So that's the basic idea of Thornwatch: weird bargains made under duress in the thick of a hostile wood. A "campaign" in Thornwatch is designed to be like a season of a show: you've got individual missions (b plots) all tied into an overarching story (a plot) that isn't entirely clear at first. They aren't mean to run long, they're mean to deliver discrete arcs. CSI: Eyrewood.

Okay, now we're getting into it. I could explain it now, but I think it would be more fun for you to learn in your first few adventures, or in a story. I don't really like it when people do that, either - that is to say "tease cocks or cock-equivalent manifolds" - but now I know why they do it. Some of them are simply bastards, some don't actually know, but occasionally it's about delivering intent and context in a tidy package. That's what I hope is happening here. Believe me, we have every intention of paying up.

If you play the Preview game like we do, that cut of today's Wolf/Bat thing in the upper right is pretty choice.

This is what we're thinking about all the time, the wayward (?) inheritors of the Lookouts' creed, so when we needed to get a few strips done ahead of time it was the first thing I thought of. It's three parts total, running until Monday.

We're overjoyed to have been invited in, but we wanted to remind people that the little arrow by "authors" can be clicked to reveal a more granular list. On this list, you can zero out our "cut" altogether and then scooch the funds over to Child's Play (or anybody else). That can happen automagically, based on percentages, or you can grip that little slider like you mean business and then GO CRAZY (with precision).

"Dating Tips For Geeks" is some intolerable new genre, malformed and asinine; there are no good examples of this ruse in existence. Well, there are good examples of how bad it is. I thank the black hole where a God would be EVERY DAY that I'm not in the market for this kind of bullshit. That in my desolation and loneliness there was no warped sexual vizier to whirl out of thin air and dispense the kind of wisdom which should be firmly contained within quotation marks.

I knew Gabriel when I was an X-Com enthusiast, certainly; I've known him since the Earth's crust was still warm to the touch. We hung out a lot then, but he didn't approve of my weekly spirit journeys and, if it is even possible, he approved of my tactics games even less.

Yesterday I had the chance to demo my Thornwatch game for some friends from Cryptozoic. In case you don’t know, these are the guys who make the World of Warcraft TCG, our Penny Arcade deck building games and are also responsible for the totally fucking amazing Lookouts comic book. Cryptozoic makes a lot of great games and I figured if I really wanted to know if Thornwatch had potential, I needed to show it to some professional game makers.

We were lucky enough to receive copies of Dishonored before release, but I am afraid we may not have been terribly good investments thereof; neither of us were particularly taken with it. For Gabriel, that's it. He's comfortable having opinions on things. Apparently every person on Earth loves the game except for the two of us, though, and that has made me incredibly curious.

Lots of single days left, but if you're looking to attend the whole show you should consider picking them up.

Working with Jerry is pretty great. I can say something like "how do people call the Thornwatch" and five minutes later he comes up with tying a wreath of thorns around a birch tree. He then cooks up a system of knots that tell the Thornwatch what the mission will be. Oh and a poem.

We were trying to figure out what "thing" we would be unable to process as society marched forward, what would possess some configuration which would render it unable to be absorbed by our aging brains, in the way that "rap" or "rock & roll" once found themselves in the twilight between exile and ubiquity.

I am a "good boy" when it comes to the vast majority of correct opinions. Some I believe because they are right, some I make peace with because they are inevitable, and some I honestly can't believe we're still arguing about, but that's what's it's like when you live in a world filled with evil people who will not, can not be wished away. They stay, defiantly, even when you've put in a firm request with natural law that they evanesce.

I honestly thought today’s comic would not appeal to people outside the target "people who are me" demographic. So I was pleasantly surprised to see my Twitter blow up with readers asking for larger versions of each panel.

If you like to read season by season, you can do that now. Now that we have a full-time artist, my guess is that the typical Season Hiatus won't last especially long. We'll get together next Wednesday and write up the arcs.

Namco Bandai is shopping around different looks for a new Pac-Man game, which is interesting, until you get to their fourth new look and you freak the fuck out. That shouldn't be real, but it is real. It's apparently for a "casual" game. Don't care. Gabriel flipped his shit and wanted to do nothing but render the iconic character in the manner of famous artists throughout history. His voice had a strange timbre; refusing him seemed... unwise.