UNWINNABLEWEEKLY

ISSUE TWENTY-FIVE

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Editor in ChiefStu Horvath

Managing EditorOwen R. Smith

Senior EditorSteve Haske

DesignStu Horvath

Contributors

Matt Marrone

Brian Crimmins

Stu Horvath

Gus Mastrapa

UNWINNABLEWEEKLY

ISSUE TWENTY-FIVE

From the Desk of the EIC

New Peaksby Matt Marrone

The First Stepby Brian Crimmins

Evil Withinby Stu Horvath

Dungeon Crawler, Part Twelveby Gus Mastrapa

Biographies and Illustrations

CONTENTS

From the Desk of the Editor in Chief

I figured it would go something like this.“So who is Cassandra?”That’s the question I was waiting for my girlfriend to ask, the question that

was going to lead to one awkward conversation I didn’t want to have. Knowing me, I’d try to deflect.

“A Trojan with the gift of prophecy and the curse that no one would believe her,” I’d offer, innocently.

“Not that Cassandra. The one you’ve been talking about on Twitter.”Oh. That Cassandra.“Oh. That Cassandra,” I’d say, completely stumped as to what to say next.That Cassandra is a character in Dragon Age: Inquisition (and also Dragon Age

II, but I didn’t play that one). In the opening moments of the game, it is clear she hates my guts. Even after 20 hours with her fighting every battle at my side, I am pretty sure she doesn’t like me. If there’s been a thaw, it is an imperceptible one. She’s a true believer, I’m an atheist. She thinks magic users are the most dangerous people in the world, I go around giving them their freedom willy-nilly. She can also kill stuff better than me and has an amazing, if indeterminate, accent. In short, I am crazy about her.

In the perfectly reasonable way a grown person can be crazy about a fictional characters in a videogame, that is. I mean, the romance subplots are half the fun of BioWare games these days. They’re practically dating sims with a lot of fantasy warfare clutter in the background.

I don’t honestly know what’s worse. Having your games-adjacent significant other think you’re cheating on them, or trying to explain to the appeal of trying to date a videogame character.

No, wait. I do know which is worse. That’s an easy one, actually. That’s why I told my girlfriend the other night about Cassandra over dinner. She thinks its hilarious. And she thinks Sera is cute. And I think she’s secretly disappointed I’m not chasing Dorian’s mustache.

* * *

In this week’s cover story, Brian Crimmins digs deep into the art of Never Alone. Matt Marrone rejoices at the return of Twin Peaks in 2016. I ponder my relationship with my videogame avatars and their appearance. And, finally, Daisy squares off with the giant spider in the latest installment of Gus Mastrapa’s Dungeon Crawler.

Last weekend was Thanksgiving in the States – I hope you had a great one. This is our last regular issue of the year. Next week is our silly Holiday Special Issue, which we’re giving away for free, because giving is what the holidays are about, right?

We’re currently in the midst of our subscription drive. Please spread the word! We’re only looking to add 150 subscribers to the pool, and new sign-ups get our entire back catalog for free. We also do gift subscriptions. Hit me up at stuhorvath@unwinnable to learn more, or for any reason at all, actually!

Stu Horvath, Kearny, New JerseyNovember 27, 2014

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Rookie of the Year:

New PeaksBy Matt Marrone

I have a computer password I use nearly every day. It includes the number “2014.”

Problem is, I can no longer type the number “2014”.Sure, it’s the current year. A fine year. A year in

which I am getting married. A year in which I went to Hawaii and to the Newport Folk Festival and will soon be going to Jamaica, too. It’s been a bit of a blur at times, and it’s had its share of low points, for sure, but overall it’s been quite good.

Still, I can’t type “2014” anymore.When I try to type it, what comes out instead is

“2016”.Yes, that’s how excited I am about the new season

of Twin Peaks.I won’t recount my Twin Peaks fan credentials or

my wild adventures covering Twin Peaks Fest for Unwinnable. (Free free to also check out my interview with Brad Dukes, author of a fantastic new oral history of the show, back in Unwinnable Weekly Issue Eleven)

Suffice it to say, I fucking love the show, and, as I write this, I am still feeling bloated from the homemade cherry pie my fiancée made to celebrate the start of our re-watching the series on the new Blu-ray box set. (A relative newbie, she’s been a pretty good sport, even putting up with my running commentary track and agreeing to start over with the box set even though we were already a couple episodes into Season 2 on Netflix.)

So why am I so excited? Do I not know there’s a history of rebooted franchises that tragically missed the mark? That left many fans not only disappointed but crushed?

I admit to having no illusions in this regard, but I am nearly ready. I have until 2016 to steel myself against the inevitable poor casting decisions, the backlash from Twitter trolls, the weight of expectations that can never be met.

There’s enough negativity on the web. Though I have very few details to go on, I choose to stay cautiously optimistic. In that vein, here are three reasons I think the new season of Twin Peaks is going to be awesome:

1. It’s the real deal.Each of the nine announced Showtime episodes will be written by series

co-creators Mark Frost and David Lynch – and all of them will be directed by Lynch. If you’re a fan of the series, you know that any episode in which the opening credits read “Directed by David Lynch” is fucking fantastic. The show only lost its groove when he got pulled away by other projects, and after ABC bowed to naive audience pressure and forced him to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer midway through Season 2.

But whether you loved or hated where the show went after that, when Lynch came back to wrap up the season, he produced one of the finest – and freakiest – hours in television history. He left fans wanting more. That’s a good thing. And while it may prove foolish to give it to them, he’s the only director alive who can. Plus, there’s a detail you don’t want to forget.

2. Twin Peaks was designed to be brought back 25 years later.Ok, so it wasn’t exactly the original plan – the seed of the return was planted

only a few years ago when Frost and Lynch got together to rehash the good old days. But a 25-year reunion is baked right into the script. Season 1, Episode 2’s scene in the Black Lodge, Agent Cooper is clearly wrinkled with age when he “first” sees The Man From Another Place (who famously tells him the gum he likes is going to come back in style) and he speaks with the trapped soul of Laura Palmer.

In the series finale, Laura tells Coop she will see him in 25 years – indicating that that first encounter indeed happened 25 years in the future. So what brought him back to the Black Lodge after 25 years? We thought we’d never know. We still may never know. But 2016 is 25 years later in real time, and Twin Peaks new season promises to answer the question – to one extent or another. Not that Lynch is the type to provide easy answers; I find it hard to believe he won’t at least provide a few more compelling questions along the way.

3. The original show is still the original show.I for one am not a big fan of Fire Walk With Me, the prequel film released

after the show was cancelled. But in no way does it ruin the show for me. Even if the Showtime series is beyond awful, the original show stands. And

because two of the show’s key cast members – Frank Silva, who played the show’s most terrifying villain, BOB, and Don Davis, who played the X-Files precursor Major Briggs, who likely would have been a hero in Season 3 – are dead, it can’t be fully restored anyhow.

So, for better or worse, it’ll be what it’ll be. We can choose to cherry pick the good from the bad, and appreciate that, or ignore it entirely. If nothing else, a new generation of misfits might discover a television show that broke all the rules, and in the process rewrote them forever. The more people who see that, the better.

So yeah, I’m pumped for 2016. But I also know time changes everything, that nothing can ever be exactly what it was.

Plus, I’ve got a lot to do before then. And, I hope, plenty more to do after.Watching Agent Cooper get excited over hot coffee and cherry pie again

sounds worthy of adding to my calendar. Along with a million other things, it’s best to be as excited about it as possible. U

The First StepBy Brian Crimmins

Historically speaking, Native American representation in video games has been very poor. Wikipedia only lists about ten games with Native

American protagonists, and as this Storify demonstrates, few of them are protagonists that either the Native American or gaming community can be proud of. The Iñupiaq community in north/northwest Alaska hopes to change that with Never Alone, a simple puzzle platformer based on their culture.

A question arose when I played it: how will the game make that culture relevant to the outside world? By its own admission, Iñupiaq culture is highly traditional, with strong roots in the past. How does one go about applying those traditions to a modern world where they risk fading into obscurity? In the game’s case, it looks to the conventions of the puzzle platformers. It applies the genre’s mechanics and Iñupiaq aesthetics to modern problems like climate change, arguing that this culture is more relevant now than ever.

The genre lends itself well to Iñupiaq traditions. Two hallmarks define puzzle platformers. First, they are a space for narrative experimentation in games. They don’t that stress gameplay through challenging scenarios. In fact, their gameplay is usually very simple (Never Alone is no exception). Nor do these games stress narrative for the player to enable the story to move forward as it sees fit. Games like Out of this World and Limbo afford their players a very

active role in the story. In these titles, the player’s actions aren’t just part of the story; they are the story. Any narration/cinematic is there as contextual flavor, not as the dominant mode of relaying the narrative.

Never Alone modifies this, if only to fit the culture it hopes to portray. It follows the story of a young girl named Nuna and her arctic fox as attempt to find out what has destroyed her village while a violent blizzard hurts the land. Unlike similar titles, the co-op puzzles are not enough to relay the story. While they are important, they’re equal partners with the narration that drives the story forward at frequent intervals. Telling the story in this way extends the “lived experience” spirit of the puzzle platformer and makes the game an active storyteller. The game translates oral tradition into an interactive form, reinvigorating Iñupiaq traditions for a modern audience.

It’s the same reason the game is so insistent on local co-op. Cumbersome? Yes. However, it’s not without reason. Iñupiaq culture is very communal and strongly tied to family. The game needs that second player right by your side (instead of halfway across the globe) to create that interconnected feeling that’s so important to the culture it’s portraying. Never Alone isn’t just a game with some Iñupiaq aesthetic sprinkled about. It brings the Iñupiaq to life by embedding their values directly into play.

The game is very aware of its place in the modern world. Along with narrative experimentation, puzzle platformers have always stressed interacting with and finding your place in the environment around you. And Yet It Moves and Fez epitomize that by making the player rotate the environment independent of their character to advance through the game experience. Never Alone doesn’t go nearly that far. It’s content to give its duo some navigation puzzles that test their unique abilities. For instance, Nuna pushes a box for the fox to jump on, which he uses to jump up walls and lower a rope for her to climb to the next area.

The role the pair occupies in the world around them obviously fits the genre’s conventions as well as Iñupiaq beliefs about the interconnectedness of man and the natural world. And yet, look at the levels and what do you see? A world that’s neutral to the characters in it. But it’s also a world struck by decay. Many of the manmade structures in Never Alone are either completely destroyed or on the verge of destruction. With the harsh blizzards, it’s sometimes difficult imagining how anybody could live in this world.

This may sound like business as usual for Alaska, the reality is that it’s a recent development on account of global warming. It’s a global problem that hit Alaska particularly hard. According to the EPA, the rate of warming for

Alaska is twice the national average. Such developments have had a profound impact on the environment and especially Alaska’s Native population, whose way of life relies heavily on the environment. Understood in this context, the game becomes a call to action. It forces us to look at our environment and, in doing so, calls attention to the negative impact we’ve had on our world.

Combine game conventions with Iñupiaq themes of change starting with one person, and Never Alone forces us to confront our ability to affect change for the better.

This last point bears repeating, as the game accomplishes these tasks in a uniquely Iñupiaq way. A significant part of Iñupiaq belief is acknowledging our interdependence with the world, which was supposed to be made manifest through the Nuna/fox dynamic. As far as I can tell, the intent was to use their abilities to situate them as equal parts of a greater system. Yet that’s not how the game really represents things. Although both have their functions, the environments demand more of the fox than they do of Nuna. He’s more independent than she is. Even later in the game, when she gets a bola to clear new paths for the fox, it’s still a very fox-centric experience.

At least on this front, Upper One Games failed to represent the culture as they’d wanted, but there’s still value to be had in this error. We should ask ourselves why it is that this imbalance exist. On closer examination, the environments are to blame. They don’t stress an interconnected system; they

stress how pressing the (human) need for change truly is. The world can survive just fine without us, but the reverse doesn’t hold true. Even the various spirits hiding about the levels are more self-sufficient than Nuna.

In a world like this, Iñupiaq traditions become more important, especially in light of what caused the world to end up like this. The game’s events don’t say it explicitly, but the game’s at the very least aware of global warming. If the documentary clip about it isn’t convincing enough, take the role of the Manslayer as an example. He’s a common villain in Iñupiaq stories, and he serves that role here. Most of Nuna’s interactions with him amount to her running away from him as he lobs explosives at her, trying desperately to claim her bola for himself. He’s so desperate that he eventually severs Nuna’s ties to nature and to the spirits around her.

Never Alone uses the Manslayer to tie tradition to modern problems. While he’s a long standing figure in Iñupiaq lore, his use of explosive and lust for the bola make him an allegory of sorts for the troubles that arise when technological advancement runs out of control and the devastating impact it has on the world we occupy. In the world that these problems have created, the lessons of Iñupiaq traditions become relevant solutions to the problems we face. We need to be more conscious of our place in this ecosystem and, while we can only truly solve these problems by acknowledging and working on them together, it only takes one person to step forward for that process to start happening. U

Evil WithinBy Stu Horvath

I hate having my photo taken. That’s the photographer stereotype, right? It’s true, though. I prefer being behind the lens than in front of it.

I imagine this is down to vanity or some similar kind of anxiety about appearance. When you take a photo of me, you’re just taking a picture of a guy you’re friends with. Point. Click. Post to Instagram.

Compare that to the very few occasions I have taken a photo of myself (just four times in nearly twenty years as a photographer). Now, I’m in my studio standing in front of a backdrop. The lighting is controlled and consistent and made more so by my countless miniscule adjustments. Taking a photo of one’s self in such a setting is an exercise in meticulousness. For my most recent self-portrait, which you can see on the previous page, I shot well over fifty frames before I got the result I was working toward. And even then, there was still quite a bit of work to be done in Photoshop before I’d let it see the light of day.

When you point a camera at me, it makes me aware of my appearance in a way that I find disconcerting. In general, I am not aware of my appearance in a physical sense at all. I don’t think about my blinking, I don’t feel the hairs of my beard, I don’t clock my posture. The camera changes that. My smile, my smoothing of my jacket, my straightening up – it is all me trying to wrest back some control over how I am about to appear in the image you’re making.

I imagine some version of this goes on in the mind of anyone who isn’t an actor or otherwise used to being in the constant gaze of eyes and lenses.

I’d say the vast majority of videogames ask you to take either a predefined role, like Red Dead Redemption’s John Marsten, or a cipher, like Gordon

Freeman in the Half-Life games. The former is a well-drawn character that has their own wants and needs within the context of their narrative arc. The latter is rather like climbing behind the controls of a human-shaped car – the game demands nothing from them outside of the reflexes and agency that you, the player, provide. Neither represents “you” in any true sense.

I have no problem with those sorts of games, but I have a deep love for games with meaty character creation systems. Weird hair options, control over skull structure, a widely varied wardrobe, all this allows me to craft an avatar that truly reflects the character I want to play: me.

I’ve been doing this for years. Fifteen years ago, playing Baldur’s Gate, it meant

choosing the pre-packaged portrait that resembled me the most (probably the creepy bard with the goatee). Since then, games like City of Heroes, The Secret World, Fable II, UFC, XCOM and more have sported Stu doppelgangers. Sometimes it even happens accidentally. Every summer my shaved headed, bearded, whiskey drinking, Hawaiian shirt wearing self unintentionally cosplays Max Payne 3.

That’s pretty weird, right? Most people I know create avatars that are wildly different from their real-world selves. Guys play girls. Girls play guys. Squares play pierced weirdos with mohawks, weirdos play even weirder options. By inhabiting a character who looks different, it facilitates player choices that are the polar opposite of choices made in meatspace. Set off the nuke in the center of Megaton? Sure, why not?

I don’t play games like that. Not really. My choices in a game hew toward the choices I’d make in real life. Since videogame morality tends to be binary, that means I usually wind up playing some flavor of goody-two-shoes. That’s not accurate, not by a long shot, but the alternative usually involves genocidal impulses. I don’t have those. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve loaded a saved game because some dingbat NPC keeps wandering into the line of fire.

Anyway. Back to my stony visage.When I fired up Dragon Age: Inquisition, the first thing I did was check the

selection of beards in the character customization. Considering the number of hirsute game developers I’ve met, the videogame beard is most often a sad, laconic creature, a cousin of that greasepaint stubble you had for your hobo costume in fourth grade. I do not get optimistic about finding a videogame beard that can match the volume of my own winter beard.

And so I flipped through the options. Too stubbly. Too mustachey. Too sparse. Click. Click. Click.

And then, suddenly, there it was. My beard, in polygons.Because of this whisker kismet, I spent extra time getting the rest of my face

right. This is the best Stu I have ever made. Bystanders have said that the resemblance is “unsettling.”

Someone in my family, I honestly can’t recall who, used to say I had squinty Hungarian eyes. This is true, in that my eyes are almond shaped.

As to whether that is down to being Hungarian, I’m not sure. My paternal grandfather’s family was from Hungary and Horvath is a common name there, but it means “from Croatia.” Perhaps I have squinty Croatian eyes.

Regardless of origin, my eyes photograph strangely. They’re dominated by iris – not a lot of white shows. They’re also deep set and my eyelashes are thick (I’ve been accused of wearing eyeliner. Not the case!). These things conspire together to pool shadows beside the bridge of my nose, particularly in black and white photos. In real life, they look fine, like eyes. In a photo, it looks odd.

The solution is to open my eyes very wide before pressing the shutter. Uncomfortably wide. You’d have no idea from looking at the photo how strange it felt. I look at the photo and wonder how on earth I don’t look like Uncle Fester. I wonder why I took it at all. Even though it is exactly what I wanted to capture, looking at it still makes me anxious.

Getting my eyes right wasn’t an easy affair in Dragon Age, either. Tilting, sizing and sitting them in the right spot on my face all took patience I wasn’t aware I possessed. Yet none of it felt awkward. In fact, I delighted in it. I spent well over an hour tweaking my avatar. Who does that?

Back in the spring, I Kickstarted a board game called Shadow of the Elder Gods (the name that originally appeared in the Kickstarter campaign had

to be changed for rights reasons) by Laboratory Games. My reward for the tier was the inclusion of my likeness in one of the game’s cards.

Sam Strick, one half of Laboratory Games and a good friend of Unwinnable, sent me an email with the specs for the image they needed to work off of and I promptly forgot about it until a few weeks ago, when my beard suddenly went from reasonable to resembling something found on the face of a certain mad Russian monk. Examining this turn of events in the mirror, it occurred to me that I was finally ready for a new self-portrait.

I took the photograph and sent it along to Sam, who thanked me for it, as he was close to finalizing the game’s artwork. After what seemed like only a few minutes, Sam sent me back a digital painting that would be on a card called “Evil Within.”

There I was, wild-eyed, staring at a strange ring I held up in my hand, my face lit with an unearthly blue glow.

Now I am in a game. Not an accident, like Max Payne. Not an artisanal, handcrafted doppelganger, like the Inquisitor. Me. I don’t know what to make of that. It’s pretty cool though.

Just…when you play Shadow of the Elder Gods, be careful, yea? Shuffle the cards slowly. Maybe wear gloves. If I wake up one morning with a tear down my head, I’m going to come looking for you. U

Part Twelve

Dungeon CrawlerBy Gus Mastrapa

Previously, in Dungeon

Crawler...

Daisy and her unlikely

companion find themselves in an abandoned mine. Could

this be the way to the surface? Or will the fell creature who spun its web in

these shafts put a premature end to Daisy’s adventure?

The monster cub screeched angrily and charged the giant spider before Daisy could even try to assess the situation. The spider stood at least twice

as tall as Daisy. Its spindly legs, bent in three places before they narrowed to vicious points, seemed that much longer. The cub, barely knee-high to Daisy, was dwarfed by the enormous arachnid.

And yet it wasn’t afraid. Perhaps creatures like the monster cub’s mother were natural enemies to

spiders such as these. A tiny thing, though, prematurely torn from its mothers breast, stood no chance. Still, the cub assailed his enemy, clumsily lunging at the spider’s legs. The arachnid slowly backed away, almost lazily lifting each leg before the cub could catch it.

The spider did not fear the small thing nipping at its heels, but the monster cub did cause enough of a distraction that Daisy had a small window of opportunity. This would be the time to run. If Daisy was lucky she could slip out of sight, hide and pray that the creature didn’t find her.

But Daisy would not abandon the monster cub. It was her only friend. And any moment the spider could put a quick end to the little nuisance. Daisy would have to do something and it would have to be quick.

She desperately scanned the abandoned mine, looking for something – anything – that could help. The man-made cavern was full of equipment, all too heavy for Daisy to lift. Everything, from the rough stone walls and the hard-packed dirt to the gravel floor and wooden support beams, was coated in a sheen of white webbing. The spider had been busy here.

All around Daisy could see lumps on the floor, the shapes of dead miners cocooned by the spider. One in the middle of large work area looked different. It was nearly as tall as Daisy and stood at an angle. It was no corpse. It was a lever.

The monster cub was tenacious and perhaps more clever than Daisy had given it credit. When it realized it couldn’t merely charge at the spider’s spindly legs

it fooled the beast with a feint. It charged, screeching at one leg, then barreled past to

the next as the spider lifted it to safety. The cub caught one of the spider’s rear legs with its tentacled maw and

clamped down hard. The spider reeled, lifting the cub off the floor.

Now was Daisy’s chance. She charged towards the web-covered lever and slammed her body against it. The impact against her shoulder was crushing, but the huge wooden handle gave way. There was loud click and thunk as the lever came to rest in its opposite position. And then nothing.

The spider shook its rear leg hard, hurling the monster

cub against the cavern wall. It fell to the web-coated floor, dazed.

With that distraction out of the way the spider set its eyes on Daisy.

Something high above them all made a resounding clank that echoed through the chamber, reverberating back to them from various mineshafts and tunnels. Then, another loud ring of metal on metal. Then another and another until a quickening rhythm began. Daisy looked up to see that the huge chain that dangled down from the roof was plummeting to the ground.

The low end of the chain slammed into the ground just short of the spider, who easily sidestepped the falling metal. It backed away from the growing pile of chain. Daisy’s gambit had failed. She had hoped that the lever would drop something big onto the spider and crush it in one fell swoop. But she had acted too hastily.

The spider would not make the same mistake. It kept its distance from the chain, tensing as each metallic link clattered to the ground. Daisy, too, watched, but with the sense that each link of this chain was like a grain of sand in an hourglass. Once they were exhausted, her time was up.

The tail end of the chain plummeted from the ceiling and crashed into the pile of metal, sending a single, glowing spark sailing through the air. The flaming sliver of metal shot across the room and came to ground, smouldering. The spark set the web alight and spread quickly, consuming the gossamer threads and spreading in all directions.

The web was scant food for fire. It burnt quickly leaving only wisps of smoke and black ash, but the lumpy cocoons went up like cordwood. The white web burned away leaving corpses that glowed like coals as they burned. One skull seemed to stare, howling at Daisy as blue flames shot from its hollow eye-sockets.

The cocoons close to the mine’s wooden supports acted as tinder, heating and setting the old lumber ablaze. Soon the burning beams began to groan under the weight of the earth.

Daisy feared the entire place would quickly be a pile of smoldering rubble. It was her intention that she and the monster cub not be buried beneath it all. U

Cover: Amber Harris Letter: Dragon Age: Inquisition screenshot courtesy of BioWare New Peaks: Twin Peaks stills courtesy of Lynch/Frost Productions Museum: Illustration by Amber Harris; Screenshots and production art from Never Alone courtesy of Upper Ones GamesEvil Within: Self-portrait by Stu Horvath; Max Payne 3 screenshot courtesy of Rockstar Games; Dragon Age: Inquisition screenshot courtesy of BioWare, Portrait by Sam Strick, courtesy of Laboratory Games Dungeon Crawler, Part Twelve: Chris Martinez

Illustrations:

Matt Marrone is a senior editor at ESPNNewYork.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011, which seems paradoxical until you learn he would rather mourn the left-for-dead geoDefense than find a new favorite game, has a nickname derived from wearing an orange traffic cone on his head and still doesn’t undestand why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.

Brian Crimmins is an avid blogger who ultimately hopes for more nuanced discourse in gaming. He also has an affinity for older titles that few people know about. Follow him on Twitter @Video_Game_King.

Stu Horvath is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. He reads a lot, drinks whiskey and spends his free time calling up demons. Sometimes, he plays with toys and calls it “photography.” Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath.

Gus Mastrapa is a hesher who lives in the desert with his wife, son and far too many animals to mention. Dungeon Crawler is a serialized work-in-progress – a YA roguelike “To Build a Fire.” He has left Twitter but, like King Arthur, will return when we need him most.

Amber Harris is an artist, lover of lore and a Magic: The Gathering fangirl. She is trying hard to convince her parents that creating art for a living is a good idea. You can find her art at cowsgomoose.tumblr.com. Follow her on Twitter @amburgersupreme.

Chris Martinez is a freelance artist who loves drawing cute things, surprisingly. He can be reached at @DrakeLake if you want to tell him to get a real job, that bum.

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