Monster Girl Card Game - Brainstorming II

More rambling notes and musings I'm jotting down here in the hope that they coalesce into something fun people would like to play.

While doing some research on the internet I remembered some articles Mark Rosewater wrote on game design a while back.  MaRo is the public face of the design and development teams for Magic: the Gathering and writes a regular column on game design.  He knows his stuff on this topic.

His Ten Things Every Game Needs articles are a good checklist to run every budding game idea against to see how it holds and identify possible weaknesses.

So let's try it here.

As a recap from the last post, my idea is for a game where the player takes on the role of a succubus-summoning warlock and uses their sexy minions to gain control of a kingdom behind the scenes.  Nothing about this is set in stone.  Rather than ye-olde-world-fantasy, the kingdom could just as easily be a corporation, or army invading hell-space, or even a college for warlocks.  The succubus minions could be intelligence agents.  You get the idea.  What I'm trying to do is think up a monster girl game that's slightly different from the usual path of smashing mons into each other (coz, I'm awkward like that! :) )

Let's run through MaRo's points and see if that helps to clarify things.

1) Goal
The player is a warlock capable of summoning demons and other monsters.  Their goal is to take over a kingdom (or other similar organisation) by gaining control of various key pieces.  The kingdom is represented by a deck of cards.

Having a central kingdom deck opens up possibilities for solo or collaborative play if the central deck is capable of defending itself.  The solo option in particular might be important.  I want to try and keep the sexy if possible, but there's a danger then that most players might find it too embarrassing to play with others.  Personally I'd prefer to aim at a niche audience than water everything down for a larger audience that probably wouldn't even notice it.

2) Rules
This is the mechanics.  From the rough concept we know each player is able to cast spells and summon monster girls to do their bidding.  These monster girls are then able to seduce and bring NPC characters under the player's controls.  The rule system should determine how and when the cards can be played and captured, and also enable players' to interact with each other.

3) Interaction
And the first warning flag.

One problem with the concept is it might not lead to interaction between players.  They could end up working their plans in isolation, with the winner randomly determined by which kingdom cards get turned over during the game.  To get around this the game will need plenty of cards that can disrupt an opponent's strategy (but not so many it becomes overwhelming) and the game should force conflicts over the various kingdom deck cards.

4) Catch-up feature
A lot of games suffer from a snowballing problems.  That's when an early advantage for one player increases their chance of further advantages later on to the point where the game is effectively decided in the first few turns and the rest is an annoying grind to a foregone result.

With the concept's theme, a player with more puppets has more influence and is closer to a goal of total domination.  But they're also more visible to authorities trying to weed out corruption.  Assuming the kingdom deck contains random negative effects (e.g. witchfinders and paladin heroes), having these disproportionately affect the leading player will give the other player(s) chances to catch up.

5) Inertia
The pull to get the game finished.

As MaRo says in his article, in Magic the power level of the cards ramps up as more mana is available to the player until something will go unanswered and end the game (dragons cost more to summon than goblins, but they typically end the game in short order if they're allowed to stay in play).  There's also an alternate loss condition where a player runs out of library, so even long games will end eventually.

I probably want a resource system - start with low-level succubi and spells, but open up access to much more powerful demons and magic in later turns.

The easiest termination condition is have the game last a set number of turns.

A more complex condition (and one I'd like to make work) is for it to be provided by the kings in the central deck.  For that condition to work there needs to be reasonably fast cycling through the central deck to make sure the relevant win conditions make it into play before everyone gets bored.

6) Surprise
Cards are good for this.  Players need access to 'trick' cards to surprise the opponent.  That means we'll need spells as well as succubi.  The central kingdom deck can also be a source of surprise factor if seeded with cards that have interesting impacts on the game whenever they're turned over.  Having a random deck of cards determine these events also adds to replayability as the game should play out differently depending on what order the kingdom cards are turned over in.

7) Strategy
Different factions in the kingdom deck.  Different factions of monster girls available to the player.  They should play differently and open up different routes to the end-goal.  For example - succubi might be good at seduction and temporary charms, other monster girls might favour taking pieces off the board entirely (e.g. carnivorous plant girls eating them), an angel faction might favour disruption by making it harder for kingdom NPCs to be seduced.

8) Fun
Playing a warlock with a harem of hawt monster girls.  Sound fun? ;)

The last two points are easier for this concept.  It's a top-down concept, in as much as I have the background and flavour first, and I'm trying to come up with game mechanics to get that across.

9) Flavour
Sexy monster girls.  I'm also trying to reinforce the sex being important by making the game about seduction and corruption rather than fighting.

One question of flavour is where to turn the dial in terms of atmosphere.  Cute monster girls or sensual-but-deadly femme fatales?  Crude sexual humour or gothic elegance?  Light and fluffy, or total grimdark?

10) Hook
Also easy.  A fun, sexy monster girl card game for an audience that likes things like my stories, Kenkou Cross's Monster Girl Encyclopedia and Monster Girl Quest.  Here's where I might need to rein in some of my own grimdark predilections so as not to scare everyone off! ;)

Still very vague and general.  I'll see if I can start throwing out more concrete mechanics in future brainstorming posts.

Thoughts and suggestions in the comments appreciated!

Monster Girl Card Game - Brainstorming I

Writing productivity is still shite.  I suspect it's a mild case of writer's block.  The ideas are there, but the mechanics of transcribing them down as words and sentences are a little jammed.  I suspect it's a little bit of mental sluggishness brought about from trying to make this my sole activity.

In the past I've found programming projects a good way to get the cogs moving again.  It might be a good time to start thinking about monster girl games again.  While going through old notepads I found some notes on a card game idea and thought it might be worthwhile to brainstorm things out here to see if the ideas could form a viable game.

The most obvious way to use succubi/monster girls is in an adult Pokemon-type game where the player summons various monster girls and has them fight (or fuck) monster girls of his opponent(s).

I want to avoid this.

The moment you slap a */* on a card to represent attack and defence values for the purposes of fighting other cards, it's very easy to get stuck on a path that terminates in generic Magic: the Gathering clone.  The design space is large (as witnessed by Magic still being a great game despite being nearly 20 years old) but the basic mechanics tend to end up being very similar.  That said, Magic/Yu-Gi-Oh-lite, with sexy monster girls doing smexy stuff to each other, would probably still be a fun game.

The other and main reason I want to avoid travelling down the obvious road is thematically it doesn't feel right.  Succubi to me seem more about seduction and subtle use of influence behind the scenes rather than bare-knuckle fighting in a pit.

Picture two warlocks (in Phil's world for example) summoning a pair of succubi to fight each other Pokemon-style.  Rather than fight, I think it more likely the two succubi would give each other a wink and then put on a lesbian sex show so hawt their gormless 'masters' would get so horny they'd have to join in... and then get their life/soul sucked out.  (I should write that story!)

I like the idea of the player taking the role of a warlock with access to a bevy of beautiful monster girls and succubi to (maybe) do their bidding.  That seems fun.

I also like the idea of just keeping it to monster girls and seductive succubi.  Having random orcs and other monsters drags it back to being about fighting, which I want to avoid.

So I was thinking of how to represent sexy succubi in a top-down way for a strategy game, and this is what I came up with:

Seduction and Corruption.

And this gives a goal and an idea for the central mechanic.  The players are warlocks.  They summon succubi and other tempting monster girls to attempt to gain control of a kingdom behind the scenes.  This is done through using their succubi to seduce and corrupt various NPC characters.

 Mechanically this can be represented with three decks.  Each player has their own deck and between them is a third deck representing the kingdom.  At any one time there will be a number of cards in play from the central deck.  These are the characters (and also maybe locations and items) that each player will attempt to subvert and corrupt with summoned succubi.

One way of determining a winner would be which player has brought the greatest influence value under their control at a designated end point.

Another thing I thought might work is to have the win condition be a variety of 'king' cards.  The victory condition would them be the first player that successfully had one of their succubus minions seduce and bring a 'king' under the player's control (the game could have a variety of 'kings' such as an actual king, or a pope, or top general of the military - each would have different strengths and weaknesses).

The idea I had then was of chains.  A player wouldn't be able to bring a king under their control right away, even with their most powerful succubus.  They'd need to engineer a situation to be able to get at them.  This could be achieved by chaining through various ranks.  Gaining control of a squire opens up opportunities to seduce knights.  Gaining a knight opens up an opportunity to compromise the elite royal guard.  Compromising the elite royal guard exposes the king.  Once the king is exposed the player can slip their most powerful succubus into the king's (or queen's) bedchamber and claim victory as their succubus corrupts the king into a puppet to carry out their every command (or the succubus's command if the warlock is not careful, succubi being deliciously duplicitous creatures and all that).

It's a rough idea anyway.  I'll add to it with a few more brainstorm-type posts as I think things through.  If it sounds interesting, feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

At this point there's no point getting too excited.  I don't need to remind anyone my track record (especially this year) has not been the best on this type of thing - but if it gets cogs turning again for writing it will be fulfilling its purpose.  And there might be a cool game there to build.

Literotica Halloween Contest Recap and Nov 2015 Update

The voting period for Literotica's Halloween Contest is over and they've announced the winners.  I didn't place, but to be honest I wasn't expecting to.  Both my entrants, "Snuff/Skin Flick" and "Chad's Challenge", are Bad End stories and generally it's the longer (sometimes very long!) stories with heart-warming endings that finish in the top 3.

One thing that did disappoint me was that I only managed to enter two stories.  The story I had originally planned to be a third entrant had an ending that was fine for a horror tale, but wouldn't work for erotica.  I had an alternate planned, but was not able to finish that in time.

Overall I liked the idea of using October as a short story challenge month.  November is normally the month for NaNoWriMo - where aspiring (and some grizzled!) writers attempt to blast out a 50K novel in a single month.  NaNoWriMo doesn't work for me as I write out all my first drafts longhand and it's not easy to keep track of the word count that way.  What I might do for future years is to instead use Literotica's Halloween Contest as a challenge to see how many short stories I can blast out in that three week period.  At least I've set a low bar there with only two entrants to beat!

Update time.

Currently I'm finishing off the two stories that didn't make the deadline.  One will likely end up being a mini-serial going out this month or next.  The other will be posted as soon as it's done.  There's a chance that one will kick up an online shitstorm, which might be fun. :D

"Sandwiched by Scyllas" is moving again.  I did the usual thing I do with stories that have derailed - start typing up the 2nd drafts early until I pick the thread back up again.

I want get these out of the way ASAP, so I can get on with the major task of finishing Succubus Summoning 201 and preparing it as an ebook to go out as soon as eXcessica has a spare slot.  I have some novel and novella ideas I'm keen to get on with, but I need to really get the second arc of that serial wrapped up satisfactorily first.  (This year would have likely been far more productive if I'd got those last two chapters finished this time last year!)

Chad's Challenge

My 2nd story for Literotica's Halloween story contest is up.  You can read it here:

Chad's Challenge

No idea where this one came from.  It bubbled up from the little black cells at the back of my brain and I wrote it down.  I wanted to write a simple old-style manyeyedhydra short story with monster girls and dangerous snu snu to get the machinery moving again.  It took a little longer to write than I expected, probably because it's also about 1.5K words longer than I originally anticipated.

It's a little freaky, especially on the sex bit...

I hope you all enjoy it anyway.

I've got today to finish the 3rd entrant.  That might be a little too tight.  The subject matter is topical, so even if I don't make the deadline I'll still post it to Literotica as soon as the story is finished.

Writing Updates: Oct 19th, 2015

Somebody highlighted this on my twitter feed.

My first thought was:  Well, durr.  You people have become the Stop Having Fun people, and it's in the nature of youth to rebel against the Stop Having Fun people.

(@radicalbytes is the man behind Feminist Frequency, responsible for the Tropes vs. Women series on Youtube.)

In the past it was the religious morality brigade.  Nowadays it's authoritarian SJWs.  South Park has already lampooned it with PC Bros, it's only a matter of time before other comics lock the trope in.

This is nothing new.  The late 80s/early 90s saw a similar push for political correctness and trumpeted the arrival of the 'New Man' - in touch with his caring, sharing side.  By the mid 90s the New Man was soundly rejected by women as an unsexy wet drip and Political Correctness was buried beneath universal mockery.  This was the decade that saw the emergence of Lads' mags and Lad Culture in Britain.

The same cycle is repeating itself now.  Unfortunately, the viciousness of the more extreme fringe of activism is greater and more visible this time around because of social media.  And I think that means the resulting pushback will also be vicious.  My own personal opinion is that the average person is considerably less [foo]ist and [foo]phobic nowadays, but there's only so many times you can get hit in the head by a rock before you give in to the temptation to start throwing them back.  It's become a cottage industry (or, in some cases, a financially lucrative business) to throw a rock at a group, then scream harassment and seek sympathy when the riled-up group throws rocks back.

Where does that leave us?  Probably with a bunch of virulent anti-women misogynists when those 10 to 14-year-old boys, fed up of being constantly told they're the root of all evil, grow up.

And on that cheery note, it's time to get back to writing.

This week I'll be trying to finish off the two stories I have planned for the Literotica Halloween Contest.  It ended up not quite being the story bonanza I was hoping for.  Progress was a little too much on the stop/start side.  I suspect I might be going too long on my short stories (6-7K instead of 4-5K words) and not getting them finished fast enough.  I've noticed my productivity and enthusiasm for a story starts to wane once it drags past a certain number of days.  Getting an idea down in 2-3 days, while it's still fresh, is what I should be aiming for.

The second story features plenty of weirdness and dangerous snu snu.  That's typed up and should be posted in the next few days after I've finished editing it.

The third story references the #GamerGate controversy, so the response to that should be... interesting.  It also features an appearance of one of my regular characters.  Sort of.  I'm deep in the 1st draft for that one.  The closing date for the competition is the 22nd.  That might be tight, but I'll still post it even if I fail to make the deadline.

Originally I had another third story planned.  The first draft is nearly done on that one.  Horror-head and Erotica-head had a fight over the ending and Erotica-head rightly pointed out the original ending, as planned, would likely leave readers feeling like they'd been cheated out of some of the sexy stuff.  The story does have plenty of nice cliff-hanger moments, so I'll be running that here on the blog throughout November as a mini-serial.

Then it's back to getting the long-delayed "Sandwiched by Scyllas" ready for publication.  I'm hoping a break from banging my head against the wall trying to write the second half of that will get it flowing again.  Lots of tentacle goodness to come there. ;)

Breaking the Sandwiched by series out of the monthly cycle that wasn't doing me any good means I won't be immediately pressured to get the 5th done (currently pencilled in as the slightly voretastic "Sandwiched by Stomachs").  That means it will be time to do what people have been asking me for all year and bring Succubus Summoning 201 to a satisfying end.

Snuff/Skin Flick

The first (and hopefully not only) story for Literotica's Halloween story contest is up.  You can read it here:

"Snuff/Skin Flick"

This is a little more horror than my usual stories.  At one point after writing it I did briefly consider sending it out to more mainstream horror fiction magazines.  Then, after I'd stopped laughing, I decided that was a stupid idea.

All the horror movie references are real horror films.  Ruggero Deodato, the director of Cannibal Holocaust, apparently was arrested on suspicion of murdering his cast for real.  That must have brought a warm glow of job-done-well to the heart of whoever was responsible for the special effects.

I don't expect "Snuff/Skin Flick" to score very highly.  The main PoV character is too far removed from the action to have the same level of sexual intensity as my other stories and my Nasty End stories never score as highly as the Nice End stories.  Still, I hope people appreciate it as a more mainstream-type horror tale.  There are more typical succubus stories on the way (don't worry, they still have fucked up elements ;)).

As always, if you have any questions about the story or there were things that bugged you about it and you want to let me know, feel free to scrawl something in the comments below.

Oh, I might as well tackle something I saw on Literotica's boards.  Snuff is on the list of things that Literotica doesn't allow in stories.  So how does a story with Snuff in the title get through?  (and correspondingly, how the hell do you get anything posted there at all, Hydra, considering the typical death count in your stories?)

I can't speak for the official policies of the site, but in general it seems to be don't submit anything where the PoV character gets sexually aroused by killing another character in a way that could be copied out in the real world by anyone reading that story.  PoV and realism are the important factors.  From a horror literature point of view this does rule out certain types of story, but I don't blame the site owners for wanting to be cautious here.  No-one wants to feel tangentially responsible for a nutjob enacting a murderous sexual fantasy they picked up from reading a story online.  Despite this, there is still plenty of leeway for a writer to depict brutality, as this story will attest. :)

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).

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... :)

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

The End of All Hugos to Come: Of Clubhouses and the Young Devouring the Old

Well, this year's Hugo Awards certainly didn't disappoint in terms of drama...

Here's the background for those unaware.  Concerned about a political bias in the awards and dissatisfied with the quality of recent nominees, a group of right-wing authors started a campaign, #SadPuppies, to get work they and their fans liked on the ballot (there was also a related, more radical campaign – #RabidPuppies).  Their campaign was a little too successful and their nominees flooded the ballots, locking up all five slots in some categories.  This riled up the rest of Fandom, resulting in a lot of ugliness and bad feeling, and culminated in an award ceremony on Saturday that saw five categories No Awarded as a protest against the slate-voting tactics of the Puppies/because none of the nominees were of sufficient quality/because of the politics of the nominees (*insert own truth).

This is just the barebones.  There's plenty more elsewhere on the internet if you want to read up more.  As with all political controversies, most of what's written is heavily slanted to one side or the other, so I'd recommend reading from sources on both sides of the fracture to get the full picture.  I'd also recommend avoiding reading anything from mainstream media sources such as The Guardian.  Over the past couple of years mainstream media has either been utterly inept or wilfully duplicitous in their reporting on flare-ups in online nerd/geek spaces and this is sadly more of the same.  The argument that this is a conspiracy by old racist, misogynist white dudes to keep minorities and women out of Sci-Fi doesn't really hold up under closer inspection (the number of women on their ballots and the fact that one of the "racist" Sad Puppies organisers, Brad Torgersen, has been happily married to a black woman for over two decades are fairly big giveaways).

For me personally I don't have a dog in this fight.  I write succubus porn for a tiny niche audience and have the networking skills of an octoplegic arachnid.  The probability of my work being noticed and put forward for an award like the Hugo is somewhere about the same as the Earth spontaneously imploding.

It doesn't affect me much as a reader either.  My reading preferences lean more towards horror than either science fiction or fantasy, and awards have been functionally useless in suggesting books I'd want to read for some time now.

While the stated aims of the Sad Puppies are laudable, replacing one clique with another—and unfortunately that's how it looks to an outside eye once you unpick the spiderwebs of who's connected to who—doesn't feel like significant improvement to either writer-me or reader-me.  All this latest dust-up has achieved is to reinforce my impression that the whole of SFF (capital-F) Fandom is nuts, probably hazardous-to-career/productivity and best viewed from afar with a strong telescope.

What I find interesting is how the whole Hugo Awards controversy is playing out as an extension of the wider Libertarian vs. Authoritarian culture war currently waging in online nerd communities.  #GamerGate has been raging for a year now, an unprecedented amount of time in the age of social media.  #GamerGate should have been a trivial bit of kerfuffle about a minor figure in the indie dev scene that blew over in a week, but then virtually all of the online gaming press decided to declare war on their own audience and, twelve months later, a good chunk of that audience is still raging.  At this point I don't think #GamerGate is ever going away.  It's gone beyond a protest movement/hate group (*insert own truth) and coalesced into a community... a very angry community furious about how they've been demonised by the media.

How does this relate to the Hugos?  One of the accusations levelled at the Puppies is that they dragged those evil GamerGaters into the nomination process.  As with most of the racist/misogynist/homophobic claims, it doesn't hold up under closer inspection.  One of the regular tweeters for #GamerGate, @Daddy_Warpig, is a fan of some of the Puppy writers and #RabidPuppies ringleader Vox Day identifies as a #GamerGate supporter, but that's about it.  Or at least, was about it.  Plenty of #GamerGaters kept a close eye on the awards and they did not like what they saw.

Still, who gives a fuck about #GamerGate?  They're just the same old bunch of whiny white dudes crying because someone let some women and minorities into their clubhouse to play with their toys... right?  And there's only like a handful of them anyway... right?

That seems to be the usual narrative about #GamerGate and every other online controversy where geeks and nerds get angry on the internet.  They're old white male dinosaurs—reactionary relics lashing out a world moving away from them.  That world is moving to a bright, shiny future filled with inclusivity and diversity, and nerd culture—be it games, comics, films, books—would be there already if these inconvenient old straight white male neckbeards would just shift their inconvenient fat carcasses out of the way and jump in the nearest canal.  That seems to be the message from a cultural media elite with their blogs and opinion columns—"We are the future, you are the past.  Your extinction is at hand, now kindly accept it and fuck off."

One thing that struck me about the aftermath of the Hugo Awards on social media was that the people most mad about the No Awarding didn't strike me as these old dinosaurs raging at their usurpation.  They sounded young.

Young.  Disenfranchised.  Angry.

And this is #GamerGate in a nutshell.  It's not about excluding women, it's not even about ethics in games journalism.  It's anger.  And most of this anger is directed at an elite media class that doesn't understand them and has repeatedly lied about and demonised them.  If they're white and male, they're angry at being lectured to about privilege by writers with far greater reach and social capital.  If they're female or a minority, they're angry at being dismissed as sock puppets, or of having "internalized misogyny".  They're angry at being called misogynists, racists and homophobes for questioning logic in media narratives that don't add up to them.  They're angry at being smeared as terrorists and rapists for having the temerity of speaking back.

One of the things I found most telling was a twitter exchange between one of these angry young nerds and a multi-award-winning author.  The author described it as Fandom successfully keeping out interlopers trying to gate-crash the clubhouse.  And then it clicked for me.  The roles are all wrong.  The angry young nerd isn't angry because they think they're being kicked out of the clubhouse to let in a more diverse female/PoC/LGBT crowd.  They've never even been inside the clubhouse.

I don't think the people that write the blogs and newspaper articles understand this.  They've made careers and names out of "punching up" and "speaking truth to power".  I don't think they recognise that to the young people coming up, they've become the establishment putting bars on the doors and windows of the clubhouse.

Now we come back to #SadPuppies and the Hugo Awards.  My personal opinion is that while I'm sympathetic to the #SadPuppies cause, ending up with a situation where the rest of the voters were left with a choice of voting for one of the Puppy picks or none at all was a mistake (and not entirely the #SadPuppies fault—it was the additions of Vox Day's overlapping #RabidPuppies slate that ended up locking out some of the categories).  People being the contrary buggers they are, voters going "fuck you" and plumping for none at all was always a likely outcome in that scenario.

The thing is, all those angry young nerds currently raging on the internet aren't going to see that.  These people have zero trust in the media after fighting a bruising campaign against it over the past year.  They've even been blamed for contributing to this controversy and casually smeared, again.

Then they see the Hugo Awards play out.  They see a bunch of people cheering the announcement of No Award and then gloating afterwards about denying people based on their politics rather than the quality of their writing.  They hear about a distinguished female editor with a long history in the field walking out because she'd had enough of the mockery.  They read the account of another female writer having what should be a dream occasion turned to utter shit.  They hear about the multi-millionaire author throwing an after-show party for his buddies in a big mansion and giving out awards to the people the in-group thought "should" have won.  Is it any wonder they came to the conclusion the whole thing is as rotten as hell?   The raging you're seeing on social media is their "speaking truth to power".

This has been reported as a victory for progressive attitudes over a reactionary backlash of old white dudes stuck in the past, further evidence that the old guard are being elbowed aside and the future of SFF is a bright one with social justice at its heart.  I think there's a problem here.  It relies on the assumption that the current backlash is coming from old dinosaurs clinging grimly on to power.  They're thinning out.  Less and less people are sharing their attitudes.  Soon they'll be gone and the cultural shift will be complete.

Except there's a good chance that all the folks raging in twitter and reddit posts are younger than the more connected folk writing all the nice blogposts about SFF's bright and rainbow-coloured future.  Which would mean what we're seeing now is not a reactionary backlash from a generation on the way out, but a backlash against perceived authoritarianism from a generation on the way in.  They're really angry at the current media class.  Their numbers are growing and they're getting angrier.  They will also bring a cultural shift, but it might not be the one you're expecting and it might not be pleasant.

That's the thing about being the future, you always end up being someone else's past.

The young replace the old.

Currently the young are very angry.  Then someone like Vox Day comes along.  Vox is an asshole.  He doesn't pretend to be anything else.  Most of these angry young nerds are not assholes.  They don't even like Vox.  A cursory glance at #GamerGate HQ, the KotakuInAction subreddit, shows this.  Every time his name comes up it's usually followed by, "Ugh, that guy," or words to the same effect.  But the thing is, if you're caught between two sides and one side is throwing rocks at your head, it's human nature to gravitate to the side not currently throwing rocks at your head.

I find it ironic that in the same year Mixon received a Hugo for her exposé of Requires Hate, Fandom seems wilfully unaware that people are still using the same hacks to spread toxicity from behind a shield of supposed social justice.  This is great for Vox Day.  Whenever one of Team "Social Justice" posts another of their venomous screeds about young white men being the most useless and deficient individuals in society, the Dark Lord of Evil rubs his hands and welcomes more Vile Faceless Minions to the fold.

It's why Vox's "SJWs Always Lie" sticks.  They keep proving him right ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.  This resonates with the young angry nerds—they've seen mainstream media lie about them constantly for the past year.  They look at #SadPuppies and recognise the same smears and hit pieces.

It's no surprise right-wing outlets such as Breitbart.com are taking an interest in these young angry nerds.  For the first time in half a century the Right sees an opportunity to not be the stop-having-fun side of politics amongst the young.  Because this is the young—the next generation coming through.  They're going to be the people writing about SFF and Fandom in the future.  Do you really want to leave them to be shaped by people like Vox Day?

Sandwiched by Succubi... Out now!

It's out:

You can get it on Amazon here.

Smashwords here.

And Kobo here.

Smashwords will also distribute it to other ebook retailers.

As with "Sandwiched by Slimes", it's a long short at just shy of 10K words.  There's plenty of hot, sexy 2-succubus-on-1-guy action, so you should get your bang (oo er, missus) for your (single) buck.

Reviews would be great, but I also appreciate people's desire for anonymity when perusing this sort of subject manner.  Feel free to drop any musings/questions in the comment section below.

As always, I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

This year has not been the most organised in terms of my writing.  With a bit of luck I'm past the worse of it and we'll see "Sandwiched by Scyllas" this time next month.  (And maybe even some long-awaited chapters for Succubus Summoning 201).

More teasers for Sandwiched by Succubi

Here's a little more on the next instalment of Sandwiched by, "Sandwiched by Succubi".

The blurb:


Sandwiched by is a sexy series of monster girl erotic horror shorts from the master of dark erotica, M.E. Hydra.  The third in the series, “Sandwiched by Succubi”, sees a man given a night of mind-blowing sex by a pair of succubi.

Julian Cress-Vejce is a man used to getting what he wants.  What he wants is a pair of succubi for a night of hot sex.  At an exclusive brothel specialising in otherworldly beauties the madam cautions against this.  Sex with a succubus is an intense experience and one is more than enough for most men.  But Julian Cress-Vejce isn’t most men, and what he wants he gets...

Sandwiched by.  One dude, two sexy babes.  A perfect fantasy... or maybe not...


The cover:

And a little excerpt:

The succubi closed the door behind him.  Eyes smouldering with desire and lips puffed up in seductive pouts, they surrounded him and helped him remove his expensive Armani suit.  They needed no help to remove their own clothing, what little of it there was.  The only things they had on were matching sets of skimpy black leather bra and panties.  A few deft movements and they weren’t even wearing those.

Julian admired the naked, buxom bodies of the succubi.  They admired his naked, muscular form.  He itched to give their naked, buxom bodies a closer examination.  Unfortunately, as much as he wished he was here solely to satisfy his carnal desires, this was not the case.

“Is that the Mark of Glykon?”

The skin of both succubi was marked.  Was it a tattoo or brand?  Either way they both bore a strange circular design on their body that looked like a pentagram made out of crucifixes.  On the succubus with a ponytail the mark was positioned on her belly, just below her navel.  On the other it was located on her left breast, right above her heart.  Assuming she had a heart.

They nodded.

Strange glyphs were positioned at each corner of the pentagrams and equally strange writing ran along each line.  They looked like the kind of tattoo you might find on your typical deadbeat, Satan-worshipping metal head.  Ironically, those marks were the one thing preventing the ‘demons’ from attacking him.

“So, without that you’d both be trying to rip out my heart and entrails right about now,” Julian said.

“Oh no,” the succubus with untied hair said.  “We’d never do anything so crass.”

“It would be a waste,” the succubus with the ponytail said.

The succubi closed in enough for the soft flesh of their sizable boobs to press and rub against him.  Their hands roamed over his exposed flesh, leaving a pleasant static charge wherever they caressed him.  Julian was very hard in a matter of moments.

“We deal only in pleasure,” the first succubus said.

“We’d get you so horny,” the second added.

“Wrap your hard cock in our sinfully soft cunts.”

“And gently suck.”

“And suck.”

“And you’d spend and spend in our luscious cunts.”

“Spend and spend and spend.”

“Until you were all empty.”

“Dried up and empty.”  One whispered in his ear.  Her lips were close enough to brush against him.

Julian was a little freaked out by how much that turned him on.  While screwing hot, gorgeous women was one of life’s finest pleasures, it wasn’t fine enough for him to think his own life was a price worth paying to experience the ultimate of sensual pleasures.  Or rather, shouldn’t be.  This little exchange had given him a glimpse into how dangerously enticing succubi could be.

The two succubi chuckled at his disquiet.  The sound was dark and rich like a delectable dessert you knew was bad for you and yet couldn’t resist taking a second helping.

“Do you fear us?” the succubus with a ponytail asked.

I'm putting the final touches on the ebook.  Look out for it on Amazon, smashwords and other places in the next couple of days.

UPDATE: I've just uploaded the files.  "Sandwiched by Succubi" will be out on the 13th August!

Coming Soon... Sandwiched by Succubi

It's been a little quiet here of late, but here's some good news.

Coming soon:

("Sandwiched by Scyllas" is now the next one after this)

SJWs Must Die!

Now that's a title that's going to get me into trouble if I ever have the misfortune of it going viral... :)

While there'll be some twonk somewhere that'll try and grab this as evidence of me giving out 'death threats' or some other stupidity, I'm actually writing about Eli Roth's forthcoming horror film The Green Inferno.  There's a news piece floating around about how Eli Roth's 'Green Inferno' devours the Internet's 'social justice warriors' and that caught my eye because of thoughts I've had on expanding the usual list of acceptable-horror-movie-victim tropes.

There have always been character archetypes in horror (especially slasher flicks) that exist for the audience to hate and cheer on their inevitable gruesome demise.  In any teen setting (which is most slasher flicks) you're likely going to get: the thuggish, bullying jock (plus cronies); the beautiful-but-vicious prom queen; the arrogant, amoral rich kid.  Over the next few years I think we'll see a new archetype added to that list: the sanctimonious SJW.

Now I imagine at this point some readers are going, "B-b-but what's wrong with social justice warriors?  They're good people.  They fight the good fight for the minorities and those without privilege."

Hmm, yeah.  It's complicated.  Social Justice Warrior (SJW) started out as a derogatory term, probably as an offshoot of Keyboard Warrior.  Then the meanings got murkier as far-right wingnuts started using it as a label for people they disagreed with and more moderately liberal folk started to embrace the slur thrown in their direction as a positive ("I am a proud social justice warrior/bard/etc").  Now SJW seems to be moving back to its original meaning as more and more normal folks experience bruising encounters on social media with the extremist element the term was originally coined for.

When I mention SJWs assume I'm talking about that extreme element - the people that clothe themselves in the language of social justice and use it as cover to engage in online thuggery (a good example of which can be found here).  I've been fairly open about my own distaste for this group of people and with good reason.  I'm a creator and while I'm fine with negative criticism, seeing concerted, organised attempts to shut writers/game developers/film makers down because someone didn't like the themes they were using or their personal politics make me very nervous.  While they're coming from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, SJWs are the Mary Whitehouses, Tipper Gores and Jack Thompsons of this generation with a slightly different paint job.

Which brings me back to character archetypes.  SJWs are the modern Stop-Having-Fun-Authority (as in you can't do x because it's cultural appropriation/triggering/offensive to people with skin as thick as tissue paper/insert buzzword of the day).  The Stop-Having-Fun-Authority is a typical antagonist in comedy (and sometimes an annoying obstacle in horror).  Typically they're a religious and highly conservative authority figure over-stepping themselves in order to play morality police.  With the declining influence of that group it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing the overbearing morality police characters coming from the other side of the political spectrum. An enterprising comedy writer could definitely have a lot of fun lampooning that aspect of modern US college campuses.

It's something I've been musing about for my own stories.  Creating a truly awful character in the knowledge you're going to inflict a hideous fate on them is one of the pleasures of writing horror.  In the past I've used the usual tropes - the corrupt politician, violent thugs, the office sex pest, a group of obnoxious teens, a critic abusing their role for sexual favours - and I think there's potential to add various flavours of SJW to that list.  If only to make a change from the usual 'guy being an asshole to women and getting his comeuppance at vagina of succubus' story. :)

I did have a playful dab at it here, but to be fair the protagonist is rather mild and the only thing they're guilty of is naivete and foolishness.  (Not that I'm exactly known for showing mercy to the naive and foolish).

Given that most people's patience appears to be running thin on SJW nonsense, I'd love to nail that archetype correctly in a cosmic justice type story.  I think it will require a little more work to create a truly satisfying SJW asshole protagonist.  There are a few pitfalls to avoid.  In this case I think an ostensibly apolitical approach is correct.  "Haha, take that pinko scum for being a stupid libtard" will play well for a small audience and very badly for the rest.  Go for the character's actions making them an asshole rather than what they believe (or pretend to believe).

I'm curious to see what Roth does with The Green Inferno.  His previous movies (Hostel in particular) have been interesting in how he subverts the usual horror tropes in who gets killed and when.  The innocent virgin has about the same chance of surviving a Roth horror as the slutty-girl-who-sleeps-around character in a Friday the 13th film (basically, none).

It's worth dissecting Deodato's classic horror, Cannibal Holocaust, at this point as this is the main influence to The Green Inferno.  The main characters in that film are so repulsive and what they do is so repugnant most viewers will be cheering on the cannibals way before the end of the movie.  A problem for a lot of horror films (as opposed to horror short stories) is forcing your audience to spend an hour-or-so in the company of utter assholes while they wait for them to meet their horrible ends can get a little wearing.  Cannibal Holocaust gets around this by running two story lines.  The moral centre, of sorts, to the tale is provided in the character charged with finding out what happened to the original film crew and returning with their footage.

From what I've seen and read so far, it sounds like the soon-to-be cannibal fodder in The Green Inferno fall more into the category of naive and stupid slacktivists than the vicious online thugs and bullies normally associated with the SJW label.  It will probably still be a lot of fun watching them all get eaten, though.

A Succubus for Saint Patrick's Day available in Print form

A few months late, but it's here.

This is the physical copy version of my latest short story collection.  The ebook version did come out around Saint Patrick's Day a few months ago, but the print version ended up lagging behind for one reason or another.  This has now been fixed, so if you prefer to read my stories in physical book form rather than on an ereader, the latest collection is now available.

Here's the blurb:

Who is the lucky one - the man given sensual pleasure beyond his dreams, or the succubus that ensnares and drains him? 

Dangerous and delectable sirens abound in M. E. Hydra's sixth collection of horror erotica.  Within these pages you'll find thirteen tales that will tempt, tease, titillate and terrify.  Read and enjoy as dark temptresses weave their seductive webs and draw in their (un)fortunate prey. 

In "A Succubus for Saint Patrick's Day" a down-on-his-luck gambler thinks his fortune has changed when a magical succubus comes to his aid.  A strange agency provides an unusual service in "The High-School Sweetheart Removal Agency".  A researcher has a dangerous and highly sensual encounter with an alien creature in "A Real-Life Goo Girl".  In "Number 66" an expat searches for an unusual girl in the fleshpots of Bangkok.  An accomplished thief falls prey to a shadowy guardian in "Rogue vs. Lamia".  A rich man gets the bigger dick he's always wanted in "Crabs", only to discover the treatment has some alarming side effects.  And finally, a young man gets a surprise when he tries to rape the wrong victim in "Joe Boyega Picks a Bad Night to Become a Rapist". 

They'll give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams, and terrors beyond your darkest nightmares...

The collection consists of 13 stories of sexy succubus/monster girl horror erotica.  Six of these can only be found in this collection while a seventh only appeared previously in a horror erotica anthology from eXcessica.

The print versions aren't big sellers for me, mainly because Print-on-Demand makes books considerably more expensive than typical mass-market paperbacks, but I always like to make a print option available if I can because I know some people prefer to own physical books over ebooks.  It's also a nice ego-trip for a writer to see their own books sitting on a bookshelf. :D

Anyway, sorry for making you wait so long for this, print lovers.  I'll try to make sure the print and ereader version releases are synchronised a little better for future books.

Hentai Game Review: Sexy Girls Hunt

Okay, we have a slightly different type of monster girl hentai game to look at on the blog today.

Sexy Girls Hunt is a battlefuck game and the plot does feature a brave hero using his "weapon" to defend a kingdom from hordes of nympho succubi, but it's not an RPG-maker clone.  While it has typical JRPG elements – levelling up, top-down exploration, turn-based battles – the art style is different and everything is mouse-driven.  You move the character around by clicking on the screen with the mouse.

Sort of, but not quite a RPG-maker game

With the games with their own custom game engines there are sometimes problems with hooking text for machine translation.  I was able to mostly follow what was going on with AGTH, although some text is in image form (the manual, annoyingly), which rendered it impossible to hook.

A refreshingly non-shota main character this time

Let's start with the good.  This is a very pretty game.  It has some of the nicest artwork I've seen on a monster girl hentai game.  Not only that, but there is a ton of animation.  NPCs noticeably... ahem... jiggle when you speak to them and the battlefuck sex scenes are fully animated.  Picture a ROBF or Erotical Night, but with an art quality approaching the Violated Hero series.  These are some luscious scenes of succubus fucking.

Oh and this is animated as well

Now for the not so good.  There's not much to the gameplay during the battlefucking.  Combat is turn-based and controlled by running the mouse over coloured circles on the screen.  I didn't really spot any strategy here to be honest.  Most of the time I set the fights to auto and tried to make sure my main character was at least two levels higher than the random encounters (personally I found those lush lush sex animations more enjoyable on auto anyway).  For bosses you'll need to be a much higher level, but if you're stuck there's a consumable that can be bought (it's the very bottom one) that gives an instant win when used.

The map has five locations of increasing difficulty.  Everything is fully accessible from the beginning aside from the final location, which requires previous bosses to be defeated in order to advance through various gates.

The world map

Overall there are twelve monster types to fight fuck.  They're mostly your classic succubi, but there are a few other monster girl types thrown in as well such as slime girls, cat girls, dryads and elves.  Each has minor variations in hair colour and underwear, but their moves don't change.  There are two different sex animations depending on who is "attacking".

Additional hentai content is provided in the form of side quests and mini-games.  There are ten female side quest givers.  Satisfy their conditions and you'll be rewarded with a short sex scene with a little mouse interactivity.  The mini-games vary from standard tile puzzles, to an arcade "bullet-hell" sequence and a comically lewd version of whack-a-mole where you slap female asses.  Nothing too taxing, but drawn in the same lush and appropriately pervy art style.

Yes please.  The result doesn't matter

Overall I quite liked Sexy Girls Hunt.  The game is a bit short and not very challenging, but there is plenty of gorgeous H material to enjoy.  It's a simple sex game with delicious succubi.  Nowt wrong with that at all.