Back in 2014 I made a cover for self-published author Patrick F Murphy for his novel for young adult readers, entitled Attack of the Dinosaur Zombies. Earlier this year, I was commissioned to create an illustration for the sequel to that novel Howl of the Robot Werewolves. You can not love books with those titles! Check them out at their links above. Here are the covers I made for both novels. Addendum (3rd June 2019): Here’s the cover for the third book in the series.
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The Martian
It is also my graduation present from Ain, in lieu of flowers. A book, I thought, would not wilt after a couple of days. I spent the same number of days for flowers to wilt reading the whole book. It was very engaging. Also, the book did not wilt. Yay. The premise is simple, astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist – who looks like the guy who Tom Hanks had to rescue back in World War 2 – gets left behind on Mars in a freak accident while his fellow astronauts had to leave immediately because of a dust storm. What should have been a fatalistic “that’s it no one knows I’m still alive and doesn’t matter not enough food I’m dead anyway good bye everyone” 3- day short story becomes a full length novel for survival that extends for months and years as Watney uses his engineering and botanical skills […]
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Ruthermore’s First Cover: Redux
The cover of Ruthermore Heidigens and the Fifth Planet was the first in the series that I drew for Ebb and Folks back in 2011. There was a request for an enhancement of the cover. Originally painted in water colours, I employed GIMP to give it a digital upgrade by smoothing out roughness and applying digital paints where required. For a look at the original painting, click here.
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Ruthermore’s Fourth Cover
After creating the cover of David Leyman’s debut entry of his science fiction story Ruthermore Heidigens and the Fifth Planet, followed by the covers of two subsequent entries, Ruthermore Heidigens and the Voices and Ruthermore Heidigens and the Nights at the Round Table, now comes the cover I made for the upcoming fourth installment of the series in Ruthermore Heidigens and the Fires of Avalon! Check out the dragon. He seems nice. Keep an eye out for its ebook release on Amazon at David Leyman’s website here!
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Lords of Nal Hutta
One of the gifts given to me by Kai and the Gamers of KL crew on our trip back to Kuala Lumpur was Lords of Nal Hutta, the recently-released sourcebook for Hutts and Hutt Space for Star Wars Edge of the Empire roleplaying game by Fantasy Flight Games. Bonus: it was co-written by Gary Astleford. It would certainly help my gamemaster (GM) the campaign I ran for GOKL, entitled “Modesty Blazing”, because we were about to meet Sassatania the Hutt, Zeltron pilot Darter Kel’s former fling and daughter of Teemo the Hutt. An illustration of Sassatania can be found in this blog post. Coincidentally, several locations described in the book had been featured in two different Star Wars D6 campaigns I ran for GOKL. (Well, one campaign and one one-shot session.) Sriluur of course showed up in A Bad Example in the Spacelanes campaign which was never finished. Kwenn Station […]
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A Package from DwD Studios
Copies of roleplaying game books arrived today from DwD Studios, sent by Bill Logan! As has been documented on the blog before, I’ve played BareBones Fantasy with Irfan the first time here, then during International TableTop Day here and finally here when he experienced his first player character (PC) death. The boy also gamemastered (GM) his first ever RPG with BareBones Fantasy last year! I’m hoping he’ll hone his GMing skills some more with the easy to play BareBones d00% lite system, and eventually play some contemporary spies in Covert Ops.This will help him develop his oratory, problem solving and critical thinking skills. Thanks, Bill! I will do just that!
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Laundry Photo Goes Viral For Some Reason
When I was reading the Laundry RPG rulebook away from home in Lunas, I thought I’d take a photo of the “What is a Roleplaying Game” section of the book and post it on Google Plus and Twitter. Here’s the link on G+. Over 130 reshares! And on Twitter the picture achieved close to a phenomenal 1,100 retweets! Here’s the screencap I took when it hit a thousand retweets. Even Cubicle 7, the publisher of the Laundry RPG, mentioned it on their official website! As usual I’m blaming the viral outbreak on the many-angled ones living at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set.
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Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook
After almost a month waiting, the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook from Fantasy Flight Games finally arrived. I went to the Pudu post office to pick it up right after a meeting elsewhere in Kuala Lumpur. The Edge of the Empire rulebook allowed us to play in fringe campaigns as smugglers, mercenaries, bounty hunters and the like. Age of Rebellion (below right) allows us to play as members of the Rebel Alliance in their struggle to topple the tyrannical Galactic Empire. In Edge of the Empire your character has Obligation that would help or hinder the player in a Fringe campaign in terms of how he acts in it and how he is able to acquire resources. In Age of Rebellion, Obligation is replaced with Duty which helps freedom fighters to define why they are in the fight against Imperial forces. Obligation and Duty are compatible with each other, allowing […]
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The Blasphemous Bookcase at the 10th Floor
The bookcase was getting messier and messier. So Ain thought it was time for a bookcase cleaning. I helped, but I also took some photos. All these books below were all over the place. I thought this clean-up would be a good time to put them all together on one shelf. Maybe I’ll call it the Legends shelf. *snerk* Here are more photos of the selection of novels we have on the shelves. Some of these books I bought myself, but more than 60% of these belongs to Sila, which she bought during or just after college. She brought back home loads for me to read. I have yet to read them all. Also, most of her books are back in our home library in Sitiawan and not with me. This is a Vancian book, this is: Also, I found Deborah Teramis Christian’s book buried in the old piles of […]
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Westward Comp Copy!
A package arrived the other day… … from Brett Pisinski of Wicked North Games. It be the complimentary copy of Westward RPG! Westward is a game of steampunk western game setting on an human-colonized extrasolar planet after the colony ship Chrysalis drifted for decades and came to rest here. Using the Cinema 6 system, players and gamemasters play and create adventures around humans whose ancestors were marooned on the planet Westward centuries ago. Lack of conventional power generation has created new technology that uses exotic local minerals and steam to build airships and steam-powered mech. Politics of the cities and settlements make for great conflict for players to embroil themselves in. And backstabbing politics, feral humans, deadly alien creatures and lethal hazards await adventurers in the waterless badlands of Westward. Also in the package is a handy GM screen. The image below is something I’d never thought would happen. On […]
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Cover for My Name Is Not A Number
David Leyman commissioned a cover recently for his new novella entitled My Name is Not a Number. I read it so I could do art direction for the cover myself and I thought this was his best work yet. And the cover turned out well too I think.
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Ruthermore’s Second and Third Covers
After illustrating the cover of David Leyman’s first “Ruthermore Heidigens” science fiction novella, Ruthermore Heidigens and the Fifth Planet, here are two more cover artwork from two other stories in the series, Ruthermore Heidigens and the Voices and Ruthermore Heidigens and the Nights at the Round Table – the former of which I made over a year ago but forgot to post here since.
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The Gifts of Star Wars Books
Star Wars: The Old Republic Encyclopaedia Tsing visited with a gift: The Old Repubic Encyclopaedia, with material from the Star Wars MMO game set 3600 years before the movies and more than 300 years after the Knights of the Old Republic/Dark Lords of the Sith comic series. It’s a great treasure trove of information not just for the game, which I do not play. It also has a ton of stuff I can mine for Star Wars RPG sessions set in the present. New ships! Not much but PCs might come across some of these vessels in deep storage for thousands of years, just ready to be explored or to be used as their vehicles. Just make sure there are unknown dangers aboard after being dormant for millennia. Strangely enough, my current desktop wallpaper is of an XS light freighter berthed in a landing bay. You don’t see the Gree […]
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Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook
Upon arriving home from Pasir Mas after an overnight drive via Jeli, Gerik and Kuala Kangsar, I discovered this note from the post office right outside the door of the house. So Irfan and I went to pick it up. It was a box and I was ecstatic at the size, shape and weight of it. Even if I was cautious about it. With my luck, it could have easily been some court summons because I’d accidentally strangled some duck to death 15 years ago or some weird thing like that. But I was happy to discover that it was indeed the Star Wars Edge of the Empire, all 2000 tonnes and 70,000 pages of it, sent by Jeremy and Brett from New Hampshire as a tradeoff for the steampunk Westward RPG artwork I did for them. Here is the Core Rulebook arrayed with the two Beginner Game booklet and […]
Continue readingCover for Five’s The End
[[image:ebb-n-folks-5s-the-end-cover.jpg:Cover with the creature Three:center:0]] Here is another cover commissioned by Ebb and Folks. Five’s The End is a novella by David Leyman that completes the trilogy that begins with Three’s Company and continues with Four of a Kind (the second artwork in this post). The style of digital inks and colours (instead of a painterly look) of the cover for all three novellas is an editorial decision.
Continue readingIrfan’s Transmogrifying Present
Irfan received a gift over the mail from Ryan Rhodes. There is a great sketch of Irfan with the octopus plushie at Wan Chor’s house in the inner cover! Here’s hoping Irfan will never stop dreaming. (Although he has been dreaming of zombie attacks these days…) It’s a Calvin and Hobbes collection – which in my opinion is tied with Bloom County as the best newspaper comic ever. Irfan says, “Thanks for the book, Uncle Ryan.” Bo shuda.
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