Sneak Attack blackenwhite

Westward Art: Sneak Attack

Recently, I was assigned to draw a vertical “sneak attack” scene for Wicked North Games’ upcoming Westward RPG. The scene involved a dark-clad assassin about to attack a nervous looking gentleman in the city streets at night. The final artwork is displayed above. Below are some process artwork for the piece. The first image shows three black and white sketches / studies. #1 is the original sketch where the assassin was changed into the version in #2 because she did not convey enough physical steampunk tropes. It’s quite difficult to design a skin-tight assassin’s garb, because most steampunk costumes are loose and puffed up in parts. After #2 was approved, I created a grayscale study in the form of #3 to see how light will play off the characters, objects and building. Then I painted the below, with separate layers making up the different characters, the vapour and particulates in […]

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DANAI/Ina and Hokusai posing for a selfie while sneaking into Yamaha-Pacifica

Eclipse Phase: A Hidden Industry

GOKL‘s Eclipse Phase “Clouds of the Morning Star” story arc (gamemastered by Ivan) continues from the previous session. Wandering Ina (played by Andrew) and DANAI (played by Darren) – both in a single Venusian glider morph – continued their investigation of a massive ego theft ring that may have passed through the Cloud Nine aerostat – a floating city in the skies of Venus. Meanwhile, Cable and Hokusai (played by me) manned their newly purchased airship, hidden in the clouds out of sight from Cloud Nine. Since Kai was unable to make it, this session had three player characters, but with two of them inhabiting one body, which was a great concept in roleplaying. The Setup It was time Hokusai delivered more weapons and gear by sneaking onto Cloud Nine. DANAI/Ina had managed to hack into Cloud Nine’s aerostat administration network and gave themselves Security-level permissions in the system. Employing […]

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Brawling - finished

Westward RPG: Brawling

I sometimes use MyPaint, an open source painting program to create my work. It has less features than GIMP, but I love how the brush paint digitally as I move the Wacom tablet stylus. This is how I painted the “Brawling” artwork for Wicked North Games upcoming Westward RPG that was featured in a previous post. At first I sketched the scene quickly in MyPaint using one of the Pencil tools. Initially the person who was throwing the punch was a man, but then I changed it to a woman in mid-sketch. I decided on a yellowish hue for the image before I started painting the sky upon the layer immediately below the pencil sketch layer. Then I started colour blocking one character, playing with some colours over it to see if they meshed well. I started to block the other character as well as refine the punch thrower. The […]

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Eclipse Phase: Blimps and Back Seat Driving

The adventure continued on and around Venus… even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we’re not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we’re talking about last Sunday’s Eclipse Phase session. As Kage’s people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock. Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecraft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane… toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to […]

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The Claws of a Bugbear

Monsters of the Shattered World Podcast, Season 2

In the début season of Monsters of the Shattered World, an imaginative fantasy podcast that features the story of an adventuring party produced by Brent Newhall, I was commissioned to illustrate two out of the five episodes that were made. The second season, however, I was tasked with completing all seven episodes of the podcasts. Here are some of the illustrations I drew for season two. To listen to each episode, click on the link above to download them for free at Troll in the Corner, or obtain them from iTunes here. Click here to view artwork from the first episode of the first season.

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Demolitions

Westward Scenes

Here are some scenes I drew as filler are in the Characters, Attributes and Skills section of the Westward RPG by Wicked North Games. These scenes, also drawn by Alexander Gustafson, Ryan Rhodes and Cory DeVore, gives players an idea of what your players can be doing on the steampunk planet of Westward and what the millieux feels like. You could arm-wrestle an Enclave – a steampunk cyborg – and win! You could write a secret messages! You could punch a guy in the jaw because he hadn’t showered in two months. You could blow up a water tower for shits and giggles. Not really for giggles since water is precious here. Westward RPG will be available online or at your FLGS later this year.

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Ivan prepares to shank his players

Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems

The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign “Fastball Express” has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two. So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited “for security reasons”. (That doesn’t sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had […]

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Jerry's the one on that side and I'm the one on this side

Savage Worlds: Weekend Warriors Playtest

Jerry Blakemore came over to the house all the way from Texas to playtest 12 to Midnight‘s new Savage Worlds game Weekend Warriors! (Not really, he was on vacation, and I just happened to be in his path.) Although I’ve bought the Savage Worlds Explorer Edition from Amazon.com seven thousand years ago, I’ve never had the opportunity to run or play any games with it. So, this was my first time rolling dice for Savage Worlds. After picking Jerry up at his hotel, we then headed back to Pandan Indah to Irfan’s school extraction. Then, we had lunch at Galaxy Ampang where many different types of nasi goreng died for us. In the meantime, we regaled each other with a myriad of gaming war stories. And then it’s off to the dinner table at home for some gaming. The scenario is titled New Year’s Day. It’s close to midnight on […]

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Covert Ops Map

BareBones Covert Ops Map

Here’s a thumbnail of a map I drew for DwD Studios‘ BareBones Covert Ops RPG. Ultimately S.E.C.T.O.R. base locations will populate this chart. What is S.E.C.T.O.R., you ask? I have no idea yet. Look for the upcoming book which should be released later this year.

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Pistol with bayonet

Balneum Blue: Gnatha Weapons

I drew some aquatic biotech ranged weapons for a project for Star Frontiersman magazine. These are biotech gear created by an alien species called the Gnatha. These are not merely tools, but they are living, breathing organisms! These creatures can swim on their own accord, while the Gnatha use them to throw deadly projectiles at enemies. Presumably the Gnatha created these living weapons  by genetically altering and splicing together different species of octopus, jellyfish, molluscs and even corals.

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EOTE Beginner Game

Paper Minis: Edge of the Empire Beginner Game

So, since Star Wars Edge of the Empire role playing game core rulebook will be delayed another couple of months, many early adopters of the game will still be using the Beta rulebook and the Beginner Game boxed set to run their adventures. As previously stated, the boxed set has four pregenerated character folios and two free for download character folios from the Fantasy Flight Games website. Download the paper miniature characters for the four from the Beginner Game (41-VEX, Lowhhrick, Oskara and Pash) and the two from the website (Mathus and Sasha) at the link below. Click on the thumbnail of Mathus the technician and Oskara the bounty hunter on the right to view the full pdf sheet. You can use them If you’re running the Beginner Game and/or using the downloadable folios for any adventure and/or just looking for general Star Wars paper minis for your own use […]

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Mention Tiree to Mar Barezz and he'll flip his cookies and potatoes

GOKL Escapes The Insurmountable Ned

Modesty Blazing 02 Escaping The Insurmountable Ned *** Earlier today I ran Star Wars Edge of the Empire for GOKL for the second time, using the Beginner Game truncated rules and extra stuff found on the internet. Everyone was given 10 XPs from the previous session with an option to advance their characters. Qillian Ryn the Trianii and Darter Kel the Zeltron advanced their characters. 41-VEX the manumitted colonist droid saved his XPs for later. A Brief Prologue A brief prologue was run to account for the absence players of Lowhhrick, Oskara and Nora. The commandeered Corellian YT-1300 light freighter Krayt Fang landed on a small oceanside shadowport on Rodia. Actually before landing, they kicked the ousted slaver captain Trex out into the humid Rodian swamps a hundred klicks from nowhere. An outlaw tech would be able to install a new BoSS transponder on their ship, but only for 10,000 […]

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Eurovision time

Night’s Black Agents: The Eurovision Job Ends

And thus ends the Eurovision Song Contest Job where the company investigates a white supremacist terror group in Malmö, Sweden. This arc of the game took four sessions and in the final session, things go south for the group and then some. A game campaign recap can be found here, followed by descriptions of certain scenes that led us to the finale. A thematic change in the game is that the players discovered that the Lampir-blood boosted terrorists were not merely from a fringe group, but part of the conspiracy that led to the top levels of the Försvarsdepartementet (Ministry of Defence), who was trying to bring down the Socialdepartementet (Ministry of Health and Social Services) who had become our allies in Sweden. Therefore, we were not just running our operation in neutral territory, but in a country that was steadily becoming an enemy territory. The party split up between […]

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Squeak, Claire and Dutch

SWAG: Squeak, Claire and Dutch

I love it when children play RPGs. Their young imagination make any game soar. If there’s any way to help introverted children to help express themselves more and be better speakers, I would always recommend parents to run tabletop RPGs for them. This was why I immediately took this request on the Star Wars Artists’ Guild, which was requested by Juanflaco. He gamemastered a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG game for his children, ages 12, 9 and 7. The 12-year-old plays Claire, the young teenager on the run from Tatooine. The 7-year-old plays R2-79 a.k.a. “Squeak”, Claire’s astromech droid. The 9-year-old plays Dutch an amnesiac former Clone pilot who has to protect the two. Click here for the forum request. Click here for the SWAG art post. Click here for a larger image at DeviantArt.

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Jake's player

BareBones Fantasy: The TableTop Day Session

For International TableTop Day, I thought I’d run another a continuation of BareBones Fantasy RPG campaign for Irfan. Thus, Irfan’s Jake Hastur the halfling wizard and my GM-run NPC Finn Riverwyld the warrior-scholar go once more unto the breach in the city of Kingsbridge in the Keranak Kingdoms. The game began at approximately 1000 hours local time on Saturday morning (+8 hours UTC) and we stopped for lunch at 1200 hours. We thought we could continue later at night, maybe after dinner, but it was not meant to be. We will continue tomorrow. Session One: Journey to Netharak Island BareBones Fantasy uses the d00 percentile system, with percentile Ability and Skill rolls, while damages are sum of d10 rolls. Before we began, Finn bought a new longsword. Jake desired a spear, so Finn gave him his own which he had not enough Warrior (melee) skill to wield properly. Irfan spent […]

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