This is the first draft of the cover, which I’ve been working on today. My intention is to overlay clean hero art (Probably three) between the title and the license fluff. I want to get the official license but at this stage I’m not sure (if alone) I can reach the levels they are asking for in terms of professional layout and art (HIGH production values, as they say). Under the Fan license of course I can’t angle for donations (to allow those who liked it enough and wanted to support future projects) and wouldn’t be able to use any other means of generating a small tidbit of revenue. The official license would allow me to sell the physical book and take donations on the PDF which I’m still keen to make freely available.
(^ Click for full image)
I feel very isolated at the moment, not only because I’m miles away from friends and loved ones but because I’m writer, illustrator, editor, layout designer and manager/promoter of this little island. Carrying the workload over all the areas isn’t easy, especially when you’re doing 39hrs a week baking bread from 3am – 11pm and juggling apprenticeship paperwork, sometimes it just overwhelms me and I’m faced with that tough choice, work on this or play L4D/TF2 etc. and relax for a few precious moments. Sleep continues to chase me around with a cricket bat, adieu!
Update: I had to redo the parchment background for the innards due to a very silly dpi blunder on software I’m unfamiliar with… here is the redone copy. I may yet tinker with the final design.
The biggest slowdown on work at the moment involves pinning down a first drafting of magic notes. I’ve scrapped two approaches thus far because the things I want to do with it seem to tug in different directions. *sigh* I am going to be forced to compromise somewhere along the line.
Current thoughts involve limiting elemental/natural magic to the Elves, this slots into their appearance fluff which denotes that their hair (eyes and other features too depending on power) reflects an elemental origin. I am suggesting to GMs that they offer Elven mages a chance to develop features that denote an increase in power by whichever level-up marker they feel best. The additional reflections of power tend to be a shift in skin hue, arcane tattoo about the face or chest and in some cases a rare (but beautiful) mutation. Other forms of magic are more open, or device dependent.
Anyway, I digress… The more I suffered on the subject the more inclined I was to look at Savage Worlds again and so I’m preparing the work with more of an eye to Savage Worlds. Notes are still going to be made for use with Anno Geometrica. In keeping with this I’m going to try and release an open draft to download at some point, this will involve me stalling settlement work a little to release it with only Furnace Town active. This means I can get feedback from generous playtesters and drop the time-consuming settlement work in at later stages.
I’ve started using Derwent graphitint pencils to work-up sketchy artwork for the system, I don’t think the scans do them justice but I’ll work on that when I have a bit more time to tweak settings. I promised I’d show off some of the work done with them so far, so here are the first two pieces…
The above reflects my current ideas on the elemental nature of the Elves, this particular Elf draws the power of air, I have referred to him as an acolyte of storms…
The above is an equipment draft for Dwarven PCs, their tower shield is one of the mightiest tools at work in tunnel warfare along with the Jade-core Splinter. The Jade-core Splinter is mildly arcane, giving off a faint glow and increasing the chances of penetrating magical shields, barriers or armour.
Apologies for the lack of updates for the last few months, every single time I got close to typing up a new entry something more important jumped on my back and forced me down.
Started work on transforming this old sketch (featuring a battle royale of sorts between monsters and heroic figures) into a coloured splash image for the currently in-active Paper Mages site, Paper Mages will be the home for Steamshaft (when it is finished) and is also going to be the web home for Anno Geometrica and a few other British authored roleplay items.
Those of us behind Paper Mages come from a background of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, wargaming (Games Workshop), Advanced Fighting Fantasy and other very Britishy products… No shock then that we enjoy keeping alive the things that made those products so great for us. Fairly early on when I was drafting the steamshaft I realised that I was making an upside down Necromunda in many ways, what a shame that Games Workshop never considered making Mordheim a more direct fantasy imagining of Necromunda… part of me hopes it would be much like the Steamshaft.
I retired as the forum admin for a community (many months ago to focus on a new job) but have been so trusted and valued for my contribution that they have retained me as a casual member of the current team. I have a continued input on the health of the community and do a little bit of work behind the scenes where I provide material for events that run around geek holidays and general holidays. The upcoming event is about Pirates vs Ninja so I have been charged with creating user ranks for the rival usergroups that will be created for its duration.
Pirate rank #1
Pirate rank #2
Pirate rank #3
Mod/Support
Group Leader (staff)
Competition rank
Ninja rank #1
Ninja rank #2
Ninja rank #3
Mod/support
Group leader (staff)
Competition rank
Events like this are really fun, the community get really involved in the roles and very rarely take it too far with each other. They also enjoy the effort the team have made to break the forum year into little glimmers of madness and laughter, with competitions rewarding user input in many creative areas. The best moment is when a user remarks ‘They don’t do anything like this on the other domains!” because it tells the team they’ve made it an event. The rivalry aspect is a strong part of most events, we normally have two temporary usergroup factions battling each other out in the competitions and threads, it encourages the users to work together to try and out fox the rival faction.
I can sometimes be very bad at sharing work and activities that occupy my time, leading to silence on this blog… often it is an element of secrecy or because I feel the entry needs a considerable bulk of text rather than just a gallery in isolation. I will try to be less TOP SECRET about everything in the future.
Too early for me to ‘review’ Champions Online but I am excited about it and most importantly, enjoying it thus far. In some ways it is too similar to CoH, which while expected feels a little lazy on the part of Cryptic. I feel bad for saying it. Really happy to have gained a Steampunk action figure in-game, not sure if they are random or based on where you bought the game but if they are fully random I am amused at being gifted the Steampunk figure.
Geekery abounds! Is that Fire Fox? Or FyreFox… I’ll probably end up having to drop the name, alas.
Just a very quick share of two tiny sketches as I pondered the nature of Steamshaft buildings… currently my mind is settling on actual houses/structures of some kind in special regions designed to support such features, often under the control of Elves. For more common buildings I am having to sketch and give thought to the sorts of buildings that might exist on a settlement by settlement basis. I hope to eventually have each settlement offer a unique way of life within the Steamshaft. But enough waffling, I’ll end up going into a much longer entry if I’m not careful!
I’ve had little to no interest in the moo.com challenge, a shame really but then my blog doesn’t extend much of a reach so it was half-expected. Still, I’m going to give it a bash on my lonesome and perhaps some people will join as it goes.
Somewhere during the second pint after arriving in Edinburgh (a semi-dreadful journey weakened me!) I realised I was probably going to fail with the taking of pictures and writing/typing of words, even the sketching would take a back seat… In the end I took photographs of the Signspotting Project madness and the Christmas Shop, the latter purely because it would amuse Nicola and her mother. So yes, I failed to capture my antics.
The literary pub tour was probably the highlight, really good night with sore heads all round the morning after and shockingly light wallets too.
On holiday at long last, though I’ve lost a day of travel I’m ready for Edinburgh tomorrow. I’m going to try and update the blog during that time with photographs. I may even find the time to finish off two entries that I’ve been meaning to post for some time now and which don’t slide into my current format of sketchy postings. The biggest thing I’ve been missing are my little audio updates, I’m going to try and sort that side out in the near future to compliment the doodles and broken writing. Speaking of broken…
You might notice that the previous entries link at the bottom doesn’t work, annoying! I think I know why it is broken but I’ve been far too tired to tinker/dig for fixes and I might be changing the theme anyway. For now the archive will serve as a hopping point, please forgive me. All fixed with the new theme now, hopefully…
This is a fairly organic follow-on sketch request courtesy of one very cute (and possibly Ninja grade) bunny. It is for @girlygeekdom who founded the girl geek dinners and does many awesome things in the world of technology.
Half-tempted to make it super bunny :/ I should have another entry up later that won’t be filled with doodles/sketches but it may end up going live on Tuesday or Wednesday, depends how tired I get.
She gave me a lot of freedom so I opted to make a Flying Spaghetti Monster in God Mecha form… The meatballs are rotating sauce blasters and the eyes are slunk down into a protected visual cradle, its divine noodly appendages feed into graviton armour which continually shifts and reforms about the noodled core. To speak more of the armour is to stand on the brink of madness and rapture!
There were lots of very strange looks in the staff canteen while sketching this, I opted not to explain because they wouldn’t get it anyway…
Apologies for missing my usual update days, I’m swamped with some apprenticeship deadlines so have been mightily distracted.
This will be a slighty shorter entry than usual and is about one small part of the internal structure that makes up the Steamshaft, largely one type of support column… The Hevnar support.
This is for @shuttler who is the source of my miniature wargaming/collecting envy, beyond that podcasting, gaming and geekery abounds!
This was the 140 character (or less) sketch pitch: 15 ft amazon women defends the city of London from alien jellyfish falling from the sky. http://twitter.com/shuttler/status/2741841104
I should also add that I had loads of fun with this one, best pitch so far… I don’t normally draw Jellyfish, Big Ben or Amazons. I’m probably going to go over in copic pens and erase what doesn’t make that and give it a touch of copic/prismacolour. Easily more that could be done to take it beyond the sketch stage. I couldn’t resist adding in that text before I uploaded.
(I probably messed up on the 15ft part, I had intended to use the vague height of Big Ben as a marker but “OMG, Jellyfish in the sky while London burns!”)
I’d also like to apologise to the city of London for the sloppiest rendition of Big Ben ever to grace the internet. I really did want to spend hours crafting each beautiful part, I really did!
Managed to colour an old sketch earlier that I love. While it fails on an artistic level for various reasons my intent was purely to liven the original in a way that pleased me. I still prefer the sketch as it was but I was determined to splash some colour to it eventually and have thankfully done so.
The original sketch was for my beloved lady as a Valentine gift in 2005, I really like drawing her and she really likes faeries, dragons and all kinds of mythical and fantastical things. This is a scan of the original made before I framed it for her:
In this second sketch diary I will be sharing a very quick part of the wider world. Many settlements are still in a creative infancy but they are coming along strongly and as other features of the setting get the stamp of finality I can lockdown parts for release and make more certain strides on the way some settlements work or serve the PC and NPCs alike.
The Steamshaft is broken up into three segments, the Delvus Minor, the Crux Delvus and the Delvus Major. Within these segments there are large regions that have acquired names of their own from the peoples that call them home. The blacked criss-cross near the middle was originally intended to be of no consequence but I have now written in a very interesting bit of background and information about what is hiding there. I will say only that it ties in with the larger story and is likely to feature in any large campaign, though a GM may opt not to use it.
The above does not feature the thousands upon thousands of outward digs, with the exception of a few specific areas I am writing, these oft-dangerous outward regions are at the discretion of the GM who can create as many as he/she needs.
While this is an early concept I am likely to leave it unchanged, beyond making it visually stronger. Continue reading →
This featured entry is going to be consumed by The Steamshaft Chronicles!
Perhaps the best part of world building is found when you get to concept sketching little details. The pick and pickaxe is an important symbol and tool of life in the Steamshaft… a source of income, a weapon at need and indicator of wealth or heritage. So I’ve been spending some time thinking about how each race approaches the pick, even the Elves who would rather not dig any deeper (or outwards for that matter) have ornate and less functional incarnations.
-Tom
This was the 140 character (or less) sketch pitch: 
-Tom
