Familiar Ground

I was hesitant about making this post.

For one, I want to keep the tone of this site light and jovial. I want to entertain people, to let them forget about whatever might be worrying them in the real world and just enjoy themselves for a while with a bit of light amusement.

Secondly, I didn’t know Dave Arneson personally. I’ve seen him at conventions, but have never actually spoken to him. I didn’t want to say words of remembrance that can be told by others who knew him and say it better.

But his contribution to the hobby that I enjoy is too great for me not to say anything. I tried several times over the past two days to come up with some drawing or strip to dedicate to his memory, but all I keep coming up with is a blank piece of paper.

So words will have to do.

Dave Arneson co-founded Dungeons and Dragons, back in 1974 with Gary Gygax. He was actually the one that came up with the original idea to switch from playing with miniatures skirmish rules to playing as characters, giving them individuality and created what we now know as D&D today.

He helped spawn an industry that is still going strong today, with an estimated 6 million players of table top RPGs worldwide. MMOs today readily admit the influence that D&D has had on their mechanics, from elves and orcs to hit points and character levels, and the number of people who play them are in the tens of millions.

Even in his later years, Dave would still attend the convention circuit and teach others to play the game in his unique style. All he really wanted was for others to have fun.

Because of Dave Arneson, our lives are a little more magical and wondrous than it otherwise would’ve been.

Thanks Dave.

For those curious about my comic strip process, I’ve put together this page that now has pictures!

It shows the creation of Monday’s strip (6 April, 09).

I need your help to spread the word about this site!

I’m trying an experiment with Reddit, a social networking site that is that is used to tell others about sites they find interesting (like Familiar Ground!)

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/search?q=familiar+ground

If you’re already part of the reddit community, just go to the site and hit the arrow keys to indicate you like the strip to increase its standing.

Alternatively, you can use the share button at the bottom of this post to promote this site among other social networks.

Thanks for your help!

Welcome to all you new readers!  According to a couple of site analysis tools, it seems that I’ve managed to gain some 500 readers over the past couple of days.

That totally blows my mind.

Some of you might not be aware, but I’m using milestones with regards to this strip.  Basically that means that once we reach the first milestone (1000 average readers over the past month), the community as a whole can vote on how to improve the strip.  Most likely that would probably mean that the strip will increase to three times a week (MWF instead of the current MW). 

So I would greatly appreciate it you can please help me reach this first milestone by telling others about the comic.

Digg, StumbleUpon, or talk about the site on various blogs or forums to help spread the word!

Someone asked me how long I’ve been drawing, and the answer is a tad embarassing. 

I’ve only been drawing for perhaps 5 months or so.  Prior to that, I wasn’t even sketching or doodling for fun.  The last art class I took was probably in 7th grade.

So drawing this strip involved learning a whole new skill set for me and I’m still developing my style.  Expect the characters to change over time.  Even now I can see signficant differences between what I’m drawing now and my initial sketches a few months ago.

 Here’s a few initial sketches on scratch paper:

The above was from around late October 2008.  As you can see, I decided to make Toad slightly leaner and younger looking.

This was from around the same time period.

Basically I knew what my characters were, their personalities and how they interacted, but how they actually looked like was one of the last steps in the process.

I sorta like with how they look like now, but I’m still working for more consistency between panels.