For this seventh video update to The Blades of Gixa, we venture into the fourth level of the megadungeon, the hallowed Halls of Ibexa, the goat-folk metropolis and see of the Kabmut Pontiff:

So what happened when I was making this level IIRC is I drew that first day (the goat statue in the thumbnail with the reflection of a sheep) more or less on a whim, and then basically extrapolated a whole belief system from that drawing, connecting it to stuff I was reading at the time (about Cathars!) That belief system informed the rest of the level, and led to an entire goat-folk city with strict social stratification headed by an all-powerful ecclesiarch: Ibexa!

Which I think was very in line with the ethos of #dungeon23: the only way to complete that challenge was to just get stuff down on paper consistently and keep going no matter what. We really couldn't worry too much about making sure everything fit together perfectly.

The whole point of this, as I understood it, was to break out of the trap of thinking you need to start with a fully-formed Idea before you can make something. I think it's very easy, especially for young artists & people who don't do much creative work, to believe that making art starts with having a brilliant idea, and the rest is just having the skill to render it. That the goal of the artist is to render their initial idea as accurately as possible, that the whole point is to turn Idea into Product. (There's a whole digression I could make here about how deeply "AI" creation tools and their boosters are enmeshed in this product-brained idea...)

Ultimately so much of making things is discovering what you're making in the process of making it. This project, for example, never would have looked like this or contained so many weird & disparate things had I planned it out in advance. In a weird way, The Blades of Gixa is my diary of 2023, and now that I'm circling back through it, fleshing it out and refining it, I'm getting to reconnect to ideas I had back then, find links between them that I hadn't seen before, and weave them all into a more interesting tapestry for you all to ultimately explore and connect to.

One thing I love about tabletop RPGs is that the process of playing them is in itself creative & collaborative, usually done without any final "product" in mind. Maybe it can be a bit of an antidote to product-brain.