Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Updates and a (Maybe) Story Bonanza for Literotica's Upcoming Halloween Story Contest

By maybe, I think three stories...  Maybe.  Maybe more.  Whenever I try to be a bit more definite about these things something goes horribly wrong and scuppers all the plans.

Anyway.  Literotica's annual Halloween contest is on the way.  The details of which can be found here.

As an aside, if you're a budding writer that likes succubi/monster girls and is not afraid to get your hands dirty with a little bit of explicit smut, contests like this are a great way to cut your teeth and find readers.

As for me, currently some of my projects have stalled and trying to bludgeon through them isn't doing my productivity any good.  I think I'll use this contest as an excuse to let #ChaosWriting out of the cage and see how many short stories I can blast out during the three weeks of the contest.  With a bit of luck that might clear my head and get the production line moving again.

The first story is already submitted.  You should see that go up tomorrow when the contest officially kicks off.  After that I'm not sure what we'll get or how many.  That's the beauty of #ChaosWriting.

I'm not trying to win this time.  There's been a trend in recent competitions for some entrants to go long, and I mean 90K-word-novel long.  With the way Literotica's scoring system works, it's pretty much impossible for a good 5-10K short story to place over a good 90K+ novel, so I'm not going to worry about it.  This is more an exercise in clearing out some old ideas and trying to get back in touch with what made me so prolific in my early days writing for Literotica (being more carefree and less trying to brute-force stories at a guess).

There's another two stories where I'm nearly done with the first draft, so I reckon we might see three new stories in October and hopefully more if the juices really get flowing.

So where does this leave the other stuff?  Here are a few updates.

Sandwiched by Series
Sticking to a hard monthly schedule isn't working here.  I like the covers and concept, so it will continue, but with a more flexible release schedule. i.e. When the story is done and I'm happy it doesn't feel rushed.  The next one is "Sandwiched by Scyllas" and I'm about 60-odd% done with it.

Okasare Kenny Series
The original idea was for this to be the monthly serial for 2016. Then I tried to use it as crazy live-novel-writing challenge, which was a cool idea, but a bad thing to launch into with other stories (in particular Succubus Summoning) still incomplete.  The Sandwiched by series was a trial to see if I could keep to a regular monthly schedule for a series with more continuity.  I'm not confident I can do that at the moment, so I won't officially (re)launch Okasare Kenny until I have six months or so worth of chapters in the can and can be confident it won't stall like Succubus Summoning 201 did.

A Night With Ceptophthorié
Alas poor game-writing experiment.  This one got shoved to the back burner when I fell behind on first A Succubus for Saint Patrick's Day, and then various other things.  It's something I want to do, but I have to get my other writing stuff sorted first.

Jackson in HRPG-World
This is tailor-made for putting up on the blog in small chapters.  I need to get other things done first (Succubus Summoning 201!) before I can get back to this.  And I will get back to it because I know how the story pans out and I'm very excited to see readers' reactions to it. ;)

Succubus Summoning 201
The big one.  The one I really should get done considering Succubus Summoning 101 outsells all my other books put together.  Why aren't I on it?  It didn't get done in November/December last year basically.  That was when I went through a rather drastic life change that involved losing my job and changing countries.  It got put to one side while I got back on my feet (and aside from not being as productive with my writing as I'd like, I am thankfully back on my feet) and now I'm having a little trouble picking up the threads again.  I should be able fix this once I get around to the editing process in assembling the previous chapters into a coherent ebook.  I'll be on that as soon as I've had my fun with Halloween.  The aim is still to get the ebook finished before the end of the year and out as soon as there's an opening in eXcessica's publication schedule.  The final two chapters (of 201) will be posted as soon as they're written though.  I'm not going to let readers wait for them longer than they have to.

Some updates anyway.  It's been a weird 12 months.  Hopefully the next 12 months won't feature quite as many missteps, fumbles and failed experiments.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy the free Halloween stories (however many of them there end up being).

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Hentai Game Review: Demon Angel Sakura vol.3

I tend to cover some weird hentai games on this blog and the Demon Angel Sakura series is possibly one of the weirdest.  While Luka of Monster Girl Quest and the various protagonists of the Violated Hero series have it bad in some of their Bad Ends, I doubt any would trade with the eponymous "hero" of Demon Angel Sakura.


Demon Angel Sakura is a platformer.  The first two games (which I covered here and here) were boss rushes where the diminutive Sakura had to fight off various monster girl titans lusting after his body (in more ways than one).  Gameplay-wise the series was little more than an excuse to show off some lushly animated and bizarre Bad Ends.

The third instalment has expanded the gameplay a great deal.  Now there are platforming levels in between the bosses jam-packed with minor enemies, each with their own lovingly-animated Bad End should Sakura not avoid or blast them out of the way.

Nothing to see here.  Just a giant succubus shooting hearts out of her pussy...
The enemy variety is a big step up from the previous games.  Instead of 5-8 bosses with 1 or 2 Bad Ends, this time there are 24 minor enemies and 6 bosses/NPCs (with some having a 2 scenes).  Each is fully animated and you don't have to worry about farting around with auto-translators as the game already comes with an English translation.

As with the previous games the focus is on vore and other bizarre fetishes.  Over the course of the game Sakura ends up being eaten (repeatedly), dissolved to mush between giant titties, inserted in a giant pussy and pissed all over, and other weirdness.  It's not a game for the faint-hearted or easily squicked out.

Flower Girl seems harmless enough.  Wait, is that our skull...?
This time there is a little bit more range to the debauchery.  Not all of the monster girls want to eat Sakura, or shove him where the sun don't shine.  Some of the monster girls just want to give Sakura a good hard fucking.  The addition of more vanilla scenes might make the game a little more appealing to monster girl hentai fans that were put off by the hardcore weirdness of the previous two chapters.  (Although you're still going to be seeing Sakura in cutaway shots of churning stomachs an awful lot).

It's still a short game, but there is a lot of H-content.  The level design is also surprisingly fiendish.  I had that classic end-of-an-Ian-Livingstone-Fighting-Fantasy-Gamebook moment when I reached a series of four doors on the final level with only one key in my possession.  I had to search the internet and a thread on ulmf.org revealed the other keys were sneakily hidden on previous levels.  Thankfully there is a shop system selling items to help with this, so the scavenger-hunt backtracking to find the missing keys is not as irritating as it first looks.

This is moderately sane compared to other stuff in the game
The other thing to note is that the difficulty level changes which monster girls appear on certain levels.  Unlocking all of them requires putting the game difficulty back up Normal or higher.  Although, thankfully for platformer-incompetents like me, this can be done mid-playthrough after the bosses have been cleared.

Overall I think the extra quantity did come at the expense of some of the quality.  The Bad End scenes felt a little shorter this time around and the boss scenes in particular didn't really do anything for me.  As always, YMMV on this depending on which particular fetish weirdness falls in your zone.  Gameplay-wise, the only thing that really irritated me was certain indestructible enemies with one-hit-kill attacks.  Those fricking Obesity Fairies... Grr.

A Sakura-Eye view of some 69
That's Demon Angel Sakura vol. 3, a game where you cross big drops by being farted out of the butthole of a giant fairy.  Do I need to say any more... :)

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

An Interesting Music Vid From Behemoth

This is for "The Satanist", the title track from the Polish metal band's last album (a cracker if you haven't had the chance to check it out).


Nothing really succubus-y about it, but it does have a pretty good urban horror vibe to it.  A neat little horror short, even without the music.

I rarely play Satanic tropes straight in my own fiction.  The cults from the heyday of Dennis Wheatley and Hammer Horror now seem a little too cosy and toothless to modern audiences.  And the central twist of most Satanic cult stories - the bad guys win at the end - has been used so many times it can hardly be called a twist any more.

The urban grit and more modern fears of alienation and surveillance give this vid a bit more bite.  Something I might have a play around with and Warsaw looks a good setting.  I've been to the city before, but it was some years ago and I didn't get a chance to see much of it (although I still ended up in places that gave me inspiration for a few stories ;) ).  Maybe I'll try and get out there again.  Hapless tourists ending up at the "wrong" strip club is always a fun recipe for a succubus horror story.

What, you wanted tits?

Okay then.  This is the first video Behemoth put out from that album (a better track in my opinion).

 
BEHEMOTH "Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel" Official Video Uncensored from Behemoth Official on Vimeo.

Good old black(ened) metal.  Never lets you down when it comes to tits.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

A Textbook Example of Censorship by Mob - Tournament of Rapists

I read this:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/11/social-justice-warriors-attack-tabletop-gaming-get-their-facts-hopelessly-wrong/

and, ugh.

The tl;dr version.  Somebody put out a (tabletop) role-playing game book with the title of Tournament of Rapists.  From the synopsis it sounds like a Mortal Kombat/Bruce Lee Enter the Dragon type scenario where the players infiltrate a tournament of death to bring down the corrupt ringleader.  The Perpetually Offended Of Social Media caught wind of it and deployed their usual strategy of Point and Shriek and Dogpile until the retailer made it unavailable.

I've been trying to avoid harping on about SJW nonsense, but this is encroaching on my own artistic freedom.  It's close to an idea I've been meaning to work on (monster girls fighting with exotic sex moves similar to the arena section of Monster Girl Quest) as a book or maybe even a game.  I'd like to be able to do this without worrying about a pack of screaming monkeys throwing faeces at me.

Healthy criticism and not liking something is fine.  Gathering together a mob to pressure retailers into not selling certain items because you don't like them is not.  Stories like this need to widely circulated so that people are aware of what's going on.  At this point we need to shout back and let these online thugs know in no uncertain terms that this type of shit is no longer acceptable.

If you're one of the people that threatened to remove your own products unless this book was banned, you are a cunticle of the highest order and I sincerely hope you look on your business in a year's time and see nothing but ash.

Monday, September 07, 2015

A Goblin Succubus...?

Wut?



Yup.  This little... um... beauty is from Age of Wonders 3.



Age of Wonders 3 is a 4X game with a fantasy theme.  Think Civilization, but where the top-end tech is dragons rather than nukes.  The game also has some RPG elements in that a lot of the game is roaming around the map and looting various treasure sites in order to level up heroes and their warbands (as well as finding cool loot for them).

The succubus is a unique unit for the Rogue class of leader.  Interestingly it's also treated as a pseudo-class.  Hence goblin succubus (the dwarf succubus has a beard...).  It's also a fun unit as the main special ability is to steal (seduce) opposing units.  Anything mind controlled and still alive at the end of the battle joins your side.  This opens up another fun part of the game - you can steal baby animals and then grow them up, Hagrid-from-Harry-Potter-style, into terrifying monsters.

While not as deep as either a pure 4X or RPG game, it's an entertaining mash-up of two genres.

As for inspiration for stories.  Hmm, sorry Miss Goblin, but I don't think you're my type...


Friday, September 04, 2015

A Succubus Team for Fantasy Football

By Fantasy Football I'm referring to the trope of fantasy races playing some form of hyper-violent sportsball (usually a derivative of American Football) rather than Fantasy Football in the mainstream sense.  For tabletop miniatures games, this usually equates to Games Workshop's Blood Bowl, although there are other games.

Blood Bowl was a tabletop game I enjoyed a lot when I was younger and since returning to the UK I've been using it as the basis of some beer and gaming nights at my brother's.  Blood Bowl as a game is in a weird state as it's still popular, has its own playing community, but has been effectively disowned by the games company that created it and is no longer supported.  If you want to pick up the minis nowadays you have to get them second-hand off Ebay.

The official ones anyway.

Other miniatures manufacturers create fantasy football minis.  They're not official Blood Bowl minis and they don't have the (presumably trade-marked) Warhammer names, but if you're looking for a Skaven team, you'll be able to find someone making a ratmen team that just so happens to have all the official Blood Bowl roster positionals covered.  Indeed, for some teams (i.e. Slann) this is the only way to get a team.  The rules for them exist, but GW never produced a line of miniatures to represent them.

While looking for alternate team minis I came upon this site offering a Succubus team that I thought looked a little interesting.

http://www.sukubusstudio.com/#!sukubusteam/c15hb

Here are a couple of the minis as an example.



I'm guessing most of these ranges are put together as fantasy-football-themed minis for people to collect and paint.  The savvier studios will also make the range correspond to one of the official Blood Bowl rosters so players can also use them as game pieces for the tabletop game.  The Amazon team roster, being the only all-female team, tends to attract a lot of alternates.  In GW's official Warhammer/Blood Bowl fluff Amazons have an Aztec flavour.  Unofficial interpretations tend to head off into more risque territory and I've seen Naughty Nuns, Bunny Girls and even a full bondage team.  (I'm guessing turning up to tournaments with that as your team is frowned upon :D )

In this case I think the studio just put a range of succubus fantasy football figures together as it doesn't correspond to any Blood Bowl roster I know of.  Interestingly, their other range of Valkyrie fantasy footballers doesn't have this problem as it corresponds very closely to the Blood Bowl Norse team.

Hmm.  Maybe it might be fun to put some rules together for this team.  Thoughts?  Any keen Blood Bowl players out there?

Thursday, September 03, 2015

Stepping aside from SJW nonsense... for now

I was going to put up a long post about blacklists and cliques, but it was coming out more like a puling whinefest than the motivational piece I intended, so into the recycling bin it went.

It was intended for just-starting-out writers in the light of some of the demoralised comments I'd seen in the aftermath of the ugly Hugo Awards debacle.  The basic gist was this:

Yes, cliques exist.  Yes they're annoying and frustrating, but as you get older you will learn to find ways around them.  Reroute around damage.  Create the works you want to create.

I was also going to do a long piece on SJWs, but I suspect my readers' patience is wearing thin on that particular subject.  I know mine is.  If it wasn't for the fact I'm acutely sensitive to censorship (and this includes the various forms of quasi-censorship people swear blind aren't actual censorship even though they result in the same outcome) I'd stay out of this clusterfuck altogether.

Thankfully, my fears of an SJW-ideological chokehold on the creative process are receding.  Say what you will about Vox Day, his strategy of adopting the same tactics manual and hitting back twice as hard has been brutally effective.  While the more thuggish members of the SJW crowd are kept busy breaking their fists on the rock face of Vox, #GamerGate, and other groups stubbornly resistant to their shaming tactics, they don't have the time to bother the rest of us.  Having the left and right ends of the horseshoe negate each other in ideological combat across social media is win-win as far as I'm concerned.

So I think I'll quietly step away from all that nonsense and get back to the succubus smut.  I have a review of Camel's latest Card Quest game I'm hoping to get out by the weekend, "Sandwiched by Scyllas" for the week after, and that Succubus Summoning 201 ebook isn't going to write itself.

The same message applies:

Reroute around damage.  Create the works you want to create.