This Hollow House (part one)

Dear Heroes!

Patient humans! Watchful. Kind. Gentle. Of so many varieties. They dwell about the Hollow House.

Oh, you thought I meant you? No, no. It's the second Our Golden Age adventure for the book.

I'm building this whole section about the PCs getting their hands on a manor, house, omniapt, or other human habitation machine. Y'know, an HQ. So, I wrote about half of the rules on running it last year, but then ~waves hands~ life ... and now I finally wrote the opening adventure.

But then, over the last few weeks I got sick again, and again the virus was followed by an opportunistic infection, so it's antibiotics again. Not kidding: sick 6 (six) times since March. This is wild. I don't think I've ever had a year like this.

Now, I don't want to make accusations or allegations, and it may just be a coincidence, but my kid started attending nursery in March. She really loves going to the nursery. I'm so happy for her. And she brings all these lovely microscopic friends home with her.

"Atchoo!"

Six times.

Right. Anyway.

I decided I wanted this adventure to be much more hand-drawn and hand-colored than the first one. I think this piece of the Hemisphere of Dust (which the players "inherit") came out really well.

I haven't figured out where to put every piece yet.

But ... I knew it needed a big center piece. If the Living Castle was the thing for Summons Unexpected, what would we do here?

I decided to go 100% analog.

And isometric. Kitchen towels - great for keeping your drawing hand from smudging everything. Other papers also work, but kitchen towels can also double as tissue paper.

cough sneeze

There we go, starting to look good. Check the line width test at top right.

And cello! It is drawn.

Then I was really sick for a few days again ...

And here it is, labelled and glorious.

I also liked a few other pieces:

For example, I redid the settlement spread - tidied up the inks and redid the colors. I think it came out quite nicely.

I won't overburden this post with all the other pages—they're in the PDF. You'll also see that the second part is still in layout hell, with a few sections missing. Yeah. Well ... Uh. Sausage getting written, story getting made, gristle gristle, magic thistle.

Next update is probably going to be a public art + works update kind of thing. Um ... Remember to join the stratometaship discord if you want to see all the works in progress as they happen.

https://discord.gg/ra6Aqp3xFp <-- here! link link! welcome!

Now I have to rush a bit to visit the doc before picking up the best kid in the world. Happy days!

Happy heat dome, everyone,
—Luka R,
Sweltering Seoul Summer

EDIT: The labelled JPG of Hollow House was missing some labels. I blamed myself rushing, but it seems to have been a weird photoshop bug. The app seems to have semi randomly NOT RENDERED some text layers, even though they were still there and functional. They got fixed when I selected them from the menu and put the text cursor inside. Bizarre. Anyway, I've uploaded a fixed JPG.