anewbiegm

A bunch of stuff I've seen and said.

[thewenglishwarlock]

Loooook at this little guuuuy! I love this scultp so much!

Wizard just here for the course credit

[oldschoolfrp]

Legendary fantasy artist John Blanche has died. He is known mostly for his long association with Games Workshop, where he served as art director and created many of the iconic images that shaped the Warhammer and 40K worlds. He was capable of working in diverse styles, but much of his art and his own creative miniature conversions made his name synonymous with the "grimdark" aesthetic, mixing elements of moody gothic architecture and body horror with a limited color palette.

He also contributed to GW's UK edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Fighting Fantasy and Sorcery! books, and other books and album covers. Wombat Games recently published an authorised biography, Blanche: The Rise of Grimdark. A skirmish game, John Blanche's En Garde, is in development with a setting and visual style based on his art.

[looceyloo]

couple of recent style experiments, having a lot of fun with bright colours and chunky shapes! this is a lil closer to how i used to draw, way back when, and it's been very freeing to go back to something more stylized!

The first one is Noelani, for mustachebabs.com on bsky. The second one is Vojka Marinova, for tyrenias.bsky.social on bsky

[thewenglishwarlock]

Finished this knight from the city of ash box, tried a cleaner version of NMM which I hadn't done as much of!

[wh40kartwork]

The War In Heaven

by Alex Cristi

[artstationable]

Nia Kovalevski

Illustrator at Magic the Gathering, Fantasy Flight Games

artstation instagram niakovalevski linkedin

More here

[oldschoolfrp]

Swords & Sorcery, The Midas Adventure Concept No 1, adventure for Spectrum 48K by Mike Simpson with Roger Pearse box art (Personal Software Services, 1985)

[vintagerpg]

Gadzooks, this is The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996) and what a mess!

It’s not Bruce Cordell’s fault, really. This scenario was commissioned as a showcase for the 2.5E Player’s Option Rules (Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers and Spells & Magic) and it’s a compelling argument to never use them. Amusingly, the villain is a wizard corrupted by outré forces, expressed by the fact that his spellcasting uses magic points. I don’t think that’s intended as commentary, but I’m taking it as such anyway. Thankfully, all this stuff is optional and can be completely ignored. It takes up a ton of space, though.

Without all that bunk, you’ve got a pretty solid, lengthy and icky dungeon crawl. The idea is that the titular gates only open once a generation when a particular comet is in the sky. The father of one of the player characters went in 27 years ago and never came out, so, well, go and get him. The outer reaches are a pretty standard, if very dangerous, slice of the Underdark populated primarily by duergar. Deeper, the party finds horrors from the Far Realm have seeped in. In fact, this is the first published appearance of the Far Realm and some of its nasty, Lovecraftian inhabitants. It would go on to become a key locale in later D&D editions, and particularly for the Eberron setting. Aside from extradimensional monsters, there’s some more conventional horrible stuff in dungeon as well. I particularly dislike [complimentary] the fountain, which Arnie Swekel illustrated just to drive home how disturbing it is.

Swekel was a good choice of artist for this, he is like a latter-day Russ Nicholson who excels at illustrating player character types in their death throes without making it too disturbing. The Jeff Easley cover ties the action to the Player’s Option books, but feels somewhat out of step for the more horror-oriented tone inside.

In a weird bit of packaging design, the adventure book came packaged in an identically fronted file folder, which contained counters and a battle map as well. My second-hand copy was missing those, but the folder…is unusual! A couple of the later Planescape modules had a similar folder, but I don’t know of any TSR products that were configured quite like this.

[wh40kartwork]

Hereteks

by Olivier Dubard

[thewenglishwarlock]

Little skaven buddy

[wh40kartwork]

Against All Odds

by Eddy González Dávila

[grace-sketches]

Managed to finish this before the new year thankfully. Lots of stuff going on at work again and next year is going to be even more busy than this year.

Pretty happy with how this came out. Its close to what I envisioned in my head which is rare. Thought the clouds would be the hardest part but actually the snakes on the frame were what really kicked my butt.

[thewenglishwarlock]

She's actually just keeping snacks in the end of the mask!

[thewenglishwarlock]

A corpse grinder necromunda lad

[vintagerpg]

Lords of the Expanse (1997) box set was an ambitious attempt to do something different with the Star Wars RPG. I would have probably been head-over-heels in love with this if I had it in ’97 or the last time I was running SW around ’99 (which, I should note, included a couple sessions on a world inspired by The Three Musketeers). Now, though, I’m a little less impressed for reasons I will get into.

The basic idea is that the Tapani sector is a semi-autonomous Imperial holding administrated by ancient noble houses who all hate each other. They have house stormtroopers and some of them duel with lightsabers despite not being Jedi (I really like that). If I had to liken it to something historical, I’d probably refer to the rivalries of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance period and the way the Vatican and the Holy Roman Emperor complicated matters. I would not be surprised if someone informed me this historical period was on Frank Herbert’s mind to some extent when he was writing Dune. Or on Marc Millar’s when he laid out the noble houses of Traveller’s empire. Same again for the brains behind Empire of the Fading Suns.

Does the black and white world of Star Wars work with this sudden shift to the intrigues of gray? I tend to think Star Wars is more plastic than folks are generally willing to entertain. I think you can run Lords of the Expanse and wind up with some excellent Star Wars flavored game memories. In 2025, though, I fear that such an endeavor would naturally mix not Dune, nor Traveller, nor Fading Suns vibes, but rather Game of Thrones. I can’t handle that at all. But maybe you could?

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

The Craftworlds by AlteyaArt

[thewenglishwarlock]

Boarbarian!