ANNOUNCEMENT: Oblique Adventures is Live!

 

Candi and I are very excited to announce the launch of our new startup enterprise: Oblique Adventures!

We're creating adventures, homebrew creatures, and all sorts of other resources table-top roleplayers everywhere. Our focus thus far has been to come up with products compatible with Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e), but we are confident that much of what we offer will be easy to translate into other game systems. 

The very first offering we've got for you is a free gift to celebrate our official launch:

"The Bugblatter Beast" draws from the fantastical mythology of the late, great Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. In this scenario, your adventurers will come face-to-face with the cosmic menace known as the ravenous Bugblatter Beast. Even powerful heroes will find this horrendous creature difficult to overcome in a straight fight... but don't panic! The adventure provides many options (all inspired by Hitchhiker lore) for using the Bugblatter's phenomenal stupidity to give you a fighting chance.

Included in this adventure are stats for new items such as the Babel Fish, the +1 Towel of Hitchhiking, and the Wand of M'arvin. You'll also find a new feat called the Knack of Flying.

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We've got a lot of plans, hopes, and dreams for Oblique Adventures. And you'll find a link to the Oblique Patreon page on our site. Oblique Adventures is how we hope to keep the lights on. If you're a long-time fan of Thunderstruck and want to support the comic, this is the best way to do it.

Comic 816 -- Not a Messiah

 This is huge?

Not a long installment, but the implications of what Gail and Sharon are talking about are pretty important in the overall scheme of things.

Been very busy this month with Oblique Adventures. We've got a few technicalities to hammer out, but I'm confident we can show you something cool soon.

Comic 815 -- I Finally Know What I Am

 Returning to the present, and our protagonists...

Phew! Back on track here.

No Comic for September

Argh! Setting up a new business is hard. We're close now to having some stuff to show you. It's coming together, but it just takes time.

Thunderstruck got shuffled down the priority list in September, alas. I didn't like my draft of the next comic, and then I didn't find enough breathing space to figure out a different approach. Wish me luck in October!

Comic 814 -- Jude's Story, Part 12

 Part 12? What a chatterbox that Jude is!

Still, it's a story that's been lurking around at the heart of Thunderstruck, waiting to be told. And now, I think it's about time for everyone else's stories to get moving again. 

Long-time readers might still have some questions, of course. I may have the answers ready to deploy when they become relevant, but I am always happy to hear your questions, observations, and thoughts in the comments.

Comic 813 -- Jude's Story, Part 11

 The delays are getting shorter!

This time, the primary cause of delay was that we have fires in our area. We weren't evacuated or anything, but the smoke... blech. Turns out I'm pretty sensitive to air quality, and when it hits a number like 239 (above 50 is unsafe, if you aren't familiar with the scale), it kind of flattens me.

Think I was a canary in a former life.

Anyway, more backstory from the end of the world. Next up: Jude's silver coins.

Comic 812 -- Jude's Story, Part 10

 Pardon the lateness... but here we are:

We're just about at the end of Jude's story. A few details to clean up (like the business with 30 particular coins), and the tale will be complete. 

Then it's a matter of how these events of long ago bear upon the perils our heroes face now...

Comic 811 -- Jude's Story, Part 9

 Finally! Here we go...

So, new tablet is up and running. I did lose a bit of work between backups, and it took a little longer than I'd have liked to get this comic up, but it's here. 

Not quite what I learned in Sunday school.

Jude utters a few lines that are more or less identical to ones in a song called "Fly from Heaven" by Toad the Wet Sprocket. Though I don't have a meticulous outline for Thunderstruck, I've known he would be borrowing those lines for a long, long time. 

My goal is still to get a comic up by the end of the month! We'll see how fortune treats us.

 

Well THIS is embarrassing...

 I was on track for the comic. I really was.

Then I left my iPad in the seat pocket on the airplane.

So... that means all the art for the latest trip was lost along with the iPad. The tablet is either gone, or will come back to me after it passes through the digestive system of the Frontier airlines lost-and-found system. God only knows how long that will take.

Since my work relies on having the tablet, I've ordered a new one, and will be able to recover the art from the cloud backup. Which is good, but it means the comic will be late. How late depends on how long it takes the new tablet to arrive, plus some time to do the finishing work on the comic.

I feel very, very stupid. Apologies to all.

Updates (i.e., why there's no comic this month)

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned at the end of December 2023, I was laid off from my job of 20 years. This has caused some disruption of my life, to say the least.

Disruption can be a good thing. In this case, I think it is. After several miserable months of attempting to look for work in corporate America (long story short: It sucks. Hard.), in April I decided to say "To hell with it."

Candi and I are starting our own business. We're calling it Oblique Adventures.

I'm not going into many details right now, since there are a lot of things we need to settle on. The nature of the business, though, is that we're going to be a 3rd-party content creator for table-top role playing games (TTRPGs), most notably Dungeons & Dragons. 

It's very exciting. Very scary, too, but in a way much less horrifying than the prospect of going back into another corporate hellscape. I have not felt this eager and energized about work in a long, long time.

I'll be keeping you up to date as developments develop. 

This rather enormous lifestyle change has made April a dizzying whirlwind, which is why I didn't find the time and energy to finish the next strip. I have no intention of abandoning Thunderstruck... but I may need to ask for some slack here and there as we get Oblique Adventures up and running. 

 So... that's the big news! Wish us luck, and I look forward to sharing our work with you in the coming months.

Comic 810 -- Jude's Story, Part 8

 Jude has taken over the comic!

I really didn't plan for Jude's story to take quite this long. I believe we're approaching the end of this Biblical saga, though.

Hang in there, everyone...

Comic 809 -- Jude's Story, Part 7

 Here we go. Sorry about the delay...

Okay, so... in spite of Thrud's confusion here, one could make a case that there was a creature loosely described as "part man, part horse" about which Asgardian goddess might have known. A nasty one, too, called the Nuckelavee.

Described in the folklore of the Orkney Islands of Scotland, this grotesque thing was like a horse and rider fused together, with some extra mutations, no skin, and extraordinarily foul breath. A real charmer! Owing to the nature of the way such folklore is passed down, it isn't clear if the Nuckelavee story was part of the culture while the Vikings were inhabiting the islands or not. 

For the sake of the comic, we will say Thrud did not know about the Nuckelavee, and thus produced some fanciful notions about what this "centaur" thing might look like. Sometimes, I go with the cuter option.

Breif Delay

 Never could get the hang of February. The new strip will appear this weekend... apologies for the delay.

Comic 808 -- Jude's Story, Part 6

 More thrills and spills from the ancient world...

Reconciling lots of different mythologies is tricky business, both for the characters in the story and the writer. Many of Thunderstruck's plot elements arise from the fact that the magical world is a crowded place, and some folks want to simplify it for their own purposes.

In other news, the search for work continues. It sucks, basically. I'll let you know when something improves.