Christmas critters!

During 2014 I've managed to make a semi-sporadic series of updates to this blog that have shown various creature designs. At the same time, I've been tinkering with other ideas and sketches as they've popped into my head or have been part of on-line threads for various RPGs. I've also been messing around with new techniques, or dusting off some old ones.

The first and most recent piece of artwork is this Mindflayer:

 

This started off as a pencil drawing, then became a line drawing which was subsequently scanned and mixed with digital colours. I've not done this sort of thing for quite a while, although I used to create artwork in a broadly similar way when I was a concept artist. It's good to have a try at this again, although I am quite rusty and need more time to get more polished. Still, I think the Mindflayer is a good illustration as to how lurid D&D monsters are, based on the description given in the 1E Monster Manual. If I get the chance I'd like to create some more D&D themed artwork. Earlier in the year I created this image of a troll:

  

This came out fairly well, although there seems to always be a fine line where a troll either looks scary or is just some weird version of Marge Simpson. I'll let you be the judge of which side of that line the above image lies. Another basic sketch shows a group of adventurers battling with orcs:

And finally, here's a more developed drawing of a goblin-like chieftan:

This came out quite well, although I think various details about the helmet decorations need reworking.

Getting back to the subject of digitally-coloured drawings, before I started on the Mindflayer I had a practice run with a creature I designed many years ago for a Star Frontiers adventure I'd created:

This is an example of the penguin-sized creatures that were living on a remote planet just outside the Frontier. This seemed to be the source of odd energy readings that could not have been created by their Stone Age culture. And speaking of Star Frontiers (incidentally, one of my favourite RPGs), here are some more sketches of aliens:

The above shows some conceptual sketches of a race called the Jakar, the best description of which would be tall bipedal bovine or bull-like creatures.

These sketches depict the Thyrann - pretty much upright lizards/komodo dragons. Both the Jakar and the Thyran were developed during discussions over at the Starfrontiers.us site. Back in January I was doodling various images of Sathar (the main baddies of Star Frontiers), which is always fun:

I've also been working on machines as well as creatures. There's this design for a prison ship for Star Frontiers:

 

And, last but not least, a pencil and 3D sketch of a light attack tilt-prop for the 2300AD RPG:

I'll hopefully add more details about this last design to my blog in 2015!

Trawling for treasure on Ebay

I'm currently in the process of moving out of London (I've been here for 20 years and I think that's enough), hence the lack of blog activity. Anyway, despite the stresses and strains that moving house involves, I've recently been able to track down and acquire various RPG-related goodies on Ebay. This is something I do every once in a while when the idea pops into my head, as there's various things I used to own and would like to own again, or couldn't find at some earlier point in time.

So, here's the result of the latest trawl:

A few of these things were new to me, such as the Tunnels & Trolls books. These are UK reprints published by Corgi in 1986, one of which is a rulebook for the game itself and the other is Fighting Fantasy/Choose Your Own Adventure-type book. It was only recently that I found out that there was a range of miniatures for Star Frontiers, and it was great to actually find one of the box sets. Here are a few pics of what's inside:

The level of detail on these is rather good, and it's particularly nice to see a Sathar miniature. Of note is a detail on the back of the box:

For some reason, the Yazirian figures have been labelled as 'Yazarian' (along with a TM) which seems an odd little mistake and one wonders why TSR trademarked this typo.

As for the rest of the above haul, TMNT and CyberSpace were always fun games to referee, although I don't think that I got as much mileage out of them as RPGs as I wanted to. As for the Palladium Book of Contemporary Weapons, this seemed to be a little rare back in the late '80s when we played TMNT. Maybe that was just because of a lack of stockists at the time, but it was nice to finally acquire a copy. It's an interesting book as far as being a system for the Palladium RPGs (as it bases potential damage of any given weapon on the calibre and type of bullet fired) and I'd like to see how this would work in-game.

One very recent acquisition was this '80s-era Citadel Miniatures Dwarf fighter:

When I was first introduced to D&D (as detailed in an earlier blog post) I was slightly obsessed with acquiring miniatures, despite the fact that I lacked the necessary cash to fund that obsession. Nevertheless, the various dwarves made by Citadel stood out for me, and so the above example was the first one I bought. I then decided to create my first D&D character based on his gear, and thus was born Mystichi Argonshire. Seeing the miniature again was a real Proustian moment - it immediately transported me back to my 13-year old self, which was a rather strange but enjoyable experience.

Planet of the Tapes...

Ever found yourself twiddling your thumbs idly and asking yourself 'I wonder what it'd be like to be a fly on the wall during a 1980s RPG play session?'. Following on from that, perhaps you'd ask 'I wonder what it'd be like to hear such a thing done badly by a bunch of 14 to 17 year old geeks...?' Well, question yourself no longer.

One of my first posts in the blogsphere described the people I played RPGs with when first introduced to it all back in the early '80s. Various gaming sessions were going on involving me or these guys, and every once in a while we'd tape the whole mess as it unfolded. Much of the time, our playing style and the banter that ensued left much to be desired. The sessions where we actually got something done and were less frivolous in our approach never seemed to end up on tape.

Awhile back I put some snippets on-line so that these guys (all now sort of grown up) could hear them. They're extracts from around 7 hours' worth of taped sessions featuring RPGs such as AD&D, Star Frontiers, Living Steel and Tales of the Floating Vagabond. Vagabond was always run as a drinking game - not that you can really tell, because we don't sound any more incoherent than usual.

Anyway, the clips can be heard on Soundcloud. Award yourself some brownie points for (a) not being offended by the expletives/stupid comments/offences against the art of role-playing, and (b) being able to understand anything we're saying due to our Somerset accents. Here's a brief outline of what each one features:

The Village of... er... - in which our heroes try to gain access to a village (which may or may not have a name/walls/ramparts/etc), quibble over descriptive details, and probably talk too much about half-orcs...

Cheese - in which our heroes completely fail to engage with the plot due to the distractions of food and an inebriated elf...

Rob Dies - in which our heroes dare to question the authority of the referee (yours truly) after Rob's character is killed. Mind you, Rob tended to lose a character during every session. And, of course, I'm right and they're wrong...

The Cantina Song - in which a classic Star Wars tune is ruined by people pretending to be characters from the film, and from Scooby Doo...

The Big Gun - in which our heroes really are probably past the point of being able to operate heavy machinery...

The sound quality is a bit patchy - but then again, so is our role-playing. 

New issue of Frontier Explorer

Issue 4 of Frontier Explorer - a fanzine for the Star Frontiers RPG - has just been released.

Forwards to something...

By the time I finished secondary school in 1985, our RPG obsession was in full swing. Our group now consisted of me, my brother (Sime), my cousin (Mr Cheeks) and some of my brother's friends. My brother and I pooled some money together to buy Star Frontiers, which remains one of my favourite RPGs, and as a group we played that a great deal for many years. Some of us had played Car Wars for a while in 1983, which is another good game, but me and my brother thought the RPG element was missing (we weren't aware of GURPS). We started to design our own version of CW-style game, originally called Freeway, which also had aliens in it called Slatzians. I can't remember why. When the Freeway Fighter Fighting Fantasy book came out, I changed the name of the game to Motormania, and also ditched the sci-fi elements. I still have some of the tables and a few characters, all carefully written up on file paper. We played that quite a lot too, and managed to test and include rules for helicopters and aircraft. This taught me a great deal about designing a game, which would come in handy in my later career. We started playing Twilight:2000 and Runequest. In 1984 or so, I'd played Traveller at school with Jaffa and Wiggy, although our actual play sessions tended to be done when hanging around outside at lunchtime.

By 1986, I started at a college, and met a few other people who were interested in RPGs - the most important one being a bloke called Porky. He joined our group and, since he could drive, his poor little mushroom-coloured Ford Fiesta had to put up with a bunch of us piling into it to go from one playing location to another. As some of us lived in the same village/a nearby village, we sometimes we would walk to someone else's house to play. People would also bike 7 or 8 miles to and from wherever we had our RPG session. Mind you, this implies some sort of order and sensibility. Nothing could be further from the truth. This photo gives some idea of what I mean:

L to R: me, Locock (near my shoulder), Sime, Chick, and Mr Cheeks. Leper stands in the background. Taken by Housey, at Housey's, 1986. I think we were playing Star Frontiers.

This one is a bit more sedate:

L to R: Frannie, Mr Cheeks, me, Locock (behind me), and Porky. The eagle-eyed among you may note that there's a Commodore C16 +4 just to the right of Porky's arse. Taken by Sime, at my place (okay, my mum's place), 1986 - possibly 1987.

The photos don't include some other key players, namely Scotty and Dods. Our sessions usually had this format: arrive, unpack our stuff and sort of arrange it on a table/floor/laps, make large amounts of tea, bicker, take the piss out of each other, start to play, bicker, take the piss, argue over a rule quibble, suggest/argue that someone may have been looking at the rulebook when they shouldn't have, drink tea, eat biscuits, bicker, take the piss, etc etc. This would go around in a loop for hours. So, if we were sat down for, say, 4 hours the actual amount of time actually role-playing was... well... I'd say about an hour. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Oh, and there was always a chance that at least one of Locock's characters would die during each session (for example - one once managed to cut off his own leg and then bleed to death in a ditch). There were occasions where we would tape record our sessions - these will hopefully be digitised soon. I'd bought Call of Cthulhu and we only ever played that at night, by candlelight. To round off the effect I had a red candle melted to the top of a sheep's skull. Ooh. Scary.

We played RPGs on Saturdays and Sundays, usually all day if we could. In the intervening time, we were either thinking about or reading about RPGs - and/or computer games. That said, none of us actually owned D&D. We just knew the basic outline of the rules, etc and went from there, and would alternate who was the DM. Games we played many times: AD&D (1st Ed), Star Frontiers, Call of Cthulhu (2nd Ed), Twilight:2000, Traveller 2300AD, Runequest, and Dark Conspiracy. Games we played at least once (and sometimes only once): Talisman, Blood Bowl, Star Trek, MERP, Cyberpunk, CyberSpace, Judge Dredd, Paranoia, TMNT, Living Steel, Mechwarrior, and probably some others I've forgotten about. We also played Motormania, and Frannie invented two RPGs that we played quite often: Arena and ATK. We did sometimes buy official adventures to play, but 50% of our adventures were created, designed and run by us. I wrote a huge amount for Call of Cthulhu and Twilight:2000, for example.

This all continued on it's merry way until about 1992. We haven't played in any organised way since then, more's the pity. Our last RPG session was a drunken bout of Tales From The Floating Vagabond. We ended up going our seperate ways in some form or another. Maybe one day, if just for one day, we'll play again.

Fast-forward to 1996. I live in London. I'm unemployed and want a job in the computer games industry. I haven't a clue how to do this. I want to be a games artist. I apply to an advert in The Grauniad from a company looking to develop adventure and strategy games. I get an interview and take along my portfolio of painstakingly created drawings and paintings, and some crap 3D work. The 'company' is in reality just some rich bloke, on his own, trying to set up a company from his ludicriously posh flat. He hires me on the spot. My first job is actually as a designer. I have to design a paper prototype for a first-person adventure/shooter game based on ancient Egypt. I have no idea how to do this. I don't know what a game design document (GDD) is. So what do I do? I just write it all up like a D&D level, including maps, room descriptions, monsters, etc. I still have it to this day. He really likes it but it is never used - a crushing blow for me then, but little did I know at the time that this is de rigueur for games development. So I do some more work for him for a few months. He then fires me because he doesn't want to pay me any more. After a while I then get an interview at a development studio called Intelligent Games (IG). This goes well. After a second interview they hire me as a graphics artist. Nice. Once there (up until the time IG folds in 2002) I do graphics work, concept art, game design, character design, tons of stuff - excluding coding. I don't do coding. It gives me a headache.

During all that time, and since, D&D and RPGs were continually feeding into my work and how I rationalised ideas, art, design etc. It turns out that the computer games industry was - and still is - largely in debt to D&D. 

Some may not agree. 

But they're talking out of their arses...

Sometime soon - but maybe not tomorrow: On the physiology of the Otyugh...