Apr 20, 2018

Norse Bestiary Alphabet

It's been another one of those dry spells on this blog. I've been juggling several projects all at different stages. A couple of the OSR things I have in the works are very close to being ready and they will be getting some sneak previews here quite soon.

Right now I want so show you a little project I did in January and recently compiled into a book and published. It probably falls well within the interest of readers of this blog. A long time passion of mine has been Norse mythology and I've always wanted to do some projects with that theme. Then an idea struck me and I started a project called Valkyria: Shield Maidens of Asgard. It is coming along quite nicely and if you follow my Instagram you might have seen a few images from it. In the course of research I did a little art challenge where I drew a creature from Norse mythology for each letter of the alphabet and posted it each day. The images struck a chord with some people and I was urged to make a book. I'm happy to announce it is available on my Gumroad store. It's a charming little book full of factoids and (I hope) cool art.


If this is something you might want check it out at the link below:
https://gumroad.com/thomden


Apr 5, 2018

Hawkmoor Map Work in Progress

I've been trying to draw the Hawkmoor map in a "Tolkienesque" style. This is my second attempt.
There are 10 zones on the map. The corner zones are Dungeons (you can see the one classic "Skull cave" in the top right), the side zones are wilderness. The middle is for the village of Hammlette. Just above the village is an area to put Fate cards which are drawn each turn the party is in the village and usually give some slight advantage or bonus, but occasionally increase the Doom. Doom is a measure of power of the forces of Chaos the party is contending against. That's how the game currently plays anyways.

I wasn't satisfied with how the Skull Cave came out, so redrew it on a separate sheet. It looks much better, but didn't match well with the rest of the map when I tried to stitch them together in Photoshop. So I'm considering just redrawing the whole map again.


The game is making progress little by little. Playtime is still a little too long, trying to crunch it down to under 90 minutes without losing any of the flavor or fun. I'll post and share more as I complete the components.