Sunday, November 3, 2024

Artists I Like: J. Freels

Another artist I like is Jeff Freels, or J. Freels. I know very little about this creator other than he created Bean! the d2 RPG and he is visually impaired.

Bean is a great little game. The central idea is it's a world of anthropomorphic beans and you use actual beans as dice. See, you get a sack of beans and paint one side of some number of them. When you roll the painted side, it is a 1 and when you roll the unpainted side it is a 0. Or something close to that. It's a coin toss. But unlike lame single coin toss systems (50/50 for everything? Boring.), this is a pool system. More beans = more chances for higher scores.

But that's a digression and unrelated to the meat of the post: the art.

Freels is an artist after my own heart. A great cartoonist! His bean characters are swanky and cool, simple and direct. And I love them.

There isn't a lot to be found about Jeff Freels outside his own website. But he has a nice bio page that explains quite a bit about who he is, what he does, and so forth. I don't care about the Reiki Master stuff, I just like the wonderful cartoon art.









7 comments:

  1. I worked with Jeff's Dad for a few years. Jeff also did paranormal investigations as well. His artwork and love of Tunnels and Trolls are things i really enjoy about him. To the best of my knowledge he still lives in he Olympia, Washington area, I think. His art style is a joy to look at and always brings a smile of pleasure to my face.

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    1. That's awesome! I love the whimsy of his work so much.

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  2. Oh, interesting! Shades of Larry Marder's Beanworld AND favorite household card game Bohnanza. I wish I had infinite time to play all these awesome games!

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  3. How can I find no evidence of anyone running a Beanworld RPG with this?

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    1. As a fan of the game, I SHOULD cheerlead and run a campaign myself. But there's so many games out there and I don't play as much as I used to. I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone actually playing this. I did run it once back in 2015 though.

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  4. (Please note that I assumed my initial reply to this didn't go through for some reason, but then after replying again just now, I realized that might have just been last night, so it maybe just hasn't been checked yet. So, either way, my apologies, and please feel free to just pick one of them OR include all of these to show the virtual world just how virtually strange I am. 😅)

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    1. lol... It's no worries. I have the blog set so I have to approve all comments. Otherwise I get a bunch of spam comments for scam links.

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