a blog about #friends at the table

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Pakunoda, member number 9¹ of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: And we are introduced to them very quickly. We have Pakunoda, who is a sexy lady. She has a lovely piece of animation. She checks her wristwatch, at one point, and she’s wearing her watch like a bracelet with the face on the inside of her wrist like some people do, so she’s, like, looking at the inside of her wrist to check the time.

Jack: But it’s…well, it’s interesting. We learn later that sort of a lynchpin of the back of this episode is the Nen power of another Phantom Troupe member. Pakunoda? Pakunada?

Keith: Pakunoda.

Sylvia: Pakunoda, yeah.

Jack: Who can sort of verify whether something is true by reading the memories of people she touches. We haven’t had this power confirmed, but that seems to be the case.

Sylvia: Yeah. I think that’s like a really important thing to draw on is the, like…the way the different founding members sort of step up during this sequence.

Keith: That’s like, the…like, emotional core of these episodes is that…

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Kortopi, member number 12 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: He is accompanied by Kortopi, a one-eyed— or maybe— hmm. A small child in a green raincoat with long gray hair cover— with only one eye visible beneath. Then there is Uvo, a—

Keith: Fully covering their face.

Jack: Yes.

Keith: Like, can’t see their face.

Keith: Yeah, this is something that Hunter X Hunter is so good at, is like, I talked about this episode as setting up pins and like, Hunter X Hunter is constantly setting up pins and you just never know when they’re gonna get knocked down. Sometimes it’s two minutes, sometimes it’s ten episodes, sometimes it’s thirty episodes, like who knows? Like, later on we see, uh, it’s introduced that Kortopi has, [Jack: Oh yeah…] that his copies count as En and then like five minutes later that becomes like a crucial part of the plan. And that sort of maneuver is happening constantly in this show, where you learn something and then a little while down the line they pull it and twist it in…

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Nobunaga, member number 1 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: Also with them is Nobunaga, who is a rōnin with a classic sort of top knot and a robe and a katana

Keith: Yeah, “Dr. Warm-Hearted Miser”?

Jack: Yeah. [Sylvia laughs]

Keith: That’s his other theme song.

Austin: I’m telling you, they’re compatible.

Dre: I love that Guilty Gear character.

Keith: That song— both of those songs are the songs of a guy who would steal a trillion jenny from a casino.

Dre: Sure.

Austin: It would make Leorio more like Lupin III and less like Leorio.

Sylvia: He would be Danny Ocean.

Austin: He’d be Danny Ocean.

Keith: Who he looks like. He looks like Lupin III.

Dre: Yeah.

Austin: He’s already a Lupin III type.

Keith: Yeah.

Sylvia: I mean, Nobunaga would fit right in, then. He’d just be, um…

Austin: I’m telling you.

Keith: Right.

Austin: Yeah.

Sylvia: Oh, I can’t remember the name off the top of my head.

Austin: Jigen.

Sylvia: Jigen.

Austin: No, Jigen’s the other one. Jigen’s the other one.

Keith: The other one,…

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Bonolenov, member number 10 of The Phantom Troupe.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I realized recently that a lot more of the episode transcriptions have been completed than the last time I had looked. As always, I’m primarily bottlenecked by how quickly I can assemble the descriptions.

Jack: On the left-hand side of the image is a embalmed person.

Sylvi: [laughing]

Jack: Uh… she is sitting calmly, uh, she is, she is not the focus of this scene, which is so fun. Between the sort of gorilla fellow, uh, uh, in the first image, you know, it turns out not being a main character whatsoever, and this person kind of just framed sideways, you know, in the very edge of the frame. I really like this. Uh, this person has been wrapped, head to toe, in bandages, it looks like. Uh, alternatively, they could be chitinous. They could be, this could be plates, almost like a, like a. Uh, a woodlouse, or a beetle, or an armadillo, or pangolin — [chuckling] the plated animals.…

This weekend, I was overcome by the urge to make this extremely specific fanart.

I recently watched Austin and Jack from Friends at the Table play Hthrflwrs’s extremely good new video game Unfair Flips by streaming it on Twitch

Over the course of the roughly three hour stream, Austin and Jack — among other things¹ — invented a pair of delightfully frustrating fictional oligarchs named The Red Duke and The Blue Baron, who alternated between jabs at their subjects (the streamers) and talking to each other about the rousing match of coin flips the were playing vicariously through them.

Published on itch.io two weeks ago, Austin Walker’s latest TTRPG, Realis has been a lot of fun to read through and talk about with friends in various Discord servers.

The core thing differentiating this game compared to other entries in the (even Indie) TableTop Role-Playing Game space is how it eschews dice in favor of Sentences: a mechanic where Sentences of a greater than or equal Reality (just think higher modifier like +0, +1, +2, +3) always counteract Sentences of a lower Reality. Over time, your characters, NPCs, objects, and all sorts of other things will have these Sentences be refined, thereby strengthening them but also taking away part of when they’re relevant. For example:

+0 I always know where I'm going -> +1 I always know where I'm going, when I'm underwater

Because so much of this game is designed around the Sentences that a character has access to from their Class, it’s been a fun exercise to come up with Classes as a sort of way to imagine a template of a story without necessarily finding people to play with first. There are 20 Classes included in the Ashcan Edition available…

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Phinks, member number 5 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: [...] Next to them is a fellow in a racing [unintelligible] outfit.

Sylvi: [laughs]

Jack: Green racing driver’s outfit, uh, uh, white shoulders on his jacket, red stripes, green sort of track jacket, almost. Now, next to this person, this is interesting. This is a character I have seen before. I, I don’t know anything about —

Jack: We have Phinks! With a P-H. P-H-I-N-K-S.

Keith: Yep. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Who is a grumpy racing driver. He’s a man in a sort of racing driver.

Sylvia: Oh, okay. That’s an interesting— I didn’t get racing driver from him. I always got, uh, Chris Moltisanti.

Keith: But I get it from the jacket though. Sorry, you get who?

Dre: Yeah, I totally get it.

Sylvia: Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos?

Keith: Oh, it is.

Jack: Oh, yeah. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: The, like, tracksuit vibe?

Jack: Yeah, totally. It’s absolutely that tracksuit vibe. I also saw it as, like, a racing jacket or, like, racing colors.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, no, absolutely.…

A year ago, a new podcast came out, and with it brought me one of the silliest and most fun art projects I’ve ever been a part of. There’s plenty more art to come, but I wanted to do a bit of a review as I migrated and archived the old art from cohost onto here. Rather than filling up RSS feeds with over 50 drawings one at a time that many of you may have already seen, I’ve opted for this grid approach. Each one is clickable to go look at the original cohost post. Maybe I’ll update them to web-archive once cohost shuts down. Who knows?

Media Club Plus is a podcast by Friends at the Table and its premier season focused on Hunter X Hunter anime based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi. I’ve been listening to Friends at the Table for years, and I knew that the group behind Media Club Plus would be fun to listen to, even if I didn’t know anything about Hunter X Hunter (HxH). Part of the conceit of the podcast, after all, was that Jack De Quidt had also never watched the anime nor read the manga, so we would…