Richard Corben

Like many people, I probably laid eyes on Richard Corben's work for the first time on the album cover of Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell. Epic pic for sure. Left an impression, kind of like David Fairbrother Roe's unforgettable cover for Nazareth's Hair of the Dog.

(Ahhh... what happened to great album cover art? Like so many book genres, I suppose the switch to digital and the need for clear thumbnails has lead to a decline in cover art and a rise in simple design. I'll proudly wear my grognard suit on this one and say I miss great covers on books, music, etc. These days it's just a bit of graphic design with huge letters. Then again, I haven't really LOOKED at album art in a while. Maybe I'm wrong? Tune in to the end of this post for the answer.)

Richard Corben's art is weird. It's in that category with Frazetta and Vallejo (two artists I do not consider to be equals, sorry Boris but you're often boring) as sort of "epic" and "fantastic" but also it's underground. Richard Corben was a comix artist, after all, and he liked to draw tits and schlongs on his characters. His figures were also in the "I just stepped out of the gym and boy am I ripped" category, while also being in the "I'm big and soft and round" category. His proportions were strange while not being exactly wrong. And that inspired me. I have said many times how much I despise things that are too clean, trim, and polished. Corben's art, even when it has a careful polish on the surface, is never perfect. And I love that.

I keep saying things about Corben in the past-sense, as if his life is over. But he went on to achieve great things in the 2000s, doing Hellboy arcs and being inducted into various halls of fame. He is one of those great artists, like Vaughn Bode, who achieved greatness but not flatness. He was never a household name. They say Rush is a band's band. Richard Corben is an artist's artist.

Album Covers

Well, I did some Google-fu on recent album covers. What I found was that things haven't changed so much. Most of the pop type stuff or hip-hop is a face shot or body shot of the artist with the title. Kind of normal. Metal album covers are same as always... lots of epic themes, Satan, sci-fi landscapes, etc. So not much has changed. I suppose it's mainly the book market, particularly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, that has changed in response to digital books. You need a clear thumbnail for your e-reader so you can see the author and title on a screen of a dozen books. That's the function that a book's spine used to serve on the bookshelf. Then you'd pull it out and see the awesome cover art. There's a lacking of awesome cover art in books right now. /rant

Break Time

Here's a chainmail chick enjoying some zzzs after a furious battle with a pesky serpent. You can check out the black and white version below.

Vaughn Bode

What can I say about Vaughn Bode that I haven't already said ten times? He was a legend. He was a shooting star. he came along, did amazing shit we're still talking about, and died very young. He was a visionary, an iconic creator, and a damn weirdo. I love him.

I didn't actually discover Bode until I was in my 30s... probably older than he was when he died. I had picked up his vibes as early as 1981 or 1982 through the osmosis of art as other creators such as filmmaker Ralph Bakshi filtered his work into theirs. But there was no Bode for young JV to be had. I didn't know it, I didn't see it, I couldn't have found it in my circumstances. Not until much much later.

In the 2000s I was going through some serious changes, which included an absolute rebirth of myself as an artist. So finding Bode's work at that time definitely left a huge impact on that rebirth. Some of his spirit definitely was folded into the mix that was to be James West 2.0. And I'm glad for it.

A Change of Power

A Change of Power

On this one I just wanted to see if I could work with a limited pallet. So I chose about 6 or 7 warm colors and rolled with it. I appreciate artists, such as Sean Aaberg, who can work with 1 or 2 colors and make it pop. It's fun to limit yourself and work within strict bounds. Fun for me, anyway.

A Study in Spring

A Study in Spring. Started out a doodle, like most drawings. Here I wanted to draw a figure that was different than what I normally do, kind of embracing elements I (we, speaking for typical artists of my peer groups) tend to ignore or gloss over. Like bellies. People have bellies.

The DM's Notebook vs. The Campaign Bible

Over on this post, Froth sagely points us to this post by The Angry GM about a delicious little idea called the campaign bible. A campaign bible is just your GM notebook filled to whatever degree you deem necessary with your notes about the game you want to run or are running. You don't show it to anyone because it's yours and it's a mess. You don't write it for anyone to read. You don't write it for publication. It is a tool. It is called a bible because it's the repository of reference information necessary to make your campaign good.

Sweet idea.

Today I happened to pull the old TSR World Builder's Guidebook (Richard Baker, 1996) off the shelf. What a wonderful little saddle-stitched tome this is. Not only is it chock full of useful tables and ideas for creating a fantasy world, but it's got the best of the late-era TSR page design going on. The headers and callouts are color, the art is monochromatic, the tables have that nice gray bar thing going on. It's a solid book if you can score a copy. You can get the official PDF here.

As a sad side note, the artist who illustrated this book, Glen Michael Angus, died in 2007. He was born the same year as me and his work was very stunning. I'll post a few pieces from this book below. R.I.P. Glen Angus.

Anyway, I'm flipping through for ideas when I hit page 4 and Baker tells us that we should definitely keep a DM's notebook. This is a great example of the idea of the Campaign Bible expressed in an official AD&D product 24 years ago, which is pretty cool. I'm guessing there are other examples even older, perhaps in the pages of ye olde Dragon or perhaps White Dwarf, but I don't know as I'm not an expert on the matter.

Baker's bullet list is pretty good. If you followed his advice to the letter, you'd at least be a well-prepared GM. I particularly liked his inclusion of a "tickler file" where you jot down the various goals, desires, and needs of your Players' PCs for use in adventure design, with the nod that Players might be more interested in adventures that ping their individual or group interests. Sage indeed.

So how does Baker's advice compare to The Angry GM? The Angry advice is more random, more angry, more visceral. And I really loved this bit right here because it's truth:

Creativity is what happens when random things bump into each other in your head and form some kind of connection.

Also, this hits home for me because I have always kept such fact sheets myself:

A fact sheet is a sheet of facts. Short, succinct lists of informational bits and bobs. Not prose. If you can’t master the vital skill of distilling things down to the important points and removing the excess crap, you can’t communicate effectively. Quit GMing.

The Angry GM gives you many more reasons to keep a bible while the Baker entry is short, sweet, and to the point about what you should include in it. I don't think these two things contradict as they are clearly talking about the same idea, just 20+ years separated in time and with wildly different formats. Both have one goal: to make you a better GM. Noble.

Here's an oldie: The Dungeon Master's Design Kit, for AD&D 1e. I never owned this. But it's got a lot of form sheets for the DM to use in creating NPCs, monsters, encounters, chases, and big ass finales. Sounds great. Given the nature of much of the official material of the time, I suspect it is dry and wordy and not very compelling. But I do see a fair number of random tables, so that's a plus. And who the fuck is going to fill out a whole one page form on a single chase scene before it happens? Talk about a bit of a railroad approach. I guess this was the era of Dragonlance.

And check out that badass art by Glen Michael Angus!

As to my own version of the DM's notebook/campaign bible, it's not well organized at all. But I do have some habits I've been following for many years.

Prior to the internet, I always kept a literal file on each major project. Inside the file would be various sketches, maps, and notebook sheets scrawled with madness. Before that I would use spiral notebooks to draw and write everything in. And I was kinda obsessive about keeping things separated. I wanted a different notebook for each idea. Most of them were filled with blank pages buffered by 1-20 pages of actual notes.

Post-internet, I started keeping digital files exactly the same way: filled with sketches, art, reference pictures, and various word docs and spreadsheets (these are my fact sheets, per the paragraphs above). Today I tend to keep my docs and spreadsheets on Google Docs or in DropBox so I can get them at work. I always have a spreadsheet and I have even named them "bibles" in the past. They contain lists of names, places, and ideas for the thing, along with random tables.

None of this stuff gets shared. Not because that's a rule, but because why on earth would you share your own personal random scrawlings? The stuff you share is what comes out of those scrawlings. The adventures you run, the finished art, the finished books (if you're publishing). You don't share your bible stuff. It's fuckin' ugly.

Swipe File

One thing I would add to the notebook/bible concept is the swipe file, a term I swiped from the comics industry, who apparently swiped it from the advertising industry. Whatever the history, my use of the term is very simple. A swipe file is a file full of images and ideas that inspire you or have the potential to inspire you. I find this a highly valuable tool for creative work. I tend to keep multiple digital files full of stuff as well as private Pinterest boards and other such nonsense. When I'm feeling slow, I browse the files and see what gets drummed up in my brain. Never be a afraid to borrow and steal little nuggets from other creators because they damn sure did the same thing and anyone who tells you differently is a fuckin' liar. Nobody makes shit up whole cloth. Nobody.

Glen Michael Angus

When I Googled Glen Angus' art for this book I got nothing. Nada. Zilch. He did work on M:tG and other TSR books, and some of that comes up, but I wanted to showcase his work on The World Builder's Guidebook. So I scanned a little bit of it. Here are a few images from the book by the late Glen Michael Angus.

Hella Nor Bio (Oldy Artz XXVIII)

Here's some information about Hella Nor you didn't know.

Princess of Pan-Gea (Old Art XXVII)

Here's a Princess of Pan-Gea.

The Future is Gooz

Concept: It is the future and all the pretty people are dead. Only the lowly Gooz remain.

Long live GOZR.

#gozr

Echoes (Older'n Dirt Art XXVI)

Page one of Echoes, a Pan-Gea comic written by my friend Jayne and scribbled by me on Paris Paper for Pens.

Fawn & Serpent (Old Art XXV)

More Pan-Gea stuff. This one was cool because a guy sent me a sketchbook in the mail so I could draw directly into it. It wasn't "his" sketchbook, in the traditional sense. He would take to conventions and pay comic artists to draw in it. Most of the art already in the book was from creators I didn't know but there was at least one or two pieces from big names. I just can't remember who the hell they were.

It struck me as a bit odd and risky to send a stranger such a treasure and ask them too doodle in it. But it turned out pretty good, I think. There's a color version of this that will show up in the series later. Since I'm getting old and senile I might forget I wrote this one and repeat the story like a codger telling tales of The Big One.

Sarrow (Really Old Art XXIV)

This guy's name is Sarrow. I think he was supposed to be a character in my comic Pan-Gea: Seven Arrows, but he ended up being cut. He's still bitter about it.

Brig Iceclover (Older Than Dirt Art XXII)

Brig Iceclover was a character from my Pan-Gea comic, a sister to Fawn Rainchild.

Russ Hillborn (Old Art XXI)

Russ Hillborn is a cat person character I created long ago. He's sort of a Gandalf figure who appeared in a short comic called Winter.

Zarp Cover (Old Art of Doom XX)

Zarp! This character came out of the early 2000s and appeared in numerous little comics between then and the mid-2000s. I still sketch and doodle this guy from time to time and I still have lots of scripts and story drafts featuring him. He's great. I wanna do more Zarp comics... but I'm also very lazy and I know from years of firsthand experience that drawing comics is fuckin' hard work. Anyway... I have this idea for a wordless Zarp comic. Well, there might be dialog but it would be in weird alien scripts as Zarp encounters strange races of creatures in his wandering across a Pan-Gea world. Zarp himself would simply be unspeaking. So this would be 100% focused on visual storytelling. Because that would make it easier to do, right?

I really love this drawing. I did it on Paris paper for pens using my standard array of PITT pens and brushes coupled with Prismacolor markers (that was my arsenal at the time). Oh, and the background was drawn with a Micron 005.

Reflections of Mortality (Old Art XVIII)

Pens and brush pens on bristol. Fawn Rainchild. Mid 2000s.

Two Slayers (Old Art XVII)

From 2005, for a commission.

Reading: The Broken Sword

I'm currently listening to the audiobook The Broken Sword, by Poul Anderson. This is a book I never had when I was young, nor even heard of, though I did have a couple of Anderson's books on my shelf. As with my consumption of music, I was absolutely random in my reading. I found things by accident and read them if the mood struck me (thank goodness for that accidental discovery of Tanith Lee!).

This is a good read so far. It's incredibly similar to Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series. But since this book came out in 1954 and Night's Master was 1978 it is clearly the case that Lee was inspired by Anderson. Both are telling what are essentially "dark" fairy tales (Lee is quite a bit darker, of course).

I'm amazed how much of D&D's approach to elves and dwarves came from this book. Right down to the way elves "learn slower" than humans, which is mirrored in D&D's XP tables being different for elves. (Kids, I'm talking about old D&D, in case you're confused. No boomer jokes please.)

I'm about 75% of the way through it. It's exciting, fast-paced, and full of blood and guts and sexual innuendo. It is not a subtle book. I like it.

As an aside, I enjoy the way Anderson plays with the Norse and Celtic stuff and has the Christian stuff layered on top as the "new thing". He definitely mentions Christ as a power that overpowers the ancient gods, though very little is actually spoken about it so far. He's not beating me over the head with it and there's nothing preachy about it that I can detect. It just feels like fun fantasy worldbuilding to me.

I'm aware that Poul Anderson was generally a libertarian, in terms of political philosophy, and that he did permeate a lot of his writing with political ideas. I don't have a problem with that since I think it would be quite impossible to avoid putting your politics into any creative work you do. There's no such thing as fun without politics, people. Get over that myth right away. Regarding the meat of his politics, I probably disagree on much of it not most of it. I'm quite sure I do. But it doesn't detract from reading this book for what it is and genuinely enjoying the hell out of it.

Sand in the Bone: Marks and Risk

In this post, I talked about weapons and weapon damage for Sand in the Bone. I said PCs would have "Mastery" they can spend on weapons. I've thought a little more about this and realized that I already have a thing called "Marks" which can easily cover weapon skills. So I'm folding the idea of mastery into Marks.

Characters begin with some number of Marks. A Mark is really just any special feature the Player wants to highlight about the character. Since this game doesn't have any traditional attributes, such as strength or intelligence, Marks allow you to customize however you like. So Mark could be a special skill, a relationship, a magical power, or even some kind of curse or negative trait.

Now, I do not want to go the positive vs. negative balance sheet route. In G.U.R.P.S., for example, you can gain points to buy skills and advantages by taking disadvantages. Need another 5 points? Give yourself a paralyzing fear of snakes. And so forth. This is a fine mechanic and I don't ever mean to give that game shit for what it does. It's solid. But I don't want that here.

So my idea is that there is a mix of creative and random elements to chargen. The random means you might get a negative Mark, such as a curse. That way we don't have to fuck around with making PCs that have intense coulrophobia in order to allow for extra perks. I want to be a better gymnast, so I'm making my dude a galaphobe!

Which leads to another concept I'm definitely working into the game: risk. Choices matter. So during chargen, Players have a baseline method for making a character and they can stick to the baseline and come up with something awesome. Or they can choose to take risks in the hopes of getting better results. This will manifest as multiple chargen tables you can choose to roll on. While there may be one basic table to roll on (A), you choose to roll on alternate table B or C, each of which have more potent results but also more drawbacks.

I want to carry that concept through the entire game. For example, the use of Sand, which I talk about here, is inherently risky. And not just in the random dice rolling way, but in the sense that you are making choices that increase or decrease risk.

ASIDE: I had flirted with the idea that you could play this game absolutely middle of the road. Making almost zero dice rolls, you could sort of coast through conflicts. But the tradeoff would be that you could never have amazing success or make incredible discoveries. You'd be living a boring life for a great adventurer. So I'm not sure if I want to include that or not.

Fawn in the Hills (Old Art XIII)