New Old School Games & Art
When the Eldritch Lords stole magic from the Elves, they built mysterious towers of learning all across the lands, usually over a powerful nexus of arcane energy. These towers would attract acolytes desiring to learn the forbidden arts. In time as the Eldritch Lords passed away, or were hunted down for their blasphemy, the towers became abandoned. Still protected by powerful enchantments they are nearly impossible to penetrate, but some few may still contain great treasures.
Mysterious ancient decaying ruins uncovered in the deep desert. What lurks below?
I'm late to the party here, but I've been diving into the outstanding Threshold Fanzine. An homage to the classic "known world" Mystara. This setting is one of the little forgotten (by WotC) gems of old TSR. It's a kitchen sink fantasy world, perfect for the wahoo fantasy style of D&D in the 80's.
The authors recently reworked the first few issues so that they'd be very POD friendly if you wanted to get it printed out at a service like Lulu or your local copy shop.
I've listened to The Silmarillion on audiobook more times than I can count, so when they diverge from canon it grates on me. Still, I'm going to be optimistic and hope for the best.
Update: turns out Amazon doesn't have the rights to The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales. So this is effectively fan fiction. My concerns about them straying from the novels are allayed. It doesn't matter.
Terror on the Prairie, starring Gina Carano, follows a pioneering family in a newly built farm which is being attacked and they must fight against the gang of outlaws that are terrorizing them.
Another Valkyrie with no stats yet. I'm deep in Gunslinger, statting out Strange Science devices and working on the Adventure Hooks section. More posts to come soon on that. In the meantime, here's a drawing for you on this Thorsday.
A while back I was reminded of one of my favorite Frank Frazetta fantasy illustrations and as I recall this may have been one of the very first I saw back in my youth before I knew anything about Frazetta or fantasy art in general. It is a striking piece full of energy and strong eye catching color. It was published in 1964 which was just at the dawn of Frazetta's transformation from one of the best draftsman and inkers to becoming the legendary master of fantasy illustration. So he hadn't quite reached the heights of his fame yet and his artwork was not always returned to him by the publisher. As far as I know the original was long lost which is why we don't see any high resolution reproductions of it anywhere. It is sad to think it may be collecting dust in some forgotten attic or worse tossed away after being photographed for the press. Illustration originals just weren't that valued back then.
After hearing a relatively positive review of the book, and wanting to get a good copy of my own I tracked down a well preserved used one rated as "very good". When it came in I wasn't disappointed, it certainly has wear on the edges but the cover is clean and in very good shape. So naturally I scanned it in at very high resolution. Then using Photoshop's content-aware fill and some elbow grease to clean up stray pixels I restored the cover to the best I could get it. The quality is only limited by the limitations of the original printing.
Now whenever someone does a search for this image I hope they get this high resolution copy that as of now is the best one you will find on the net. I know because I have searched very hard for a long time to get a good image of this and there wasn't one. Until now.
Alright, all I've talked about for the past two weeks is Gunslinger. Time for something different.
The Book of Valkyries is still coming along, I draw at least a Valkyrie a day (or a Viking, or something related) regularly in my sketchbook. I haven't written up stats for this dangerous lady yet, but I do kind of like how she came out. So here it is Freya's day, enjoy this Guardian of the Northlands. Remember if you want to keep up to date on my art I try to post every week (daily if I can) on Instagram.
Howdy partners! Thank you to everyone who backed the campaign. As my first Kickstarter it was a real learning experience. My guess was that it would be around 75 or so backers, and under 100, which was about right.
"Looking good! Quite attractive in terms of layout and with much useful extra content. Some nice touches stood out when I took a quick look, like the horses getting a character sheet of their own complete with silhouette to customize."
I participated in a Q&A on the Randomworlds RPG chatroom. A lot of great questions were asked, I tried my best to answer them. You can read a log of the chat here:
