Our Golden Age Cover WIP + Post Frequency Poll (Patreon)

Dear Heroes,

As promised last week, a poll!

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>>>For the poll, jump to the end! It's about how often and what you would like me to post!<<<

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Those who've known me a while will know that I have (and still do, I guess) struggled with perfectionism and insecurity, which has often kept me from sharing things — drafts, concepts, even finished pieces.

Recently, my struggles have been much less, and I'm very happy with how the Our Golden Age book is progressing. Sharing individual chapters and subchapters as they're "finished enough" has given me the space to keep shifting things around, while still having something nice I could share ... and I suspect you like having a coherent piece more than ... uh ... my Uranium Butterflies approach, where I just shared new versions and listed where the new content was. In retrospect, that was messy.

And insecurity inducing!

I'd actually like to share more of the things I make, more of the process, pieces that don't make the chapter cut, and so on. However, this makes me worry: I don't want to overwhelm your inboxes (wouldn't it be better if the plural of box was boces? Hmm, but then a fox would be come foces ... well, I can live with that). That's what this poll is about.

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Here's an example of the kind of post I'd like to add between the content posts.

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I got to thinking about this question as I've been working on the cover for the book. Some will remember how it started with UB:

From there, for a while I toyed with something like the UVG Guide Book cover, but then - wisely - forked that off into its own thing:

As a side note - this cover art was intended as a cover for SEACAT way back in 2020, but it fits the guidebook better. So, it's come full circle.

I played with this following cover for a while:

This style eventually made it into the zines, like magitecnica and ecologicon. Here's something I'm cooking in the background, as I sift what stays in OGA and what gets its own booklet.

But what works great for an A5 book(let) or zine series doesn't look so great in an A4 book that's supposed to sit next to the UVG 2E on a shelf ...

So from where I was with the cover last September:

I started thinking I needed something different. I cycled through a placeholder ...

And another placeholder that gave me an idea. See, the title itself looked kind of like a circle and I was pretty much thinking of this as the Circle Sea book ...

I had this idea ... what if I symbolically interpreted the map of the world with the circle in the middle, making a stylized map all around it ... I made a grid for how I would illustrate it ...

... I made two attempts at that and it was terrible. Far too busy and terrible to draw. But, but, but ... As part of that process, I ended up hand-lettering the title and I thought it looked amazing.

I scrapped the map, but kept the circle and the map.

Ages ago I made a drawing of a city out in the wastes built inside the engine of a landed spaceship and I was struck by the image of a wimmelbild-style depiction of a voidship turned grounded city ... with one engine reactivated (probably by the PCs) in the middle of the page. So I started drawing.

... and drawing ...

I think I have another 10-20 hours to go to finish inking the cover, then I'm going to color it in. This is the front cover, the back cover is going to be a whole second page. Scanning and stitching the two together is going to be a ... labor. Then the coloring.

 So, now that you've read this far, you can learn that an unexpected bonus will be a titling font with relatively large latin language support, in capitals and lower case. Oh well, surprise!

Right, now the poll. About posts and content and types of posts.

Thank you and take care, good heroes!

—Luka

(note: this post will become public on May the 9th)