Small World

Created by Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton, Geek and Sundry's new biweekly TableTop web series features 30 minutes of tabletop gaming video that shows how much fun it is to pay tabletop games from boardgames like Ticket to Ride to card games like Munchkin to roleplaying games like Fiasco! Each episode, hosted by Wil, shows how each game is played by playing it onscreen. Every episode also has different guests.

Irfan and I saw the first episode together and he totally fell in love with the board game they played, Small World.

Small World allows a player to control a society of one fantasy race after another, allowing your race to expand or decline each round using the game rules. The game randomly mixes in special abilities and racial abilities, and by planning a combination of these abilities you are able to maximise the number of points you acquire each round. At the end of a set number of rounds (which depends on the number of players) the player with the most points win.

Eclipse Phase: Boom Goes The Octopus

And that is the story of how Hokusai Tarnungshaut, my Eclipse Phase neo-octopus character, got himself resleeved in a used worker pod morph.

At least he didn't go insane during the resleeving proces.

Eclipse Phase: Sheldon-class Drone

Here's a type of drone which we use in Eclipse Phase: the Sheldon-class drone, named after the chick Sheldon of Garfield and Friends. It's small, it's egg-sized and it has a puppetsock. It can get through enclosed spaces and scout secure rooms. However, it has problems opening doors thanks to its lack of any sort of manipulator waldos: It has no arms.

If you have an entire fleet of Sheldons, you could use them to carry a load like a crate or an unconscious sleeve back to safety.

It uses the Gnat robot stats from page 346 of the Eclipse Phase core rule book, "except we use legs and cyberbrain with puppetsock," says Ivan Tam the GM.

Call of Cthulhu: The First Game Ever

I've had the Call of Cthulhu RPG for a decade now. I've never run it... til now. It was a gift from Gary before Irfan was born. We used to joke that if I couldn't find anyone to run it for, I should someday run it for Irfan - who was then still unborn. And at the time I had yet to discover GOKL.

Almost ten years later, I have refereed Irfan in a Call of Cthulhu game, who rolled up his character yesterday: a young detective in San Francisco named D.J. Stark.

Episode 1

Here follows the actual play report:

Cover for Azamar: The Paradise Fragment

Apart from some interior art I did for Wicked North Games' Azamar RPG supplement The Paradise Fragment - as seen in a previous post - I was also tasked with the painting of the cover for the book.

It took me three different tries to get it right. The floating city of Adrya Orth proved adifficult factor in painting it because I tried putting the city and a couple of characters before it in an action pose. This caused characters to partially block the city. Finally I just put more characters in the picture but positioned them further away, and voila:

For a closer look of the cover art, check out its entry at my DeviantArt gallery here.

Encounters ~ Plots ~ Places: Barlax

A new commission for Ben Gerber's Encounters ~ Plots ~ Places Kickstarter project is a book. Well, I draw a book. You can't find this book at Barnes and Nobles because of its unearthly, eldritch and trickster nature. So you can probably search for it at Amazon.com.

Barlax

From the Kickstarter update page descibes this sapient book:

A magical tome that assists in translating just about any language in existence. It also has its own wicked sense of humor and considers practical jokes to be wonderful things!

The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Queen of Air and Darkness is the title of T.H. White's second novel of his Once and Future King series. In the Star Wars universe, the Queen of Air and Darkness is a sabacc face card that possesses a value of negative two. There was a request on the Star Wars Artists' Guild by one "Lord Cygnus" of a starship in his Star Wars RPG campaign named The Queen of Air and Darkness which I picked up.

The ship is a heavily modified Corellian Engineering Corps YV-545 light freighter and this is how it turned out after about 90 minutes of work:

Here's the original request thread and here's the final image on SWAG.

Azamar: Paradise Fragment 2

Here is the final interior artwork for the scenes in Azamar: The Paradise Fragment RPG supplement. Instead of including it with the group of artwork in the previous post, I shall describe how the illustration came into being using work-in-progress photos.

First, pencils are made for the half-page sized illustration. Something stalks the characters as one of them pushes open the strange stone door from a previous picture, then a dragon swoops down. Is it attacking? Is it warning the characters of something?

A close up on the partially inked artwork. Pencil lines are still visible with the inks - but you can't really see it thanks to the blurred photo.

A close up on the other half of the artwork. The details on the dragons are added using brushed ink.

The image is scanned, then GIMP is used to add ziptone / newsprint shade effects to the final black and white illustration.

Voila! Add garnishing and serves four!

Azamar: Paradise Fragment 1

Here are some interior artwork for the Azamar role-playing game's upcoming supplement The Paradise Fragment. Player Characters (PCs) are sent to the deserted and floating city of Adrya Orth on a mission and uncover a deadly secret. What is the secret? Don't look at me I'm just the illustrator, not the writer. However, the publisher's art order requested that a series of sequential artwork was created as if it was a comic and I had the discretion to direct the visual flow of the story if not the actual story.

Let's see how the game story ends up!

Watch this space for the upcoming release of the publication soon!

D6 Magazine: Two Monsters

Two final images commissioned for the latest D6 Magazine issue featured two entries below are the Redcap and the Springheeled Jack and lots of spilled blood.

Redcap

Springheeled Jack

Download the zine from DrivethruRPG to read about them, complete with OpenD6 stats!

Savage Star Wars Character Sheet

Almost two years ago, I was looking at custom Savage Worlds character sheets online. There were ones for games such as Solomon Kane, Slipstream, Necessary Evil, Realms of Cthulhu and Deadlands. These roleplaying games used the Savage Worlds system and they were officially supported.

However, what if you need to play Savage Star Wars? I know there are a number of fanmade (unofficial) documents designed for you to play a Star Wars RPG using Savage Worlds.

So, I fired up Inkscape and created this custom character sheet. If you're using Savage Worlds to run Star Wars, go ahead and download this pdf file.

Zipped PDF file (221kb)

Click here to download the Savage Worlds test drive rules version 6.0 PDF at the Pinnacle Entertainment Group downloads page!

D6 Magazine Issue 3: An Interview

D6 Magazine - the online fanzine for Open D6 roleplaying game material - has released issue #3!

The horror issue has a variety of articles and scenarios, including vampires, a hell hound, a redcap goblin and Spring-heeled Jack. There's also a simple Sanity System for running D6 horror adventures.

The eerie, underwater Cinema6 adventure "Down Below" written by J. Elliot Streeter brings the zine to a close. You might remember my artwork created for the adventure in this previous blog entry.

But it also has a bonus four-page interview with me by Peter Robbins, interrogating me about my past, present and future in artwork and illustrations, as well as role-playing games!

Here's an excerpt:

Q: When did you decide, "Hey, I could make money doing this? Sure, let's roll in that dough!" And what were your emotions when this decision came into fruition in your life?

A: When I ran out of kidneys to sell on eBay. 

Dowload the PDF now which is free at DriveThruRPG here.

A Squad of Clones Plus Change

These are illustrations for pregen characters for a Star Wars Saga game to be run by Gary Astleford at Totalcon 2012.

The one in Massachussets, not the one on Commenor. Register quick if you want to get in on the clone action.

Lieutenant Krieg

Sergeant Aren

Doc

Rudi

Senth Herf

Voris Xilef

Some Encounters ~ Some Plots ~ Some Places

Ben Gerber's latest RPG Kickstarter project is Encounters ~ Plots ~ Places, where you'll be given a whole slew of role-playing game NPCs, creatures, weapons, gear and locations you can easily adapt to your own campiagn! Lots of awesome stuff about, such as the ones I was commissioned to draw below:

Floating Cavern

Iron Mace of Law

Faris the Awakened Wolf

Sword of Vegetation

D6 Magazine: Hellhound

The Halloween issue of D6 Magazine will be a bit late, but here's a late commission from the publishers! I'm not in the loop as to which article this illustration is slated to be in, but I guess said article has a Hellhound in it!

And it seems to be somewhat agitated.

Void Vulture Scrawlings

Three more Void Vultures RPG artwork was commissioned over the week and a half and here's what I've come up with. Click on the thumbnails to view bigger images, but I can tell you that the world of the spaceborne Void Vultures are filled with psionics in peril, homicidal brainbots, giant mecha, feral mutant killers and a guy who has to call his mom NOW!

To read more about Void Vultures, check out their Kickstarter page here!

Void Vultures Scribblings

Void Vultures is a role-playing game by Josh Roby and Ryan Macklin where players take the roles of space derelict retrieval personnel - salvage experts, so to speak. Space is littered with dead, derelict starships and space stations and players will have to salvage them.

However, it's no easy task since the old derelicts might have perils such as alien creature infestation, mutant beserkers, cyborg lunatics and heavily armed rival salvage teams!

To read more about Void Vultures, check out their Kickstarter page here! And here's an awesome illustration of frickin' space sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads by fellow art conspirator Ed Heil.

Check out my three art contributions to the Void Vultures RPG by clicking on the thumbnails below.

D6 Magazine: Down Below Redux

So, anyway... under the sea, I take it that it's better down where it's wetter; and also where they devote full time to floating. However, the sturgeon and the ray do not get the urge and start to play in the adventure Down Below in the upcoming Halloween issue of D6 Magazine! Gamemasters and players of OpenD6 system of role-playing games take note!

Something horrific is awaiting players who will have to eventually board the deep sea station in the illustration I did:

For the previous illustrations I did for the adventure and hints to what players will encounter in Down Below, please click here to view them in a previous blog post.

Dark Times in Brighton

Recently DWD Studios commissioned two black and white artwork for their Labyrinth Lord-compatible RPG product Dark Times in Brighton, an adventure for 1st - 2nd Level characters.

The first is a goblin throne room with the adventuring party sneaking upon the host behind pillars and stuff. Click on the thumb below to view it.

The second is the same adventuring party having a party while adventuring with carion crawlers. No not really, the crawlers are trying to eat them.

What's that decanter doing in the background with the well? Get the book to find out!

D6 Magazine: Down Below

Halloween, being a permanent fixture to the month of October, has inspired the upcoming issue of D6 Magazine to have horror-themed articles. The third issue of the online magazine continues to deliver articles, adventures and interviews for the Open D6 gaming community.

Here is a sneak peek to illustrations I did for a horror adventure set deep under the sea, entitled Down Below.

Yes! That's a baby dumbo octopus in the bottom illustration there. Watch out for the third issue of D6 Magazine due to be released at the end of the month.