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Hello friends, I am here to draw your OCs ‘cuz my commissions are open!!

🔗in bio to submit a request form!🩵📜

(I will be especially happy to draw any romance hihihi)

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TarotWeaver, a Tarot TTRPG

Take your fate into your own hands.

Back TarotWeaver on Kickstarter.

A year ago I had the pleasure of running into two incredible artists at Sonoma State University while taking a drawing class. At the time I was mulling over the idea of a tarot based roleplaying game, but knew that to do the project justice I would want to create a tarot deck for the game. I knew writing the game would already be a mountain of work, lo and behold Arie and Sara had reimagined the major arcana for their final project.

It felt like fate had put us in each other’s path at that moment.

Over the following year we collaborated to create a unique game taking inspiration from Over the Garden Wall, Adventure Time, Cairn, Into the Odd, Whitehack, Everway, and the OSR. While Arie and Sara worked tirelessly to create 78 amazing images in their reimagining of the Rider-Waite deck, I set out to create a lightweight and fun game.

I had two design sensibilities going into the project. The game could only use tarot cards for all of its mechanics. Something that turned out far easier said than done. The second was the entirety of the rules and an introductory adventure had to fit into 48 3.5”x5.5” pages. With some napkin math that meant only 720 square inches of space to write. For comparison, Mausritter has roughly 960 square inches of printable space at 24 5.5”x8.5”.

It’s difficult to pin down how excited I am for this project to come to life and hope to share it all with you soon.

Cheers and happy holidays.

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Live-Play at the indie TTRPG zine fair!

This was originally a sketch for a now shelved illustration project. But I loved the drawing so much, I decided to tighten it up a bit and share it! You know, you can hire me to do this FOR you? 😳 sob-comix.com

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On the Absence of Gold

or why you should stop killing God and taking his wallet

Although I haven't yet heard a single complaint or comment I find it necessary to discuss the absence of gold or really any money in TarotWeaver. I would love to say I've created a post-currency economy or something akin to communal bartering within the games rules, but to be honest, I omitted money because I just didn't find it that compelling to leave in.

In certain circles, money is the de facto measure of a successful adventure. Especially within the OSR community, gold has become the banner carrier for entire experience point systems. While fitting enough for a life of high risk violence in dark dank places, I've always found gold to be perhaps the least compelling aspect of the roleplaying experience. It is even less of an interesting motivator for stories. Outside of grand heists where the protagonists manage the impossible with almost no risk to themselves, it's just hard to really pin down the type of person ready to brave the depths of hellish dungeons for a fat payday. Sure such stories exist, but the money is rarely the real reason.

So where does that bring us? Similar to TarotWeaver's background generator, I sought to envision characters outside of their ties to capitalism and finances.

Yes, there are backgrounds with explicit ties to wealth and financial security, but my concern is focused on what that says about your character. What does a life of luxury look like outside of raw financial power? Did your character grow in a community rich in harvest and culture? What does it mean to be born without in a world past the idea of gold?

Of course, who am I to stop you from just adding it back in? We’re currently in the middle of crowdfunding a print version of our game TarotWeaver on Kickstarter. You can also find the PDF on itch.io.

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Our Kickstarter is officially live. Early backers get $10 discount! Hope to see you there!

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The Possibility of Failure

As we approach the release date of our upcoming kickstarter campaign I cannot ignore the lurking possibility that it may very well crash and burn in a glorious spectacle.

What I am here to write about is not some passé example of toxic positivity and misguided optimism, but rather the stark and grim idea that failure can absolutely be a terrible experience from which nothing can be gained. A simple sapping of the will.

I am here to tell you failure can and does suck.

How do I know? I’ve been here before. This is actually the second launch of TarotWeaver because the first campaign failed out of the gate. Even with the adjusted expectations, with the revised and renewed effort to promote the game, countless emails to folks that went ultimately nowhere. I have to accept the very real possibility that this might fail too.

And that’s not ok.

I know what we have made is good.

I have been told time and time again it is good.

There’s been a myriad of promising moments that have yet to materialize into something meaningful or measurable. It’s no one’s fault, mind you. And in a way, that makes it all the worse.

I say all of this while holding on to just a little bit of hope. Hope that what we’ve spent a year working on together might actually capture the hearts and minds of people. That folks might see what we’ve done and fall in love. That all of that work and stress might be worth something.

It’s ok to not be ok. Sometimes the cosmic slot machine of life will beat you down.

All that’s left, the only thing you can ever really hope to do, is keep playing.

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The Magician, The High Priestess, The Fool, The Chariot, and the Empress cards for TarotWeaver.

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Building Character(s)

Every TTRPG I’ve played has resolved character creation and life path generation to mostly involve a character’s occupation with maybe some flavoring here or there. While fine for giving a narrative justification for a character’s skills, I find such systems lack the ability to really define a character on a more personal level.

I have no doubt that more personality focused systems and engines exist, some probably dating back to the beginning of the hobby. In fact, I welcome you to name them down below as I always love exploring new games with interesting concepts. However, when creating TarotWeaver I realized that padding out a character’s resume would not really do justice to the narrative power of tarot itself. So I set out to create a more personalized character generator.

Something magical happens when your character becomes a series of life events. You immediately get a sense of who they are through your own interpretation.

On top of that, I decided to abandon alignment and its irksome baggage in favor of something more flexible and actionable. A character’s core allows players a means to wrap everything under a singular mantra.

The feedback I’ve gotten from play testing is almost unanimous. Players feel like they immediately know their character’s on a personal level, even after spending only a few minutes making them.

It’s probably my favorite aspect of the game, and something I hope resonates with folks.

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It occurs to me that in fiction, our protagonists often have act on instinct, hunches and guesswork, and turn out to have been correct all along. It's incredibly common for the protagonist of an adventure story to 'follow their gut' and for that to work out in their favour. Our heroes make lucky assumptions that move the plot along all the time.

In tabletop rpgs, you can in fact do the same thing. It is, in fact, entirely reasonable for a player character to make a lucky guess about what's going on or what they need to do, and for that to be right.

You hear the question "but how would they know that?" come up all the time, often with the implicit "if you can't justify knowing that, you're metagaming, which is always bad". This is a stupid line of discussion. When you know what you want to do, because of your own out-of-game knowledge, you can simply have your PC make a lucky guess. Their hunch turned out to be correct.

A character like (say) Leuitenant Columbo, Monkey D Luffy, Doctor Van Helsing or Bilbo Baggins does this sort of thing - following a hunch with little hard evidence, that turns out to be correct - all the time. There's no reason why your ttrpg character shouldn't do the same thing.

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The Court of Cups

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The Court of Cups

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The Court of Pentacles

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The Court of Swords

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Sneak peak of the deck and rule book.

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Some of my favorite cards from the project. Really excited to see how people receive it. #art

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The Minor Arcana for our TTRPG, TarotWeaver. We're currently trying to bring the game to life through print. TarotWeaver is what you get when you mix Over the Garden Wall with Dungeons and Dragons and Tarot. We're launching our kickstarter on November 19th. We hope to see you there.

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The Major Arcana, TarotWeaver

The Major Arcana for our tarot based role playing game, TarotWeaver.