Lino Cuts, Spells & Death to AI

Various updates this month both on the site and the book. So let's get into it!

Lino Cuts

The Glumdark Book is very heavily influenced by early (15th & 16th century) bookmaking, as I've noted in previous Patreon posts. And what you see over and over in those books is really cool woodcut icons. 

Here's an example I love:

I had drawn a bunch of dice icons for the book which mimicked this type of iconography, and I think it worked alright. But I really wanted to try my hand (literally) at cutting them.

So that's what I've been working on in the evenings this week:

One cool advantage of this is that the book often has a row of icons for lists which require 2d6s or 3d20s, etc. This will allow each of those icons to be different as a result of the cutting and printing process. They ought to look much more visually interesting as same-but-different icons. I'm exciting about it and I'm planning to post some timelapses to the woefully-neglected Glumdark instagram account (I loathe social media) if they come out looking interesting enough.

Spells

Because I am crazy, I decided that the book needed one more massive table which would take me days to write. Thus, I've been working on a collection of more powerful spells to compliment the pew-pew Cantrips table which is already written and typeset. 

This table is coming along nicely and will be posted to the website once it's completed. At least for Patron access, anyway. I'm not sure when it will arrive for non-Patrons as I'd like to keep some stuff unique to the book aside from all of the art, editing, original fiction, & etc.

Death to AI

McGlintlock & I were guilty of being wooed by the early days of Midjourney and we used it to generate some material for Glumdark back when Midjourney was first made publicly available. Since then, our thoughts on AI have had more time to coalesce.

Moral arguments aside, and I also think there are moral arguments to be made, I just think AI-generated art is a lot less cool and interesting than hand-drawn work. If you ask me, art is the result of the practice of an artist. While it can be superficially recreated by a machine, it's just not as interesting. It's empty. 

So we've been deleting and replacing the AI-generated art on the site. I started with the art which existed for individual tables, and then replaced all of the NPC portraits with Vil's incredible Faces for a Dying Land . We've commissioned Vil for a custom set of Glumdark-inspired faces. And those will also be made available to the public domain once they're finished in a couple of months or so. 

What's left are the biome images on the Travel Location Generator. These I'm going to probably re-draw on my own when I can find the time. And then we'll presumably commission new work for the rest of the tables, when the budget allows.

Book Progress

Oh god, so much. It's now 129 pages long and I still need to add the "final" Spells table. I finished the first copyedit and have sent it to some friends for design review. It inches closer every day.

--

That's all for this month! Thanks for sticking around!

-CTRO