Homestuck

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The logo of Sburb, and de-facto logo of Homestuck.

Homestuck (also known as Hamsteak or Homosuck) is a webcomic written by one Andrew Hussie. It is but one of the comics featured on his website, MS Paint Adventures, which is often abbreviated into MSPA. It is famous for being even more WORDS WORDS WORDS than Ctrl+Alt+Delete, having a shit-ton of characters and one of the most ~~annoying~~ ~~wonderful~~ prominent fanbases in existence. For this reason it is often referred to on 4chan as Homeskub.

What is Homestuck?

Homestuck began on April 13th 2009, one month after the creator's previous story, Problem Sleuth, had ended. It started out in the same vein as its predecessors; a Quest-style comic run soley by user input. The first three stories, Jailbreak (left unfinished for ages, then wrapped up hastily partway through Homestuck), Bardquest (a multiple choice experiment that was abandoned very early and will likely never be finished), and Problem Sleuth (actually finished, and whose unexpected popularity directly precipitated Homestuck) channeled old-school point-and-click adventure games based of a man trying to escape prison, a bard in his quest to slay a dragon, and a hard-boiled private investigator trying to leave his absurd office respectively.

Andrew Hussie went in a different direction with his newest work, by making it about a group of early teenagers who chat and play video games online. Homestuck begins with goofy young hero John Egbert getting his hands on beta copies of a hot new game called Sburb for his birthday. What looks like a novel team-based version of the Sims takes a crazy turn when the game reveals powerful reality-warping properties, and matters soon begin to escalate as John and company find themselves surviving meteors, cloning themselves, fighting all sorts of monsters, dealing with aliens of various degrees of friendliness and/or blood thirst and ultimately facing an immortal Time Lord demonic time-travelling crime boss seeking terrible and destructive ends.

All the MS Paint Adventures are notable for being more than regular comic strips; Homestuck frequently includes simple animations, occasional Flash animations of escalating complexity, entire flash games, and a soundtrack that covers several dozen albums. You can also buy printed versions of the comic from the website in case you want a hands on experience, but that means missing out on the flash goodness. So not only do you read Homestuck, you watch it, play it, listen to it and (maybe) buy it. It finally ended on April 13th 2016 after 2 gigantic pauses that disbanded the fandom, and ye gods it was about time. For both the fandom and the comic.

Homestuck has over the course of its seven years of existence amassed a spectacularly huge cast of characters. There are four kids who each have their own guardian/pet, Consort, Denizen, Exile, Archagent, Wise Black Man and more. Then there are the Trolls and their associated characters, who increase this total by roughly four dozen, and many more beyond. The cast was then further doubled by introducing the kid versions of the Kids' guardians and the Trolls' ancestors via parallel universe shenanigans. This all gets very complicated, and there is good reason to believe that Hussie was duplicating of parts of the cast solely to bait the fandom into shipping (for his own perverse lolz).

What is Sburb?

Sburb is the game that got the plot rolling. It is a combination of The Sims, Spore and Minecraft, with a bit of Earthbound thrown in. The main "goal" of the game (much ignored and treat as the excuse plot that it is by the protagonists) is to defeat the Black King of Derse and claim his scepter to stop The Reckoning, an event that unleashes massive desturctio via a rain of meteors. The real goal underlining all this is, via cooperation with the White Kingdom of Prospit, a series of shaky political dealings with powerful god/demon entities called The Denizens (one is assigned to each player upon entering the game) and a extensive and convoluted sidequest about frog breeding, to create a whole new universe for you and your co-players to live in. Sburb is by nature a multiplayer game, with two players as a base minimal, and the highest known number of players in a single session being 48. This number needs to be more than one, lest there be dire consequences.

The game itself is described best as an intricate LARP supplemented by vidja elements. You are the player and as you play you personally level up, gain special powers, magic items and may even transcend humanity.

Getting Started

To start the game you need fellow players and one copy of the game's Client and Server disks for each. You install the Client disk while your a fellow player installs the Server disk, making you the "client player" to his/hers "server player". Each player installs their disks so that everyone is both a server for and client of another player.

Entering the Medium

The first act to playing a game of Sburb is the removal of the lid from the Cruxtruder. A heavy blow or dropping something large on it will work (this is where the server player comes in handy), releasing a powerful source of energy called the Kernelsprite and "starting" a countdown anywhere between 1 minute and 25 hours. Two things must be achieved in this time: prototyping the Kernelsprite; and creating and interacting with the Cruxite Artifact. This is a rather typical example of the "Oh look it's cool and uses weird made-up words, so it must be deep!" stuff that goes on.

The Incipisphere

Players will find themselves within the heart of the Medium, a strange place called the Incipisphere, where the meat of gameplay occurs. Each Incipisphere is comprised by a number of planets, orbiting a larger body in the centre.

Prospit and Derse

Sooner or later you discover you have another body when you fall asleep: your "dream self". You will also discover that this person wakes up in a room that looks just like your bedroom (except in either yellow or purple) on the moon of either Prospit or Derse. These are the two kingdoms that fight the war on the battlefield.

The Battlefield

At the center of Skaia is the Battlefield, a chess-like location where the final parts of the game takes place. Its shape depends on the number of prototypings that have taken place. Unprototyped it resembles a 3x chess boards with the only pieces on it are two kings locked in a never-ending game: one black and one white. If you have a basic grasp of chess you will realize this is an eternal stalemate. But as more and more prototypings take place, the battlefield changes. A single prototyping increases its size to a large chess board with multiple pieces on it, a second turns it into a massive cube, a third into a sphere and a fourth adds a series of non-euclidean tentacle-ridges around the sphere.

While being mainly a series of black and white checked hills and plains, there are some features including fertile ground for growing crops, bodies of water, forests and castles.

Residents of the Incipisphere

The players are not alone in the Incipisphere. A number of beings reside on the players' planets, Prospit, Derse and the Battlefield.

Carapacians

The peoples referred to as the Carapacians (because of their tough exoskeletons) are the inhabitants of Prospit and Derse. They are on average shorter than an adult human and a slight bit stockier. While not more difficult to directly kill than humans, they are less likely to succumb to wounds to non-critical locations and are less likely to bleed out. The lower-ranking Carapaces have dentures that consist solely of molars, while the higher-ranking Carapaces possess arrays of cutting teeth for eating meat.

The King and Queen are both Carapacians, as are their subjects (commonly referred to as pawns or agents, depending on their activeness in the war). Both kingdoms also employ living constructs that are upsized versions of Carapacians. Derse is known to employ Archagents, Carapacians of more intellect, cunning and skill. They are often sent on more dangerous or difficult missions for the kingdom.

Every player will have one of five Carapacians assigned to him/her to serve as a guide (though not one per player in the case of the trolls); these are called Exiles for they have been exiled from the Incipisphere to the players' home planet, to a time period several centuries after they lived there.

Consorts

On every of the player's planets lives a race of intelligent [herp]tiles called Consorts. They live in simple agricultural Iron Age-style communities and worship Bilious Slick (more on him later). The consorts are not very smart; most famously falling for Dave Strider pulling a rather basic stock market scam on them with timeclones of himself and promptly pissing away literally quadrillions of grist; while capable of speech and able to follow simple instructions they appear to have limited capabilities of deduction and have difficulty understanding human technology. The Consorts are also non-violent; they have zero combat ability making them easy targets for the various Underlings and the best possible candidates for "damsels in distress". They can be thought of as a parody of the NPC villagers you meet in most computer RPGs who mill about doing the same inscrutable daily routines and spout the same lines until the plot says somethiong happens to them.

Underlings

Creations of the Denizens of the various planets, these are the primary enemies within Sburb. They are found on the players' planets and will begin to attack their houses upon their entry into the game. While mainly the servants of the Denizens, they are on friendly terms with the forces of Derse and will cooperate to achieve mutual goals on the planets. They seem to possess an intellect on the level of the Consorts. All Underlings are enhanced by prototyping, so if you were to prototype a Myr card and a bird, the Underlings could have Myr-like noses, wings, slender arms and legs, beaks, tails, or any of the above combined. These attributes combine with all those gained from prototyping, so you can expect to see a large variation of Underlings during the game. There exist a number of Underlings, some of which include:

Imps are the most common enemy. Standing at roughly 1 meter tall they can pose challenges for new, unupgraded players unless they have considerable enhancements from prototyping.
Ogres are the second-most common enemy. They are roughly 4 meters tall and possess large tusks. While large and physically strong they should prove no challenge for a player of a reasonable level or with moderately powerful equipment.
Basilisks are lizard-like creatures approximately six meters long. They fortunately do not possess a dealy gaze like most of their namesakes do, but they can easily devour a low-level player.
Giclopses are large (6 meters) enemies with short legs and low-browed heads. They are very strong and can be more than a match for players early in the game, but can be overcome with wits, skill and proper equipment.
Liches are amongst the first mid-level enemies. Approximately as tall as an adult human, they have gaunt bipedal bodies and skull-like heads. They are said to be frighteningly powerful, but the few times they appeared the protagonists made quick work of them.

There are other, rarer kinds of Underlings including massive horned or multiple-armed giants, giant octopi, huge skull monsters called Acherons, tick-like things called Titachnids and the enormous faceless things called the Lich Queens.

Denizens

Breath	Light	Time	Space	Life	Hope	Void	Naturally Powerful players
Typheus	Cetus	Hephaestus	Echidna	Hemera	Abraxas	Nyx	Yaldabaoth

Quite possibly the toughest enemies in the game, the Denizens are the de facto rulers of the players' planets. They have massive serpentine bodies, are incredibly strong and possess amazing intellect. Another notable thing is that they are aware of their status as constructs in a game, but do not take action based on this. They serve as the penultimate final bosses for the players, to be defeated in a 1-on-1 fight between the planet's player and the denizen itself. However, players who do not engage them may discover there are alternate routes to victory that do not require actually fighting the Denizen, which may even result in the Denizen providing aid instead. Aside from serving as a "final exam" of sorts to test if the players are ready they also possess immense hoards of Grist which are needed for the endgame. Which Denizen a player has is determined by the player's Aspects, which is described on the right.

Classes and Aspects

Like the majority of RPGs; whether video game or pen and paper based, SBURB has a class system. At first the twelve classes; Heir, Witch, Mage, Seer, Bard, Prince, Rogue, Thief, Sylph, Maid, Page, Knight and the two master classes of Muse and Lord all seem self explanatory enough, as do the twelve aspects that when combined with a class; denote a player's role in a game; these aspects being Breath, Blood, Light, Void, Time, Space, Rage, Hope, Doom, Life, Mind, and Heart. Then you do a bit of digging and find that no, it's not at all as simple as it seems. To make a long story short, your aspect is what you govern and what governs you the most and your class is how you make use of it and how your aspect affects you. Players do not get to choose a class, they are quite literally born into it by the mechanics of ectobiology; with the class and aspect combination being a reflection of the kind of person you are and the kind of challenge you will face in your quest to grow into the role assigned to you by Skaia as you play your part in the creation myth of the universe to come. This is perhaps the single most analysed aspect of SBURB on the internet and there are hundreds if not thousands of people who have given this a lot of thought and come to a general consensus on what each class and aspect mean. We're certainly not going to pretend like we have that kind of deep knowledge of symbology or mythology so we're just going to regurgitate the general consensus below.

The other half of your classpect, Aspects determine what aspects of the reality you control. Note that while the classes are already a bit more than what their name entails, aspects are all so very much more than that their name would imply and together the twelve of them cover every facet of the universe. While some are more self-explanatory than others, even the most obvious ones also have secondary meanings and portfolios that link back to the most obvious one. Some aspects have somewhat overlapping portfolios with each other, but in the case of overlap they cover different kinds of that concept, such as Doom's sudden and untimely death versus Time's slow erosion towards inevitable oblivion. Each aspect has an opposite; Breath with Blood, Time with Space, Doom with Life, Hope with Rage, Light with Void, and Mind with Heart. Like classes, aspects are matched to personality and when you combine the class and the aspect, you get the rough outline of the expected challenges for that player.

So Why's This so Popular?

Length

It's pretty damn long, so getting engrossed in the story means you'll have a lot of fun to look forward to.

Storytelling

The author likes to play with words. All of Gussie's work is horribly punny, and filled with very creative wordplay. Plays on wording and meaning can sometimes be both figurative and literal within the comic, and this leads to Fun.

The author loves to be self-referntial, and make references to earlier points in the plot. And also earlier in the story, in general, turning throwaway footnotes into major plotpoints for laughs. Homestuck is therefore a massive cluster fuck of "oh yeah that thing." He also loves Easter-eggs.

Further, he does the now-popular thing of using multiple universes, so that everything can be really clusterfucked, bigtime, and the story can continue.

References

Homestuck, to a degree beyond any of Hussie's other work, is a mess of references to pop culture. Everything from old-school video RPG tropes (like arbitrary elemental alignments, players ignoring the story, annoying inventory management schemes) to juggalos to jabs at overly-involved shippers (like the kind that Homestuck inevitably attracted). The comic is rooted in 2013, so being a teenager at that time really helps when reading.

The Fandom

The homestuck fandom and how to exploit it.

It has a large fandom, so... Lots of potential for new friends, I suppose?

So why do people hate it so much?

Because it is overtly long and starts off slow.
The story can really swing between whimsical fun, grim darkness and relationship shenanigans. I.e., it entirely lacks a clear tone. Some people want a story to be consistent in tone, while others don't mind it switching around.
The fandom: The fandom was Newgrounds-destroyingly massive in 2014. Any fandom that big inevitably becomes quite vocally retarded, and this was all before the internet watched several other fandoms do the exact same thing. People at the time viewed Homestuck as something that makes you stupid, and they feared it as horribly cancerous.. That legacy haunts it to this day.
And still more people hate Homestuck because they feel it is rather pretentious, and doesn't deserve the popularity it receives.

Games

Here are the ones that still exist for some reason

SKRUB v 8.1 (still working on it as of may 2016)
God Tier RPG
A User's Guide to the Apocalypse. This one uses Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, a tabletop RPG that's about feelings instead of combat and that doesn't use dice, so it only half counts. The game is playable though, if you count "people sitting on an internet chat talking about their feelings" as play.
RPGStuck It's a modified version of DnD with some weird shit added to it. Seems somewhat active, but it is only hosted on reddit so far.

the rest of these were hosted on mspaforums and other daoots sites, but who knows, maybe someday they will be back.

the one based on Gamma World v4
Updated from the original Gamma World edit, still active.
- [Now found on the Omegaupdate forums: http://omegaupdate.freeforums.net/thread/339/homestuck-edition-temporary-omegaupdate-home]
the one that uses poker cards for d4+d13

Be aware that we're still learning about the rules of SBURB so updates to these RPGs are fairly frequent. Just whenever we think Hussie's finally told us everything about the game, he pulls a Billy Mays and shouts "but wait, there's more!"

Links

The big enchilada Be prepared to spend several days at least going through it.
A homestuck *booru image repository
The soundtrack albums free to listen streaming.

Gallery

Post this on a Homestuck forum. The shitstorm will be legendary.
The average Homestuck reader.
Andrew Hussie, Creator of Homestuck, doing the dance of his people.
No, seriously, what is with this comic?
The comic makes a joke about grimdark for a while.
Yes, it has gotten this bad.
Problem Sleuth gave us this glorious, monolithic, porcelain edifice of a bust, known as the Bowen Stilson Dogg.
Andrew Hussie knows of /tg/. And he finds great pleasure in our gifts.
Problem Sleuth never got as complicated as Homestuck.
Sister of Battle initiate Kanaya Maryam shows you how rage is done.
It
really
is.
John Egbert and his Fanciful Harlequins.
Not even Boreale himself could withstand their crossover addiction...

Homestuck

Contents

What is Homestuck?