When it comes to fictional worlds, first and foremost in my affections will always be Star Wars. I can’t even number the ways in which that universe has shaped my artistic sensibilities, and my life as a whole. And when it comes to the men and women who gave that world life, few can be given more credit than artist Ralph McQuarrie.
Ralph McQuarrie rarely worked on fantasy projects, though I was able to find a few pieces he did relating to He-Man and the Master’s of the Universe. (A franchise others are far more familiar with than I). I particularly like this sketch of Castle Grayskull. The way that the castle is largely generic in construction, with only the skull shaped entrance to mark it as unusual, is very interesting to me.
I’ve long felt that the Cleric Quintet is an underrated series, from a writer who gets a lot of undue flak simply because he’s popular. (Protip: disliking something popular does not make you cooler than the people who like it).
I have several of the books in this series from the first print run, and I’ve always loved the art for the series’ final installment, The Chaos Curse. If you play D&D, you’ve probably seen Jeff Easley’s art at some point. The guy joined TSR in the early ’80s, and continued to produce official D&D art up to at least D&D 3.5.
His official website has some very nice, easy-to-browse galleries.
I love this piece. Tabletop art tends to focus on characters and monsters. Occasionally you might get a sketch of an item, but most of the time there’s some kind of living creature at the focus of the image. And while that’s all well and good, I think illustrating environments is extremely underrated. As GMs, its our job to describe environments in a way which will paint a picture in the player’s minds. So it makes sense for us to imagine and share pictures of the types of environments we need to describe, doesn’t it? How would you describe this room in a way which is short enough to hold the players attention, but still covers all of the important details?
A couple years back, my local comic book store came into possession of a large number of oldschool Dungeons and Dragons modules. I bought as many of them as I could afford, and have thoroughly enjoyed owning them, reading them, adapting them, and basking in their marvelous artwork. I’m sure a lot of that art will end up as part of this series eventually if I continue with it, but this one holds a special place in my heart. Among the modules was an early D&D supplement, the Player’s Companion: Book One by Frank Mentzer. This is the cover. The artist is Larry Elmore, whose artwork you’ve probably seen before. Dude is prolific.
Where to begin? The sweeping landscape in the background speaks to me of endless adventures and armies charging across the planes. The castle at the end of the long road gives me a feeling of power. For some reason I imagine the knight is the lord of that castle, and he’s here defending his lands with his own sweat and blood. The dragon is just perfect. It maintains what I would consider the ‘traditional’ dragon anatomy, while also appearing sleek and limber enough that it isn’t just a lumbering colossus as dragons are often portrayed.
And then there’s that sword. What the hell is up with that sword? That is some serious Cloud Strife shit right there, right in my oldschool D&D! I like to imagine that the sword was left on earth by a defeated angel, and the knight’s purity of spirit allows him to wield it even though it is far too large for him.
Darlene Pekul is responsible for a lot of artwork in AD&D. In addition to the iconic unicorn which graces the inside cover of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Darlene’s loopy signature shows up a few dozen more times elsewhere in the book, as well as on other products from that period. And while her personal website is down as of this writing, it had a lot of cool stuff on it when it was online. Hopefully it comes back soon. [Edit: It is back online, and you should check it out!]
I particularly like this piece from the back cover of In Search of the Unknown, because I love snapshots of adventuring parties. These characters aren’t iconic. You don’t know who they are, why they’re fighting Troglodytes, or even what class they belong to. The characters have no established personalities or traits. They are expressed entirely through this piece of artwork, which gives the viewer a lot of leeway to imagine.
I also like that the majority of party members in this piece appear to be women. Rock on, Darlene!
I’ve often wanted to find something I could do on Tuesday and Thursday each week. I’ve had a lot of various ideas in the past year, but ultimately none of those ideas worked out. This, however, seems simple enough that I can keep up with it easily, and interesting enough that my readers ought to enjoy it. Every Thursday I’ll post artwork which inspires me in my writing or my tabletop gaming.
I’m not sure if this will be popular or not, so consider it a trial run for now. Let me know how you feel about it so I know whether I should keep it going, or drop it as a regular feature.
This piece is from Teddy Wright, who does a lot of fantasy artwork. In early 2010 he did a few different pieces like this one, where everything is a stark contrast of black and white. I’ve featured his work on Papers & Pencils before, but with the start of this series I wanted to do so again. I’ve come to really appreciate simple black-and-white paintings, and this one (along with the Succubus linked above) are among the most memorable pieces I’ve encountered.
If you have any ideas for artwork or artists I could post on Picture Thursday, you can let me know in the comments, or send me an email. And, incidentally, if I’ve posted your artwork and you’d like me to remove it, just let me know! I want to respect your rights to your work.
It’s pretty self-indulgent of me to post this, so it’s going up on a Tuesday when there wouldn’t normally be any post anyway.
Long ago, in days of yore, I played World of Warcraft. A lot. Truth be told, I love that game. I think its overall quality has gone downhill over the years, but I still love it, and have very fond memories of the time I spent playing it. And aside from being massive amounts of fun, the game fostered a number of positive changes in my life. It gave me a vessel with which I could remain close to some of my friends even after I moved far away, and it allowed me to make new friends, one of which I’m now involved with. Without the years I spent playing World of Warcraft, I never would have started writing Curse of Senility. If I hadn’t started writing Curse of Senility, I never would have been noticed by WoW Insider and hired by them to write Blood Pact. And without the confidence of knowing that people were willing to give me money for making words, I don’t know if I would have ever taken writing seriously enough to bother maintaining Papers & Pencils as long as I have.
So yeah, WoW played a big role in my life. And my character in WoW, the only one I ever took very seriously at all, is Sentai Grehsk, The Corpse Seeker. My warlock was the first character I rolled, and he’s the one I’ll always love. On the Silver Hand Role Playing server, I was the senile old warlock who rambled on about how much he loved fancy hats, and behind closed doors became a cunning, and sometimes ruthless, diplomat. It’s a little embarrassing just how much time and effort I put into the character and his backstory. And it is really cool to see him drawn so awesomely, courtesy of my very talented ladyfriend.
But if you don’t care about WoW, it’s just an awesome picture of a wizard. That’s cool, right?
There are two things you should know about me: I’m serious about making writing my career, and I’m a huge dork. Getting business cards was really the only logical thing I could do. After all, nothing says “take me seriously” quite like business cards for a blog.
I’ve always planned on getting cards for this place eventually. A couple years ago when I met Jen McRight, she gave me a business card, and I just thought it was cool. It’s one thing to talk about writing stuff on the internet, it’s another thing to be able to hand someone a tiny, physical banner ad for your website. I’ve been putting it off for a few months, because I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. But I’ve had a few conversations recently where a business card would have been handy. Plus I’ve got Paizocon in a couple weeks, and it would be nice to have them on-hand while I’m there.
With so many websites claiming to print business cards so cheaply, I had some difficulty finding one I felt I could trust. In the hopes of saving others the trouble: I used Vista Print. The base price for their cards is better than most places I found, and my cards arrived less than a week after I placed the order. I’m very happy with the product, but I did find their service severely lacking. I needed to click through something like 15 pages of addons before they would let me check out on their website. Page after page of “would you like this image on a coffee mug? No? Well how about on the hood of your car then? On a T-shirt!? PUT IT ON SOMETHING, PLEASE!” It was like web based version of that guy at Best Buy who keeps pestering you until you want to punch him.
To add insult to injury, the last thing they offered me was a discount on additional cards. So let that be a lesson: if you want more than the minimum 250 cards, order 250 and wait until they offer you a cheaper price on 500!
If you’re interested, here’s the design of the card. I’ve already got some thoughts on what I’ll change in my next batch. But I’m rather proud of how it looks already.
Only a short post today. As I’ve mentioned in the past, two of the members of my current gaming group are artists. This works out pretty great for me, because I regularly get to see my games come to life in cool ways. Such as the above picture.
Currently, my ToKiJaTiMo gaming group has a lot on their minds. They need to kill a dire spider for its eyes, find an entrance to the underdark so they can steal some hair from a drow, track down a spider which is more than a thousand years old so they can nab one of its eggs, investigate a nearby forest where gnolls are mysteriously being transformed into half-ogre monstrosities, hunt down a lich, and make a trip to the Abyss to harvest some demon blood. And some of them haven’t even reached level 2 yet!
In order to facilitate their rather ambitious goals, they traveled across the continent to meet up with their old friend Mahudar Kosopske. The wizard gave the original party members (now level 3) some of their first adventures, and they’ve remained on friendly terms. So when they came to him requesting information and supplies, he was happy to aid them. Even if he did require almost all of their treasure in exchange!
This piece, by the way, is from my rather talented ladyfriend. She’s done a lot of art for Papers & Pencils in the past, and you can see more of her work on her DeviantArt page.
Edit: My ladyfriend is on a roll! This post has not even gone online yet, but she’s already completed another piece based on the same game. Here she depicts a battle earlier in the adventure where the party fought some of those mysterious half-ogre monstrosities. I really love the coloring here, with each of the characters being highlighted in a color which thematically represents their class. Red for the barbarian, green for the ranger, blue for the rogue, yellow for the cleric, and purple for the sorceress.
We’ve got an uneasy sort of détente. It stays out of my realm, and I stay out of it’s. For the most part this works for the both of us. I only need to go outside when travel to work or the game store. But then, all I need do is scurry through the sun’s realm from my front door, to the car door. And since I live in the pacific northwest (the Seattle area) the sun often doesn’t even show up to harass me during that jaunt. Clouds and rain do, but I get along with them just fine.
Then I let a woman with plans to become an ecological scientist move in with me. This was a bad idea. Every so often she drags me, clawing at the carpet, into the natural world. I try to explain to her that the Sun will view this as a breach of our unofficial treaty, but she seems to think that I’m just being melodramatic. Somehow she doesn’t view the sun bombarding me with potentially lethal radiation as proof enough of its malice.
One minor benefit of these harrowing excursions is the inspiration I’m able to draw from them for my games. As I’ve mentioned many times before, reality is filled with amazing facts, many of which can be used as inspiration for gaming. Today I encountered a number of different natural environments at the two nature reserves we visited. And there, I discovered three things which I thought might be fascinating to use in a game.
At the first location we visited, we saw this large space filled with nothing but mud and death. Apparently this area is, naturally, an estuary. Simply speaking, an estuary is a meeting of fresh water and salt water, where rivers reach the sea. When early settlers moved into the pacific northwest, they blocked off the salt water, and used the land around the estuary to create an orchard. The land has since become a nature reserve, though, and the dike blocking the salt water was recently removed. As it flowed back into the landscape, it killed off all of the fresh water plantlife, resulting in this deathlike landscape. In a few years, salt-tolerant plant life will reassert itself. Until then, however, tell me this doesn’t look like a perfect environment for undead to live in? There’s nothing visibly alive out there. Just dead plants, murky water…and mud-caked undead ready to attack foolish adventurers?
As a game master, you really don’t need an excuse to create an environment, since most of your players probably won’t be too picky about how a given environment came about. But if you strive for accuracy, just put an abandoned settlement and a dike that crumbled from age.
It was as we were looking at this creepy landscape that my ladyfriend also took the opportunity to tell me about Bog Bodies, which you should totally check out if you’re a fan of undead stuff like I am.
The second location we visited is apparently somewhat unique to our area, and somewhat mysterious as well! Scientists are not entirely sure what causes the formation of Mima Mounds, which are sort of like tiny hillocks. The tallest are a little taller than an average person (about 7 feet), and they apparently occur primarily in areas of plains/prairie. What I found most fascinating about them, from a tactical perspective, is that they are almost invisible. Since the entire area is a field of grass and small plants, it can be extremely difficult to identify the mounds. In the picture above, they are only clearly apparent because that photograph includes the treeline for them to intersect. Check out this photo where the mounds don’t block your view of the trees. I promise, there are a bunch of mounds in this shot:
This would be an absolutely perfect place for an ambush. Particularly for small creatures like halflings, gnomes, kobolds, or goblins. Four or five of them could hide behind each mound. The small field I visited today could cloak several hundred warriors, all able to appear instantly to charge across the flat ground between the mounds.
Finally, there was this crazy moss. Neither of us was even able to identify it, so I can’t share any solid information on it. It was growing absolutely everywhere on the Mima Mounds, in huge patches as large as 7-8 feet across. It was so prolific we assumed it probably was not actually dead, yet it sure as hell didn’t seem alive. It was completely dry and brittle, crunching under our feet as easily as snow would. And a lot louder than snow would as well. It would be impossible to sneak up on anyone through moss like this.
On a final note, as we were leaving to head home, we met Spiderbro. He was a bro.
