Dungeoneering Game Blog: Midnight and Mistborn

Jun 3, 2020

Midnight and Mistborn

16 years ago I painted covers for the Midnight role playing game by Fantasy Flight Games, and even won a Silver Ennie for the core book cover. At the time I didn't appreciate how important it was to the company. To me it was just another commission I was happy to work on. But the feedback kept coming in and the revisions and all the push back got harder and harder to work on and it slowly donned on me this was serious business.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy book that comes up regularly on recommended reading lists. I finally got around to reading it last year.

What a great book.

What does it have to do with Midnight? As it turns out the premise of both Mistborn and Midnight is essentially the same: what if in The Lord of the Rings the Darklord won? The world is repressed under the might of his forces. The characters are struggling under an oppressive regime.

The details work out quite differently. While I do have a certain fondness for Midnight, I have to hand it to Brandon Sanderson for his excellent authorship of Mistborn. In particular he created one of the most compelling magic systems in a fantasy world.

Still, that is no knock on Midnight. It is a very well realized world, plays with some fantastic dark and evocative themes, and is quite well written, designed, and produced. If you can get a copy I highly recommend it.

These are the three books I did the covers for, and I also drew almost exclusively all the interior illustrations of the first edition core rule book. I didn't know it or appreciate it enough at the time, but it was an honor to get to work on it.