#they have so much potential to do something PUNK with their steampunk setting

[hapalopus]

steampunk elves save me.

steampunk elves.

save me steampunk elves

[whirlybirdwhat]

AU where Morgan reign of terror traumatizes Coby and he leaves with Luffy and Zoro instead of becoming a marine.

ANON I LOVE YOU YOU HAVE INSPIRED ME!!!! I don’t know how to make this a comprehensive story yet so have some headcanons about 

~~REVOLUTIONARY COBY!!!~~~

Coby is disgusted by way marines are run

He has a “THIS ISNT JUSTICE” Revelation like in Marineford, but on a smaller scale. He sees how thin Zoro is, from being starved and crucified for saving a young, and how happy the people are now that Axe Hand is gone and is like - this isn’t the justice I wanted.

“I want to catch criminals, not harm innocent people.”

Coby starts thinking about his new companions and thinks Luffy’s rough and luffs feral, but he hasn’t hurt anyone. Axe Hand Morgan and his son have.

So Coby follows Luffy and Zoro into the great unknown.

He’s not entirely sure he wants to be a pirate however. Unlike everyone else he does have a moral compass.

“I don’t think I want to be a pirate.” He says after watching Zoro keep calling Luffy Captain.

 “Then be a bounty hunter? Go after whomever you want” – Zoro, who does not give a shit about Coby’s internal crisis, but wants to support him.

⁃Coby: “Huh. Okay”

⁃Cue nights where cobys just thinking about his future as he drifts in the waves with Zoro and Luffy being dumb idiots together and just heading for their dreams

HE doesn’t know if he wants to be a bounty hunter, because how can he tell which bounties are for genuine crimes and which are for people the government wants to kill?

Potential other au lmao coby becomes a bounty hunter

⁃At orange town, he panics at Buggy and hides - he doesn’t know how to fight, but he does get the key from chouchou the dog. He’s helping, in his own way.

⁃Zoro sees this and is like “NO. You need to learn how to fight cmon we’ll teach you.” Like Luffy, he has an aversion to people who cant stand up for themselves, but he likes Coby so he’s gonna help.

⁃So Zoro and Luffy tag team each other and teach coby how to fight. He learns a weird mix of swordsman ship and punching that really don’t go together, but its better than what he had.  

⁃In the meantime, Coby keeps on seeing all the places the marines dont reach and keeps losing his faith in the system. He starts wondering why the Marines are hailed as this awesome force when really a lot of the times they just abuse their power or do nothing to help people.

⁃At Syrup, he helps get Kaya to safety with Usopp, still unwilling to fight, but starting to regain his resolve to do something – to reclaim a dream thought lost.

⁃Coby’s disgusted at the Fullbuster guy on the Baratie and punches him. 

⁃“YOUR FIRST CRIME!” Luffy says, cheerfully. The chefs applaud. Go Coby.

⁃Now, Coby isn’t advancing as fast in training, because one, luffy and zoro (and Sanji, eventually) aren’t Garp, and two, he doesn’t have that drive anymore. Why does he want to be a Marine who punishes justice?

⁃But when Arlong shows up Coby figures out his new dream. He knows what he is going to do.

⁃“I’m gonna take down the Marines - they can’t be this corrupt forever, and how many people are just innocent people? I want to give the world justice again!”

Luffy doesn’t really care about anybody else, innocent or not, unless his crew cares, but Coby cares. He’s not a pirate, but maybe if the law isn’t right, being free to do as he wish shouldn’t incriminate him?

⁃THEN the Strawhats run into Vivi and Chopper and suddenly there are more caring people like him, and more evidence that the system is corrupt which he already knows but how can he change it. He’s able to fight off some men now, and helps fight off some of Wapols men and the Whiskey Peak people, but that isn’t enough.

⁃All his friends have goals that seem impossible but they are so sure they alone are going to reach it, even without the crew there. Coby doesn’t feel like he can do the same.

⁃But hen theres alabasta - He’s stronger now, can through a punch, hes more lean with more muscle. He helps fight, and maybe it doesn’t do much, maybe the man (Luffy) who opened his eyes to the world is still there bleeding out, but he did something.

⁃And Ace and Robin have a hint for him, for his dream.

⁃(Who is this, Ace asks, referring to Coby. He has no role on the ship, but Luffy is proud to call him my friend, and say he wants to change the world for the better. To bring back what Justice really is. Ace cringes at the thoughhht of Garp but hums, and says theres a group of people who will do that – The Revolutionaries. Look for them, Ace says, and leaves. They will help you)

⁃(Robin, who knows all, tells him about Dragon unknown in the East Blue, his home, buth the most wanted man elsewhere. He has a plan, to take down the World Government, and perhaps Coby can find equal footing.)

⁃The Revolutionaries -  Dragon, Luffy’s father.

⁃Coby has a goal now.

⁃He doesn’t want to say goodbye to the Strawhats, but he does, taking a boat lent to him by Vivi, and setting off to find the Revolutionaries. Pirates don’t care about fair fights and Justice, but Coby does, and the Revolutionaries do. His dream will grow there, but he will always be an honorary crew member of the Straw Hat Pirates (the first in some stories).

⁃At sea he runs into Helmeppo, whose drifting at sea stranded due to the marines, and helps him. They bond, and Helmeppo has done a little growth in character as well, and decides to follow Coby, much like Coby decided to follow Luffy.

⁃They run into Garp who is losing faith in the new generation and believes that maybe his son is right, gives them a few fists of training after asking about his grandson, and goes on his way.

⁃They save a town or two

⁃Coby punches several people in the face.

⁃Still no sign of the revolutionaries, but they have heard things from the grape vine that a pirate ship has fallen out of the sky into a navy base. Coby assumes at least Luffy is doing fine.

⁃Finally they run into - guess who – Sabo, on a information recovery mission, which Coby helps with. He questions them at first and learns their story.

⁃And knocks himself the fuck out when Coby says “Ace” “Luffy” and “Brothers”

⁃“OH SHIT THEY ARE GOING TO KILL ME” - sabo,after waking up, to a confused Coby and then profusely thanking him.

⁃Sabo agrees to let Coby and helmeppo into the Revolutionaries and trains them (wow Coby’s been trained by a lot of ppl at this point) if Coby helps him find Luffy and Ace.

⁃CUE WILD GOOSE CHASE WHICH ENTAILS COBY BECOMING THE HERO OF THE REVOLUTION just like Garp is the hero of the marines!! They just fight ppl but instead of in the name of becoming the pirate king, its for REVOLUTION and JUSTICE because Coby has a working moral compass.

⁃Coby develops new moves combining all that he’s been taught into a rather weird fighting style with a mix of weapons and martial arts. He gets a bounty, and it’s the worst day of his entire life and also the best. He can’t decide, Helmeppo Sabo and Koala (whom he met when Sabo had to explain why he wasn’t on his mission) laugh at him.

⁃Then Sabo runs into Ace, ands that reunion goes as well as you would expect, but that not the important thing, because its still not enough to not send Ace to Marineford. But they don’t know this. Yet.

⁃Sabo and Ace both get news about Ennies Lobby at the same time. Coby, when Luffy mentions knowing Coby to his visiting grandfather, receives a shudder down his spine as if he has narrowly avoided a horrible fate.

⁃But its whatever. Sabo contacts Dragon and plans to meet with him and Luffy at Sabaody, to keep an eye on the Supernovas and let Sabao and Coby see Luffy again.

⁃They never get a chance, as the Strawhat Pirates have disappeared by the time they arrive… and Ace is on the execution block.

⁃Sabo has to go save him and drags Coby along for the ride, who eagerly awaits the opportunity to THROW DOWN SOME MARINES

⁃Luffy still goes through Impel down and all that, but Sabo and Coby still arrive late to the battle.

⁃You know how Sabo saves Luffy and Ace in that one excerpt? Cue coby punching akainu in the face for trying to hurt his friends then dodging the hell outta there as sabo saves ace and luffy.

⁃He Learns his haki! Is like oh shit my crush is gonna die, better do some shit about that! The haki allows him to actually stop Akainu for a second, and stop the fighting, as he attempts to question the people – is this what justice is?

⁃Coby meets trafalagr law and also buggy again. He isn’t afraid anymore, and doesn’t hide. People are quietly proud.

⁃Luffy gets saved and ASL reunion happens.

⁃Luffy decides to train, and tries to get coby to come along with him.

⁃Coby Is just frustrated because he has a moral compass and Luffy is just here saying he’s now best friends with corrupt war lords and the pirate kings right hand man, who is a cool dude, but why luffy, coby is hurt, please stop punching people because you feel like it.

⁃(Coby’s just putting on appearances)

⁃HEs just a good boy who wants to tear down corrupt systems why do you make friends with criminals luffy why do you hurt coby like this

(Again, appearances, he’s not insane, thank you very much)

After leaving Luffy to train and after helping him due his oxbell thing, he leaves with sabo to FINALLY MEET DRAGON

He goes through his own two year training with helpmeppo who is along for the ride. Who Coby has now decided is stuck with him for life.

Training is hell, because Coby wants to find his own fighting style which means a lot of different stuff and seeing what works best and it HURTS

 “Just be grateful im not my father-“ – dragon

 Coby feels the shudder again

Yknow how The revs have that steam punk theme? Well

 STEAMPUNK COBY!!!!
 this is. so cool oh my gosh

 Coby goes around freeing people and when they asked what inspired you hes like “rubber bastard who doesn’t have a moral compass fkdjsha,dk”

Hes gay for luffy he cant deny it

Luffy fanclub #1

Anyway, Coby goes on to take down Akainu and corrupt governments across the world, and makes his dream of tearing down the marines a reality post Pirate King Luffy

[odogaronfang]

What are your thoughts on a modern fs au? I'm curious

well, i think it really depends on a lot of things, tbh. modern aus have so much raw potential just from making it modern- there’s so many differences from the canon universe to a modern one, and a lot of ways you could go with it. you could do the kind of modern au where they’re literally just put into a modern setting, with our map and our languages and technologies and foods, etc, or you could lean a little more towards alternate explanations of some modern things, kinda like botw- link has an ipad and a motorcycle, but it isn’t just like ‘lol link has an ipad and a motorcycle’, they fit those modern things in while keeping an explanation for them that’s a little truer to the series.

i think each have their merits, and which one is better really depends on where you’re trying to take a story. if you’re just looking for, like, a college or high school or coffee-shop or tattoo artist/florist type thing, oneshots and all, i think the ‘shove them on Earth’ is a good way to go, because, you know, there’s not much worldbuilding to be done and you can just take it and run with it. i personally favor alternate explanations for the technology, because i like to make things difficult for myself. and that is, in a way, where botw works as an example? you use the technology as the conflict, if you’re looking for something longer than a oneshot. ‘we made these cool spider pottery laser robots to kill ganon, oops they’re killing us’ type stuff.

i myself don’t do modern aus much, unless they’ve got other elements to them, really. i find i can’t think of much to do when i’m just putting them in my situation with a phone in their hands, you know? i’ve always been a fan of sci-fi/fantasy, and the genre and universe they’re in fits just fine.

but here’s a concept: cyber/solar/steam/something-punk modern aus. i love those, okay? solarpunk modern au, and ganon is the head of a big corporation seeking the exact opposite values of what the links are, total industry and urbanization of the world, and every little thing is going to cost you. cyberpunk au, where ganon is a scientist/engineer/researcher developing these great new technologies, ways to enhance organic life forms, but somewhere along the way he gets a little crazy, starts hacking off limbs and killing people and performing ridiculous experiments to try and further his work, founder and leader of an organized crime ring, the goal of which is to incapacitate as many people as possible so they’ll be forced to seek out the help of the rapidly monopolizing industry that ganon heads. a steampunk au, and ganon has gone mad with the revolutionizing technology, and decides that he is going to make the most bizarre and terrible things he possibly can with this steam-and-gears era, because if you can, why shouldn’t you?

or a modern au where technology is so, so advanced that it’s integrated into just about everything, including training simulations, which includes the military. and who knows, that technology could be SO advanced that it will be real if someone doesn’t stop them. so: VR, except it’ll be real reality if nothing’s done about it, and there are the links, a few of the designated fighters, traversing a world that isn’t real, against an enemy that can manipulate the terrain however it desires.

i just feel like plain ol’ modern gets boring, or at least when i try to write it. i experience this world every single day, and i write aus to get out of it, at least for a little while, y’know?

[kl-writes]

Overall Goal

Create a TTRPG focused around heists, schemes, and mysteries. The genre is fantasy-cyberpunk, with some elements of pulp adventure and noir.

Sources of Inspiration

Shadowrun: Heart Machine is a TTRPG in the fantasy-cyberpunk genre. I couldn’t avoid taking some inspiration from Shadowrun if I wanted to.

Dungeons and Dragons: Heart Machine is a TTRPG, and just about every modern TTRPG comes from D&D or older.

Final Fantasy VII: A fantasy-cyberpunk/steampunk video game- it’s worth looking into how FFVII works.

Cowboy Bebop: A lighter side of cyberpunk with a dash of western and space opera. I want a system that can be setting-agnostic, so it’s well-worth looking at the edges of cyberpunk.

Arsene Lupin (OG, not III): If you want to do heists, you ought to look at the greats. And besides, I like Lupin.

Doc Savage: Perhaps less so- but this is adventure pulp with a team of experts, there are bound to be things to borrow.

Dresden Files: More urban-fantasy, but it has a good deal of crime and mystery in it. The magic used is also different from D&D, Shadowrun, or FFVII, and worth looking at.

Metropolis: The WIP name is taken from this. I think this movie might be the earliest ancestor of cyberpunk as we know it.

Wu-tang Clan: Similar to Doc Savage and Arsene Lupin, this is more of an “aesthetic” or tone sort of inspiration.

Cultist Simulator: Cat-and-mouse games with detectives/rivals, and strange magic. Also has the victorian/pulp feel that I like.

If this seems like too much, remember: Art is subtraction. If anything, I’m not listing enough sources of inspiration. There’s no Gibson, Akira, Lord of the Rings, Die Hard, SCP, Sherlock Holmes- all sources of inspiration that I may study and call upon later.

Mechanical Design Goals

Player decisions and planning have a greater effect on the outcome of a test than luck.

There are degrees of success and failure. It is possible to have both a success and a failure at the same time. You can succeed, but with an unexpected obstacle or setback. You can fail, but with an unexpected opportunity or advantage.

Snowflake/Fractal Character Creation. New (or busy) players should be able to create a character in 15-30 minutes. However, you can spend 2-3 hours fiddling with your character if you would like, to better specialize them. Using either method shouldn’t make a character substantially better or worse than another character, though the detailed character creation will likely yield better or more focused results. Both methods should create characters that can thrive in the same party.

Modifiers for something you have/are versus something you plan/do affect different things. This makes it easier to mechanically ensure planning is more important than luck. It may also mean that good planning can overcome a lack of skill, which is fine.

Have the mechanical/mathematical explanations of rules decisions available where possible. Perhaps not in the core rules outside of GM tools, but available on the website.

Setting Design Goals

Adaptable: There is room to be lighter or darker within the setting.

Cyberpunk: The megacorps won, and that’s bad. Life sucks The world is probably about 20-50 years past a large disaster or near-apocalypse that destroyed much of society. The apocalypse/disaster is humanity’s fault, in some form. Talented human capital is at a premium- the population of the world is much less than what it used to be. Misuse of technology harms the world. Mercenaries work for corps on shadow/black/dark operations as part of corporate warfare. Some punks work for the downtrodden. Gangs run rampant in the streets. Organized crime is in bed with megacorps.

Fantasy: Magic exists, and has always existed. Dragons are a thing. Elves, dwarves, orks, and trolls are a thing, but the main races may be subject to change. Everyone starts with the potential to use magic, though power and talent vary. Ancient evils may emerge, to threaten the world once more.

Adventure/Noir Pulp: Memorable villains, extraordinary heroes. Catchy one-liners.

Archetypes/character worlds: Physical, Arcane, Quantum, and Hardware. Physical world of fighters and infiltrators. Arcane world of magic users. Quantum world of hackers. Hardware world of drivers and drone operators. Names for these archetypes are TBD.

Setting-agnostic: The mechanics do not require you to act in the Main World, and indeed there are tools for building your own. But a Main World exists.

[aion-rsa]

INTERVIEW: Cartoonist Ru Xu On Her Dieselpunk Adventure Newsprints

Ru Xu is the cartoonist behind the webcomic “Saint for Rent,” a story about an inn for time travelers, but she’s just been introduced to a wider audience with her first graphic novel, “Newsprints,” which was just released by Scholastic’s Graphic imprint. The steampunk/dieselpunk story involves a young girl named Blue, an orphan who pretends to be a boy. She meets a strange boy named Crow and an inventor named Jack, and the war, which seems far away, arrives uncomfortably close to home as Blue has to decide what she believes in and tries to be her true self.

“Newsprints” tells the tale of a girl named Blue who disguises herself as a newsboy in order to work at a newspaper company called The Bugle. It’s a story that encompasses a lot of how I felt growing up – how differently adults treated children depending on their gender and how much of the adult world seems to be so confusing and difficult to grasp as a child. I would say that’s because adults follow their own rules and not necessarily the rules that they teach children.

CBR: As “Newsprints” is set in an alternative steampunk universe in roughly the early 20th Century, where did the aspect of the story that Blue is pretending to be a boy in order to sell newspapers come from?

Ru Xu: “Newsprints” actually started out as characters. I went through several stories before I finally settled on the one I submitted to Scholastic and is now going to be published. Originally, it was a college project. It was supposed to be a PC game where a little kid helped the player character through this strange and crazy emporium to stop the inventor at the very end from destroying the city with his inventions. There’s a kind of whimsical-ness that I think carried the characters through each of the various stories I’ve tried out.

This story is where I went back to my roots of what I really enjoyed as a kid. I read a lot of stories about children uncovering government plots and stories about girls who had to disguise themselves as boys in order to seek their ambitions or do things that they were told were off limits to girls. “Newsprints” became a combination of a lot of things that really spoke to me as a child and I wanted to pass that down.

Who were the characters, besides Blue, that you originally created?

Originally, it was Blue — except Blue originally had a nebulous gender. Jack was also there. Jack hasn’t changed that much since the very beginning. He was always this red-haired inventor that was a selfish man who pretty much marches to the beat of his own drum. One of the other characters was a woman named Jill who had a very minor role in the very beginning as a flower shop owner, but she eventually turned into more of a supporting character with a bigger role in the story. The character of Crow – the very mysterious boy who Blue meets – he appeared as different birds in different incarnations of the story.

Always a bird?

There was always a bird in the story. I really liked birds since childhood so it was natural for me to make a story where birds was a very central allegory to the story.

It’s interesting you describe Jack in that way, because he plays a role in the book which we’ve seen before in stories but you really show that he does his own thing, which isn’t necessarily positive but more ambiguous and a little selfish.

You have the child world, where being able to do your own thing is great, but even though you gain more autonomy as an adult, in a lot of ways the adult world is very confining. Jack is kind of a giant child. He doesn’t want to follow the same rules as other adults do. Blue found that very admirable at first. The problem was really when Jack lost his nerve and started going back on everything that Blue really admired about him.

At the risk of making the book sound darker than it is, Jack teaches Blue that doing your own thing doesn’t necessarily lead to a better outcome or make you a better person, though she does end the book as she began it – believing that you have to make your own way and hold true to your principles.

It’s true. Maybe Jack didn’t chose the right decision, but at the same time, Blue is a very optimistic character.

Were you thinking in terms of a specific timeframe as you were building the world?

This world is currently in the 1920s. I imagined a world where there was no gap between the First and Second World Wars — it was just one big war between these two countries in particular. So this is a small part of the world, but Book 2 opens up this fictional world more. I always describe “Newsprints” as diesel punk, but a lot of readers have called it steampunk. I don’t know. Maybe this world is in that transition between coal and diesel?

As you say this is the first book and you’re working on a sequel. How many books do you have planned?

I’m working on a sequel right now, and we’ll see where it goes from there. You’ll have to ask Scholastic.

Did you always see this as, if not a larger story, a story and a world that had the potential to be something larger?

I think so. I put a lot of thought into building the world, so it definitely has the potential to expand into a bigger story across generations of characters – previous generations or future generations.

People who know you are familiar with your webcomic “Saint For Rent.” For people who don’t know, what it is?

“Saint for Rent” is about a guy named Saint who runs a hotel for time travelers. It’s semi-animated in gif format so some of the pages have little animations in the panels. It’s a very nonlinear story because there’s time travel involved and characters go back through time loops to re-live certain events a few different times. It’s a way for me to sort of make time travel a casual slice of life thing.

I think that’s what interesting in your work both in “Saint for Rent” and “Newsprints” is that you like to play with these big concepts and ideas, but you’re primarily interested in people.

It’s always character first for me. I feel like how characters react to these big ideas and events is a more interesting story.

What has been the difference for you between making a book versus making a webcomic?

There seems to be a lot more milestones [with a book]. Just periods of great activity and then no activity, whereas in webcomics it’s very easy to just consistently keep going and making two pages or three pages every week. I always wrote “Saint for Rent” as if it was like a book, but working on a book with Scholastic has been really nice. It’s been really eye opening to see a different method of working – not just a few pages at a time but an entire thumbnail manuscript at a time and then discussing it with my editor and other readers and then moving onto the line art and the colors and so forth.

I thought about doing it black and white. My editor asked if I would consider doing it in color. I considered doing a monotone approach where it was just one color per scene, or in total. Ultimately, I felt like the story would be a lot richer with a richer color platte. It would be a lot more immersive and cinematic and that’s the kind of approach I wanted to have with “Newsprints.” Having a color palette with really strong lighting really helped with that.

There’s a lot of light in the book, which people may not expect given the real world associations we have with cities in that period.

Nautilene, where the story takes place, is a port city. Their main source of income is not industry but trade and even that’s been put on hold a little bit since the war began. I meant for Nautilene to be a bustling port city where the buildings used to be very grand, but now it’s fallen into disarray. The citizens are still very proud of the city and it still has all the qualities of a beautiful city, it’s just been depressed because of the war.

I’m curious, are there any big influences on the book that you can really point to?

This book in particular was heavily influenced by Studio Ghibli’s work. One of the first movies I saw from Studio Ghibli was “Castle in the Sky,” which had a lot of really awesome flying machines. I really enjoyed that aspect along with the lush world building. When I was working on this story and thinking about colors and characters I also was thinking about “The Iron Giant,” which was a movie I really liked. Also I really enjoyed how ambitious “Avatar the Last Airbender” was, not only in its world building but also the scope of the conflict that they tackled in the story. I guess I was just ambitious in wanting to do that myself.

Not to give anything anyway, but at the end of the book, Blue goes off to the nation’s capitol city. As you’re working on the next book, are you conscious of changing the setting and altering the scope?

Absolutely, because not only are they going to Altalus, they’re going to go to Grimmaea in Book 2, so it’s very important to me to be able to create settings that are different from each other but close enough that it looks like they belong in the same world. It’s important to me that the settings are still really interesting no matter where they go so not everywhere is going to look like Nautilene.

But you’re thinking that even if Book 2 doesn’t completely stand on its own storywise – being a sequel – it does need to have it’s own visual identity.

That’s a good way of putting it. I think Book 1 definitely will look very different from Book 2 in a lot of ways – but I can’t be sure until I’m done with Book 2!

The post INTERVIEW: Cartoonist Ru Xu On Her Dieselpunk Adventure Newsprints appeared first on CBR.com.

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