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.

Eowyn (Old Art What Clawed Up From Grave XIX)

This was some time after I watched the second LotR movie and I just thought we needed a busty pin-up Eowyn. So I did one.

And here's a colored version. This was colored by a dude named Sean Loftiss. I know nothing more about him as it's been many years since I interacted with him at all. But it's a neat color job. A little heavy on the airbrush FX, but not quite so much as to be a negative. Nice work.

Colors by Sean Loftiss

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.

Wonder Woman Action (Old Art XVI)

Another old favorite. Did this one soon after a bit of a rebirth of my creative soul. I went through a somewhat darkish time in 2000, a long slump. I came out of it creating art like this. Rather like discovering you can draw even though you'd been drawing for years.

Savage Rider (Old Art XV)

The RPG Folder Van Damme Couldn't Spinning Roundhouse Kick

A continuation of this series, in which I clean out my "new" RPG folder and properly catalog this shit.

B.Y.O. Dungeon Rules: The Scrapbook RPG is a 15 page PDF by Jacob DC Ross, who I have never heard of. In fact I don't remember ever looking at this before.

I kind of expected to open this up and see a lot of images or pasted words, like a real scrapbook. But there are no other illustrations other than the cover and the whole thing is laid out in single column digest with a sensible sans font.

The introduction says this is a game you use for any genre and it's inspired by Troika! and, I think, the Fighting Fantasy books that inspired that game. So this is a good thing. I dig that. It also says it was designed for use with the author's line of dungeon chapbooks. Which also sounds interesting. However, if I'm being honest here, I always get a little disappointed when I see a generic system. I dig the ideas they might bring in terms of mechanics, but their universality leaves me cold and dead on the inside, like a man who's Mörk Borg has been converted to G.U.R.P.S..

So, after reading this book, I can say that this is more-or-less exactly what Troika! is, but with less style. Now, I don't mean that as an insult. This is actually a well-explained, tight little set of rules if you enjoy FF type games. It has all the standard stuff: Luck, Stamina, Skill, d6s only, etc. It has a couple of interesting rules tweaks. For example, it includes character abilities, which are slightly different from... oh wait. Now I see. Since this is a universal game, they changed the spells to abilities. But they work the same way. So instead of "I cast Mysterious Jolt" and subtract 1 Stamina you say "I'm using my Cunning Dash ability" and subtract 1 Stamina.

Abilities have levels just like skills, but are different in that they may have inherent limitations (use once per day, etc.) and they cost Stamina. These are like feats or other such game mechanics from other RPGs.

It does not have Backgrounds included. You have to invent your own. Which is fine... when I'm writing Backgrounds for something like Supercalla I'm inventing them as I go. This game just asks each player to do that on their own instead of rolling on a table.

Overall, seems solid. I could see me using this instead of Troika! if I had a really specific idea that wasn't weird enough for that game. I still don't know why it's called "the scrapbook RPG" but it's free.

Macho Women with Guns by Greg Porter with art by Darrel Midgette is a 13 pager that delivers on the title. You play the roles of tough females, usually with guns, doing adventure shit. Looks like this came out in the late 80s, according to what I read. Which is awesome... this isn't a game trying to look 80s, it is an 80s game. I also read that this doesn't have a PDF edition... but I have the PDF... oops... PIRACY!! There's also apparently a big, shiny version from Mongoose.

Chargen is point buy. Stats are things like Str, Dex, Macho, and Looks. You also have skills that add to your ability when using them. Then you roll equal to or under that number on 3d6 to do badass shit.

There are character advantages in addition to skills. So you can have stuff like teflon skin or a secret love.

You can do a Macho attack... being such a badass that you effectively diminish the Macho of your enemies and they might even just stare, stunned into submission by how fuckin' cool you look.

Apparently this was followed up by Renegade Nuns on Wheels and Batwinged Bimbos From Hell... so I want those.

Is this game sexist? I dunno. I can see an argument there, but I feel like the spirit of the game is pure and fun and any hint of sexism is relatively inconsequential and not worth whining about. Fight me if you want, I don't care.

Some funny and cool "monsters" from the book:

This is SOOOO 80s, and SOOOO cool. It needs its own RPG.

Wonder Woman (Old Art XIV)