- What if I told you that right now, hundreds of artists are having a war. So there's this guy, Tom Parkinson-Morgan who creates a very successful comic called "Kill 6 Billion Demons" and works on a tabletop role-playing game called Lancer. And Tom has invited hundreds of artists to come and do battle on an epic scale, a war involving thousands of pages of comics.
This is War for Rayuba. And I'm here to tell you how it works and what happened when we joined the fight. (chill music) So for starters, how on earth does this work?
Well, there's a world in "Kill 6 Billion Demons" called Rayuba. This tournament is called War for Rayuba, and it features one team led by a giant sentient sword who wants to destroy the world and start over and a sort of good team who think the world is worth saving even if it's a teensy bit tyrannical. Now, when artists sign up, they pick which side they want to join, but also they have to submit an original character to join that side's army.
And this can be anyone or anything. Of course, there are a of cool warriors, but there's also a cool warrior who just happens to be a tiny bug. There's another cool warrior who is literally loads of arms.
There's one character called Aubrey Chamberlain the IV who basically works in or is her side's HR department and is animated in both senses of the word. And there's another character who's just called A Cool Rock I Found On The Ground. Then in each round of the tournament, one side will choose a bunch of artists to go off and attack a whole load of squares.
And the other side will decide which of their artists are going to defend. Then that other side will send the rest of their artists to go and attack, and the other side will defend with their remaining artists. Now, a lot of the time, these decisions are deeply strategic, just not all the time.
- A lot of the teams have chosen things based on like location, on like gentleman's agreements, on like grudges they have, on like, "Oh, there's a cool tree here. I want to have a match in the cool tree, or like, you know, someone's so, I've done some fan art with them for three weeks about our characters fighting. I really want to fight this person.
Please Mister Bastion Captain, put me against them. " - Once every artist has been assigned their opponent for the round, then the madness starts. Every single artist in the tournament has to create a comic showing how their character gets the better of their opponent's character.
How long should this comic be? Should it be coloured? That's totally up to you.
The only rule is that you get it done on time, which means the day before deadline, War for Rayuba's discord channel is jam packed full of artists wondering why the sh*t were they so ambitious. Finally, once you and your opponent have submitted your comics, a panel of three judges decides which comic wins. Control of that square goes to that side and more excitingly, the winning comic becomes canon.
So all of the winning comics across all of the rounds become a history of the war, spanning thousands of pages. War for Rayuba is an astonishing labour of love for the artists involved, but spare a thought for the organisers who have to not only administrate a tournament and judge all of these comics, but they've made life even harder for themselves by having special rules for certain territories on the map, special rules from round to round, even special weapons for these artists to fight over, the most infamous of which is the Coiled Snake Sword. Whoever picks this up turns every round they're in into a death match, a special round where the winning artist permanently murders the other character.
Well, to understand this craziness, here on People Make Games, we decided to go and fight in the War for Rayuba. The only question was which of us would do it? So myself and Anni, People Make Games' artist and animator, each decided to create and compare our own original characters.
So I don't have a tablet. - No. - And I just kind of did more of like a raw style.
- Oh my God, the head is so round. Well, oval, oh my God, wait, let me. .
. - Yeah, actually, that is, MS Paint let me do, like completely perfect shapes. - Whoa, that's pretty high tech.
- What I've always thought is really cool is when businessmen are like handcuffed to briefcases 'cause what's in the briefcase is so important. So then I thought, what if this guy's so important, his hands are briefcases. - Right, I liked those kind of characters where like, it's not all written down yet, you know, there's still some story to be told there.
Speaking of which, this is Peggy our dog. The narrative behind this is that Peggy is incredibly weak and frail. In fact, even not in the context of a battle, could do with a mech, just generally.
- Oh, wow, okay, right. - I put in a banana for scale. - Anni failed to see the statement I was making with my outsider art, so we decided to go with her character as the safe option.
Anni made a comic introducing Peggy to the other artists in the tournament. And soon our team captains had paired us up with an opponent for the next round. Peggy would be fighting Eris, a cool tarot-wielding spell caster with a bad attitude.
Seriously, she wasn't very nice at all. If we lost this round, not only would we lose control of this square, bringing the other side even closer to winning the war, a woman would have canonically beaten up a dog. Also, Anni would have had her art credentials questioned for all of YouTube to see.
To be sure of a win, we'd have to pull out all the stops. So first I reminded Anni that one of the judging criteria for the competition was effort. So it was a no brainer that Anni would have to colour her entire comic.
I also helped by suggesting that Anni begin the comic with a lavish establishing panel, drawing the city using reference images from the "Kill 6 Billion Demons" comic, a highly laborious and irritating process that was sure to make a good impression. It was also decided that we should do something unexpected. - A lot of stories they go in a very similar direction, which is I'm fighting my opponents and we fight and I fight them and then they beat me up because I'm not cool enough.
And then I look in inside myself and I'm like, "Remember that time that my sister told me I was cool? " And then I unlock my hidden potential and I beat them. - Got it, no looking inside yourself, no sisters, no cool.
Inspiration then struck when Eris' artist sends the list of her spells and we caught sight of number 19, the power to create bizarre and distressing illusions. With the hard work of brainstorming our comic now over, Anni proceeded to make the comic. And just like that, we were finished.
Jokes aside, you can read Anni's comic and her opponent's comic right now in the description of this video, but also supporters of the People Make Games Patreon right now have access to a special half hour long video going through this process in more detail. There's more of Anni and I talking about our original characters, us all brainstorming the comic. There's lots of Annie talking about the process of making the comic and she takes you through her opponent's comic as well.
That video is live right now on patreon. com/peoplemakegames and your pledge would make a huge difference to us. But in brief, Anni's comic begins with Peggy and Eris squaring off, which is funny because Peggy can't speak.
Eris' magic sets Peggy hallucinating and turns the city into a limitless tapestry of spooky cats. This scares Peggy, which then causes the mech to try and defend its pilot. And Eris, after almost accidentally catching an energy cannon to the face, decides that this deeply irritating and unpredictable opponent is not worth the glory or any glory, in fact.
It was really fun to have contributed to this massive tournament and see people in War for Rayuba's discord chatting about our comic, but what was even better was seeing our opponents comic for the first time. In it, Eris has a brief, incredibly awesome tussle with Peggy. She slices off all of the mech's limbs and even kills its original owner.
Once judging was complete. We did in fact win, and canonically, Peggy defeated Eris. But I can't help, but wonder, in pitching a professional artist against Eris' artist, were we the bad guys after all?
But honestly, we'd maybe gotten a little fixated on winning when it felt like the real prize was seeing another artist interpret the same fight in the same location so differently and even better, lavish attention on your original character. From what your character does in the opponent's comic, to the tiniest detail on their expressions and how they're drawn, it's like watching your kid grow up and leave home. To learn more about this thrill, we interviewed one of the team captains who was more involved in the larger story of War for Rayuba.
- So there's a really interesting narrative function to this meta story that is happening in this tournament, in that all of these stories are happening simultaneously. All of these characters are existing in this world together even if they don't, even if they're not matched up with each other, right? In particular, we have these various, you have these two big sides of this conflict.
And so your character will have allies that are these other players and they'll have enemies that are these other characters. And so one thing that is very fun to see and very exciting is when you see people feature like NPCs or like other characters from other comics in their own. This kind of cooperative narrative structure feels really cool, and it adds a lot of texture to the world that feels like we're really building something together that I really love.
It's honestly got a lot of the same appeal to like the Marvel cinematic universe. Like in "Thor: Ragnarok", he needs to see like a cool wizard to like learn about some new information. Well, cool, he gets to meet Dr Strange.
People who do know who this wizard guy is, can kind of get that exciting moment of recognition and the artists can get a much more exciting moment of recognition. - It's sort of reminds me of the creative equivalent of when people online say, "Hey, if you donate to this cause, I will match your donation. " If you can just drum up enough care to create a comic, the people in War for Rayuba will match your investment.
- For some people it's the challenge of being able to do this at all, right? A lot of people like, "Oh, I'll never be able to do a full comic. Like that's ridiculous, I don't have that kind of time or energy or talent.
" But in an OCT it's like, "Okay, well, you know, I can try. " It's like for a game, you've got this structure to it. And people kind of give it their shot.
And when they do it, they actually look back and like, "Oh, like over the last like few months, I've drawn 40 or 50 pages of comic that I absolutely would not have done without this tournament. " - Thanks so much for watching everybody. And huge thanks to all the artists who let us display their work in this video.
You'll find links to all of those people in the video description. Also in the video description, you will find a link to the Rayuba archive, a fan made project that makes it just a bit easier to browse the many, many, many comics involved in this tournament if you just want to read what people are making. And if you want to get in on making those comics yourself, I'm happy to say that at the time that we're releasing this video, the War for Rayuba is still raging.
So if you're an artist of any skill level and you want to get involved, just head over to the War for Rayuba discord channel, which is, again, linked in this video description.
