Roaring Mouse, Pets and Wards

Dear heroes,

I hope this week and a bit has been good for you. It has been quite good here. Getting the chance to book an appointment for my vaccination on Monday, which will be quite a relief. The summer heatwave is also receding—after over two weeks of 35C days and 27C nights, it's good to be able to go out without instantly melting.

Now, without more ado (and before the doggo drags me out for her afternoon constitutional—I see her peeking out of the windows the way she usually does before making her demands):

1. The Book

It's time for version 0.74 of seacat aka. Beyond the Black City. I'm not going to go into terrible detail about this update (I've appended a changelog). The big things are:

• I went through my art, and found about 200 pieces I had drawn for seacat but forgot to use. Facepalm. Some are now included. More will be in the fullness of time.
• I finally added the consumables and completed the defensive gear. It was tricky - I realized I had to have a functioning overview of how the gear fits together (and is priced and modified and customized) before I could easily make all the different things.
• I finished the fifty pets. Well. I planned 50, they ended up 60. Close enough. See above.

2. Patreon Changes

Last week I also announced (and eventually carried out) some changes to the patreon. So here I'll list them:

• I've redone the description to show that I'm working on seacat / btbc because ... honestly that's the project now. I hope you like how it looks! It should be easier to share with new humans now. More intuitive and such.
• I've changed some art for the tiers.
• I've unpublished the neohero tier because it's functionally the same as the hero tier now. If that's your tier, it's not disappearing and it will not disappear. You do, however, get a legacy title :).
• Added a few cool higher level tiers with hidden benefits--hidden because I haven't fully defined them yet. :P
• And expanded the membership limits on the tiers.

Which is a fancy way of saying ... ok, we're now almost ready to go for 667 heroes. Suggestions for what to do at that milestone are quite welcome.

3. Processes and Learnings

I do want to take a little bit of space to talk about the changelog. Seacat is now a 230-page book. This is great!

This is also terrifying. It messes with my brain as I work on it in quite unusual ways. Specifically, even if I write, layout, and illustrate 10 pages ... my brain doesn't see the result.

Last week I finished all the pets. That's a 10-page section done!

Did my brain celebrate?

No, it immediately went to the next section and said, "ah, but this is not done yet."

Hence my attempt at a running changelog, where I list everything I do as I do it. Hopefully, this will encourage the brain to notice when something gets done :).

4. The Stratometaship Discord

For more chit chat, art, and ajour inspiration, here's another 7-day link for the discord: https://discord.gg/vA5UBNae for those who care to drop in and say hi.

5. Next Steps

Over the next couple of weeks, these are the rough goals:

• Finish detailing the offensive charms and rhetorics.
• Detail up about 42 consumables.
• Restore the golemancer to the book. Update the spells.
• More art.

I'm also hoping to publish a free version of the rules (roughly pages 10–29) on the internets next week. You know, as self-promotion and marketing. I've been a little bit worse at that self-promotion part of being an artist factotum these last few months. I suspect the summer and the unending disease situation is ... at least a little bit to blame.

6. And now something utterly random

Cheers!

—Luka

PS - oh, nearly forgot! Stats for Poncho!