originally posted at https://comicalmomentum.tumblr.com/po...
So I took a look at the card game. It’s got a pretty neat mechanic - tiles (cards) are placed in a grid, and interact with adjacent cards. It would be interesting to try it out, though I’m not convinced it would be particularly long-lived. I kind of feel there should be a variant with triangular tiles given the setting.
Back in the comic… hurt/comfort turns into despairing breakdown. I’m not sure about what’s being done re: disability tropes with Chou here.
Another weird traditional rule: only single-lens optics ever. Implying telescopes are right out. What don’t they want people to see?
Apparently there’s a conspiracy to prevent people knowing tea is grown as a plant? Bwuh? Hm… all will surely be explained… so the witches are using tea money to fund an expedition to harvest ‘deifica’ and cause a spread of religion, as part of the witch-alchemist power struggle? I think deifica came up before in the context of Uni getting pissed on by the unicorn, as a plant that causes religious experiences.
And now, it’s time to learn a bit more about the Weakness. The caption says “The Air No Longer Nourishes” and it sounds to me like it’s some kind of physics-incompatibility between the outsider Humans and the triangle-based physics of Tryslmaistan.
There’s a side story where Redcloak and Fodderman go on a monster-slaying expedition and fight a big crystal monster. it’s p gay imo. Simple story but it’s pretty good and I can see JDR was itching to experiment with colour again? And there is a suggestion that teleportation is possible in this setting at the end…
Lupiko and Chou are rescued from the Weakness by a mysterious Alchemist with a beard. He says it took him a long time to find them, but now he’ll watch them, ‘whatever the risk’. Did we ever establish who Lupiko’s dad was?
Cut to someone completely different, and a glimpse of a weird triangular chess game called Taasen that I saw linked from the main page of the site. I don’t think we’ve met this bald rat-owning person before. He appears to be a toymaker and he ends up hosting Lupiko and Chou. His name turns out to be Wai Wai, and I think we’ve seen his toyshop on the map before. And he may be some kind of spymaster as well as a toymaker!?
…the ‘best agent’ turns out to be Beardy Alchemist. Beardy Alchemist is using a broomstick to escape in blatant violation of the treaty!
Chou becomes friends with a local girl called Lili, and Lupiko meets up with a local mum. The relationships between local parents are something that I don’t often see approached in webcomics so this is interesting… for some reason (possibly something Wiccan) Chou and the local girl are spending a lot of time naked though which is kinda weird.
In an AU strip, KaiWai gets a dream about a collapsing plate. Prophetic?
WaiWai was a witch once and is now inventing stuff. He kind of implies that Lupiko’s mistake was not inventing stuff so much as not framing it as a ‘tradition’.
Ah, here we go! Taasen time. It sounds like an interesting game actually, and I’d like to try it, though the game graph may not actually be that big and it would be interesting also to see if there’s a foolproof strategy. An old Windows binary is provided, but maybe an updated Python or Javascript implementation would be a fun project.
In fact you know what? Let’s call it on this post and make a post all about Taasen.
Comments
entropicdecay
I was surprised to find the Taasen Windows program appears to work fine on Windows 10.