Electric Team

In yesterday’s blog post, I explained how I want this comic to have a serious tone, and yet I’m fine with an evil carrot saying the words, “Squash them, my squash!” For some reason my creative approach is often to take seemingly-dumb things seriously.

Take, for example, Laser Ponies. Years ago my friends in Hex Games and I were joking around about a game called Laser Ponies, in which players take on the roles of adorable ponies who could shoot lasers out of their eyes. We imagined this being like an 80’s toy-based cartoon for girls, only with a lot more violence. Like many of our dumb ideas, this came up late at night at a convention. The next day, though, when we were driving home, I had a sudden inspiration, and told the others that I wanted to write the Laser Ponies game.

So I did. It’s gone on to be one of the more successful things I’ve written; you can order it at DrivethruRPG, if you want, and if you act now, you can get it for 25% off. And it’s crazy cheap to begin with.

But anyway, I wrote my first draft, and when my friends saw what I had written, they were surprised by the approach I took. I entirely avoided irony and played it straight. It might seem tempting, to make your game about laser-shooting ponies into a a parody, but it’s also too easy. I realized I would rather try to make something sincere, something that kids could enjoy. Also my daughter had recently been born, and I was starting to realize that there were not enough kid-friendly female action heroes out there (this is a theme we will return to in future blog posts, don’t worry.)

Over the years, I’ve explained the concept of Laser Ponies to children on many occasions, and none of them ever thought it was dumb. They seemed to think it was a perfectly reasonable idea.

Why am I thinking about all this? I’m going to GenCon in Indianapolis this weekend, and running a Laser Ponies game on Saturday. Should be big fun.

With the arrival of page 11, the last of our main characters’ names — Brianna and Jaxula — are revealed.
 

 
That means that our Cast page is now updated. If you went there before, it had a lot of black boxes and question marks in place of the characters’ names. But now the black boxes are gone, replaced by character portraits lovingly rendered by “Sensational” Sam Albert. Like this one:

Mr. Amazing, Brianna, Jaxula, and Plant Man were named by my daughter, Electric Team co-creator Abigail Connor. Leeta and Zarko took some discussion and negotiation, since their original names were trademark violations.

At first I had my doubts about the name “Plant Man,” and I tried to come up with something fancier, something plant based. And I think I had reached “Chloro-Phil” when I gave up and said, you know what, he’s a plant who walks like a man . . . “Plant Man” really sums it all up.

Anyway, check out that Cast page . . . it has additional background information that’s not been included in the comic yet.