Barabrians of Lemuria: Fantasy

BoL Fantasy

Here are my free and easy house rules for D&D à la BoL.
Just in case anyone is interested...

Barbarians of Lemuria: Force Awakens

BoL Awakens

I knocked up a super-quick one sheet for a Star Wars game set in the Force Awakens era. It's designed for use with the Barabrians of Lemuria rules.

It's just for a one-shot set in the underworld of the Outer Rim (just winging a criminal thing on a spacestation) so it doesn't go into great detail but I thought I'd share it. Feel free to use and abuse as you see fit.

Merry Xmas

Slaughter Beach

So, here is the cover which I did for Dark Minds' 'Slaughter Beach' by Ben Jones. It's a pulpy slasher of a thriller with a japanese twist.

I went for a bold design which would grab the eye; something which would grab you in a summer airport lounge or the like. I picked out a simple yet bold font to accentuate this aspect.

The kanji on the back is just the title in japanese. I drew it out and added some blood splats to convey the 'slasher-horror' feeling a little.

The palm trees took ages. But I didn't just want to use a generic stamp off the internet.

The skull in the moon was both quick and fun. I really enjoyed that part and am quite pleased with how it turned out. I love the pen strokes.

The final was compiled and converted to a pdf based on the provided dimensions. It was formatted for print at a high resolution.

Seeing it in the flesh was very satisfactory. Somehow it looks better as a physical object.

Get your own copy here:

Slaughter Beach

El Occulto

El Occulto- luchador monster hunter character.

This is a comic character I came up with a while back. I've since adpated him for the new version of the awesome Dicey Tales RPG (if you like pulps, you need to check this out).

I hope to get a strip or two done of his adventures at some point.

I'm always looking for work with good people on good games. Please pass the word around.

Hunters of Alexandria

I broke a stylus nib drawing this lighthouse.
Great fun, though.
Great game, too!
Check it out.

http://d101games.com/storytelling-games/hunters-of-alexandria/

Numenara Character

I was contacted about drawing someone's character from their Numenara campaign.
(Numenara is a cool RPG which includes a lot of different stuff, from fantasy to sci-fi. If offers you a pretty broad sandbox to play about in.)

This one is called Elise. She came with some pretty specific design elements, some of which were quite a challenge (glass hand with a magic symbol in it, black glass claw, golden sword with a transparent liquid claw, digital static facial tattoo and a giant beetle) to draw.

Working out how to draw all of these was a good experience. Pushing yourself is always a good thing as an artist so I always try to do something new or differently on each piece.

I had a real blast drawing her. It's always a bit of an honour getting to draw someone else's character. I know how attached I get to mine, even new ones, so I am very conscious of doing a good job on them. It's important to capture everything they tell you about the character and distill it all into a real, cohesive design. Something which captures and portrays their essence as much as possible.

The client was also a genuine pleasure to work with. We had a great dialogue, which is important and makes everyone's life easier.

I hope you like this one, anyway. I had a lot of fun doing it.

Dungeons & Dragons 5E Adventurer's Toolkit

5E Adventurer's Toolkit

I have been busy compiling together all of my homebrew stuff into a pdf for public consumption.

Here is a quick summary of the contents:

•There are new player races, including duregar, hengeyokai, fey'ri and more.
•New archetypes for every character class including a newly improved beast master, exorcist, ninja, gunslinger, bounty hunter, medic battlemage and engineer.
•There are new backgrounds such as the detective and the occultist.
•New firearms and devices rules for more advanced societies.
•The CSI: Waterdeep campaign setting with the new City Watch faction.
•Return to Ravenloft rules for 5e expiditions into the mists which includes new races like the vistani, the werewolf, the dhampir and the revenant.
•And finally, the rules for Martial Arts with new feats, ki manoeuvers and setting ideas.

All of these rules are designed to be used together. There are backgrounds and classes which mix ideally with some of the settings. Please have a play around with them, pick and choose as you like.

If you like anything in here, then please share the link on to this page.

I am not charging for this, it's all done out of my love for the game and gaming in general.

I elected not to put any illustrations in this edition to make it more printer-friendly.

All of the original material is copyright of Wizards of the Coast. Any new rules are copyright of myself and are not to be printed for monetary gain without prior arrangement with myself.

Fantasy Detective

I've been working on what started out as a little expansion for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (which has since spiralled out to over 80 pages so far..) and thought I'd draw one of the backgrounds from it.
He's a little Bladerunner.
All done in Sketchbook on my Samsung Galaxy Note mobile.

Mad Max: Furiosa poster

Mad Max: Fury Road is just fantastically amazing.
The depth and beauty it manages to express in what is essentially just a big chase-scene action blockbuster is astounding.
Charlize Theron is her usual fantastic self in it so I had to do a little tribute image.
When I had drawn it I decided to knock up a quick background and poster layout for it just to round it out a bit.
I really enjoyed painting with the big smeary brushes for her skin. Also, using these for inking was a blast. Hopefully I'll get to do more of it.

Harely Quinn: Suicide Squad

I had to do a picture of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn from the new Suicide Squad movie: she looks awesome.

Here are a series of process shots from rough pencils to finish.

All done on my Smasung Galaxy Note phone and in Sketchbook.

Lady rogue

This is a character illustration for a female bard. It's for a personal game project I'm working on on-and-off.

I ended up changing her whole colour palette as I went on. I was originally going to have her in a full dress but I wanted to make her a little more action-ready so I changed it. I got caught up in enjoying my earthy palette.

A little hint of her bardic past is in her comedy/tragedy belt buckle.

I also changed her hair colour. She was going to have black hair, but I am making a conscious effort not to draw everyone with black hair, at least for a while. The hair ended up being the last bit which I did and it was just blank white canvas, which looked quite nice and complemented the rest of the composition nicely so I went with the very pale hair. (Also, with being dyed like this it makes her look a little theatrical and plays to her half-elven roots - yes, her ears are meant to be a little pointy like that.)

Rogue One

I wanted to do a little tribute poster to the new Star Wars Anthology film which is coming out next year.

Rogue One sounds like a really interesting and exciting direction. It reminds me of some of the commando team games of the Star Wars RPG which I ran years ago.

I loved 'Monsters', by the same director and the teaser trailer is pretty exciting.

Plus, Felicity Jones has a very lovely face.

I did this in Sketchbook, on a Galaxy Note.

Daredevil

My little tribute to the amazing Daredevil series on Netflix.
A massive, heartfelt thank you to everyone involved. DD is my all-time favourite superhero and to see him done so well, better than I could have imagined, is awesome.

#Daredevil #Marvel #Netflix

Barbarians of Lemuria cover: inspiration

The BoL cover I did is actually a tribute to a classic image from Sal Buscema's 'Savage Sword of Conan'.
I've obviously rejigged it quite a bit for composition and so on, but this is the image which I based it on in my head.

I wanted to avoid having too much of a sexual bias in my work, but with material like this, you have to play up to the tropes a little.

Having said that, on the final image I have the intended sacrifice looking directly at the viewer. She is calm and confident. She is the only one in the scene who knows what is going on. Our poor barbarian and kraken are content to play out their roles and hack away at each other. But she knows better. She sees the plans of the universe, the strings being pulled. She knows what will happen.

In our inital discussions, this book cover here was a popular direction for us to take. We wanted to have a clear tribute to the source material, so I painted up the red and black background to drop the image onto. Frazetta was, obviously, an IMMENSE influence on the game (and on me in general: I have Fire & Ice burned into my soul!).

As mentioned previously, the final cover ended up being different from this one due to formatting restrictions, but this here is a small insight into what went behind the final image.

If you haven't already grabbed yourself a copy of this awesome game from Filigree Forge and Beyond Belief Games, I suggest you get yourself over to www.drivethrurpg.com and pick up the pdf now. It is S&S gaming at it's finest and the final book is an absolute joy to behold: everyone involved put in their A-game on this one!

Rooftops by Night

I've been saving this one for a while as it's my favourite: possibly the best thing I've done so far, I think.

It's definately the best sky I've done. I wanted to try and capture a little Spielberg essence in it, so I have a vast wealth of stars and the classic shooting star.

Colour was an important factor here. I wanted purple and orange to set up a complementary palette. The glow of the city coming up to meet the sky. I think it turned out quite nice.

The scene shows the outcast prince Kalexes from a far-off land coming to a nocturnal city ruled by evil sorcerers (he has a cool jungle beast skull as a shoulderplate). Here he has met with Tineblas, the Black Spider: a powerful assassin and man-of-mystery who has become his firm ally (he wears a steel mask which has spider-like glowing green eyes). The festival of Starfall is an annual event which marks a meteorite shower- it is the one time that the city streets are filled with light and revelry. Tonight is the night they start their grand scheme to take over the city.

I like the idea of a hero character and a companion- it's a classic Sword and Sorcery trope (which is played out well in Omnihedron Games' Epoch system).

I did this piece mostly in Leeds, when I was there for the In-laws' Xmas party. I listened to a lot of the classic Conan soundtrack and Clutch. (Which is what I do most of the time, but I listened to even more when I was doing this).

Barbarians of Lemuria: behind the cover

Here are a couple of shots from the process for the cover and a couple of zoomed-in snapshots to show some of the detail.

My initial blueline, based on one of a few layout concepts.

Colours in progress on the princess. I like her hair: I thought white was a strong choice to distinguish her from Krongar and one that we hadn't used in the rest of the book. I usually prefer to draw black hair, but have tried to push myself away from this default setting. I'm getting more comfortable with that.

Then there are two zoomed-in shots just so you can see the linework and so on a little better.

Sketchbook has some nice brushes in it for texturing. There are a couple of drybrush-looking ones, with the 'bristles' flayed-out which are great for layering hair highlights.

Barbarians of Lemuria: Fan Cover

Here is a fan-tribute cover which I have put together for the mighty Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic Edition (available now on DriveThruRPG.com!)

The published cover is great, but it chops off some of my tentacled beastie so I thought I'd bash one together where you can see the whole image, instead of just posting it up on a white background. This is what we originally looked at for a cover concept, but working out how to get the pulp texture to work with the bleed on multiple formats for print was impossible. The fantastic guys at Filigree Forge made absolutely the right decision for the final project in going the way they did. Plus, on the final layout you can read the details on the characters better (and there are a lot of details- for example, one of Krongar's coins has my logo on it!)

I had to do it in two parts (Krongar and the Princess was one part- the stone head and beast was another) and composite it together due to the huge size of it. Those tentacles took a hell of a long time to draw, but I'm quite pleased with them in the end.

I tried to get that classic old pulp novel look to it (much thanks to my art brother Corlen Kruger for his guidance!)

Barbarians of Lemuria: characters

Here are the various characters which I did for the Barbarians of Lemuria RPG.

I had a ton of fun designing these characters. I tried to capture a sense of the classic sword and sorcery feel as well as a hint of an 80s animated series.

Krongar against the Star God

Here is another piece which I did for the Barbarians of Lemuria RPG (...available now on DriveThruRPG.com...).

This was a tribute to the cover for the last edition, but I took a lot of licence with it (mainly because the ape on the original had a mask on, which looked cool, but I really wanted to draw an angry gorilla face. I do love my monkeys (and, yes, I know it's not a monkey, I do have a degree in anthropology.)).

The piece was done with a transparent background, the frame at the bottom made from some jungle vines, as I was asked to provide an image without corners. It was fun to come up with the composition.

The big elder god thing at the back was just made up as I went along. It is described as a writhing mass of tentacles with eyes, so I added in some mouths and eyeballs at various sizes and angles to convey its' unnaturalness. It's lit from within with the glow of stars, to express its space alien nature. I was a bit daunted at approaching the tentacles at first, but I got quite into it in the end. I faded out the beast/god/thing by duplicating its's layer and filling it with white and then dropping the opacity on that. This was to give it a bit of a feeling of distance from the foreground action.