Nobody Wants To Hear About Your Character

That’s right. Nobody wants to hear about your character. Don’t regale people with stories of his exploits. And for the love of Pelor, don’t blog about those exploits. When we first started Stupid Ranger, I used to hear this quite a bit. I’d try to make points and back them up based on things that happened in our campaign. Occasionally, I’d just tell a funny story. Usually the reader response to this was mostly positive. But more often than not, somebody would come along and complain that nobody wants to hear about my character.

I offer the following response to anyone who ever told me that.

Who is this fine fellow with a hot chick and a devil baby at his side, you might ask? I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that because that would be talking about my character.

Long-time readers of Stupid Ranger may remember a post way back in January of ’08 in which I detailed the exploits of my rock-n’-roll bard Bat Loaf and his attempt to conceive a child atop the legendary Tarrasque.  This post exploded a few minds and then lay dormant for over a year, when someone emailed me out of the blue and asked if they could draw my character. As it turned out, this person happened to be an artist by the name of Adam Black. I hadn’t seen his work before, but it was plain to me pretty much immediately that this dude was really good at his craft and he deeply understood what Bat Loaf was about. Adam runs a site called Monsters & Nekkid Ladies (NSFW, duh), the contents of which are pretty self-explanatory. Lots of demons and boobs and swords and monsters. And demon boobs. Adam also draws a really excellent webcomic called Locus (NSFW again) and he created the (now sadly defunct) KISS 4K webcomic. Yes, for that KISS. Basically, I’m not sure I could have asked for a better person to draw Bat Loaf had I done an exhaustive search of the planet to find one, and here he was offering to draw him.

A couple days ago, Adam got me the finished piece. As you may have guessed, I am about to vibrate into tiny little pieces due to the criminal levels of excellence applied to this picture of my bard.  In all seriousness, I have to thank Adam from the bottom of my heart for doing this for me. I’m just happy to have written something that made people laugh, and to have someone so skilled magically appear and bring one of my favorite creations to life in such detail was one of the most excellent things that’s ever happened to me. Please go to his site and show the man some love. It’s the metal thing to do.

Just think — this never would have happened if I hadn’t blogged about my character. (And, as you can see, the mission my character set out to accomplish atop the Tarrasque was a resounding success!)