My Gurps campaign, which lasted for two years and one month, finally arrived to a logical conclusion, and it was great. Every time I previously mentioned «the RPG campaign» on this site, I was referring to this one. The game, code-named «SSD», tells a short story about five residents of Edgeworld (a world created by me) who were abducted by a faction of the living dead and are trying to return home.

I won’t be providing a full retelling of the plot here. In short: everyone who needed to be defeated has been defeated, and 4/5 characters reached their home capital. This article is intended to showcase some of the works that were created for the campaign.

Stamina

The character I wanted to show most. The first mechanical singer (in this setting), a «miracle of necromancy and engineering» — the automaton Stamína.

The idea for this character emerged back in 2024, when I discovered the band Steam Powered Giraffe, the recordings of their live street performances from 2009 to 2013 have had the most significant influence. Her name came from the typing trainer program «Stamina» that was installed on my family’s Windows XP PC. If a key was pressed incorrectly, the program would play a random silly sound; in my early childhood, it wasn’t a typing trainer for me, but a thing on the computer for making funny noises, so I’d press keys haphazardly for fun. Consequently, Stamina is also a machine that produces sounds upon request. I could have thought of a more clever name that would better reflect her tragic existence, but this one’ve stuck firmly; the presence of the «mina» in her name works in a fun way in terms of etymology relative to the setting’s lore.

Another obvious inspiration were Vocaloids. I usually devise plots starting from the end and I knew that SSD would end with the players attending Stamina’s performance. I thought for a long time about which song to include at the very finale, went through many options, but none felt right, so I ended up writing a song myself. It is best viewed or heard with subtitles; not all words can be clearly discerned since the original language of the voicebank is Japanese. And the song itself is in Russian.

The vocal part was created in OpenUtau; I used the Kyoukine Sora VCVs voicebank, which was the closest match. The program proved very easy to use, and typing out the lyrics in transliterated Russian for the correct operation of the EN-to-JA phonemizer (a sub-program that selects appropriate morphemes from the bank based on the text) was quite fun. The voicebank was downloaded from some ancient discussion on VKontakte… It would have been great to create her own unique voicebank, but I do not have the resources required for such a task.

The Rotting Prince

I have mentioned before that I use RPGs for world-building as well. The settings of my past campaigns were very derivative because I was just starting to figure out both TTRPGs and worldbuilding. Since my personal contribution (aside from the story itself) was minimal, I easily abandoned those campaigns as soon as they became boring. Edgeworld was created from scratch, and the SSD story have been completed in its entirety.

One of the goals of this campaign was to explore different ways to implement the undead in this world, which led to the creation of the ims. They are former humans who continue to exist after death by taking life from others.

The Rotting Prince is the leader of the ims faction. The nickname, as it often happens, is incorrect; he is the only one among all other ims who does not wither out or decompose over time. Hence, he is the leader. His subjects are guaranteed that they will always be returned to life. They can be killed, but doing so is not easy, as they feel pain significantly less and caner seamlessly reattach lost limbs. The Ims are not the only representatives of the undead in the world, but they are definitely the most conscious ones.

I will end this selective retelling here; otherwise, it risks turning into a collection of articles for a nonexistent Edgeworld wiki. I definitely should make one, but only after the novel’s full release.