Acknowledgments

A lot of different materials and inspiration have gone into the stories posted on this blog and the content of the blog itself. On this page I try to highlight the creators responsible for those works, to give them credit where credit is due, underscore the fact that many of things I play with aren't my IP and I don't intend to profit by them, and to spread the word. None of these are affiliate links. Click or don't click as you like.

Site Design and Assets

My cute sidebar image is courtesy of @pepperjackets on Twitter, who made the Picrew I used to make it. Some of the images on the Characters page were generated using the tools on Artbreeder, an AI-based art generator. You can find my account here.

SCP Foundation (Jules, Najma)

The SCP Foundation, which inspired the game I played Jules and Najma in, is the product of a website which hosts collaborative storytelling about the fictional organization responsible for managing supernatural, alien, and undefinable phenomena. The work the contributors do there is amazing and has inspired so many other works. Pretty much all of the technical lingo and organizations you'll find in the SCP stories originated on the site. Najma is hugely influenced by G. Willow Wilson's run on the Ms. Marvel comics, and the rest of her fiction, which is great, but particularly Alif the Unseen. The game system we played was D20 Modern.

Entropy (Rok)

Entropy was played in the first edition of Stars Without Number by Sine Nomine Publishing. The second edition is available now and a truly fantastic game, with an established human history which is great fun to work with. Rok was the product of countless different stories of artificial intelligence, robots, and history I've eaten up over the years, but in particular Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Dane Vogel is a 100% unabashed cameo by my favorite scumbag CEO from Saints Row 2. The title of "BECAUSE FOR ONCE THE SWORD BROKE IN HER HAND" is from the poem "France" by Cecil Chesterton.

L'ordine Della Rosa (Multiple)

This was a campaign I ran for four years, which began as a Pathfinder game and was converted to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition towards the end. The setting of Pathfinder remained, however, which made the Inner Sea World Guide invaluable to me. That is the source for a lot of the mentioned locations, peoples, and places in LDR stories.

Harvest of Shadows (Delia)

This dark fantasy game was played using Pathfinder. For Delia, I took a lot of inspiration from fiction dealing with medieval history, witchcraft, and folk magic. The movie Black Death starring Sean Bean was influential, as were The Crucible by Arthur Miller, The VVitch, and, hilariously, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett.

Out of the Abyss (Tova)

Out of the Abyss is a hardcover adventure for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition which was run for me by a local DM. The gaming experience was pretty harsh but it gave me a lot of inspiration for a character with low INT but high WIS. I was reading R. A. Salvatore's early books for D&D (specifically The Icewind Dale Trilogy), so having a character dual-wield scimitars definitely came from the exploits of Drizzt Do'Urden. Her ornery blacksmith wife is a love letter to Kate from A Knight's Tale, who probably made me gay(er).

Kind of Blue (h3x)

Kind of Blue was a play-by-post, Discord-based game running Stars Without Number Second Edition. h3x as a mixed Indian-Arab hacker was hugely influenced by Alif the Unseen from a cultural standpoint. Birare, his home planet, and a lot of his style and mannerisms were influenced by the works of William Gibson, The Millennium Trilogy's depictions of hacker culture, and the illustrious Hackers (1995).

Numenera (Tae)

Tae was part of a Numenera module run by a friend, and heavily inspired by the player-created descriptor "infested," as well as Mira Grant's Parasitology series.

The Library (Multiple)

The Library is another Discord-based, play-by-post game, running Monster of the Week. It moves through historical decades, and circumstances may lead to me playing multiple characters in a decade:

• 1920s - Frankie, my bigender flapper, is a character I think of as my "assigned reading in high school, but make it queer" character, drawn from The Great Gatsby and All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as Brideshead Revisited.
• 1920s - Ginika's origins as a form of the archangel Michael with a long history were drawn from this highly-dubious blog post. Her attitude, flavor, and cultural touchstones are Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and southern gothic fiction in general.
• 1930s - I will be GMing this decade, which may lead to more general stories.
• 1940s - Margot, the French expat living in San Francisco for the next formal decade of play, I will be playing as the pararomantic class.
• 1970s - I will be GMing this decade, which may lead to more general stories.