Beyond the Western Deep

Wow, it’s been a month, huh? But don’t worry–we haven’t been sitting idle. Actually, you might notice that the website is running a little faster, is a little more dependable, and has its SSL certificates again!

Yes, after 12 years we have finally decided to make the hard (actually very easy) decision to part ways with our original web host. While they provided us with pretty solid uptime over the course of the comic’s entire existence, we’d begun to notice some unfortunate site-wide slowdowns and performance hitches in recent weeks, and then of course there was the fun SSL downtimes that happened every year following them convincing us to “upgrade” our SSL package to something “more secure.”

I suppose that technically the site is very secure if nobody can access it, true. But every year around mid-February you might have noticed the site going offline for a week or more because the SSL certificate did not auto-renew, requiring days upon days of live chat support, department escalations, and probably resulting in some tech wizard living alone on top of a mountain receiving a curt email from corporate to please “delete and refresh Westerndeep.net’s SSL cert whenever convenient.”

Speaking of things that make our collective blood boil, how about that Quinlan, huh? That’s Crim’s take on it for sure–he worked his tail off his whole life, turned his whole body into a treewalker-killing machine so he could become Captain of the Royal Guard, and instead the position goes to this noodly doof who–from his perspective anyway–coasted through his entire life as the grandson of a war hero and lacks any real captain’s training, stature, or gravitas.

And Crim wound up taking command of the Tamian Scouts, replacing a character we’ve never met before but has been name-dropped a few times in Wintersdawn in the Deep canon: Scout Captain Reed. She retired around the same time Caldus passed, but I’m sure we’ll find a way to tell her story eventually.

Of course, while Quinlan’s genuine interest in Crim’s role set the scout captain off and revealed a slew of pent up emotional baggage, our lovable protagonist is nothing if not honest–so what will doubling down on the compliment and revealing his true feelings about the situation do?

We’ll find out next time! (Or, you know, NOW if you’re on Twitter ;) https://twitter.com/TheWesternDeep

Thanks for sticking with us, and we’re excited to continue to share news and updates from the world of the Western Deep in the weeks to come, including updates on the Music of the Western Deep Kickstarter, the upcoming V3 Kickstarter, and of course that neat game project we revealed a while back!

Until next time!