#evil hat

[tshortik]

An illustration I made for the third issue of HORIZONS by Wildmage Press. It's showing a new location for the dystopian-mystery-battle-royale ttrpg Deathmatch Island.

[wyllora]

shoot the messenger

@spacediscoverer 's party dragon jester for Monster of the Week!

from artfight (for heartfighters) last year!

[the-last-teabender]

Girl by Moonlight: A DMing Check-In

The blog of author and journalist Kara Dennison. Books, critical essays, observations, and more.

It's been about three months since I last checked in with myself on GMing. I'm still enjoying it, my players are still awesome, and the impostor syndrome still hasn't gone away.

But I have had some new experiences when it comes to handling (friendly) player disputes, and I've also spotted some weaknesses in how I plan sessions that I can potentially fix.

It is all a bit like writing, when you come down to it - just don't have an editing phase before everyone sees it. Which is nerve-wracking. Anyway, check out my blog for more thoughts, I suppose.

[airborneham]

New Game Lab post! Today I discuss Deathmatch Island from Old Dog Games and Evil Hat, and how the "competitive" genre of TTRPGs gives a new twist to the play-to-lose style of storytelling games that I love. Check it out on my Substack Now!

[thryth-gaming]

An Expert's Haven

The Expert has spent a long time accumulating knowledge that they have honed into a weapon. They know things others don't and they understanding the consequences of reckless use of supernatural abilities better than most. The locus of all this expertise can be found in an Expert's Haven.

The options in the core book cover a lot of bases, but in the new books we decided to expand upon this haven by adding some options that are more oriented to sci-fi games featuring alien invaders and infiltrators, but also fill out some options just fill out some gaps in the original set.

Sadio Khouri - The Expert

Charm -1

Cool +1

Sharp +2

Tough +1

Weird +0

Basic Weird Move: Weird Science

Haven: Supercomputer, Lore Library, Guardian (a small dragon)

Moves: Preparedness, Often Right

Gear: Magical Dagger (2-Harm Hand Magic), Shotgun (3-Harm Close Messy Loud), Juju Bag (1-Harm Close Magic), Mysterious jet-black kitsune mask (it's cold to the touch)

An engineer turned artificer who has begun to craft bits of tech infused with magic alongside more traditional tech and magical talismans. Her creations are strong but take more time to build than a traditional spellcaster. At some point she picked up a friendship with Yeraguin, a small dragon that has taken up residence in her home to protect it from intruders.

Check out the new books here!

Slayers Survival Kit and Hunter's Journal

Two new Monster of the Week books to equip your Hunters with everything they need.

[dailydungeondelves]

I recently did a buch of simple portrait commissions for Tavernaut's youtube actual play of Girl By Moonlight - ChronoBloom! I was super happy to work on this because magical girls are my jam!! Look at all these cuties! The characters are featured in their mundane and transcended forms.

You can see the artwork on the overlays live, or catch up with the series here.

(You can also check out my commission info here)

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGCovers Week Eleven Agon John Harper (2020)

I didn’t mention this earlier when I listed Blades in the Dark, but I honestly hadn’t realized that Harper had done all of the art and graphic design for that. I’m actually stunned now that I know he did the amazing work on this volume too. I love how iconic this cover is. And again part of that comes from the super smart design of the logo. The font here is thinner, echoing the lines of curl work on the helmet image above. It blazes out– it smartly has the brightest point of the orange there at the top of the G & O, making it seem like a centerpoint of the fire happening behind the black. 

The whole image looks like a stencil against a fire– maybe a campfire in the night, which would explain the greens/teal to the left hand side. It’s not exactly chiaroscuro (a word I had to look up), but it's something close to that. The shape of the helmet emerges from the figurative design lines. They criss-cross in different directions. On the right, the color dominates over the black, on the left it is more inverted with dominant black– but it is not symmetrical. Though the shape of the helmet as a whole feels even, it is unbalanced in several ways. 

The colors on the top two thirds create the illusion of lighting. I’ve been painting a look of miniatures recently, using zenithal techniques to work more with hue and shadow. It looks effortless here. 

And I don’t know why, but the fact that the crest of the helm seems to bleed off the top of the cover feels dynamite. That's one of my favorites. And that’s even before we get inside and look at Harper’s absolutely amazing images for each of the islands. I could spend a week just talking about those. I enjoyed Agon when I ran it and every time I look at the book again, it is the imagery and cover that create a burning desire in me to play it again.

[the-gabardine-fox]

Costume design for a friend's character, Bianca, using procreate.