Monica would be in The League; Felicity and Katt would be in the Magical Renegades.
Scene 3 foreshadows that Chelsea and Ainslie would also be in opposing groups.
I posted about this on Mastodon to explain why updates have stalled. The update was quick and had an open-ended message; I could still continue this story at another time even if I don’t resume it for the rest of this month.
The drawings I made and the stories that I could write were the foundation of a spin-off, and from having that foundation it’ll help me with how to continue it. It’s a spin-off that began through a month-long art challenge, but doesn’t have to be restricted to that one month.
There’ve been days I wanted to draw things that weren’t just for a webtoon episode but I couldn’t decide on prompts. When I’m looking for a prompt for something to draw, want to draw something for Magical Renegades and I’m not doing another challenge already, I could return to this. I already got some of the toughest parts setting up this spin-off story out of the way.
November is right around the corner which means I'll want to participate in Huevember! There's another story project I've been juggling and I've been thinking over whether to have Huevember focus on those characters, more for Magical Renegades or for 3D modeling practice. 🤔
I was inspired to do more 3D modeling ideas that'd help make stylized outdoor scenery I can use in the webtoon. Outdoor scenery has been one of those major stumbling blocks with 3D modeling, but I learned much more efficient ways to model trees than the way I first tried 🥲
Also from more practice and resources I learned about how to model with better topology, so I want to also revisit this 3D modeling project that I finished last year.
Some parts were very difficult because of issues with topology and that I didn't know how to snap objects into place! If I knew that, then modeling the lights and fitting them on would've been so much easier! The techniques I used worked then for a working render; the sloppy handling of how the lights were fit on was able to be hidden and this wasn't going to be a model I was going to sell, but it's a good habit to keep clean topology when modeling. It'll help avoid a lot of problems later.
The webtoon went this month without an update so that's making me want to focus on an update for next month. I'm still not decided on what I'd do for Huevember but I'd want to work on the webtoon in between Huevember entries if I'll do that so I can at least post WIPs.