Dangerous Idolatry

I enjoy discovering new artists and being amazed by what they can do. The internet has been a magnificent blessing for the arts as more and more folks are practicing and sharing their work. In the old days, you'd find new artists by reading comics and browsing the bookshelves and magazines. Today you can find ten new ones a day and get bored before you run out.

Sean Aaberg amazes me.

The ones that impress me to the most often have copious amounts of work, including a seemingly endless series of sketchbooks in addition to their finished works. And I'm always blown away by that because that ain't me. I'm the artist over here with just a handful of sketchbooks, most of which are not full.

Erol Otus mesmerizes me.

Part of this is because I don't believe I'm obsessed with drawing. I love to draw, and I think about drawing nearly all the time. But I don't actually do it as much as I would like. Another part of the reason is that between 2009 and 2023, with maybe a year offset somewhere in the middle, I drew almost exclusively digitally. So I don't have physical drawings lying around from that period. I have thousands of PSD and TIF files*.

Raven Perez blows my mind.

But that's an aside, really. The point of this post is to talk about why envy is a potentially toxic shitty thing to do to yourself.

Brian Baugh makes me happy.

To be clear: it is good to look at the art of others, marvel at it, love it, and even express the very human "man, I wish I could do that!". This is not the problem, as long as you don't let it become one. That feeling turns dark when you look at their work and compare it to your work, looking for all the ways in which you are not as good as them.

Don't do this.

Evlyn Moreau enchants me.

It isn't helpful to anyone, most of all to yourself. You are not them. The strokes you make are yours. The drawings you draw are yours. You can never do what they do because you are not them.

Bud Root gives me funny feelings.

Also, they are not a representation of perfection. I don't care if their art is the most beautiful you've ever seen and it makes you cry and they have thousands of beautiful pieces and other thousands of pages of sketches. They are not you, you are not them. And you can only be you.

Joe Vaux kickstarts my imagination.

It sounds stupid to say it. Like a "duh" kind of moment. But you gotta realize how urgently true it is. You are an embodied individual tied inextricably to your own personal history and your own personal future, which has yet to be written. Focus on what you do. Look at their work, enjoy it, learn from, take from it what you feel will help you grow and feel more robust. But never do the math on who is better. That way leads only to dread and self-loathing.

Matthew Allison makes me want to get better.

*Honestly, to satisfy my lust for printed material, I am considering doing a "digital sketchbook series" where I collect tons of those drawings into a few print books. I think that could be super fun. 

Vaughn Bodé sings to my spirit.

Black Pudding #7

I'm very proud of Black Pudding. What started in 2016 as an experiment to create the kind of OSR stuff I liked to see has persisted, albeit at a slow pace. This post is about the latest issue, #7.

This issue is a milestone for me because it includes a 16-page gazetteer (17, counting the names tables) setting of my fantasy world of Yria. I had toyed with this idea for a long time, assuming I would have to devote an entire 100-page book to the topic to do it right. In the end, I realized all I needed was a quick-and-dirty GM's guide to the setting. And 16 pages did the trick, at least for me.

It starts with a map, as is often the case. I have a love-hate relationship with maps. They define things a little too much up front for my tastes, but they are also beautiful and inspiring - and the whole point of any Black Pudding zine is to inspire. The Yria map is one that has went through a lot of incarnations over the years, but the one showing up in BP7 is as close to legit as you're gonna get. Hell, in a future edition I might utterly change it. I don't know. Each TTRPG table is its own world, after all.

Next you get a list of the major areas on a d66 table. So 36 areas are given as possible birthplaces
and/or adventure locations. I also include a d20 inspiration table for adventure keywords, something I've always done for myself. I often call these "beats". So when I'm coming up with an adventure to run I might list 3 or 4 beats such as ritual, paranoia, moon, and dead crops. Beats sort of paint the images in your head. The keyword table in BP7 includes words that are essential to the Yria setting. They are not random words, they all have meaning to me. They are deliberate choices.

The next two pages are an actual gazetteer of the 36 locations, ala X1: Isle of Dread. Less is more. I went with broad strokes, planting images using keywords for each location. Instead of describing the government structure and ruling elites of Seapath, I just tell you the vibe: One of the five cities. Serpentine across the mountain pass, ruled by the rich, sought by the desperate. Come to trade, stay to dream. You get an image of the city (serpentine across the mountain pass... it lays like a snake, humped over a mountain). You know who runs the show. You know why folks would go there and something about why they might stay. It seems to be a place rife with corruption, but also full of hope or at least potential wealth.

Next five pages are devoted to the five cities. Yria only has five cities of note. Any other cities are either ruins, cursed, or not very big. This concept is very much in the vein of the "points of light" across a "dark wilderness" motif. That is, I believe, a super-effective way to game*. Each city gets one page with imagery and various tables for what you might see or encounter. The rulers are noted, and a very brief description is given, akin to the 36 location gazetteer style. So if the short description of Seapath from above isn't enough, the one page for Seapath gives you a little more.

The second half of the section is the mythos. This mythos (100% using that term because of Deities & Demigods, the most inspiring D&D book of all time) has been with me for many years. Decades. It underpins almost every fantasy setting I've ever created or tried to create. It is based on one dozen beings, each of which I sketched onto small blue cardboard cards sometime in the early 2000s. Those images appear in the book, though in gray scale of course. The section gives you that list of beings and their general powers, broadly-speaking. Being heavily influenced by Deities & Demigods, I wanted/needed each of them to be corporeal as well as spiritual and eternal. They have bodies. They have stats. You can interact with them.

Rather than giving the specific stat block for each deity, I opted to merely suggest them. Each one is based loosely on an existing B/X monster. So for example Black Wing (death) is based on a giant roc with 300 hit points. Each god is described loosely, focusing on their demeanor and concerns. Some sketch is given of how you would worship them and what their clerics are like. And the final detail, which I really liked, is that each one has some lists of keywords to describe being in their presence. I think that's all you need.

The whole thing wraps with 5 d66 tables of common names, each keyed to one of the five cities.'

In case you ever wondered, this is my favorite thing so far in the series. I realize it isn't exactly the same kind of stuff that made the zine popular. It isn't hand-scrawled, it isn't universally useful. It's very specific to my world. But I designed it as loosely as possible to allow easy access. It is very easy to steal from.

Other things in the issue are more typical of the zine. There are 4 new character classes, one of which is the Rat Bastard. I created that one way back in 2017, which is why it, more than any other, has the tone and vibe of early BP issues. It was meant to go into issue 2 but somehow I left it out. I have no idea what happened or how I missed it all these years. Happy to finally include it.

The other class I really love in this one is the Eyeball. That one is a keeper, for me. And we also get some coolness from contributor David Okum! A handful of monsters and a character sheet round the thing out. In fact... this one features my favorite character sheet so far. I love this one because it is the cleanest and most useful that I've ever created.

*The first proper D&D campaign I was ever in, way back in 1987 in high school, started as a crude 8.5 x 11 map of a town. It was the DM's setting at that point. I think he only knew the town and nearby areas, so that's where we adventured. It grew a bit over time. It's a brilliant way to do a campaign: don't flood the players with information! Just paint the image and start playing.

John Ra

I really don't care too much about precision when it comes to describing the arts. For example, there might be an album I call heavy metal and you say it is technically grindcore, I think that's fascinating but ultimately I don't care about getting it "wrong" very much. It's still metal. And let's be real: some of the sub-categories of metal are ridiculously granular*. Unless you're a super-aficionado, nobody cares. Heavy, thrash, death, prog, and black are probably all you need to describe the landscape. Maybe.

That's a digression. The point of this post is to talk about genre in fiction, a little bit. And to ramble. A lot.

I am not an avid reader. When I was a teenager I read what I considered to be a lot of books. Started with some books I can't remember and moved into Tolkien and Howard and others. But upon hearing the reading habits of some of my RPG friends, holy shit I was not an avid reader. I was a dabbler at best. My god some of you people read like you want to destroy your eyes.

Anyway, the books I read when I was young were mostly fantasy novels with a few SF tossed in here and there. I know a lot of people say that D&D expands kids' vocabulary and leads them to read more. In my case, once I started playing D&D I actually read fewer books. I was too damn busy making things up and giving them stats. Why would I read someone else's ideas when I could make up my own?

Later, mostly in my 20 and 30s, I read a lot of nonfiction. Far more nonfic than fiction. I was really into books about science, such as The Beak of the Finch and River out of Eden and I also read things like A People's History of the United States and Night.

Today what I discover is that my favorite genre of fiction is sword and sorcery... a sub-category of fantasy that isn't easily defined and is historically marked by some of the most egregious sexism and racism you can find in fantasy fiction. I never claimed to have lofty tastes, after all. I am a lowbrow artist, I believe.

But when it comes to making games, I really do love sci-fantasy. That is, fantasy with spaceships and robots. It's kind of goofy, a little over the top, but it offers everything and that appeals to me for some reason. Especially when running games. I like to riff and improvise and such a setting is most forgiving in that regard.

*I use Spotify a lot. Like a fucking LOT. I go to sleep with it in my ears on most nights. Each year they do this "wrap up" thing where they tell you what you listened to. Mine always tells me I'm "adventurous" because I listed to over 1,000 genres in the past year. How the FUCK are there 1,000 genres? I know for a fact I do not listen to all types of music. I've never been into hip-hop, for example. But I guess because there were a handful of hip-hop songs that I listened to more than once that counts as me being adventurous. I dunno. But jesus, "hyper-techno-death-thrash-grindcore-alternative" is not a fucking thing. It's probably just rock.

Women and Weirdos

Beauty and the beast is a kind of trope that refers to a juxtaposed couple: the beautiful, pure, true, good female and the bestial, rough, bad male. Of course the story typically entails her finding the good in him.

But what is the wider trope of the beautiful female juxtaposed against the grotesque, weird, robotic, or monstrous male? Not quite the same as beauty and beast, this wider trope can involve any sort of weirdo being next to the female character. It's a super common thing in fantasy art. You see it all the time with artists like Bode, Azpiri, Corben, Frazetta, etc. It's so common it just kind of hides among all the other art.

Women and weirdos. Hotties and horrors. Chicks and chucks (ok, that's a stretch).

To wit, here's an Arthur Suydam piece perfectly illustrating the idea. Let's ignore that he's a prick for a moment and enjoy his Wally Wood impression.

Arthur Suydam

Blas Galego doing it as well. I don't know anything about Galego, but I enjoy his work.
 

Blas Gallego

I recently fell in love with Brian Baugh's art, which is 100% in this vein. So check him out.

80s

WARNING: Rambling ahead. Just a whole lot of rambling.

I'm trying to remember life in the 1980s. I was born in 1970, so my entire later childhood and teenage years were in the 80s. I grew up in the 80s.

This is an interesting position, I think. Because I remember the 70s, to a lesser degree. I was there for disco and punk rock... at least temporally. I was a kid so I didn't know punk rock from pop rocks. I heard of disco, of course.

The 70s was before the rise of cable TV, but at the heights of TV's general power. When I was really little, we only had whatever channel would come in using the antennae (bunny ears). That was basically KET and the local Fox 41. I saw Emergency, Bozo, and The Incredible Hulk.

But anyway... the 80s came. Things changed as they do. Cable was a thing. We were poor, so we didn't have it. But we did have it once for a few months, including The Movie Channel. It was great. I saw 1941 and Excalibur and a bunch of stuff I don't remember. Hell, I watched Excalibur when I was 12... probably too young. Those scenes of naked women juxtaposed against armored knights really left a lasting imprint on my brain.

In the 80s, you had rotary phones and push button phones at the same time. And phone cords that got twisted up. We didn't have a phone at all until I was about 16. If you have never lived in a world without a phone, that is probably hard to fathom. Like... how the fuck would we have called for an ambulance if we needed one? The answer is we'd run to the nearest neighbor with a phone. When I was about 8 in 1978 my mom and I lived alone on a hill in an old shack without a phone, bathroom, or sometimes electricity. There was an old lady about half a mile down the road who had a phone and would let mom use it if she needed.

So anyway. In the 80s you had the rise of the VHS. We didn't own a player but you could rent one with your movies. If I remember correctly, it was about $5 to rent the player for 3 days and I think $1 per movie. So one of the things we'd do on some weekends, after mom started working at a factory job, was rent a player and 3 movies. I got to pick one movie. The store had maybe a hundred or so movies and my focus was on fantasy and sci-fi.. so basically this one shelf with maybe 20 films on it. I watched Beastmaster, Road Warrior, and Weird Science many times.

The other way you'd catch a cool flick was when they would put it on TV as a special event. They did that frequently with Conan, Road Warrior, and First Blood.

For music, this was the reign of the cassette tape. My first foray into listening to music on my own was to get my hands on a cheap jam box and score a few bootleg cassettes at the flea market. Alabama's Roll On was the first, I think. Then a cousin hooked me up with some AC/DC and it was all over for me. I was a metalhead. When I got my job at Hardees, I would buy at least one tape every paycheck. Often it would be based on the cool ass album cover and names of songs, having no clue who the band was. I didn't read magazines and didn't know anyone who knew shit about it other than a couple guys at school who seemed to know what was up. They clued me in on Metallica.

It was like that, though. Word of mouth was perhaps the most potent form of advertising. Because you weren't going to see TV ads for the super cool shit like D&D (with exceptions... there was the cartoon) or Vinnie Vincent Invasion. You needed your stoner friend who was a year older than you to say "Check this out, man. It's badass."

We were afraid of being consumed in a nuclear fire. This is not hyperbole. We were in a cold war with the USSR and a full-blown nuclear arms race was the name of the game. We had post-apoc movies like Mad Max. I remember checking out books from our local library about survival. They had one called Nuclear Winter that scared the shit out of me. At one point I planned to move to South America and live in the Amazon... probably because I had watched Romancing the Stone a few times. Kathleen... sweet Kathleen.

Let's see... I rode the bus to school pretty much my entire career with the exception of my senior year when I carpooled with some guys. The road I lived on at the time was hilly and curvy. If it snowed and school let out, the bus driver would not attempt to go up the hill. So she would stop and let us out. It was about a mile and a half to my house from there. About 8 of us would get off and hoof it home. By the time I got home, I was alone because I lived near the other end of the road. It was a weird, dreamy time. I don't know if the driver was supposed to do that or not, but it was done.

My friend had a computer (Tandy) and so we did play some games. Test Drive, Galactic Conquest, Bards Tale, etc. But the idea of an "internet" didn't enter my vocabulary until around 1994. I didn't get my first computer until 2000. I think I got my first email, a Yahoo account, in 1996 or something. But in the 80s, almost nobody had a computer until much later in the decade.

We did have consoles. Specifically Atari 2600. My cousins had one, which we played on their huge floor model TV on the carpet in 1982. We didn't get an Atari until a few years later when mom started working. Combat, Pac-Man, Pitfall, Berserk, Duck Hunt, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Swordquest!

Lots of people smoked. Every restaurant had ashtrays, every car, everywhere. Yes, you would visit some office such as a doctor or whatever and you'd see people smoking inside. That's just how it was. It was less so in the 80s than the 70s, but still omnipresent.

In my experience, which I know is particular to me, there was never any discussion of race, gender, or sexual orientation in the better part of the 80s. Sexual orientation definitely became a topic as the decade progressed, with the AIDS epidemic. And I know it was a hot discussion point for a very long time before that, but those discussions never filtered down to my level: rural white trash. Fuck's sake, in 1982 I was still telling racist and gay jokes in school. EVERYONE DID. And even though I felt that nagging sensation that "this ain't right" it didn't stop me from occasionally doing it to get the yuck-yucks from my peers, who were mostly redneck boys who probably still tell them to this day.

It was a time.

Another topic nobody talked about was socialism. Holy shit... the fucking communists were the enemy! Socialism was very literally a dirty word. I had no idea what it meant other than it was "people who hate freedom". The level of propaganda against communism and socialism that blanketed the USA at that time is incomprehensible. If you are a leftist today posting on social media about politics you really have no idea how lucky you are to be able to do that at all. You couldn't breathe a positive word about that shit when I was a kid. It was exactly as bad as saying you were gay... and that shit would get you beat up.

Not the best of times. But it had its charms in other ways. We got B/X D&D, some great heavy metal, some classic movies, and some killer comics out of the deal.

Wulf and Batsy

Like I have with so many other artists, I discovered Brian Baugh's work via Instagram. Let's face it, old farts, we live in a time of great riches in terms of art. You can complain all day long that they don't make 'em like they used to, but god dammit they make a lot of 'em and a lot of 'em are fucking awesome.

It was through following Baugh's Insta that I noticed all the posts about this "Wulf and Batsy" duo of a big werewolf and a slinky vampiress. Which eventually lead me to visit the Alterna Comics website and actually BUY THEM. Good move. Because these are great comics.

Physically, the comics I got from Alterna are tops. They are lovely objects, very old school, with a $1.99 cover price that is kind of amazing today. Not sure how they do that. But the printing is on some kind of newsprint, interiors are black and white. But it looks fantastic.

Printing aside, the comics look gorgeous. Baugh is not worried about being in a hurry or trying to cram too much into a small space. One story about a weird science villain takes four issues to play out but what happens is actually very simple and straightforward. But Baugh likes to soak up the scenery and give us what we came to see: cool ass black and white horror line art that is one part gothic, one part classic, and one part sexy pinup.

FUN.

Check out the cool trailer for the series.

I'm just happy this kind of thing has space to exist today. I want more.