Oh boy, this was a weird one-
I went further with an additional piece too. What a horrible thing!
Still figuring out the best way to post these, I don’t know if I want every blog post to be a Substack? Idk it feels like too many emails would get on folks nerves? For now this blog will still be the main thing, with occasional posts also being Substacks/emails.
So this post is going to function as part signal flare and part canary. If you’re getting this message it means that you gave me your email address so that I can bother you with updates about my artwork, game design and merchandise.
If you don’t want to get these emails I imagine there is a button that you can click to fix that. I am sorry I don’t know exactly where it is but you’re really smart so I bet you can figure it out.
My new risograph print THE DRAGONSLAYER is available on my webstore, I made it to help counter act the high prices of diabetic supplies that my wife experiences, and it features her slaying the large dragon of for-profit medical supply companies.
I’m currently in the layout phase for my next game supplement-
Better Legends FRIENDS & FOES issue: 1
things are still in process but you get the general idea
Each of the characters in these issues will come with a ready to print front/back miniature of themselves, so you can really immerse yourself in scissors and glue style session prep.
I’m planning on doing a number of these as digital releases in the coming months- This project is a combination of some old things and some new things, I started drawing these characters back in 2017 as a way of giving myself prompts for drawing on stream. Over time they all started to occupy space in a shared world that is slowly turning into it’s own game! Here’s the tiniest little preview of that, which I post now against my better judgement.
The game as it stands is an old school style (ish) dungeon crawler that is meant to be very visually oriented. I’m not really trying to reinvent the wheel, but rather reinvent the process in which the instruction manual for the wheel is read.
I wanted to make a game that satisfied my own needs when trying to parse game text (I am bad at that without lots of pictures). It will be a fairly rules lite game, but with lots of lore on the back end. I want to spent the majority of my time crafting a world that folks can have a good time in, and in my mind that means lots of unique monsters, spells and treasure that lie scattered across a story rich world. I love rules lite games, but I find a lot of time they tend to communicate a vibe and then leave the nuts and bolts of the world building to the reader- which is great! I just want to try a different approach, with lots and lots and lots of lore rich, ready to play content.
I’m also working on the next installment in the Adventure Journal Series. For those of you familiar with An Ecological Study of Fortles you might be pleased to find that Salvador Moss & Skullboy (what an annoying little man I am, breaking myself into multiple people to work on a book alone) are back to shine a light on the ever growing hobby of DUNGEON CRAWLING. They’re going to be following around a group of these strange hobbyists and learning about the ins and outs of THE CRAWL
Expect somethings similarly gaming-adjacent as Fortles was.
Over on Patreon I’ve been releasing weekly pages of my erotic-fantasy-romanace comic
Sorry kids, this one is only for the grownups.
and as with all of my Patreon projects it will be available for sale on my itch.io page after it’s finished (as a free download for the patrons that helped make it possible and as a paid product for everyone else) but right now it’s only for patrons- who get the exclusive page drops and the occasional extra content in between. If you’re interested in that, consider subscribing! It puts me closer every day to only working on my own projects, and having to spend less time on the high seas of freelancing!
Thanks for reading, I’ll have a new dungeon23 spread tomorrow probably, if I can manage to draw the map page that I’ve been procrastinating with!
doing some boss monster things for May. First up is the Wyvern.
Laying the foundations for some some wilderness within the dungeon.
Hey I was on a couple of podcasts recently if you wanna hear me spout off about games.
Between Two Cairns I joined Brad and Yochai to talk about B3 Palace of the Silver Princess for a new and reoccurring episode on the show called GAMER BLASTS FROM THE PAST. I’ve been on a few times in the past too if you missed those, talking about The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford and The Isle of the Plangent Mage.
The Plaid Hat Podcast - I got a chance to chat with the folks at Plaid Hat, and my co-illustrator Allison Carl about making art for Freelancers: A Crossroads Game.
I recently just finished a Risograph print! I love the way that it turned out and so far the response has been really good. I figured it might be nice to break down the start to finish process for folks that aren’t familiar.
you get the idea.
I started sketching in Procreate. This is a new setup for me (my sister gifted me her old iPad for Christmas since she doesn’t use it anymore) and I’ve really started to enjoy the freedom of being able to work away from my desk without having to worry about things like scanning, paper, erasers, lots of supplies etc. Digital drawing is something I’ve been doing for about 10 years now, and this is my first foray into working directly on a screen, the tablet I use is an Intuos 4 from 2009 so I’m finally kicking and dragging myself into the 21st century.
The sketch is rough but it gets the point across for what I need figured out first, which is pose and silhouette.
After the sketch layer I switch brushes to something closer to a pencil and start figuring out what everything is ACTUALLY going to look like.
After the pencil lines are done I finalize everything with a ink layer. Normally this would be separate line/shadow layers but Risograph prints are color layer based. So everything that’s going to be black has to be on the same layer, and I just do the shadows at a different opacity to they look grey.
Colors are the next step! Risograph print shops each have a list of the colors that they use on their website, I love this, because working under a restricted palette builds character. Here were my choices at Lucky Risograph. I went with them because they are fairly close by and I had seen some artists I like use them before.
I’ve always been a big sucker for CMYK printing (which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Key/Black) So I chose Black, Cornflower Blue, Sunflower Yellow & Bright Red. This gives me basically infinite flexibility in my palette through the use of opacity and color blending. Now I get to experiment with how everything looks for a while. I switch from the iPad and Procreate over to Clip Studio Paint on my PC and I start playing around with layers and opacity.
They don’t look like much without the black layer, but you can see a bit of how I got various color combos out of the yellow, blue & red.
It’s important to keep your layers separate here. The file you send to your printer should have 1 layer per color used.
after that I email my file to the printer, get a quote for the print and pay! I decide the kind of paper I want it printed on based specifically on the fact that I need to roll these into a tube to mail them. We decide on 80lb Via Vellum in Bright White.
Then I play the nervous waiting game while I wait for them to tell me that the job is done and it’s on it’s way! They sent me this picture to make sure everything looks how I want it to, and it arrived a few days later!
We press on!
I’ve got a new print up in my store! Go check it out.
I promise being a few days late is not becoming a bad habit! I was out of town, visiting an old friend and while I kept up with my daily room writing I have taken to an extended drawing session on Sundays for the map itself and that was not in the cards while away from home.
I have been thinking a lot about the nature of this KIND of project. To save you the long winded version I will simply say that the point of this now is to finish it, and to have finished it. I do not care what it ends up looking like in the end. Is this a bad thing? I think not, because the goal is to have done SOMETHING. Personally I learn more from pushing through the boredom or monotony of a task than from giving up. This phase of the project is ABOUT disliking it and what I’m producing. Having been consciously participating in the process of artmaking for the better part of 20 years I know the ebb and flow of my own interest, and I am excited for the next big swell.
All of this being said I think I can say with some certainty that success with this project requires the following-
An understanding that it will be a disjointed mess
An embracing of that disjointedness, likened to praying to a chaotic deity.
A simple gaming framework on which to build a world, and to lean back on when inspiration is no where to be found
A good strong arm with which to handwave any logical inconsistencies that get in the way of the practice.
A few different good pens, so you can shake things up from time to time
An understanding that it will never be a finished product, and the understanding that a sketchbook is not for selling, it is for learning.
A notebook that fits in your preferred method of transportation (the Hobonichi Weeks fits snugly in my pouch so I bring it everywhere with me like a travel sized holy book)
The willingness to skip the practice some days and batch multiple entries on other days.
A good place to write about and catalogue the experience of the practice.
At least 2 other people’s work that you are closely following, so you can feel the communal aspect without being overwhelmed by the work of others.
If you are reading this and also continuing to work on the project, keep going.
I came a hair breadth from calling it quits on D23 this week. I made this wing of level 4 this morning though, and I got excited again.
The secret to me not giving up is that I switched pens and liked the way it looked better. Idk man, it’s just like that sometimes.
Obviously, the players have to choose whether they want to help raise the dragon from last week, or the holy undead titan from this week. Choices choices- either way it definitely ends in a kaiju battle.
April’s almost half over! Here’s some things I’ve been working on.
If you haven’t checked out the Bridgetown Kickstarter yet you should- they managed to secure funding in a single day, and for good reason! It’s a really cool setting and I’m excited to be a part of it. I think the best Troika stuff takes a simple concept and digs really deep into it, fleshing out all of the nooks and crannies. Bridgetown manages this nicely and I think the setting would make for a really good mini-series style campaign. I like that length of game, it gives you a couple of sessions to build out your characters, while not scaring off folks that might not want to try and commit to the classic “once a week forever” style game that are often sought after, but incredibly rare.
the map is my latest foray into the Where’s Waldo/ Richard Scarry style of artmaking.
My band, Teencat, has a new shirt that just arrived today! It’s printed by the fine folks at Night Owls Printshop and I can’t recommend them enough! They did an amazing job. Thanks again to everyone who helped out with the preorder, I’ll definitely be doing more shirts in the future both band and non-band related. I’ll have a new store page up for these by next week, once we get all of the inventory processed and the preorders shipped.
In the realm of personal projects I’ve started streaming again- Friday mornings around 10am EDT (emphasis on the around, but if you follow my social media I always post when I go live)
I decided it would be fun to re-draw some of the characters I made for the Patreon and started with Jorda Mulgoan. She’s featured prominently in this adventure as well
This quickly turned into a much larger endeavor as I’m going to be putting them together into a book. The plan is to have them statted for OSE/Moldvay Basic characters and easy to drop into an ongoing campaign. I’ll be posting them on my Patreon as the project moves forward.
I’m currently waiting to see proofs on my newest print, The Dragonslayer. This 4 color risograph will be available in my store soon! It features my wife, slaying the big dragon of medical debt. Do you know about the big dragon of medical debt? I bet you do if you also have a chronic illness and a bunch of your revenue goes towards medical supplies. It’s incredibly frustrating to interact with the American healthcare system and unfortunately the only bullet I have in my gun to combat anything is artmaking. All money made from the print will be spent on diabetic equipment, so if you like artwork featuring nice young women killing big monsters- this might just be the perfect print for you.
I’m also working on my first comic! I’ve been wanting to make one for ages, but something about the form eluded me. I guess something changed though because I currently have about 16 pages mapped out for the first chapter of this story. I’m having a blast, and currently dropping a page a week on Thursdays for my DungeonXDungeon Patrons Subbing at that level of my patreon gets you the comic as it releases, along with a number of other erotic illustrations in the backlog.
Kind of a stressful week, so I wont say much. I look forward to someday fleshing this section out more.
I’ve spent the last year working on illustrations for a board game! It’s called Freelancers, and is a sequel to the game Forgotten Waters. I thought it might be cool to post some of the in progress shots from the project. There are a TON of my pieces in it, and I’ll post some more here, and on my Instagram over the next few weeks.
thumbnails for possible covers
final cover illustration
A lot of the work I did was character design. Here’s some process shots of a few of them. Starting with Trent, a Treant hireling you can meet in your travels.
This guy definitely has a name but all my files just say “Troll” so you’ll have to buy the game to learn what he’s actually called. Despite not being on a first name basis with him though he was one of my favorites to draw.
This is Serpa, a Medusa Lawyer-
This was one of the last ones I worked on, and one of my favorites. I feel like my drawing skills leveled up a few times during this project.
Ambush!
There is exactly one dragon in this game. I tried my best to make it as epic as possible.
Fighting the last dragon
I am excited to be into a new level. I think a feature of a long-running project is that there are going to be some lulls. You need lulls though so you can come back from something. I’m really excited to fire up a really focused floor this month- especially since we’re really starting to get into some more interesting, high level spaces. So I figured it would be fun to do a really over the top, death trap level. Here’s to April.
Didn’t get around to posting this here on Sunday like I normally would, because I was busy losing my mind writing a different blog post.
I got on a tear reading about how silk is manufactured though, and here’s what came of it. Enjoy!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence of TTRPGs on video games. It’s probably because I played video games first, and it’s probably because the games I love most are older now and therefore closer to this genesis point of primordial interest.
I didn’t realize how true that was until I read Palace of the Silver Princess though. (Green Cover, none of what I write here will be about the fated Orange Cover release, that’s like, a whole other thing man)
It’s Zelda.
Most specifically it’s Link to the Past.
Let’s look at the broad strokes-
Palace of the Silver Princess Introduction
(Italic Text indicates things you find out later in the adventure)
Also, obviously, spoilers.
Haven is a peaceful valley surrounded by mountains, and kept prosperous and safe by a group of magical beings called The Protectors that live in a timeless land called Faerie.
The Princess Argenta rules the land from her Shining Marble Palace is kind, fair, and loved by all.
The Dwarves in Haven unearthed a gigantic ruby, and made a gift of it to the princess, calling it “Our Lady's Heart” The gem is actually “The Eye of Arik” an ancient evil thought to have been sealed away in a “special dimension” long ago. He has cracked the seal enough to throw one of his eyes through and the dwarves unearthing it from the mountains allowed him to channel his evil magic into Haven.
The Princess decides to throw a big party, inviting everyone in the kingdom to celebrate the Dwarves' achievement. The day before the party, a mysterious stranger arrives on the back of a dragon. This stranger is Ellis The Strong, a Knight of the White Drakes, an order of Knights devoted to repelling evil, as his Dragon’s name “Ariksbane” suggests. He came to Haven to investigate the ruby, as he thought it might be Arik, but was still somehow caught by surprise. Upon arrival he immediately fell in love with the Princess. Both he and the Princess are trapped inside the gemstone, and the rest of the palace is driven mad or turned to stone.
At midnight, the land was plunged into chaos. Crops withered, livestock died, the palace and everyone in it was frozen in a ruby force field, the land was besieged by all manner of terrible monsters, and the protectors vanished. The evil cleric Catharandamus, among the summoned, begins the ritual to break the dimensional prison using the ruby sword of Arik and attempts to unleash Arik upon the world.
The players are visited in a dream that night by The Protectors, who tell them that Haven is in trouble and that they need help. They’ll use the limited power they have (because Faerie is also under attack) to open a portal into the castle so you can save everyone. In order to defeat Catharandamus you must destroy the gem using
1. The ruby sword of Arik, a powerful weapon unable to be effectively wielded by anyone except Arik, but touching the two together will be enough to shatter both.
2. The breath of the Dragon Ariksbane (who has been banished and must be summoned via 3 statuettes found within the palace) or
3. The song of banishment, played on the Ice Harp, a relic once wielded by Rowena, a mysterious hero from Haven’s past, that now resides in Faerie.
You then play through and introductory scenario that gives you a crash course in Roleplay Adventure Games. It basically reads like a choose your own adventure that the group plays through together, in which you have to figure out how to open the inner portcullis of the gatehouse so you can begin the actual adventure of running around the castle.
Link To The Past Introduction:
Title Screen Intro:
Long ago in a beautiful Kingdom called Hyrule that was surrounded by mountains and forests, legends told of a great golden power that resided in a hidden land, many went looking for it but no one knows what happened to them. Then evil power started to flow from the land and the king commanded 7 wise men to seal it up. A great war was fought in order to seal the evil into the sacred land. The wise men were aided by the Knights of Hyrule, an order of Knights dedicated to fighting evil and then guarding one of the pendants that allows you to wield the master sword.
A mysterious wizard known as Agahnim came to Hyrule to release the Seal. He killed the king, and imprisoned the descendents of the 7 wise men, one of which is the Princess Zelda.
You name your character and start playing
Princess Zelda visits you in a dream and tells you she is imprisoned in the castle dungeon and that Agahnim has seized control, captured the descendents of the 7 wise men, and is trying to break their seal. You wake up, and your uncle says he’s leaving for a while, but will be back by the morning and tells you not to leave the house.
Obviously you leave the house, and after being repelled by the castle guard, you find a hidden entrance into the castle, where you find your uncle lies defeated, he gives you a sword and shield and tells you to save the princess.
You fight your way through the castle, find the princess, and she tells you that Agahnim is controlling all the soldiers with his magic.
You escape the Palace via a secret route that the princess knows and you wind up in the Sanctuary, where you learn that if the Wizard breaks the seal it will flood the land with evil. You are told to seek out the Master Sword, an ancient relic that can't be wielded effectively by just anyone that's powerful enough to stop Agahnim. Link finds out that he and his uncle are descended from the Knights of Hyrule so he’s worthy of wielding the sword.
Tip of the Iceburg
That doesn’t even cover all of the similarities, some of which I’m sure are just coincidence, but I can’t help but be forced to look at the whole Silver Palace adventure through any other lens than Zelda now.
I didn’t even MENTION how Harps are always showing up in various Zelda games.
Or how Agahnim also has big eye imagery. I know this is probably a reference to “The Evil Eye” but c’mon-
Or the 3 protector statues in Silver Palace that bow to a veiled woman that could totally be Din Foror and Nayru bestowing Hylia with the Triforce
or the themes of music fixing problems
Or how Ellis is basically Link except he’s not the main character and so he has to get rescued too and how that’s way better than always making the Princess be the one stuck in the castle- MR. MIYAMOTO.
Or the ways that tapestries are used to tell the backstories of tons of Zelda games.
Or how all the soldier in sunken Hyrule got frozen in time/turned to stone,
I’m not gonna drag on any more about it. If you’re interested, pick up a copy and spend a day turning into Charlie Day like I did. It was fun, and now I have read way too many things about both Silver Princess, and Zelda.
So they’re similar. Lots of Fantasy stories in RPGs and Video Games play out like this.
Palace of the Silver Princess was released in 1981. A few years later in 1982 a company called Shinwa Publishing released a Japanese release of Keep on the Borderlands; they did 3 print runs. As best I can tell this was the first major North American RPG product translated into Japanese, but if you know better than that feel free to correct me.
The Mentzer Red box didn’t hit shelves in Japan until 1986. Which means that when Palace of the Silver Princess was released in Japan in 1983 it was predating most of the D&D products that would eventually be available in Japan (to say nothing of RPG systems like Sword World that were made to be more tailored to a Japanese audience which was first release in 1989 and is the basis for Record of Lodoss War) and the people that played it were most likely using the introductory rules found in Keep on the Borderlands, or possibly just the procedure for play found at the beginning of Silver Palace.
The point I’m trying to make is that two years before anyone in Japan was playing Wizardry, or Tower of Druaga, The Black Onyx or Hydilide, Palace of the Silver Princess and Keep on the Borderlands were there, being read by a niche group of people who were seeking out new and interesting forms of entertainment.
You remember the first time you read a TTRPG book, and you remember which one it is. And you remember what happens in it, because it's confusing and exciting and makes you want to MAKE THINGS.
So I like to imagine that sometime while they were studying at Osaka University of the Arts, Kensuke Tanabe and Tekeshi Tezuka played in a game of d&d where they saved Princess Argenta and Ellis the Strong from the Ruby Prison and thought-
“Hey, that was pretty fun”.
Not much time to write, on my way to a board game convention. Enjoy!
I realized after I posted last week that there was no place to go from that wing, so I decided we needed to dig back into last weeks entry and add a secret door behind the organ! You open it by either using and open door spell, or playing the song “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’” on the organ itself (this functions as a knock spell, and sheet music is how bards learn new spells) I don’t even have bards in games that I run and now I have to because I love the idea of them finding sheet music for spells, damn.
The theme of this area is a bit obvious but I had fun with it. I am particularly fond of the lung rooms coughing and shaking if you have a lit torch with you.
Until next week!
Level 3! March is upon us and that means it’s time for a 3rd level of Dagamoor. I just cant resist BIG OCTOPUS and you shouldn’t either. Tsa’Rook is something I’ve had written in a notebook since before I was born and I’m glad to commit its gigantic hollow bones to something more tangible.
I sometimes think I’m still doing this specifically just for the satisfaction of flipping through an entirely filled notebook. Which is actually the greatest thing a person could ever do.
