[Art] Campaigns Old and New

[jordangreywolf]

Tabia, the Desert Trekker
I've been delving through some salvaged old hard drives, and happened across a few scans of artwork from my old "Akoma" campaign and my horrible attempts at writing a supplement for the "Ironclaw" RPG setting. (I did quite a bit of "research," and I think I came up with a fairly robust setting, but my editing was atrocious, and the working document was bulked up with a bunch of trivial junk that should have been left out. I cannot fault Rafferty for rejecting it. Not that it was actually formally rejected or anything. Just dead silence.
Yeah, I guess it was THAT BAD.)

Anyway, this was back when I actually did drawings and stuff. This is one of the fennecs (they seemed to be popular for some reason) from our playtest campaign, who rode a giant scorpion. (In Ironclaw, all the conventional modern mammals -- and quite a few reptiles and birds, it would seem, circa Jadeclaw -- are anthropomorphized, so in order to fill the "beast" role, we need lots of dinosaurs ... or, for that matter, giant bugs. Cheese and milk are the foodstuffs of children or barbarians, I suppose, and anyone wearing fur might as well be adorned in skulls. It requires a bit of care when trying to come up with "Earth-analogs" for some things.)


Zabu the Battle-Dancer

This was a ringtail from a pseudo-Egyptian/Nubian land on the north side of Akoma, played (briefly) by Gwendel. This character had absurdly high athletics/agility/acrobatics, and could practically dance over the tops of enemies, causing chaos.


Kashka the Story-Teller
Another fennec -- this one was a traveling storyteller who would earn a living by spreading tales form one community to the next (in exchange for room/board and maybe a little extra for the road), and delivering messages. Basically, a charisma/"face" type character.

---

Fish out of Water

And then, for a completely DIFFERENT setting (but still with anthropomorphic animals and other things in it), here's a "fish out of water" doodle I drew while sitting at a table on the floats at the Waterfront in Disney Springs. "Waiter, might I have a refill?"

It was a nice day, and we managed to get a small table on one of the bobbing floats out lake-side at the Waterfront restaurant. It was busy, service was slow, and I was out of tea, with no waiter getting close enough or looking in my direction for me to wave down. Somehow that led to this, because I was trying to think of doodles to draw for a revamp of the old Wonderland No More rules. (KLA finally got rights back to the setting, and I'm tasked with updating it to the new SWADE rules, plus doing a bit of cleanup. Some of our setting rules were either absorbed into Savage Worlds or otherwise rendered moot, so that freed up some space in the book -- presuming we're going for the same page count -- for a few more illustrations or other content.)


Lady Darkhorse at the Caucus Race Grounds
An NPC from an online Wonderland No More campaign from ages ago.


Slithy Tove Games
A doodle I drew for "Slithy Tove Games" -- since apparently we need a "company name" in order to have a license with the Savage Worlds folks.

Comments

[rowyn]

Ooh so THAT'S what a slithy tove looks like!

The "fish out of water" is absolutely a charmer. :D And that pic of the fennec on the scorpion is breathtaking, I love how striking the inks for it are.

[jordangreywolf]

Well, officially, a slithy tove is a bit of badger, a bit of lizard (note the tail and hindclaws in particular), and corkscrew (the nose of course).

The fennec-on-scorpion pic was originally done in ink -- that is, a combination of "crowquill" pen and brush. I had a bamboo brush -- possibly still do SOMEWHERE but I don't know where -- that I'd used to dip into a sealable ink pot, but that limited my possible working space to having ready access to a *sink* to promptly and thoroughly wash the brush out. (And, I also had to have a blotter behind the picture, as ink might seep through the cardstock.) I had a tendency to "paint in" an awful lot of solid areas of black when working with the brush, since it was easy to do so, but it had a nasty side-effect of bowing the paper. When I got around to scanning things, the black areas wouldn't necessarily appear as uniformly black as I'd like, so a bit of digital touch-up was always necessary. ("Level-adjustment" in Photoshop made that a whole lot easier, eventually.)

[tuftears]

Great art, I purrticularly like the inset dark desert night backdrop for Tabia, the lively acrobatics of Zabu, and Lady Darkhorse reminds me of those old-time pictures that Trader Joe's sticks into their flyers with those neat, sharp lines.