Goodbye Suppression
It’s been a wild ride for eleven years and change. Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll follow me forward as I make something new.
SUPPRESSION
Updated Tuesdays
It’s been a wild ride for eleven years and change. Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll follow me forward as I make something new.
Well its been a tasty stew if nothing else.
Long time lurker here. I have quite enjoyed your work. It has had a number of unique things I haven’t seen anywhere else. From how long Suppression has existed for this must be a big decision for you. I eagerly await wherever you plan to go from here.
me, upon opening this page: oh hey is that me mentioned by name
me, after reading the whole thing: aw, fuck
…….i will write a proper message after i go to the gym and process this a bit though, I obviously don’t want to leave this without a proper response.
https://greetingsfromeboncreek.tumblr.com/post/665870519404478464/sad-trombone-noise-thats-all-folks
Aight, there we go!
So yeah, I’d love to make a narrative sloppy joe. I love big complex stories with a lot of moving parts. I just kinda got ahead of myself with an small audience that was already initiated. The reboot was a harder sell than even the first time around.
But enough of that, Let’s answer some of those questions in no particular order!
So when it comes to what the Heart of Adigard actually was. The world tree symbolism that kept cropping up was actually quite literal. The rings are built atop the stump of a massive tree. This tree was grown by Holly Adigard, and the Old Wight “lost city” of Adigard was built atop this tree before it was cut down in a rebellion.
The tree was a magical construct with roots that reached down to the leyline giving the wights magical control over the surrounding land. You couldn’t even grow crops without Wight approval. The distruction of the tree was belived at the time to break this control, but instead destroyed the balance of the leyline leading areas of barren desert and thriving demonic forest to cover the land surrounding the city. Nobody is sure how for they reach or if there is even any civilization anywhere else on the planet.
The Heart is the litteral heart of Holly Adigard. Her phylactery. It can be used to reactivate the roots of the tree and control they broken leyline. While it could fix the world, it could also be used to subjugate it as it once was long ago. Also… ya know, also a phylactery so it could also be used to bring back Holly.
As for whether or not Arrie knew about the expedition She knew it happened but she was never told that they found the Heart. With how badly things went and how everyone nearly died, Sam decided they should never tell Arrie where to find what she was looking for. This is also why Sam grumbles about Arrie’s projects. Sam does actually understand what Arrie wants to do, but knows that if she went all in, she would would get hurt.
This one is big but it covers ground I’ll need to cover anyway for other stuff I wanna say. The voices Sigvaldi talked to when the reboot rebooted are other characters who exist in the story. Some we hadn’t met at the time. People who keep their memories through a chain of time loops where they compete in a contest to try and best each other. They each have their own tactics in this game, and opinions of being trapped together in an eternal struggle. These people are Sigvaldi, Santris, Horace, and Narron. But people can be added (and theoretically removed) from this roster. This timeline’s Charlie actually the same Charlie. He “won” the game when he self destructed in the old Wight crypt. And his reward for finally getting his revenge was to have to do it again and again forever with even more enemies.
Next topic, Bael’s backstory. I barely touched on it at all by saying he was there, but I couldn’t gloss over it completely since it set off something important. This timeline’s Bael Zebul started out as someone much different. And telling his story touches on some stuff I scrapped from mentioning in that write up.
So back in this version of the South Four incident, Maggie was the fourth friend of Azgrut (the silhouette was Lexi when I made that page but ignore that for the purposes of this, it was a toss up who I’d use and the coin landed wrong back when I made the page). She invited Horace up to see what they were working on with the armor.
Now here is where things go pretty far beyond what I mentioned before. Horace used the pretenses of the demon snuck past quarantine to assassinate the king. Glossing over the steps used to get this to happen, this version of the South Four Incident was a knock down drag out fight between a feral demon King Figaro and Horace Tyburn, head of the slayers.
But there was someone else Horace wanted to kill. Through multiple timelines, Solstice had been used as an effective asset of Narron. This would mark the second timeline where Horace went out of his way to attempt to kill her as a child.
A rookie knight stepped forward to stop Horace. But he was easily defeated. As the knight was bleeding out, Charlie came out of the shadows and offered the knight a second chance at life. Charlie had kept the demon Arrie snuck into the rings. He offered the knight a chance to live through the plague.
With the plague healing his body, he attacked Horace once more and Solstice escaped with her life. But Horace still won that second fight, and took the knight prisoner with plans to torture him for what he’d done.
This knight’s name was John Victus, but we know him better as Bael Zebul. That’s right another character mash up. The same reboot shenanigans that kept Artur and Maxwell fused did the same to Victus and Bael.
So with the friend of a friend chain recruiting Iggy for the expedition, they didn’t know him very well. They just wanted an earth mage to help with excavation. They just happened to run into him while a freshly escaped Bael was making a break for it in Iggy’s body. He jumped at the chance to skip town and wander around a place nobody would ever come looking for him.
But he was still a knight despite it all, and he put his life on the line to protect everyone… But the life he was risking was Iggy’s. And in the end, it was Iggy who paid the worst price of anyone on that trip. Left for dead as Bael and Sally made their escape.
Honestly, Bael and Sally didn’t even hook up directly after that. Sally was researching demonology before she got plagued. She didn’t even hesitate to check herself into the asylum. It went badly, and Bael broke her out. Though it was a long process to convince her to leave, even with her treatment being awful.
Let’s just rattle off a few of the simpler answers real quick.
My favorite character isn’t “everyone” but I don’t think I can pick just one. Charlie and Alaster are good contenders as I love writing the “fun psycho” type characters. But Alaster eeks out ahead with is big brother stuff giving him more depth than the lovable revenge monster that is Charlie. But I will Give honorable mentions for any character adapted from someone I played in a tabletop. Phylo, Azure, and some of what Terra was based on. It’s such a shame Azure didn’t get to do her whole thing with her serious persona being an act.
Favorite Scenes are probably Alaster’s death flashback and Charlie’s origin story.
I’ll have to dig through some stuff to see if I’ve got any concept art lying around. I lost a lot of stuff when I lost access to 3dStudio Max. Like I still have it around here, I converted all my files for blender, but I haven’t looked at any of it in years.
As for the rest, yeah I should set up a Twitter…
It’s going to be a while before I get things off the ground but I can’t expect people to check this dead site for more info. I’ll gladly take you up on chatting over discord.
Wow, that was fast!! Thank you so much for going into all of that in such detail, wow! I’ll go through in notes and reactions, lol:
-It’s amazing how important Holly was in this version of the timeline, considering that she only BARELY showed up in the preboot. Its also Nicely Symbolic how originally the necromancy side of things and the life magic side of things weren’t really separate at all.
-That ALSO answers my question of “are there any other cities on the planet, or…”. And validates a couple of hidden OCs I had that just kind of. Wandered around/tried to live out there. (I never did get around to posting up the rest of those fan characters, oops.)
-The revelation of the other voices explains a LOT, though it also has some bonkers implications. Like… how Horace is the only one of them to have *kids*. I can see why he might be a distant father to Maggie- I’d imagine it’d be a bit difficult to be a present parent when you’ve raised a ton of copies of this brat already. It also completely explains Santris and why he has that smug ‘I know everything’ air. (Also its very funny to imagine if he remembers the older versions of himself. Looking back at his old character models from the OCT days and just going “oh now THAT was a phase.”
-Jeez, Bael and Victus being combined is a THING. (Oh yeah, btw- did you ever have a “real” name for him planned back in the preboot timeline, or was that always going to be a running joke?) I love the idea of Bael being comparatively ok with his demon self, in control of it, but the “evil copy” in his head isn’t a demon so much as… himself as he was/could have been. The part of him that was a knight and genuinely wanted to do good. (Also once again, him and Sally are a very sweet couple. :3)
-I feel really bad for Iggy still. He had pretty much zero reason to be there and got caught in the crossfire regardless. At least he… probably still had his family in this timeline? Unless the Grennerman incident… still happened. In which case Dr.Grenner is a character who ALSO just can’t catch a break.
-Charlie and Alaster are also up on the top of my list though I agree, Alaster is probably a liiiittle bit higher for the sibling shenanigans. (Even though Charlie had, like, infinite siblings.) Which of course makes those scenes you mentioned some of my favorites too, though Sam’s original death ranks up there too.
…It just occurred to me that I have no idea how I originally contacted you back on tumblr. uh. Like, I know we DID have correspondence because I sent you that one guest comic, but I can’t find anything on it via email or tumblr asks or anything like that. Weird. I still have the comic script you sent me, but no email attached to that so uhhh yeah. I sent you a DM on tumblr though, so fingers crossed it goes through!
Oh right, Bael’s real name. I never brought it up after the reboot since he was Victus this time around and I didn’t wanna spark confusion by adding another name to the pile. But with things as they are I might as well just say it. His name’s Robert Zekaitus.
Bob Zebul.
It was never really all that interesting under it all. A pretty common name. It’s no wonder he jumped at the chance to spice it up.
Hi, bonus person here; I don’t think I ever commented before, I tend to lurk in forums and the like, webcomic comment sections are even less a place to feel my presence.
Right, so I’ve got to say Suppression is a great world and I’m pretty sorry to hear the end of it; I’ve been checking back every week or three as the reboot developed, but yeah…
But this lore dump ending is one of the better way’s I’ve seen a webcomic die THANK YOU. So many end with a “Now that things have settled down, I’ll get back to updating regularly” post from a year and a half back with nothing since.
About the taste of a story; simple sandwich stories are nice when you want a simple narrative, but an epic needs a foundation of a world that lives in your head, even the bits that never make it to screen. Suppression like other great realms let me feel the depths of a history that had produced the now. I liked it.
I’m sure whatever you do next will rock. GLHF.
damn, can’t believe how long i’ve put off checking this site. sad to see the story shelved, but hope to see where you go next. you have had so many interesting ideas on how different types of magics could work, necromancy in your story is the most horrifying I’ve read, and interesting characters put in admit ably horrible, but interesting, situations