BJ @bj@xeno.chat

Just Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, and Ⅻ left to draw and I'll have the whole council, I think. Well, except for the two outliers.
ⅩⅢ is one of them. The thirteenth of the twelve. The one who doesn't fit into the circle, but she doesn't mind. It gives her more time on her own to fly in a far more eccentric orbit.
The other's number is zero and is a special case. All the council have associated celestial bodies and colors (which they take their names from). What color is zero?

Febra is an artist herself, specializing in makeup. She has a collection of cosmetics made for skin, fur, feathers, scales, or even synthetic bodies, and she likes to find ways to draw out people's inner selves by bringing them to the surface.

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Here's Febra laVender, the island council's expert in all things artistic. Her museum on the island is a multilayered one, with contemporary art on the upper floors (Febra has no great love of the classics; she likes art that lives and breathes and flourishes in the present) and then a dinner-and-dance hall in the middle. Febra is as much about music and food and everything rich and sensory as she is about visual art, and frequently invites guests over to share their creations.

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Sketchier than usual for my daily sketch journal, but that's the kind of mood I was in. Blit Bitkin is the common thread here. The top left one is him in his "kid at school with no idea what he's in for" youth, the ones along the bottom are casual (unarmored) Blit in a simplified style, and the big thing in the upper right… well, that's an initial design for something that'll come up later. There are parts I like and some I don't. It's not supposed to look like it has a kilt, at least.

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Julius Khryseos is the largest gryphon on the island; he's not as big as the picture makes him look, but a 4 meter height gives him a commanding presence, especially on stage in front of his favorite backdrop to tell tales of history. He doesn't just focus on great leaders and battles, but enjoys tales of bravery, cleverness, willpower, and everything else he finds admirable about people. Fitting the sun motifs, Julius hopes everyone can find an inner light of inspiration to greatness.

[⎉] Hey, Blit? About that symbol you picked.
[⎈] This hexagonal doodad?
[⎉] Did you know it's the standard symbol for the Control key on a keyboard?
[⎈] …yeah?
[⎉] Are you really sure you want to broadcast "hey, I'm a control freak" that loudly?
[⎈] … okay, maybe I do need to find another one.
[✼] Careful, Vid. He's touchy about stuff like that. I've heard a bit about his past.
[⎈] That's a story I'd like to tell myself, thanks. And not before the time comes. But you all deserve to know.

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The council of twelve has 5 male, 5 female, and 2 nonbinary members, and Ariel is one of the last group. The extra wings are for more than just looks; Ariel can fly at impressive speed. Their particular forte is communication - this covers everything from linguistics to media studies, but what Ariel especially likes to study is education. Ariel cares about being an effective teacher no less than a speaker or a listener, and loves to travel around to share what they've learned.

Even to the point of having different physical equipment. The Western-flavored Sharpshooters use a deck of cards. The tanky and tactical Cavaliers get (small simplified) chessboards. Summoners bring in a figurine (plastic, plush, whatever works) to stand in for their pet's turn at the table. This sounds both fun to design and extremely weird to watch, and those are good design goals as long as it results in a workable game.

...the thought occurs to me to lean into the idea that different roles (i.e. classes) could feel mechanically very different to play. Keep the outcomes consistent, but have a big diversity of play styles for making stuff happen.

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Bonus sketch - it's been a while since I did anything with Delyria, so I felt like drawing a Harmakhian mystic. I still don't quite know what to do with that setting, but it's still kicking around for whatever form it needs to take. Tabletop RPG seems the most likely at this point.

Novena has the ability to determine any living thing's nutritional needs at a touch, which is very useful for her caretaker role, and she'll happily go consult for people with dietary issues to figure out what they should be eating. Don't ask her to cook, though; your needs will be met, but she has no real concern for esthetics, so everything she makes just comes out as a mild-flavored brown mush. (2/2)

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Novena Fiara is sometimes mistaken for one of the island's wildlife - maybe a fluffy puma, maybe a large fox, maybe something else - but she's no less one of the twelve leaders of the island. Her domain is earth science; under her beast-shaped exterior is a wealth of knowledge and experience related to biology, geology, ecology, and such. Her museum is full of terrariums with rare bugs, lizards, and anything else small enough to live in one. (1/2)

@terrana

The inventor of the = sign agrees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History

I should state here that I already know who all 12 of these leaders are (plus the two who only sort of count), although I'm renaming and redesigning some of them. They're all gryphons in one way or another, but all with unique body shapes. The one thing that's been more formalized is what subjects each is a master of, and you'll see those spelled out as I draw more of them.

The Tower of Curiosity also has twelve floors, not counting the wide ground floor that forms its base and the section at the top with the polyhedron in it. Each floor is a library containing books about one of the twelve subjects, all written by the islands' caretakers over the years. For instance, all of the Maya Blues down the generations have their writings on philosophy collected on the fifth floor.

I've been planning out some of the areas of Lamppost Island. One of its most important features is the Museum Plaza, where each of the island's twelve main leaders has their own building devoted to their subject (Maya's garden, for instance). Twelve buildings arranged in a circle, the whole thing about a quarter mile on a side, with a big public square in the middle. If that sounds like a familiar layout, that's because I posted a rough diagram of it before.

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Maya Blue, another of the island's leaders, spends a lot of her time in her well-tended garden full of fountains and waterways, stone paths winding between raked beds of sand, and calming wind chimes. Her domain is philosophy, and she believes that calm contemplation and meditation are ways to stay in touch with the meaning of things beyond the purely physical or intellectual. She's well-versed in many historical traditions, which makes it hard sometimes to tell what she believes in herself.

And here's a tiny Vida sprite superimposed on a corner of that. (actually smaller than she'd be now that I measure it, but I wanted to get a colored picture of her for once).

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Getting some work done on graphics today. Here's the beginnings of a Lamppost Island tileset; I'm looking for something that's a little more abstract than realistic, but not quite as abstract as the checkerboard ground of a Sonic game. I think I've found a pretty good style for that, though I'm not very experienced with tiles yet. More to come later (at the very least I need some darker-colored backdrop tiles to give it a more three-dimensional look).