Ouch + Goodman Games DCC RPG News
Posted: March 24, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 6 CommentsI was reading this short article about medieval monks putting weird and funny stuff in the margins of the works they were copying and came across this picture of a blemmye shooting a skiapod right in the pooter:
Good stuff, but I feel bad for the skiapod — that has got to hurt. I’m also interested in his foot; it looks more like a fish flipper than a human foot. In my own drawings on the skiapod, after experimentation, I decided the big toe belonged in the middle of the foot with two smaller toe on either side of it. Of course, I might go back to the old ‘right foot’ version, with a minority of skiapods being ‘left-footed’ just like a minority of humans are southpaws.
DCC RPG NEWS: Also, as a contributor I got a sneak peek at the final (or near final) version of the DCC RPG layout from Goodman Games. I know that since I am involved as an artist, saying that it ‘looks great’ seems pretty self serving, but it does look great — with some of Jim Roslof’s last drawings in there, some Erol Otus, Easley, Edwards, McAusland, Kovacs, Mullens and others and me all contributing. There is a lot of art in there, much of it running up and down the margins and fitting around the charts or having information for the game in the drawing itself. I don’t want to show anything that hasn’t already been revealed out of respect for Goodman, so here is one of the pics you may have seen before that I did. It’s of some kind of magic spell that turns a sling stone into a spider. I was thinking about the Illustrated Bible I had as a kid when I drew it, so it has sort of a King Tut/David & Goliath vibe to it:
Great looking picture. And nice shot by the pharaoh. And that poor skipod. Yowsa! Of course I’m trying to figure out exactly what he was doing right before got shot. That isn’t exactly a defensive posture.
gothridge: In every single drawing of the skiapods I have seen, the medievals always drew skiapods in that pose. I think Pliny wrote that they had a single foot so large they could use it to take cover from the sun, which is what I’m guessing this poor dude was doing when that blemmeye popped an arrow in his ass. The skiapod drawings also never make it clear if they have one or two buttocks — I’m guessing one, but I always draw them from the side just in case.
Well, as a non-artist contributor to the project, I got to see it too. He’s right. DCC RPG is going to have a lot of great art from a lot of great artists, new and old. Just as importantly, it’s not just good looking art, the styles complement each other and really contribute to the atmosphere of the book overall. I think is a shame that most of the big RPG publishers have mostly abandoned ink line drawings in favor of pseudo-manga paintings. It’s a medium where artists like Stefan and Peter Mullen really shine, and I’m glad there are RPG publishers out there again using art like this.
Yeah — I got requests for some pretty unusual shaped drawings as we were working on this, like 7.5 wide x 1 inch tall, etc., but it really works and does kind of have a ‘medieval marginalia’ thing going on.
I hope the io.com article links to the blog “Got medieval” — tons of great marginalia there, and medieval pics of people & animals sticking all kinds of things into each other’s kiesters.
Love the spider slinger! Back in classical times, they would also sling beehives and clay pots full of scorpions or snakes onto the decks of enemy ships with staff-slings. Need to see more of that in D&D.
I love ‘Got Medieval!’ The guy who writes it really cracks me up. In case io didn’t link it (which would be criminal), here it is: http://www.gotmedieval.com/