An unfortunate side effect of drawing my comics traditionally is that I can only really do the bulk of the work at home where I have a decent size desk set up with all the accroutements  needed to pull one of these pages together.

For a while now I’ve been looking for something I can work on when I’m out of the apartment since I almost always have a tablet on me capable of kicking out digital work fairly easily. But I didn’t want to switch Other Tales to digital and I din’t want to take away from its writing time either.

Enter Dwarf Fortress. If you’re not familiar with Dwarf Fortress, it’s a surprisingly detailed simulation game that models a world according to some loose parameters you set. Fills that world with dwarves, elves, goblins and nightmarish forgotten beasts. Then it tracks a truly mind boggling amount of information about most everything you could ever want to know. It somehow manages to tell you everything about everything while also being vague and abstract enough that all that information is completely open to interpretation.

Basically it’s a very complicated story generator.

After a few hours of playing a game that is more or less just staring at text, you can’t help but construct a narrative that strings it all together nicely. And so that is what I decided to do.

So I have started a second comic called Bridgedflickerd (the auto-generated name of my fortress in game) about my attempt to build a functional fortress. It will be a yonkoma style comic with each strip focusing on something I found funny or interesting in the game. You can find it in the comics section along side the Other Tales chapters. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did drawing it.

– Lee