The Great Gathoxan Giveaway!

First thing's first - I'm gonna give away some original art! Here's the rules of the Great Gathoxan Giveaway:

1) As a GM, you need to run a full session of GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem.

2) You need to write up a full session report, including traps solved, treasure gained, and a list of the dead.

3) Share that session report either on your blog, or on G+. Tag me in on your post or let me know that you've posted your session report.

4) The first 5 GMs to run GVS2 will receive an original piece of Gathox art in the mail, and we'll trade contact info to make that happen.

5) I'm down to ship anywhere in the continental US. If you're outside of the lower 48 states, you gotta cover the costs of shipping.

That's it - just run the module for friends, post about it online, and the first five folks to do so get original Gathox art! Go get some!

Quake Alley Mayhem and Updates!

Alright, so I'm super stoked to announce that GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem is finally out! The module was a blast to work on and I cannot thank Mike Evans at DIY RPG Productions enough for being patient with me and supporting my work through thick and thin. Mike recruited the speedy, hard working, and talented Matt Hildebrand to handle layout, and Matt just nailed it to the wall with tightness and little design flourishes that really make the book pop.

You can find GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem here!

Okay, so what's in the module?

GVS2 is a tournament module with pre-gens. It's a classic 'Get the MacGuffin,' only it's not. Sure, retrieving the ancient artifact known as Vaclav's Holy Driver is the mission objective of the Purple Rockets gang played by the players, but the real mission becomes clear as soon as players enter the enemy base: beat the clock!


For every 20 minutes of table time, another earthquake occurs, invoking particular physical effects within the dungeon and sapping the PCs of crucial resources along the way, but these effects become more deleterious over time. This puts the pressure on players to solve the traps and puzzles of the dungeon as quickly as possible, as it becomes clear that the longer they wait, the closer to death they come. Finally, the dungeon is a high-density puzzle-and-trap dungeon  which means that players will have to apply their wits at top speed without rest in order to survive and retrieve the Holy Driver!

Why did you make a tournament module?

One practical and one design reason each inspired the decision to make a tournament module.

Practically, I needed a module I could take anywhere and run for total strangers to highlight the fun and deadliness of Gathox. I've been fortunate to run Quake Alley Mayhem at cons, out of state at friends' homes, for distant acquaintances and strangers by invitation, and for a number of local gaming groups. The Quake Table and time limits in the game allow those sessions to be action packed, concise, and constrained without being too short - all the fun of haste and hustle without the stress of sessions dragging out through indecision.

In terms of design (puts on designer's cap), over the years I've come to view retroclone games like Swords & Wizardry as a bit of a team sport, like football. I know, I know, this is a roleplaying game, but it's also tactical, conflict oriented, and requires cooperation amongst players whilst promoting varying degrees of competition within the group. To me that seems fun as hell.

What if I don't want to run a tournament?

You're in luck! There's an entire section in the module devoted to adapting Quake Alley Mayhem to campaign play, with alternative mission parameters and appropriate Reputation Points rewards. There's even a 'Tower Defense' version where you get to defend the Holy Driver from waves of gangsters pouring in to retrieve it! There's also a rumor table for roaming about The Kettle neighborhood, containing hints as to the deeper history of the Driver and linking out to potential new contacts, as well as random encounters to make that fact-finding mission more challenging.

If you're not convinced of the sheer radness of Quake Alley Mayhem, watch the sweet animation I made for the launch of the book:

Updates

So, it's been a minute or two since I last posted on this blog. Rest assured, I'll be posting here regularly again. This last year was gnarly, to say the least, in part because I lived in a camper in the woods with little to no internet through the long winter. I still live in my camper with my pupper, but I've finally made my way back to Missoula, MT, where I can have nice things like access to internet and gaming and playtest groups.

I'm just wrapping up my first draft of the Lamentations book I've been commissioned, and will be creating art for it once it's been submitted (which should be very soon). Additionally, I'm running two competing groups of players through my Gathox megadungeon, The Ruins of Ce-C'el, and will regularly post session recaps of those. You may find them interesting both for the sheer fictional joy of them as well as for their use in running multiple groups of players. I'll be doing my best to tease out larger design thoughts and strategies for that as I go. They're only a week in, so we'll see how it goes!

Finally, thank you so much for your support and interest in the things I make and do. I'd love to hear your thoughts and see your creations as well - tell me about how you use Gathox! If you make cool stuff, I'll be happy to promote it. Cheers!

Gathox Process: The Cover Art . . . also, updates!

Today I'd like to feature a step-by-step of my construction of the Gathox cover art, which follows below. But first, I'd like to make a few brief updates as to all things going on over here at the official Gathox Home Base Headquarters Neighborhood Friendship Society (TM) (R).

Update 1: Gathox Print Edition

You can get your digital copy of Gathox Vertical Slum HERE!!!!!

Mike and I had to make some changes and modifications to the original print files we sent to OBS. Those changes are complete (we hope!!!) and a final test print is on its way to Mike's hands as we speak. If it looks good, we will be turning that live on all of the OBS sites (DriveThruRPG.com, et. al.). Anyone who bought a .pdf will be getting an email with a discount off the print copy equal to the value of what they paid for their digital copy (in this case, $10). I'm super excited!

Update 2: GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem!

Over the last year and a half I have playtested and drafted an awesome tournament-style module for Gathox, called GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem! It features a 'Get The McGuffin' style mission full of traps and deadly consequences, and runs on a unique timer with escalating deadliness. The manuscript for GVS2 is complete and ready for edits, and the art is almost done as well. Ideally, I'd like to have this PC-killer ready for folks by Christmas time; cross your fingers, no guarantees! Also, the custom Gathox Character Sheet is almost ready for upload to DTRPG, and will be totally free for download.

Update 3: Life Stuff

I've been fairly quiet on the blog front as well as on G+ and Fb, and for good reason. I figure that I owe you a brief explanation as to why.

First, the committed relationship I was in for the last 4+ years ended, necessitating a move to a different part of the state. I now live in a remote part of Montana with my dog, and the internet here is essentially held together with chicken bones and hope :) The upside is that I recently was able to acquire an 18' Roadrunner camp trailer (for a song, no less) which I'm converting into a full-time home and off-grid mobile art studio - and I'm super pumped!

Second, shortly after I moved, I suffered a series of illnesses which kept me from working as much as I normally do. I've since healed up and am back up to par. The uptick is that my immune system is that much stronger, and I likely won't get ill again for some time to come (knock on wood).

Third, I've been given the opportunity to write and illustrate a book for Lamentations of the Flame Princess!!!!!!!!! The book is tentatively titled, "The Goddess Who Sleeps in Bile," and features a procedurally generated hex crawl, nightmare inputs from the players, and lots of level-agnostic deadliness. The research and drafting of the book eats up lots of my time, in the best possible way.

That's it for the updates; now on to a discussion about making the cover for Gathox!!!

Gathox Process: The Cover Art

I employed a mixture of physical and digital processes to make the GVS cover come to life. My goal was to make it look as natural and physical as possible, so I simply started with pencils on a standard 11"x17" sheet of Bristol board (100 lbs., lined for comics).

As you can see, I went for a unified, single-point perspective that would let me emphasize the verticality of the city environment. I set the horizon line far enough up from the bottom of the page so that I could detail a full street battle, but not so far that I couldn't communicate the steepness of the surrounding buildings. Also, the giant head belongs to Jackie Zhao, the gear-vomiting recluse featured in the chapter fiction written by Josh Wagner. There's a tiny gear on his tongue, but I like to think it could be mistaken for a tab of acid ;)

I chose gangs and characters that featured prominently in the year-long first campaign I ran for Gathox. On the left you see early and eager versions of The Firestarters (the PCs' gang), and on the right I've begun to illustrate a one-eyed hypercapitalist Kermen warrior getting punched out.

Here, I've continued to add in more Firestarters and Kermen, as well as some mangled hirelings and a Gongwarped Fisherman (the players had a hell of a time with the Fishermen in the first campaign, and I figured they deserved a spot on the cover as well).

Here I've added to the cluster of bodies on the page with some additional FPA gangsters and a laser-shooting Zhezhn known as a Pyramid Eye (which falls squarely under the heading of "Things in Gathox Inspired by Conspiracy Culture.") It's almost ready for ink . . .

I decided to start the inking process by blacking in the border of the image. I used permanent black ink and a flat, angled brush from a pack of kids' paint brushes (like $2 at Target). Blocking in the black border helps me see everything I'm doing better and gives me some leeway when I am working close to the edges of the image - I don't have to gauge where to terminate a line and can more easily avoid tangents along the sides of the illustration.

Like a lot of my friends and colleagues, I tend to ink from top to bottom. Because I'm left-handed, I also tend to ink from right to left. This keeps my hands out of the wet stuff. As an old crew boss of mine used to say, "Keep you hands, feet, and other objects outta the shit!"

Occasionally I'll switch over to working from the outside of the image toward the middle. Sometimes this is to frame up everything outside of the subjects, sometimes it's to work in line weight variation, and sometimes I do it just to switch things up.

After I finish inking my lines, I go through and add my spot blacks, beef up line weight as needed, hatch or texture parts that scream for more detail, and find ways to clarify an image with ink. I prefer to use ink washes on most of my black and white ink drawings, but decided against that technique for the cover. First and most important, I knew I wanted to colorize this piece with as much active color as I could, and washes would dull that out. Second, and really only a minor consideration, I knew that I had to scan this drawing in four different pieces (because I have a tiny scanner), and stitching the image together with washes was going to be labor-intensive with no guarantee that it would look good.

After everything was ready to go in terms of line art, I turned my attention to color.

I cut four sheets of cold-press watercolor paper in half and applied some paint in an abstract fashion. I used kid's neon tempura paint to get those super bright colors you see above, as well as some runny washes of gouache paint. I let gravity do some of the work, taping the paper at odd angles to my tilted drafting table to dry before applying another layer. I allowed the paints to mix a bit, working sufficiently wet that my dry time was slow and the pigments could interact.

Finally, I used acrylics to paint a large abstract background. I first covered my 16"x20" canvas with Open Acrylic additive, applied thinly with a palette knife, which slows the drying time and allows me to mix colors on the canvas, wet-on-wet, like oils. I knew I wanted a light source at the top with pooled darkness below, and the patchy mix above is what I ended up with. I dig this canvas on its own and might do more of these in the future for their own sake.

The next step took a while, but I was very pleased with the results. I used the canvas painting as my background, and began cutting selections from the scans of the watercolor paper and pasting them underneath different figures in the line art. I took inspiration from the old, brightly colored plastic toy action figures you could buy in bulk at the dollar store, and did my best to make the figures brighter than the background. Finally, I took several passes at shading and highlighting all the figures and surfaces digitally, paying attention to whether or not I was obliterating too much of the natural texture and detail from the color scans.

To finish the cover off, I got the print specs from Mike, built a template in Inkscape, imported my artwork, and built the graphics. I had made font choices for the book long before I finished the cover, so it was more a matter of toying with the fonts and box elements to get everything looking nice. I decided I didn't want to cover any of the art up with text, and given that Gathox is, well, vertical, I figured that a vertical title bar would fit nicely with everything else. Oh, and also neon green, because neon fucking green, that's why.

Cheers!