About

What is This About

We’re Aviv and Eran, two London-based gamers who work in and around the tabletop gaming industry and enjoy various creative activities. Also, games!

What’s the webcomic about?
A group of friends are playing a tabletop role playing game, with all the cool, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprising things that happen to you when you’re involved in such an activity.
Also, the world of Crystal Heart in which they play is wicked cool – everyone has stones instead of hearts and they can get super powers by replacing the stone with a Crystal. Yeah!

Didn’t you guys use to do mostly one-off jokes?
Yes, and you can read them all here. We moved to London a few years ago (and two years apart), and a lot of the webcomic’s humor comes from this culture clash. Several years ago in Israel, we used to have a popular webcomic called V Squared – it was hosted by a video game website called Vgames, so it’s a clever play on words – and for a while we’ve been wanting to re-ignite that flame, since we had a lot of fun creating a gaming webcomic. Thanks to a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign of Eran’s RPG podcast, we got the needed kick to, well, start, this new webcomic, this time in English.

After two successful years of doing this, we’ve decided we want to try something new‎. And so, Crystal Heart! Now that this is also over, we’re waiting to see what we do next.

“This game references the Savage Worlds game system, available from Pinnacle Entertainment Group at www.peginc.com. Savage Worlds and all associated logos and trademarks are copyrights of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Used with permission. Pinnacle makes no representation or warranty as to the quality, viability, or suitability for purpose of this product.”

The Crystal Heart storyline is also available on these sites. Please consider subscribing and liking, it helps us get noticed by new readers!


Contact Us

Our email address for any enquiry is comics@uptofourplayers.com. Our personal emails are listed below.

Elsewhere on the Interwebs

We’ve been interviewed on: Secret Hitler, The Campaigner, Gaming with Gage
We have a GeekList on BoardGameGeek with all of the games we featured in strips.

Translations

These guys occasionally translate strips for their websites:
Czech: Karel Hladis for hrajeme.cz
Portuguese: Renato J. Lopes for tabulaquadrada and Carlyle for his store.

 

Aviv Or

avivor@gmail.com – art, writing, site design, accounting

I’ve been drawing comics ever since the 90’s animated X-Men series showed me a brand new world of superheroic, fantastic, tights-wearing action adventure. Well, at first it was less comics and more mangled doodles of flying humanoids, but with time (and with a copy of the magnificent How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way) doodles became characters, characters started posing in scenes, and scenes turned into stories.

Nowadays I do freelance comics and illustration work, mostly for tabletop games. Some highlights include:

Find me on the web:

Eran Aviram

eran.aviram@gmail.com – writing, some storyboarding, logistics

I edit and write games, with the main purpose of turning more people into players, and then give those players the tools that allow them to enjoy more things. These days I’m the editor in chief for Son of Oak (City of Mist, Queerz!, :Otherscape, Legend in the Mist), and work as a freelance editor and writer.

Previously, I also did these things:

    • Various writings for Goodman Games, EN Publishing, Mongoose Publishing, and others. Some of it is available here.
    • On the Shoulders of Dwarves, an RPG theory-in-practice podcast I  produced and hosted alongside Uri Lifshitz, alongside it’s Hebrew edition that’s been running since 2013.
    • Menagerie of the Void, Caregiver, Venture Forth, and other games I developed and published.
    • I have translated or edited every major roleplaying book published in Israel since 2002, including D&D 3th and 4th ed., Pathfinder, Exalted, Dungeon World, and Savage Worlds (also, some board games)
    • I also used to own and manage Tactica, a board game and RPG store in the middle of Tel Aviv, for two and a half years.

Find me on the web:

Both of Us

Some of our past collaborative efforts include:

Tech Guys

Aviv Manoach is a marketing professional with several years of experience with both SMB and corporate clients, including work with some of the largest companies in Israel. Founder and editor of IceL.me, a gaming and technology website; publisher of roleplaying games. Find him here.

Evyatar Amitay is a video game developer and player. He is not a miniature hoarder, he only plays one in a popular webcomic (though he does appreciate sequential dice arrangements).