All twelve have faces

Four days ago nine cards were painted and I wrote that the rest were still line drawings. They are not any more. Every one of the twelve now carries artwork, and so do the three Empyreans behind them.

The Heralds came first: Tsathoggua, Mother Hydra, Abhoth and The King in Yellow. Then the four Spawn, which nobody had drawn because they are the small ones you meet in the first minute and forget. Deep One, Mi-Go, Shoggoth, Nightgaunt. The Mi-Go carries a lantern with a human brain inside it, which is not decoration: that is what it does.

The pipeline learned to call its own failures

The interesting part was not the painting. It was that eight masters in a row arrived with the same defect, and by the fourth one the build could see it coming.

A card paints the skin’s ink through the artwork’s transparency and then darkens it by the artwork’s own brightness. That works when the shape lives in the transparency and the detail lives in the brightness. Tsathoggua arrived the other way round: a solid silhouette with every line inside it. On a dark skin that is beautiful. On a light skin the ink is dark, dark times dark is dark, and the card renders as a featureless black blob.

The first three times, I found out by looking. Then I measured what the four had in common and it was not what I expected. It is not how dark the artwork is. Abhoth was nearly twice as bright as Tsathoggua and failed identically. It is whether the silhouette is solid. If the shape carries no information, all of the information is in the brightness, and the light skins will eat it.

From the fifth master on, the call was made before building. Five, six, seven, eight. The Nightgaunt needed a second lever on top, because it arrived darker than anything before it and its own suit paints in the dimmer of the two inks, so the two compounded and it read as a smudge in your hand.

The King in Yellow is the one that bends the rule

The deck has one law it does not break: tint, do not paste. Colour comes from the skin you are wearing, never from the file, which is what lets one drawing be bone on black and black on cream without being drawn twice.

Exactly one entity argues with that, because its name is a colour.

So the card is still painted in the skin’s own ink like every other, and a second layer lays gold over the lit structure only, masked by the artwork’s own brightness rather than by a second file. The gold falls on the tendrils and the beak and the robe edges and nowhere else.

It is stronger on dark skins than light, and that is structural rather than something I can fix. On a dark skin the bright parts are the creature’s lit edges, and gold there sings. On a light skin the ink is dark, so the bright areas are the recessive ones and the gold lands where there is least contrast. Muted on parchment is the trade I took, over gating the card per skin, which nothing else in the deck does.

The gate that checks no file names a colour outside the theme sheet caught this the day after I wrote it, which is precisely what it is for.

The art stopped touching the words

One thing changed on all fifty four cards, painted or not. I measured the frame against the text beneath it and found that a name plate began at the exact pixel the artwork ended, with no gap at all, and that on a card in your hand the power word was overlapped by six pixels. That is why chains and tentacles were crossing the word BOUND.

The art now stops at eighty five percent of its frame. It is done when the file is built rather than in the stylesheet, because the alternatives all had teeth: the obvious one distorts every card whose artwork is taller than it is wide, and the other changes a box the layout depends on.