The Escapist Club

Author notes

The Killing Machine

dr pepper

on Nov. 30, 2007

This is padded considerably from the real life event. In that, there were 6 players, not 4, so the "death machine" had 5 people shooting at it. There was no actual battle, just a bombardment followed by a thud. That player was at that time going through a phase of trying to come up with the most outrageous character ideas the rules would allow. And the other players started getting annoyed. One of them actually declared they should start each game by killing that one player's character, just to be safe.

As for the look, this time I widened the panels a little and I also widened the angle of the table, which I use to create a fake perspective. This makes the scene more horizontal which in turn makes it easier to fit the speech balloons. On the other hand, it also reduces the feeling of claustrophobia I was trying to project. After all the game is in the back of a teashop, surrounded by theater curtains.

I also changed the font. I had been using Comic Sans Serif, which was recommended to me as better than Arial, which had been my first choice. I still think that was wrong, Arial is nice and clean and easy to read, but the response was that it made the comic look "thrown together". Well, hell, it is thrown together. But I'm trying to interest people in reading it, so ok, I changed the font. But Comic Sans Serif gets kind of fuzzy when I reduce it. So this time I'm using Balloon Bold. And I'm using Cocoa Wide as the effects font, you see it here with the dice results.

The dice are another story. I have photographs of actual dice, custom drawings of dice, and simple commercial clipart of dice. But I didn�¢ï¿½ï¿½t find any of it satisfying. So I came up with a geometric image that sort of looks like a die. I'll pronbably find something I like better later.