{"id":45883,"date":"2019-03-31T18:00:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-31T22:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=45883"},"modified":"2019-03-31T22:20:38","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T02:20:38","slug":"12-the-name-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=45883","title":{"rendered":"#12 The Name Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I can see that some people have trouble with this sort of thing, so as a public service here are the three steps to naming your character in a fantasy setting:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Research a diverse set of mythological stories and legends.<\/li>\n
  2. Collect a list of characters who have traits or themes that you would like to explore in your own character.<\/li>\n
  3. Name the character after your favorite Jedi or Ninja Turtle.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Shamus Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    I like how Josh is even attempting to grief them with his name.<\/p>\n

    Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    You\u2019ll notice this is the first time Sapphire has actually looked attractive in the comic, as opposed to like a transvestite with giant breasts.<\/p>\n

    Lazerturkey was the name of a particularly obnoxious griefing hunter in WoW. (If he had been a druid, the name would have been stupid but it would have at least made sense. But he was a hunter!) Stabby McStabsalot is my personal favorite of the names mentioned. (Although now, 2 years later it occurs to me that Stabby McStabbington is funnier.) Baron VonBadass was a running joke from Fear the Boot, our little injoke for fans of our then home.<\/p>\n

    One odd thing that happened during the original run of Chainmail Bikini was the Fear the Boot forums had fans of the podcast, fans of the comic, and the two rarely crossed over. After the initial podcast Shamus and I recorded to announce the comic, our interaction with the hosts was generally limited to technical matters, and the comic and the podcast generally didn\u2019t have much at all to do with each other after a while. We were essentially two independent groups of creators\/communities under the same roof. There\u2019s a lesson here for future webcomic creators, in that generally this is a less than advantageous situation.<\/p>\n

    Ideally if some site brings you in to do a comic, people will not only read your comic, but become fans of the other content on the site, be it podcasts, blogs, whatever. If you\u2019re going to do a comic\/podcast\/blog\/whatever combo, it would probably be a wise idea to coordinate with the other creators. Tackle similar topics now and then, mention the other guys now and then, etc. It\u2019s something to keep in mind if I ever branch out from Clockworks to include other steampunk or gaming stuff.<\/p>\n

    (Now, the Escapist is something of a different story, having enough content that only those with way too much free time will read or watch everything on the site. Still, from my view there appears to be a decent amount of coordination.)<\/p>\n

    EDIT 2019: Shawn was right about the Escapist back in 2010. They were still running the place like a magazine. They had a weekly topic. The editorial staff would build their content around it, and those articles all went up on the same dayTuesday, IIRC.<\/span>. External contributors like me were gently encouraged to cover similar topics, although our content was staggered throughout the week. <\/p>\n

    Since the reboot, the Escapist has a much looser approach to content creation. The external gaming news cycle will still push the site into covering certain topics, but it’s no longer handed down from management. So the site has a handful of articles covering the hot news item, and then a week later – once the audience has stopped caring and moved on to the next thing – I’ll show up to cover the same story in my column. Don’t ask me for hot takes. My most common hot take is, “How interesting. Let me think about it for a week.”<\/p>\n

    To tie this barely-justified digression back to tabletop games, I’ll point out that the site now has a weekly feature called Escapist Unplugged<\/a> that covers the hobby.\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45883"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46405,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45883\/revisions\/46405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}