TheAstralBackstage

 Hello. C J here. I’ve reorganized how I post here recently now that I have all of the core rules done for the Legend Series of games. I am trying to be a lot less hypothetical and only mention things that are done or that have the part I’m mentioning done. I am trying to stay away from pitching products that I don’t have yet. Still, I know what I can do and today’s post is well within the boundaries of what I know I can pull off. The Legend Series contains five core games and I’m not adding to this list. I’m working now on expanding the list of books I offer within these game lines as well as making the cards for both card games. Again, I’m sticking to the generic Astral content in the Quantum Starter Set and the Ascala modern day themed content from the Quantum Expansion about Ascala, Five Million Strong. Both of these are in the Astral setting region. At least that will be true until I finish one of them and move onto the next setting region in line. I think that the two card ga...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got two new corporations heroes for you all today. First up is the Division Chief for Vehicles for the vast Ascalan manufacturing company Blackforge Industrial. This corporation makes almost everything in the city that’s made of metal. Blackforge Industrial has three Divisions, Consumer Goods, Vehicles and Weaponry. The Consumer Goods Division is led by the black dragon Balath Regal, who will be featured in the Starter Set. The first character here is in charge of their factories and research offices that make vehicles for both consumer and military use. Meet Cal Soundwolf, our tan coloured wolf Division Chief. The Division Chief for Weaponry is the very publicly known mage Cobalt, who conveniently is a cobalt blue lupine. Both of these characters, Cal Soundwolf and Cobalt, are the Legend Setting species forge wolf. Forge wolves can be found as normal people in several of the Legend Setting regions and are open species for all non commercial use. For commerci...

Hello. C J here. I’ve got two new corporations heroes from Five Million Strong for you this afternoon. First is Hawthorn, the mage coder who acts as the public face of the Shadow Knights. The Shadow Knights are technically a corporation despite the fact that they are decentralized and have no known location. They are coders and computer wizards who keep the other corporations honest without ever letting them know who within their own team did what. Hawthorn is one of the few of them who will meet outsiders, although what this says about his rank in the team is unknown to anyone except for him.   Next up is Phoenix Captain Miak Youngsun. The term Phoenix Captain means she’s currently the top ranking member of Phoenix Legion. Phoenix Legion is the continent’s largest professional mercenary organization and while they are known for their speed they are also known to follow the law very closely. Often the corporations need manpower in their quiet wars and conflicts they have in the Int...

 Hello. C J here. Production is underway for Five Million Strong. I have lists of things I’m doing for it and I’m doing them in the order I get to them in. The Starter Set is still under production as well. Expect updates about the Starter set to be interspersed with these ones here about the city. First though, concrete. Okay, so strange sentence there. Concrete. Most modern day cities are built out of it, including Ascala itself. Five Million Strong details the entire continent but today we’re looking at the central city itself, which is also named Ascala. How was it built? By construction workers, how else? I want to represent every civilian job on the continent in the cards here and so I’m working today on the five decks of ten heroes each that the Expansion needs. Each of these five decks is for one of the five playable factions of Ascala the continent, two of which are in Ascala the city itself. These are Ascala the city, the corporations, the Interior, the Empire of Vantara ...

 Hello. C J here. I have an early morning artwork for all of you. I'm back to using my line art style and today's subject matter is one of my three main characters, Zed Matthews the Black Lupine. This famous Astral Traveller runs a merchant ship and is often found wherever he is needed most, for a price of course. He isn't evil but he's out for his own gain. And like most who call themselves Astral Traveller, he never tells anyone what his true motives are. Here is the final art of him for his owner card in Quantum. In Quantum he's one of the ten starting playable characters. I'm including his stats as well. Enjoy! Zed Matthews The Black Lupine Melee – Leadership – Mage – Mind     I have a male black wolf tribesmen with pale as an ally. He is a wizard. Come to me.     A powerful mind wizard and sorcerer from Arkad, Zed Matthews and his entire family took to wandering ages ago. Gifted with genetic mastery over mind control and hypnosis, he goes wherever...

 Hello. C J here. I’ve wrapped up double checking that I have all the core rule done I need. Next up is better organizing the Downloads again and proofreading the card games core rules. These core rule PDFs are final and will remain there even when the games are done. We’re good with game design as a concept. As a result this blog may change in tone and style quite a lot. Also, typically posts here take a month to get a view and then another month for two and so on. The internet in real life moves a lot slower than it does on TV. So I’m expecting that if anyone reads this a month from now it’ll be a bit out of date but still useful. The blog is now going to shift focus and this has taken a week of planning to do. Next job, Ascala. Ascala is the largest and most modern of the nations and cities in the Astral setting region within the Legend Setting. The Legend Setting has eleven setting regions and their names are not all public yet. It’s one per gem colour in the card game, with th...

 Hello. C J here. So, this blog gets views on the timeline of months and not days. I'm waiting for this to speed up but it's not happening. Blogging might not work that well without a dedicated audience and if you want a dedicated audience then that means normal social media. I was going to post on Facebook again. I've been contemplating more YouTube. Then I remembered I left both of those platforms for a reason. So I'm going to spend some time finding and posting on other social media platforms. I need them to allow video format, have more ethical processes for sorting content by relevance and also be fine with me actually writing or drawing a sex scene in something. I need all of this in one or two platforms that actually get views and then tell me about them. Also I do have adult content somewhere on the internet with my characters. It's as gentle and violence free as my all ages content. Most of it is me depicting informed consent for fun. This is mostly what I ...

 Hello. C J here. I've finally figured out how to market on Facebook in a way that makes sense for the company. Here are two of my setting's species, aurora foxes and forge wolves. These species are available as free open use species for all creative projects. I'm posting these images to Facebook later on today for people to use and I'm going to keep making and posting more of these. Feel free to use them in any project and if you want to do commercial work with them just sign up for the commercial license through my Patreon. That simple. C J Mcpherson  

 Hello. C J here. I’m mostly wrapping up some of the last planning for Eternity today, in particular the Quantum Expansion set Song of Eternity. Quantum will feature the whole region in all its steampunk beauty. Uprising will also feature more detailed locations and character biographies. Uprising is now being made using AI art because I’m having fun seeing what the medium can do. The project here will just be tons of typing and art from now on for Song of Eternity. None of this requires math anymore. I’m thinking about what I’m doing next and if I want the next Expansion after Eternity to happen at all I should start working on it now. Ascala is my next planned setting region with its card set Five Million Strong. I’m also thinking about my project to draw all the first three generations of Pokemon as humanoid characters as inspiration for the species in my setting. I thought, why not put the Pokemon in Ascala? I’ll have to draw every species my setting has to do it and allocate t...

 Hello. C J here. I am still making AI art for fun and I found something amazing. I've managed to make a faithful recreation of the Eternity setting region hero character Victoria Thatcher. This worked. I'm happy with it. Legend - Quantum will continue to be hand drawn. I am in no way ever parting with that style. Legend Quantum is made much slower than Legend - Uprising, which is kind of why I chose the name Legend - Uprising in the first place. If I can make my characters in AI art then that changes things. I might use this art in the faster paced game. It looks good enough. I'm including a few other AI images as well. One is of the capitol of her nation, the city Cydrell, and the other is our main character for the region, Leonard 'Leo' Goldsmith. Here's the art. Enjoy. C J Mcpherson  

 Hello. C J here. We've finally had our family Easter here and I can thank my local and extended family for about 8 kilograms of chocolate that I need to eat as well as gift cards for chocolate and some Pokemon swag. I'm still working with AI image software just for fun so here's an Easter themed AI image. This was custom made by me using generic internet software. Now for french toast. I'm posting an edit here as follows. Hello. C J here. I've posted here before about my often failed attempts to get some of the local fandoms to meet up. I'm tired of this not working. I'm thinking I didn't go loud enough the first time. So, I am planning on starting to host monthly or even twice monthly meetup nights for creative professionals through Facebook. These will be in person. I'm done organizing barbecues until I have a team who will actually show up. I'm going to check about hosting these at Downtown Kingston restaurants like the Copper Penny. Everyone...

 Hello. C J here. I’m posting later than I usually work today but I’ve got something really fun to share. I’ve heard a ton of buzz about AI generated art and text. I haven’t had the time to look into either of these for a while and while AI generated text isn’t really interesting to me, and might be blatant plagiarism if it doesn’t work, art seemed like a good thing to investigate. I’ve spent about 48 hours straight on my laptop running keywords through a free online art generator. Dear All. Dear, dear All. The things I can get the generator to do for me. I checked and according to Google AI art is allowed for most commercial uses. Thank you, Google. I hope the application I’m using doesn’t have a more specific terms and agreements section because the AI art I’ve gotten out of it is really nice. Here, for the first time in art, is Wanderer, fate wizard and headmaster of the Order of Mages. This is the code I entered to get our friend Wanderer here. I have every code that worked sav...

 Hello. C J here. I’m continuing to work on planning in person events in Kingston and the Islands, Ontario, Canada where I live. I’ve been trying to get some of the local fandom to meet up. Reliably I am getting nowhere. Furries don’t meet in person. Here I thought I could change that. I guess furries really are horrible at having social lives. I am kind of disappointed about this. I also need to find people I can trust to help make my next round of products for the company. I’ve got a budget for this that I’ve spent none of. Running this company doesn’t really require money. I’ve trained or retrained in mostly free software and I use free Google properties like Blogger and YouTube for posting the content I make. I know that in the model companies are supposed to operate under there’s an operating budget for the year and maybe a research and development budget as well. I don’t have either. I just have my own personal money. I own a phone and a laptop and those mostly do the job for...

 Hello. C J here. I took a bit of a break from posting after finishing Legend – Uprising. Now with the core rules of Legend – Uprising done I have all the core rules I need for everything I want to make. The Legend Series now has five core rule sets and they’re all compatible with each other. I had three of these planned but I had so many goals that I had to split the last one into three parts. Here are some product updates for the month of May. My main three projects are as follows. First, the Eternity setting is being built actively for use with both Quantum and Uprising. Quantum will have the characters, spells and broad history of the nations while Uprising will have more storytelling components and street by street maps of all the cities and wilderness regions. All of this will have art done by me. Eternity is first and after I get this block of work done I’m doing Ascala. Sometime in Summer I’m going to make the core history and location cards for Carthia. Carthia and Ascala ...

 Hello. I've just uploaded the complete core rules text of my final core game product for the Legend Series, Legend - Uprising, to the OneDrive link in the Legend folder. This is the last core set of rules I need to detail the Legend Setting in full and to plan out future novels and video games. The game is much smaller and more reasonable to read or learn quickly than Legend - Quantum. Legend - Quantum is still being made but Legend - Uprising is easier to work with and more narrative. Now onto script writing finally, probably for my video game project Duskbringer. Legend - Uprising is a cooperative city building deck builder with skirmish combat. Your hand is buildings you can play to gain supplies and buy combat units. It also contains crafting and will be my way of telling the backstory of the many locations and people in my setting who fill my stories. By playing it you build a story together using the text on the cards and normal d12 rolls. I am now going to move over to plan...