Back in 2014, I made these artwork for a charity project in the tabletop RPG community: Double Feature Charity Module: Erik Jensen’s Bonespur Glacier and Jason Paul McCartan’s The Tomb of Bashyr. It was published by InfiniBadger Press.The two adventures in the book was designed to be used with OSRIC rules, but with modification, it can be played with any old school D&D edition. I helped draw some art for Bonespur Glacier that took place in the ice. Five of them can be found below. Click here to grab it from DriveThruRPG.
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Theatre Arts Class On Stage
Narrator: Previously, on Hishgraphics blog… After seven weeks, on and off my co-curricular class has come to an end. We ended the class by running a stage play presentation just like the last time I ran this class. At first, the students limbered up, rehearsed their lines and planned their staging while still trying to wake up at 8am. Everyone warmed up fast. Two groups had to rehearse their staging more than the third group as they had requested permission to set up their props, backdrops and rehearse the previous night. The secondary stage has a bad spot where many a student slipped and fell. But the student above was on the platform because the script called for it. Wait till you see the results of the third group’s make-up work further down this article. Gear and Shaft presents Rumpelstiltskin The troupe that named itself Gear and Shaft started the […]
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Star Wars RPG 30 Year Anniversary
Five years ago I wrote this article. Today, it’s time for a new anniversary image based on the game session I ran yesterday. Note: Although the upper image above was taken in 1989 it was not of our first game. I believe it was of the session in the same campaign entitled “The Yesterday Man” which some day I will write about.
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SWD6: Community Rejuvenation Jailbreak
Episode 01 Community Rejuvenation Jailbreak Last night, I ran my 30th anniversary Star Wars RPG session, as in April 2019 is the 30 years to the month (can’t remember the date) of the first time I GMed my first game. I think. I don’t really recall the date. According to the note Atok wrote on the book, I received in late April. 30 years ago, after reading the rules, I corralled my first player: Sila. We played a simple scenario then, set on a space station orbiting Mon Calamari 30 years later, she returned to play via Skype whilst living on another continent. Also attending was Irfan (who’s been playing for some years now) and Alya (who’s playing for the first time). At this point little Rafe was an observer when he was in the vicinity. We began a brand new campaign, which we hoped would continue over time… Dramatis […]
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Many Machines on IX
THIS CHRISTMAS. The teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode IX dropped during Star Wars Celebration Chicago very late into Friday night for me. I was sleepy, but very ready for it.
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Irfan Camps Out at Timah Tasoh
From last Friday to last Sunday, Irfan attended a uniformed bodies co-curricular camp at the Timah Tasoh camp. Each uniformed body from his school sent 10 personnel to take part in the programme. He was one of ten Scouts from his troop to attend. After the camp, Irfan told me there were physical and mental activities that he enjoyed participating in. Furthermore, he got to sleep in a tent with his buddies. Here are pictures of us sending him to the camp, and then picking him up after. However there was no photos of his activities as phones were not allowed during camp.
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Aliens Without Number
I met the acquaintance of one Nik May in my time on Google Plus. Recently he commissioned me to draw three alien species for his Stars Without Number role-playing game campaign. Here are the three creatures for your viewing pleasure, made with Krita and cleaned up in GIMP:
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Goodbye Google Plus
G+, You will be missed. Hundreds of friendships blossomed over there. Many carried over to other social networks. Once I attended Google’s gMalaysia Conference. There, I spoke a bit on Google Plus as the primary platform for my freelance illustration work. Here are some of my old G+ entries just for kicks.
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Weekend Food at March’s End
It all began on Saturday evening when we headed to Kuala Perlis very close to the first place where we stayed overnight upon travelling to Perlis as a family. Before, the premises only sold fresh belacan. Since then, the owners have opened a restaurant proper where we discovered kerabu maggi that was perfect to our taste; and cheap too. Also, we ordered some deserts as can be seen below. Sunday evening, we headed for Arau where we discovered a restaurant that sold chicken chop for less than RM 4! Irfan ordered the cheese wedges. Needless to say we would be returning here next month.
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ART: Skip Junkies Meat Runners
Last couple of months I was commissioned to create several artwork for Chris Mennell’s science fiction role-playing game project Skip Junkies Meat Runners. Here are three of the illustrations I produced:
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DnD: Five Sessions in Five Classes
Another first for me this entire week is the fact that I ran RPG sessions for every one of my English classes, using Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. The students used Level 2 pre-generated characters downloaded from the DnD official site. I wish I was able to plan for more weeks, using the game to improve their speaking and writing skills, but c’est la vie. Here are capsule actual play write ups for each session that I ran. The names and details of the characters in each session can be read in the accompanying photos. The theme of the week was Arts and Culture. NOTE: The students who wrote these play reports speak nor write English as a first language. They did the best they could in light of other more pressing courses and assignments. Grammatical and spelling errors have been left in the text for research purposes, so do […]
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Cloudscape in the Wing Mirror
I headed home from class as the red-orange glow of dusk slowly crept across the land. I headed west. The sun was behind me. There was a traffic light stop. Quickly, I took a photo of the view I saw in the car’s wing mirror. I was impressed that the photo turned out almost as spectacular as the real thing. The traffic lights turned green, and I continued home.
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A Meeting With A Poet Laureate
Another thing I would have never thought I would ever do if I were still back in KL was to meet A Samad Said, the national laureate, who was in town because of Perlis Book Festival 2019. The Centre for International Languages Bahasa Melayu team organised a talk with the renowned writer and poet. Because I had no classes at the time, I headed to the library auditorium to attend the talk. I am glad to know that Mr. A Samad Said has the same positive thoughts about today’s youth as I do. Here are some photos of the event:
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Students in the Amphitheatre
After two semesters absent, English Theatre Arts has been offered as a UniMAP co-curricular course once again. Like before, I am the course teacher. But unlike before, instead of less than 15 students I now have to handle 40 students. I returned to my course notes to adapt it for many. Thankfully, the students are very proactive and hands on with the course. Three groups of theatre troupes were formed. Each group will be organise a proper theatre performance at the end of the course, like the last time I taught this course. This includes writing their own play. For the first week, I took the trainees to task. And they performed magnificently in their own groups. Each troupe were able to quickly produce plays with various levels of amusement, comedy and pathos. (Someone was stabbed!) There was a problem with the air-conditioning system our hall, so we all relocated […]
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The Laundry: Getting Ahead of Themselves
Episode 3 Getting Ahead of Themselves Last time on The Laundry, Team Bunga Tahi Ayam was sent to Ulu Yam to look for the missing Team Bunga Kemboja of Capital Laundry Services agents. Their de facto field supervisor Pn. Izani escorted them in their car while micromanaging them loudly and obnoxiously. The trail of the agents lead them to the kedai runcit of En. Sabri Mat Hassan where a pair of undead armed with automatic weapons attacked them. Later, they discovered the house of En. Saad Ibrahim, a sculptor who works with wood. One of his sculptures had been possessed by an extradimensional entity and killed Team Bunga Kemboja leader Keith Yong. It seemed like this was caused by occult pages of a book that was found all over the countryside. The conclusion of the encounter with the possessed wooden sculpture was a blast… Dramatis Personae Azizah a.k.a. Jijah (Yuzi) […]
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DnD: Winter at Stonehaven
We have visitors this week. The language educators from Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University, Thailand are on a three-day working visit of Universiti Malaysia Perlis. There are a number of activities that the Centre for International Languages scheduled from them. One of the activities is a tabletop role-playing game session. I was given a table to set up books, dice, maps and paper miniatures for a mini-exhibition. Before me, my colleague Yuzy (who plays the teenage spy Jijah in our The Laundry (Malaysia) RPG campaign) ran an ice-breaking session and demonstrated how online learning tools like Quizziz and Kahoot were run in class. After Yuzy’s activities were done, I began my segment with a short slide presentation. The presentation summarised what a tabletop role-playing game is, what games exist in the market and how it could benefit language learning, especially in an ESL environment. Not to mention how it could improve […]
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