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Because they made me alive 💛

#critical role

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[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.

each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]

🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.

notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)

i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.

i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)

i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.

actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.

handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.

WIP : full text card assignments

bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.

[image description: they are truly garbage notes, i tell you. half of it is written at angles to the other half, many numbers in the math problems are not labeled, mistakes are scribbled over. it gets me there but it doesn't look pretty. end description.]

#DESERT BUS ON MY DASH??? #I should get back to playing disco elysium

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RANDOM DASHBOARD INSPECTION!

#game changer

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Oops I made fanart of my own cosplay. How embarrassing

Pike by @goingmomo

Characters owned by Critical Role, Ashley Johnson and Sam Riegel

#critical role

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humbly making my contribution to the dorian wearing the dorian shirt pile!!!!

#critical role

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my mind has been consumed by Nott (brain rott)

anyways. I like the lineart of the first drawing better but whatever. I painted the pen doodles from earlier though and I adore them

#critical role

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Just a Keyleth straight out of my comfort zone. Did you happen to know that you can commission me? I'd love it if you commissioned me. Link in my bio.

#critical role

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My one gripe with the new Game Changer is that they should’ve committed to the FixItMan78 bit harder, they shoulda paid SungWon Cho to make like 30 of those videos so the contestants had to scroll through a bunch to find the right one.

#game changer

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when you're 'just a little guy'-sized, you can be a clothes thief with every single person you date. they can't even do it back. it's the perfect crime.

(sometimes i like to relax while thinking about a modern au where Will is alive and Orym has a husband AND two boyfriends.)

#critical role

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Congrats to Mike Trapp for getting a good grade in the time loop, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve

#game changer

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🌸Fearne the Wildfire Druid, and Mister

#critical role

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In another universe, Sam Reich is part of Batman's rogues' gallery.

#game changer

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✨ A Distant Star ✨

#critical role

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I'm sorry. Are you?

#critical role

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the girlfriends!!

#critical role

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Fy'ra Rai is always so much fun to draw

#critical role

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#game changer