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Castle Marrach Comic Released by Skotos.


Skotos Tech has released the first issue of their Castle Marrach comic, Awakenings. This fantasy comic written by Shannon Appelcline and illustrated by Bob Cram, Jr., is available for free viewing online or for download at http://www.skotos.net/games/marrach/comic/awakenings/.

Castle Marrach: Awakenings is set in the world of Skotos' Castle Marrach online game. In another place, in another time, there stands a castle atop an ancient mountain. It is a castle of fantasy built atop a mountain of dreams. It is an empty castle, full of vacant passages and cavernous rooms. It is a castle beginning to awake. Awakenings tells the story of the brutish Victory Savary, his rebirth into the Castle, and what he finds there.

The Awakenings comic has been released under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, which gives other creators on the Internet the right to revise, adapt, modify, and republish the story as they see fit--which could be as simple as colorizing the illustrations, translating the comic to other languages, or adapting it into other mediums, such as creating an animated short or a radio play.

"Castle Marrach has always been about stories," says author Shannon Appelcline. "The castle is full of storytellers living through their own tales. My story, told in this comic, is ultimately based upon the stories told by hundreds of others who came before me. That's how tall tales, faerie tales, and other sorts of folk lore work. Thus, by releasing this comic to the Creative Commons we're continuing a tradition that lives on in the online Castle Marrach and that dates back thousands of years."

The game of Castle Marrach was launched in 2000 and for five years players have wandered through the prose fantasy setting, roleplaying unique characters and telling their own stories. The game is available at http://www.skotos.net/games/marrach.

ABOUT SKOTOS TECH INC.

Founded in 1999, Berkeley, California-based Skotos Tech Inc. (http://www.skotos.net) is a developer and publisher of multiplayer games. Its games all center around socialization and new Internet-based communities. Other games currently published by Skotos include Lovecraft Country: Arkham by Night, The Eternal City, Meridian 59: Sacred Haven, Monsters! Monsters!: Grendel's Revenge, and Galactic Emperor: Hegemony. A group of external developers known as "The Skotos Seven" are already working on the next generation of Skotos games.

ABOUT THE CREATORS

Author Shannon Appelcline is a RPG designer and fiction author whose published work includes the story "Keystones" in the Arthurian anthology _Legends of the Pendragon_. Artist Bob Cram, Jr., is an artist who has illustrated numerous RPG supplements and has done comic book work for Malibu and Marvel Comics.

Posted by MPOGD on June 21.


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