Art

Happy Halloween Kids!

/ jstater / 1 Comment

Hey all you little ghosts and ghouls – maybe the most appropriate holiday of 2020 is upon us – HALLOWEEN!

However you’re planning to celebrate (and I hope you’re planning to celebrate in some way – don’t let all the bastards out there get you down!), maybe this little wallpaper I made will help get you in the … spirit!

(Special No-Prize if you can name all the namable characters in there!)

I actually turned this thing into a poster, which I had printed at bestofsigns.com … and they did an absolutely fantastic job. Just a free plug for some folks who really came through. Oh – and no, the poster isn’t for sale anywhere. Just a personal project.

In the various and sundry category … RIP Sean Connery. I have a tremendous fondness for Roger Moore’s James Bond, since he’s the one I grew up with (mostly seeing the movies on TV – always a big event!), but you cannot deny the greatness of Connery in the roll. Then there’s his turn in The Hunt for Red October, Outland, Indiana Jones, Darby O’Gill and the Little People (in which he sings!) … Old Tam will be missed on the silver screen.

Also – I make a solemn oath to have the next issue of NOD, and the High Frontier supplement for GRIT & VIGOR out this November. I’ve dragged my feet on finishing them off and uploading them for sale (a process that becomes more tedious with each passing year and each passing revision to the process) for a couple months, so I need to finally cross that finish line.

Finally … I messed around with turning a classic piece of art by J. C. Leyendecker into a template for designing old-time football uniforms. Why? Because I’m writing a second edition of Pen & Paper Football with rules modifications for different eras of professional football, plus rules for the Canadian game, recreating old rosters (i.e. the last blog post I did) and some rules tweaks that I think improve the game. Of course, if I was going to playtest a league in the 1930’s, I needed to design helmets and uniforms! Here are a couple of my designs. My league is up to 1937 … I’m going to play it through to the 1980’s to test everything out, and then spend a couple weeks playtesting the Canadian rules. Fun fun fun!

Have a Happy Halloween folks! Eat some treats, watch a movie (I think we’re doing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein tonight), and please choose love and fun over hate and despair!

Everybody Loves a Spaceman in Uniform

/ jstater

After drawing those Jason of Star Command uniforms (in Excel, of course) for the post last weekend, I decided to try my hand at drawing some more sci-fi uniforms.

Below is the result of my mania. I chose a bunch of science-fiction TV and movie uniforms – not just costumes, you understand, but uniforms – and with MS Excel in hand cobbled them together as best I could. They are presented in the chronological order in which they appeared in reality – I thought about doing it in order of when the show/movie was set, and may do that one later.

It was a fun exercise, and although it took longer to do than I had planned, it sure helped me mellow out while I worked on it.

What’s your favorite old sci-fi uniform? What’s your favorite that didn’t make it onto my little poster? Let me know in the comments!

Aliens I Have Known

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I love lo-tech aliens. I don’t mean aliens who wield sticks and stones, but rather aliens from old TV shows and movies who look goofy (or often look goofy). I love the creative work done by make-up artists and folks working with rubber and shiny polyester on these creatures. I’ve always appreciated old time special effects with technological limitations – nothing has taken the magic out of sci-fi and fantasy for me more than computer graphics. I used to wonder how they did it … now I know, and I wonder why with the ability to do virtually anything, they did what they did.

But let’s get back to those old sci-fi aliens – here’s a little chart of aliens I have known (or “watched” would be more appropriate). I’ll include a link to download it below. This could be used for rolling random alien encounters in a gonzo fantasy game, or just for inspiration when doing your own thing.

Oh – and those aliens from a galaxy far, far away who are too stuck up to come visit the Milky Way Galaxy – I left them out. Enjoy!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

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Fashion of the Future!

/ jstater / 2 Comments

Saw something interesting at Public Domain Review about the future of fashion. Actually, the imagined future of fashion in the 1890’s based on a book from future (1993). W. Cade Gall, the author, found this book, which tells of the immutable laws that govern the waves that move through fashion.

Let’s see what the future book tells us about fashion in the Roaring ’20s

Hmmm. Pretty close

Now, here’s what I think is usable (besides the images, which will figure prominently in what I write for Terra Obscura, the land of the Philosopher Kings in Nod) in the article.

Random Fashion Table
For the most part, when I write cultures in Nod I base them on real world cultures (or perceptions of real world cultures). Why? Because a thoroughly make-believe world requires the players to learn a tremendous amount of made up bullshit about things that don’t exist, instead of them focusing on having fun drinking beer, rolling dice, and playing a game. That said, I do like to throw a few weird civilizations out there to keep things interesting, and the little table of waves might be useful for generating ideas about how they dress. The book conveniently gives us six waves – to whit:

1. Angustorial / Wobbling
2. Severe / Recuperative
3. Latorial / Decided
4. Tailor-Made / Opaque
5. Ebullient / Bizarre
6. Hysterical / Angustorial

The first term refers to the type, the second to the tendency. And no – I don’t know what “the tendency” means for sure. And “angustorial” and “latorial” – I can’t find definitions for those words. Perhaps they meant augustorial? Oh hell, maybe it’s not that useful after all. Or perhaps I just need to make a few changes:

ROLL D6
1. August and senatorial style as dictated by the elite; many ornaments, rich fabrics (and lots of it) and textures, meant to look refined, stately and elegant
2. Severe and simple, a reaction to the previous style that is casual and not ornamental in the least, focusing on solid colors, simple fabrics and clean, classic lines
3. A loosening of styles, fuller and blowsier, with sedate patterns, with a bit more trim (but not the ornamentation of phase 1); fashion is highly dictated at this point, and weirdos are barely tolerated
4. Much as before, but quality is the watch word – clothes are tailor-made and well fitted, and no two suits or gowns are quite the same
5. Ebullience and joy reign supreme, as a new generation takes advantage of the loosening of rules and introduces doodads, geegaws and bright colors and patterns to the mix – Ah youth!
6. The ebullience of before becomes a hysterical riot of color and pattern, with over complicated and impractical designs and a high degree of ornamentation; even now, the elite are beginning to create the august style that will appear next …

What If Arthur Szyk Illustrated a RPG?

/ jstater / 5 Comments

One thing I’ve long wanted to do is to produce different versions of a role playing game – we’ll say Blood & Treasure since that’s my game to play around with – keyed to different artists. The rules would stay largely the same, though it might be fun to introduce a couple optional rules to bring the game closer to a particular artist’s style – i.e. rules that make the Arthur Rackham version of a game slightly different than the Frank Frazetta version of a game.

If I did this with Blood & Treasure, for example, I would create a “basic” B&T – much shorter, simpler, and make the layout serve the art (and be in color!). I think it would be fun to have simple games to play in books that mainly exist to be beautiful. Imagine something about 30 to 40 pages long, with maybe several nice illustrations in color.

Anyhow – I got to thinking about this again because I was perusing the artwork of Arthur Szyk today. Imagine a game with illustrations like these …

Fighter
Cleric
Magic-User
Thief
(No, I don’t know why the thief would wear a chef’s hat … just work with me here)

 

This might be something worth doing after I finish the NOD 23, Tome of Monsters, Grit & Vigor and the revision of some older works. Of course, the books would have to work off of stock art by modern artists or works  in the public domain (so no Szyk or Frazetta, unfortunately) to make them financially feasible, but it still might be fun. Maybe the basic version of Blood & Treasure could be called Blood Simple (crap, I think I’m starting to really like this idea …)

Images found at the following sites:

Arthur Szyk, The Alphabet of Illustrators

Lehigh University Special Collections

Power of Babel: Arthur Szyk: The Canterbury Tales

Support the Illustrated Bestiary of Fantastic Creatures

/ jstater / 2 Comments

Got an email yesterday from Casey Sorrow, who is starting a Kickstarter to finance his An Illustrated Bestiary of Fantastic Creatures. Casey produces some amazing art, and the book promises to be game rules-neutral. That being said, it sure has an old school feel to me. Throw some bucks his way, so the mighty Casey doesn’t strike out! (Yes, I deserve whatever punishment the universe summons up for that one.)

You can find the Kickstarter HERE

You can find Casey’s website HERE

 

Merry Christmas from the Land of Nod!

/ jstater / 1 Comment

Quick note to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and all the blessings of the season. More than getting everything you wanted, I hope you all have everything you need (and are wise enough to know it, if you do). My Christmas present to you folks today is a quick preview of some new art I’ve commissioned for the forthcoming NOD Companion – all of it drawn by Jon Kaufman – for the classes collected in the book. Enjoy the art, and I hope you all have a wonderful day, whether you’re celebrating or not.

Puritan by Jon Kaufman

 

Psychic by Jon Kaufman

 

She-devil by Jon Kaufman

 

Traveler by Jon Kaufman.

I’ll be posting a couple new ones soon that will appear in the book – The Vigilante and the Femme Fatale.

Merry Christmas folks! Thanks for making me feel like a success with this little hobby of mine. Like many folks of the geeky persuasion, I’ve never had the best self image in the world, and your support over the last few years has done wonders for me. In the coming year, let’s all remember to be kind to one another.

Deviant Friday – Recent Favorites

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Here are a few of the illustrations I’ve “favorited” (yeah, favorite is now a verb – get used to it) on DeviantArt recently. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

(always one of my favorites – I should be getting the recreation of Morgan Ironwolf in the mail soon!)

 

 

 

(Shame this game wasn’t made – probably would have been fun)

 

 

(I so prefer this to the more anime-inspired armor and weapons that show up in many fantasy RPG products these days.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you like these, be sure to visit the artists galleries as DeviantArt and their websites – maybe purchase a print.

See you all tomorrow with a Dragon by Dragon!