Almanac – Alchemy
September 1st, 2011This week’s almanac entry is alchemy – the magic of Corthis. Magic isn’t really the right word for it. Corthis is a scientific world, but its science is difference than ours. It is modeled on the principles of science of the time of Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, and Gottfried Leibniz (or more generally, in the early years of the Royal Society of Great Britain and the Académie des Sciences of France). This means Newtonian alchemy actually works. The spheres of the planetary spheres work per Kepler’s Platonic solids model (with a Corthis-centric model instead of a Helio-centric one). Anyway, please check out the first installment in the alchemy of Corthis. There will be many more as Blaise and Jassart begin to unravel the mysteries of the world – or more accurately trip over them.
A few other things. We will not be updating a page on Monday because of the holiday (hurrah, Labor Day!). So look for the next page on Wednesday. I’m posting an extra-long almanac entry to cover Monday.
Also, Snow by Night will be in the Artists’ Alley of Intervention. This is my favorite convention of the year (with perhaps GenCon being a close second.). It’s an incredible event. I’ll be on two different panels: (1) Young Punks Kicking It: the new kids on the block at 1 p.m. on Saturday and (2) Writing and Creating Three Dimensional Characters at 1 p.m. on Sunday. You should come and see us and this great convention.
omg, sorry, just saw the “no strip on monday” thing. Sorry.
Actually, I should be the one to apologize for the lack of page on Monday. August was a beast. We’re located in Virginia so we got both an earthquake and a hurricane (an earthquake in Virginia? Weird). Both Brit and I had family obligations that couldn’t be avoided. The result of all this was our buffer of pages evaporated. We’re trying to rebuild it now, and Labor Day seemed an excellent reason to delay a page by two days. If we were going to miss, I wanted to do it now rather than later in the chapter. As you can probably, midden is about to hit the windmill in the comic. I didn’t want any missed pages on the second half of the chapter to disrupt the action.
You’re in VA!?!?!?!? I wish I’d known! I was down there all last week!
Yep. All three of us live just outside of Washington DC in Fairfax. It rained all day today. My dog hated it, but the herbs loved it.
So where’s the strip for Monday Sept 5th? It’s sad enough that we only get 2 strips a week (although I do understand that life gets in the way, so 2 strips a week works for you) but I’m kinda sad that it’s Tuesday and there’s no Monday strip. Will we get 2 tomorrow then?
So we have d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20 elements… you’re not developing an RPG setting are you? (And if so, where can I get a copy?)
Gygax went to Platonic solids when designing his dice for D&D because they provide regular sides. The only die that isn’t a Platonic solid is the d10. Since they’re both drawn from the same source, there’s overlap between the dice used in RPGs and forms in alchemy. No, I am not developing an RPG setting for Snow by Night at this time. I am doing some work for Wizards of the Coast and writing for their Forgotten Realms setting. I did a piece on Daggerdale which was published on the Wizards’ site in July. I have a few more projects with them coming out in the future, but I’m not at liberty talk about that just yet.