TheAstralBackstage

    C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I've posted a new YouTube video with my new epic science fiction themed setting project, Nebula. The art from yesterday turned out to be just what I needed to start work on the Nebula project. Find out more in my video. https://youtu.be/j1YNsDRRWtI C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. Inspiration finds us at the strangest times. I wasn't intending to draw this image today. I was doing some online shopping and price matching and I found an image of a book. The front cover doesn't really resemble this art but I found an angle I liked and a colour and so I decided to try and draw it. The image worked far better than I expected. This is of a known character I'm working on a name for in the Legend Setting's epic science fiction region Nebula. Here is Warrior's Rest, my first ever piece of Nebula art. And yes, those comets are hand drawn.   C J Mcpherson

Hello. C J here. I'm working today on Heart and Fur World, specifically the setting chapter of the core book. I know I can work on two projects at once and one novel. Heart and Fur World is resembling the novel category more than I expected. It's a modular story building game that runs without a Game Master using a combination of player choice and dice rolls. Even the setting descriptions and NPC actions are written for you and just need to be read out loud. Here's an example from today's work. Setting     This chapter presents the starting setting for use with Heart and Fur World, South District Ascala. Ascala is a thriving modern day city with five million citizens in its vast stretches of urban life. South District is the animalia ethinic region, although here they’re often called half-animals. The region is a centre of international shipping and has some of the oldest buildings in the city. It is the week of Summermoon, the animalia culture’s traditional Summer Sols...

 Hello. C J here. I’m making quick progress on Sigil, my new classic fantasy themed tabletop RPG. With the release of Dungeons and Dragons core rules into the Creative Commons I am going to do my take on the genre. This might be a good product to print and sell at conventions as well. Dungeons and Dragons has a lot to work with and I’m planning frequent production notes here. First up, there are a few mechanical changes I’m making to the core rules. I’m using a d12 not a d20 because I know how to balance around it better. Combat relies on the Triptych system. Characters have three actions a turn once a round. Moving their speed, shifting one square and making a basic attack all take one action. Often more powerful attacks or spells require more than one action to perform. Crafting is done like combat with the character moving items and tools around a workspace in a grid. Magic is a bit more modular and spells have more options for elements or transformation effects. I want more rea...

Hello. C J here. Recently the core rules of the current Dungeons and Dragons edition were released into the Creative Commons. I know the company behind Dungeons and Dragons isn't doing well financially right now and I think most people are concerned we're going to lose the entire genre. So, me here, I'm doing something about it. Welcome to my current project, Sigil. Sigil is my take on the classic fantasy genre. I'm revising a bit of the original genre and races just to make them feel a bit more modern but I'm trying hard to preserve the look and feel of what was. I'm going to write the core book as fast as humanly possible even if it takes priority over my video game. Then I'm going to need a truly absurd amount of art for it. Now that I'm allowed to use the original monster names I'm going to see about working with or parodying them. The game will use a d12 because I'm more familiar with how it works. Here's two of the races. Fae     The ra...

 Hello. C J here. I don't think I've ever mentioned this here but the Legend series wasn't ever intended to end after I made the card game. The Legend series was made to be compatible with any time period and setting and today I'm aiming to prove that. Here is the first page of text from my new setting project for the Legend series, Legend - Verse. The name Verse is part of the setting. This is not the Astral and the Astral won't come up in this new book at all. Once I've got the core text written I'm going to track down people to help illustrate it. Here's that sample.      Humanity’s new home has many names. Haven is its actual name while Homestead or just Stead are common derivatives. The planet has been occupied for just over a hundred years and in that time humanity has tried to keep it alive through storms of magic and industrial revolutions. Most of the planet is a dense wilderness ranging from jungle to parched badlands, all dotted with research ...

 Hello. C J here. I’m working starting today on adding a crafting and survival mode to Dragon Engine called Island mode. The plans for South District are being drawn up but first I’m working on Island mode. Island mode will allow you to land on a 2km square island of your choosing and raise a settlement there. Islands allow for building structures but not remaking the terrain. That will be for the eventual Creator mode I have planned. Since this mode doesn’t have a storyline I can do it faster. Islands are to be explored and resources are to be gathered from them to build and survive. There will be a health metre but no hunger or stamina. Crafting relies on five supplies, each one linked to a gem colour. Ruby is ore, sapphire is sand, topaz is wood, alabaster is stone and onyx is clay. From these you can build modular foundations, wall tiles and roofs as well as furniture. This mode will be updated with new furniture and crafting options as I update Dragon Engine as a whole. First ...

 Hello. C J here. Welcome, friends, to South District Ascala. This setting region, and this District of it, is my main focus for the next while. I’m still doing some cards for Carthia, my Ancient China setting, later this summer. Otherwise my two focuses are South District Ascala and the Wild Lords faction in Eternity. Find out more about the Wild Lords of Eternity in my YouTube video Wild Like the Wild Lords, under my channel C J Mcpherson. I’ve managed through a lot of planning to reduce my list of product lines down to mostly three. We have Quantum, the Legend Setting’s official card game. The Starter Set for Quantum that comes bundled with the core rules details the food, magic culture and technology of Ascala. We have my video game slash animation software Dragon Engine. The starting area for its main storyline, Absolute, and its prologue is set in South District Ascala. Dragon Engine will be free and supported by my Patreon. I’ll set up the links to the Patreon here in a bit....

 Hello. C J here. In honor of it being Easter I've uploaded a new sample of my upcoming RPG game Heart and Fur World to the Downloads link. Find it in the Heart and Fur folder in the OneDrive link on the Downloads page. This free sample has the rules for sex scenes as well as a sample of my first planned sourcebook, Lands of Creation. This is an all ages blog here but the game is strongly educational in nature and also I keep reminding myself that authors are supposed to actually have creative freedom. Like, by law that's how it works. I left Facebook for a reason, thank you. Anyway, the game isn't explicit but there are rules for consensual sex because it's a game so I'm going to make it fun. The sample of Lands of Creation has a sacred sexuality theme that is actually incredibly accurate to real life spiritual practices including sacred marriage, fertility rituals and ceremonial magic throughout real world history. When I have the core rules typed I'm going to...

 Hello. C J here. I've finally returned to YouTube with a new video series titled All Myths Are True. Here I share all my research and knowledge of real life spirituality and magic in video format. All of it has things to teach us in our modern lives. Here's a link to the first one. Enjoy. https://youtu.be/nZ3D253gXzg  C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. To round out my week of experimenting with Mexican and Spanish flavours I’ve finally attempted and, if I do get to say this, nailed churros. The recipe took really very little effort and they were one of the tastiest things I’ve ever put on this website. If you’re new to this site, I’m actually a game designer but I want my game and its setting, the Legend Setting, to have real life roots. This includes the food. I’m picking the best 5 or 10 recipes from every real world cuisine that I like, which is pretty much all of them, and putting them onto cards for my upcoming card game. The churros were made with my pancake batter. Instead of frying them in a quart of oil I just used about a quarter cup of salted butter. Trust me, the salt adds to the flavour. I never use unsalted butter because I rely on the salted kind as a flavour enhancer. I would have made them a bit thinner if I did this a second time but they tasted great. Do not under any circumstances discard the...

 Hello. C J here. I've been reading cookbooks, food blogs and my family's notes about food for the least few days. I'm working on Food of the World, my project to put all the best dishes from real world cuisine into my card game. The cards have game effects but they depict real recipes. I have to try them all first to make sure they work. Today they all worked. It turns out that throwing a Mexican Fiesta is fairly easy so long as you can handle a frying pan or griddle. Here are today's recipes and some photos. No Yeast Flatbread This flatbread is the staple bread for most of the cultures in the Legend Setting who have Middle Eastern. Mediterranean, or Mexican influences. It has no yeast but despite that is light enough to eat with dip. Ingredients One and One Half Cup Flour One Teaspoon Baking Soda One Half Teaspoon Salt Three Quarter Cups Milk For the No Yeast Flatbread Mix the flour, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Mix in the milk with your hands and kneed the d...

Hello. C J here. I've been doing some serious food research today. I've been reading recipies for Spanish rice dishes and entrees for about four hours now. I have tried a few things and today I think I hit gold. Here is my recipe for Spanish rice followed by my first ever recipe for a Spanish tapas. Both of these have been altered a bit by me to make them easier and cheaper. I hope the tapas bar in town doesn't mind. Tomato Rice Ingredients  Two Cups Rice One Cup Diced Tomatoes or Salsa Four Cups Water Three Tablespoons Oregano One Half Teaspoon Salt For the Tomato Rice Combine all the ingredients in a large soup pot and bring to a boil over medium high heat. Reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover with a lid and let simmer for 20 minutes. Serve with any Mexican or Spanish dish or combine with meat for an easy paella.  Spicy Sausage Rounds Ingredients  Two Sticks Worth Spicy Cured Sausage  One Onion One Tablespoon Garlic One Fourth Cup Butter For the Spicy Sausage Rounds ...

 Hello. C J here. Welcome to Weaver. Weaver is my new furry collaborative game project. I’m looking to track down authors and furry creators to help me design, write and narrate a full tabletop game manual set in the Quantum Era. I’m paying for all of this, of course. I’m planning on finding people on the writing and creative groups on BARQ and from what I’ve seen these groups are incredibly active. My budget for the project is $2000 CAD. I can top up the budget later this year or next New Years if I have to. Money and BARQ sound like a good combination. Our new game has the concept ‘dragons in the darkness of space.’ Anything goes so long as it’s in line with the concept and isn’t violent. The Quantum Era has only dragons as the playable species but they can look like any other furry race and they have mastered space travel. I’m planning on making a new OneDrive folder to store all the in progress drafts and I will be the creative director as well as doing all the proofreading. I ...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got three new finished Quantum cards for you all today. Now that I’m done documenting my plans for Dragon Engine I can start making the process into a guide about how to use the software I’m using. I thought though, why make this a book when I could stick it all on cards and make it into a Quantum set? I’m doing this for all of the plans I have for the Dragon’s Guide to Things series, as I call it. This already includes Draw Like a Dragon, which would work great on cards, along with planned books on video game design, making your own fantasy miniatures out of clay and stage acting. When the Do It Like a Dragon series of cards is done it’ll be the other set I print and sell in person along the Core Set and the Starter Set. These two will go well with Cooking With a Wolf as a bunch of practical knowledge for home office professionals and video game coders. Here we have two more sapphire gem cards you can pay to cast spells or craft sapphire colour item cards al...

 Hello. C J here. I finally have the first ever final Quantum card done. Here is the sapphire gem card for the numeral one. This is part of a set of ten cards detailing sacred numerology and is part of the in game currency system called gems. The card is a sapphire gem, also referred to as Prima in the game. Prima is a resource in the Legend Setting that a magic user can spend to generate matter or alter concepts. Appropriately the first of these cards done is the numeral one. Once I've got a couple dozen cards done and I know the patterns they're made in better I'm going to start batch posting art on SoFurry and marketing in the BARQ groups that allow external links. Have fun! C J Mcpherson

 Hello. C J here. I've finally started on making the terrain for the first region of Dragon Engine. Here's a screenshot of the construction of the first ground tile. This is a generic grass tile and I'm planning on decorating them with grass, trees and other textures of grass or stone. Then I tile the ground of the level with them. After that it's a process of making buildings and mountains. The mountains are tiles that are taller or slanted. Simple. Thank dear God, it worked. The tile is a single asset, which the engine calls a static mesh, composed of an eight by six grid of meter-wide cubes I recolored to be grass. More soon.  C J Mcpherson

Hello. C J here. I think that with the pancake post yesterday you folks know all my recipes. I’ll have more, like next year. I’m narrowing down my posts for the year we’re in down to the ones I know I can still do. The most popular stuff on here has always been number one, dessert, and number two, spirituality. I could have predicted the dessert but not the spirituality. The third most popular is short fiction and script samples from my games. We won’t have new recipes for a while but I can definitely post more stories, which is my actual job I do as a person even more than game design is, and more of my notes about real life spirituality. I’m going to stick to two post series for the year. These will be updates about Dragon Engine, which will mostly be script samples and screenshots, and posts about real world mysticism and magic. The card game will be mentioned only when I have new final draft content done for it, and then the card game will just get a post announcing the new downloa...

 Hello. C J here. I found a fun game the other day. I’m currently watching Let’s Plays of old PC games on YouTube to get ideas for level maps. That wasn’t the game I meant though. I realized I can look up what the most popular Google searches are for a specific category. I found a reliable way of looking up the most searched for Google recipes and I found that people want recipes for shepherd's pie, meatloaf, chili, chicken, pork tenderloin, more chicken and in particular pancakes. I like pancakes! So I’m shamelessly catering to my demographic and finally giving you folks a pancake recipe. This recipe is the best one I’ve ever tried and has exactly five ingredients in it. I adapted if from a number of old cookbook recipes and websites and then tripled the sugar. They’re great. Pork tenderloin though might be a challenge. That’s a lot of meat on one of those. Pulled pork is nice but I don’t need pulled pork for eight weeks straight. Anyway, time for pancakes. The recipe makes four p...

 Hello. C J here. I think my posting about setting up my product lines is mostly done. It will hopefully be just finished products or free samples from now on. That’s easier on my end and also a lot easier to market. This includes recipes, like this one. I once had a dish similar to today’s Thai recipe at a Thai food place. It was somewhere on the back side of a shopping complex in my hometown but despite being hard to find it had remarkably good food. I don’t touch MSG if I don’t have to but when I went there the food seemed fine. It was mostly vegetables, as good Thai food should be. They had a spicy chicken stir fry that I was very fond of. Then they closed. As usual, these stories don’t go well for the person who originally invented the recipe. Seriously, what is it with my hometown? We don’t mean to destroy everything we touch, I swear. That was like 8 years ago. I’ve been trying this whole time to make spicy Thai chicken like theirs. It was chunks of deep fried white meat wit...

 Hello. C J here. I have one last task to do in order to set up this website. I need a Contact page with my social media on it. You’d expect Facebook and X along with maybe tiktok or Instagram. Nope. I’ve reliably learned that these platforms are not the right place to meet people. My goal here isn’t some strange abstract concept involving keywords in a post’s heading text or content saturation by day at 4 AM EST. No, I actually want to meet people and not bots and Avon salespeople. I’m sticking to the social media for the Contact page that I know I can manage and that I know I can use. BARQ, thank god, exists. I make mostly furry stuff and that furry stuff needs to find people who are already in the fandom and that means BARQ. I’m also on Discord and I will be launching a ton of my art and text on SoFurry. Discord and SoFurry were picked very carefully as my other two I can manage at once. But there’s a rule I’ve learned about what social media works and what doesn’t. I’m trying t...

 Hello. C J here. Welcome to my second product update for April 2025. My plans for the first couple of Expansions for my card game are being reordered. Roads to the Spirit World will now be a book line since Roads to the Spirit World is in the spirit world and by both the rules of real life mythology and my setting spirits can’t die. There’s no conflict so I can’t give them armour or weapons. I’m moving it to the Heart and Fur World game line. I’ve had to pick what of the next two Expansions I’m doing. I will do the Starter Set first but the Starter Set is done being planned. I decided on Expansion three instead, Five Million Strong. At least that’s my plans so far. I’m done finally planning out Dragon Engine and from now on I’m just going to make the card game and Heart and Fur World and port the stuff over into Dragon Engine. I’m not used to having this much working time that isn’t learning Blueprints. So, could I handle more than one project at once? We’ll see. I guess I don’t n...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got a few product updates for the month. I’m doing the initial setup of Dragon Engine slowly. I need to make the floor, roof and wall tiles that the landscapes and buildings are made out of. This is a lot of planning and assigning materials to shapes. I also need to duplicate, rename and sort additional materials and shapes. This is not being done quickly. I know for a fact that doing this fast would burn me out. I’m not as horribly bored as that sounds. More on that in a moment. I’m also considering Roads to the Spirit World. That product would work much better as an expansion or a series of expansions for Heart and Fur World. The spirit world and the spirits that live there can’t die. There’s really no point in putting them in armour and giving them weapons. I’m moving Roads to the Spirit World over to Heart and Fur World. I’ll decide later whether I work on Lands of Creation or Index Armour next. These two make more sense being done first. Lands of Creatio...