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Unsounded - Blog Posts
Thank you for asking, BizzAnon! And thanks for answering, Ashley~ Me eyeballs shall live another day~
From what I can make out on a first lookin’:
First pole: “Fret not my children … for there is little…”
Second pole: “Be done in this world but… Think and fixate on the *illegible*”
Third pole: “Your I N G N (or V?) V (or U?) I V Y H T S… Brought…”
Fourth pole: “For they are not your…”
Fifth pole: “…A O E D E R H … U A U R”
*edit*
AC on the Discord deciphered the third pole as “Your ingenuity has brought,” which is delightfully ominous. Thanks, AC!
BizzAnon: Rainwalker on the Discord is trying to read all the little text on the boards around Tirna's shrine on the cover page of the first chapter. Any chance you could throw up a high-res zoom of it and spare a reader's eyeballs?
Oh please, I think we all know by now that Matty’s the big bad of this story.
One of the plats (probably Jon or Magnus) is the big bad and this is their origin story admit it.
But I thought Lemuel was the Big Bad and this is HIS origin story! Think one of the Plats could be his primary minion?
Ironic, isn't it, feeding these bird-lover's tongues to the crows.
Wow, so many props I could put on a play
Was the mention of the volcanoe perchance when Sette wasn't trying to teach Duane to lie and teaching through example she said "I'm the best liar to ever climb to the highest peak of Mt Bloodbasin" ?
You got it first, all the props to you ;)
So I hear some of you guys like print books. The Unsounded Volume 3 Kickstarter is live now!
I’m hoping to fund a fantastic print of the third volume and also reprints of volumes 1 and 2! You’ll find some other goodies up for grabs there as well. Reblogs are always appreciated!
I’m nervous because that is my nature, but you guys give me strength. Thank you for supporting me and the comic :) Please disregard Sette, she is a garbage baby. Jivi, Matty, and I will keep her on the straight and narrow.
At first hearing that Duane was at any point in his life anything other than a bookish, pedantic wizard nerd caught me off guard, but then you think of all the times he ends up punching people and begin to wonder if there’s more ‘bully’ left in him than he’d care to admit
Wait, what was the divine revelation that made Duane pursue priesthood? Or will it come up in the comic later?
I don’t know if it’ll ever come up in the comic, and Duane’s always been kind of embarrassed to speak of it aloud because it makes him feel like one of those backwoods zealots that preaches anecdotes from a stump, but yeah, he had an Experience when he was a kid. Ssaelism is a very rational faith. It doesn’t encourage you to go around saying Ssael appeared to you in a vision and told you where you left your lucky kedis foot. If you tell your priest that Ssael speaks to you he’ll roll his eyes and suggest you stop mixing beer and wine.
Anyway, Duane was badly injured in a street accident (it was totally Lemuel’s fault, he was being a little shit) and very nearly didn’t make it. Duane was a very rambunctious kid - some might say a bully - and though his grandfather was teaching him pymary Duane tended to use it like, well, Sette might. To make his brother and their peers miserable. After he was hurt he was bedbound for a few months and his interests abruptly turned bookish. At the same time, frigging Sonum Ssael started talking to him in the back of his head, saying he needed to straighten the hell up.
Even after he recovered Duane was hobbling for a year and never took up his old role of neighbourhood bully. Instead he began studying his grandfather’s books, reading everything Ssael ever wrote, and spending way too much time in the ghers library. He shocked his grandfather by beginning to beat him in their play-duels, and shocked his dad by humbly requesting to attend seminary and become a cleric instead of becoming his apprentice in their family print shop.
Duane always heard Ssael with startling clarity in his prayers. That voice went away after his bad night in the snow.
What's the difference in pronunciations between the Ss in Ssael and the S in Soud? Are they, perhaps, pronounced the same, but spelled so as an artefact from Old Tainish? What about the Mm in Mmatont- how's that pronounced?
Double S is a z. Double m is an m with a stop after, treat the mm like its own syllable. So it’s mm-atont. Like, yum, delicious traitors. Mm-atont.
Double n works the same. ssh- is the same. Double L I borrowed from Spanish, and is an english y, with the interesting New Tainish tweak of becoming a separate syllable if it’s at the end of a word. So sshupall (friend) is pronounced probably nothing like you’d imagine! It’s four syllables. ssh-oo-pah-yeh.
Originally I considered using more apostrophes and diacritics in Tainish but fantasy languages are always tattooed up with marks like eighty year old bikers. If French can have utterly unintuitive orthography, so can Tainish, by gum.
Oh yeah I forgot that was a thing that existed. Quite understandable, considering I’ve only read the first chapter 8, 9-ish times. Poor Root, it didn’t ask to be burned up by virtue of Sette’s foul mouth and Duane’s pig-headedness. Rest In Pieces
"Empathic trees" I cannot recall any empathic, or even sentient trees in this comic as of yet. Would you be so kind as to clarify?
The Wand’ring Root in the first chapter!
*whispers* every time you respond to an ask here I feel so special~~~
Care to share any lore pertaining to the carvings on the wall in the inner temple, or would that be too spoilery?
We’re going to get much more into the two-toes in chapter 12. There’s an old lady lizard who will expand upon her culture much more colourfully than I can here :)
Oh no, don’t tempt me to look into the formspring. But I don’t think even I am brave enough/ have enough free time to tread the festering pits of information that can be found on the formspring. On another note, I’m so glad you gave Vliegeng bigger mouths haha
Ahhhh I just finished reading this entire tumblr! So informative! I love you and your story even more now! So, do I get a medal for this feat of obsession-driven lore consumption? Or how about just vliegeng facts, as they are probably the best mythical creature to be created since dragons became a thing in like, BC 800 or whatever. Please seduce me with inessential minutia about vliegengs Ms. Cope~
Most impressive! Before tumblr I used a site called Formspring for Q&A, so as humongous as this archive of useless information is, imagine it four times longer with an even less intuitive UI :)
Since you’ve read all of tumblr though, I’m not sure what more to offer when it comes to vliegeng. Their original conception was in my roleplaying days. A certain horrid demon could only interact with humans (without driving them insane) by possessing the body of a notoriously hearty burrowing subterranean goat-snake. The demon’s master, a Lich named Lord Nihil, kept the poor critter chained up in his lair for the demon’s convenience. I believe Bastion killed it towards the end of the game. Bastion was always killin’ interesting monsters.
But that’s the reason for this illustration, and why the vliegeng looks so glum. It was not a happy captive.
Of course it was repurposed and altered for Unsounded. Instead of gliding through the earth like a Graboid, I moved it skywards, and added its unique relationship with the khert lines. And it’s such an ugly thing I liked the idea of making it distinctly Aldish, to clash with Aldish elegance. This simple contrast helped define Duane’s brother’s character somewhat. Duane had a brother in RP as well, a completely different character who was much more like him. Lemuel is quite a bit different: earthier, less pretentious, less cerebral. His role as a vliegeng handler influenced that development, I think.
Cool, thanks for answering! ^.^
Two things: 1) what exactly is the Foi-Hellick affair? I know it was an Aldish civil insurrection of some kind but I am interested in the details the details and 2) (if this is not too spoilery) What exactly was Queen Sonorie's agenda in having Duane killed? I never fully understood that. P.S. Love your comic so much it has taken over my life
Haha, don’t let it take over your life, there are better things out there like coffee and foot rubs.
You ask about intentional mysteries! Well, the Foi-Hellick affair isn’t too mysterious, it just hasn’t been discussed in the comic yet. The Foi-Hellick affair/war/insurrection/rebellion/call-it-what-you-will was indeed a civil insurrection. It concerned an attempt by two wealthy families recently joined by marriage (the Foi-Hellicks) in the Aldish district of Avelpit to declare their independence from the Aldish state and become a holding of Cresce. Queen Sonorie reneged on her promise of military aid after the mastermind of the affair, Roger Foi-Hellick, absconded to the Crescian court, abandoning his family and his cause. The Foi-Hellicks tried to go Just Kidding Bro but it didn’t work out so well for them. When it became clear they were going to be made an example of, they recruited a citizen army and hired southern mercenaries, kickstarting a pretty brutal few years of warfare that they ultimately lost. Badly. Impaled-on-spears-in-front-of-their-own-children badly.
Duane and his brother served in the army during this. We’ll see some of it firsthand in an upcoming chapter and meet many of the players. This was a very important event, which is why I threw in some early references to it.
As for why Queen Sonorie had Duane killed, you can believe Duane’s speculation here, or not. Duane thinks Sonorie wanted to encourage the ill feelings between Alderode’s two religions by making it look like she supports the Gefendur. The idea that Sonorie would kill a Ssaelit priest for them would have to positively infuriate Duane’s camp, no? If Alderode falls to all-out religious civil war, that can only be good for Cresce. “Divide and conquer,” suggests the zombie.
But this is only Duane’s speculation, and all he has to go on are words written on a wall in his own shed blood.