New Sci-Fi RPG Supplement

By The Illustrator  |  2012/05/07 01:33 Posted in Extreme Future, Future Heroes, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (1)

space habitatThe Colonnade system RPG supplement is the subject of the first ever system guide for Extreme Future and Future Heroes. I’ve sweated over the blurb for RPG DriveThru as usual, and here it is.

Colonnade, the first system guide for the Extreme Future game, provides an entire star system to start adventuring from. It is a safe and populous system nestled within the heart of the Core Worlds, but there are dangerous corners even here.

Characters can stay within the confines of the Colonnade system, or use it as a jumping off place for exploring the entire galaxy. The supplement has information on all of the planets within the system , both artificial habitats, and the system’s artificial planet.

The supplement also outlines how the politics of the Core Worlds affect the people of the Colonnade system, and indicate which corners of the system are safe havens, and which parts are a little more adventurous.

The supplement can also be used with the Future Heroes game, a game of superheroes of the extreme future, so take a look and make the jump to the Colonnade system.

The image is a space habitat, and it’s huge, providing space for a billion inhabitants. There are space docks at either end, and a few more sprinkled across the space habitat’s hull for good measure. There should always be a friendly spot to leave your spaceship.

Superhero Illustration – a scary hulking monster

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/24 01:36 Posted in Future Heroes, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

blue monster supervillainI keep trying to paint superheroes, only to have them come out looking mean, angry and supervillainy. This creature has just stumbled out of the lab he was created in. Judging from the jets of green light shooting from the lab building roof, we can tell that this supervillain is powerful.

I’m still half thinking of turning him into a superhero though. His face and hair look a little manga, and they give him a friendly vibe. If the metal underpants he’s wearing are removed, and replaced with a nice Spandex outfit and cape, there’s no reason he couldn’t fight for truth, justice, and all the rest of it. Whichever way he goes – using his powers for good, or evil – the strange blue guy is growing on me.

The metal underpants are supposed to be part of the machine used to breath life into his monstrous, cobbled-together carcass by the way. Still sticking to him as he stumbles to freedom.

For superpowers, they would probably revolve around super strength and some energy control power. He would most likely travel by jumping long distances. like our old friend the Hulk, and his weird scars would probably light up before some kind of green light pours out of his eyes, as an energy blast power.

I’ll be adding the illustration to my superhero  role-playing game, Future Heroes, either in the core rules, or in a supplement collecting a bunch of superheroes and supervillains together that I’m working on at the moment.

 

Red Spider a superhero swinging from building to building

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/22 22:34 Posted in Future Heroes, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

female superheroThis is another image from The Future heroes Role-Playing Game. It shows a dystopian future city, rust colored and dilapidated. Through the canyons of the future city swings Red Spider, a superhero with powers connected to projecting rays of web like matter from the palms of her hands.

I’m just noticing that a lot of the images I’ve been doing are of graceful superheroes. The very next one will have to be some huge brute with big muscles and bad skin, such as The Hulk, Ben Grim, or one of the other tanks that no superhero team seems to be complete without.

As with most superheroes from the Future Heroes setting, she does not wear a mask. Superpowers are much more accepted in the extreme future setting of the game, and the authorities are falling over themselves to recruit people with superpowers.

In such a universe the superhero sees little need to hide their identity.

Wikipedia gives some common motivations for a character to choose to have a secret identity, which include:
Allowing the character to live a “normal life” when not fighting crime.
Preventing the hero’s enemies from seeking revenge on others the hero may care about.
Giving the hero an advantage in crime fighting (e.g. Batman or The Shadow striking fear into criminals).
Gaining timely information on incidents as they happen, often through their occupation or that of their associates (e.g. a reporter or a newscaster would likely be more informed about incidents that a hero might be able to help with).
Aliens, upon coming to Earth, may choose to set up one or more secret identities as a learning tool. By pretending to be humans, they can explore the different roles and lives that a regular human is expected to have in his/her life and using their deeper understanding of human condition to help others.

None of these really seem to hold anymore in the setting of the far future, although if the superhero gets sent into the past, there would be some incentive to assume a secret identity.

More Superhero Role-Playing Game Art

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/19 19:32 Posted in Future Heroes, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

superhero in power armor in orbitHere’s another image from the latest Starbright role-playing game, Future Heroes. The image is an illustration of a superhero, whose powers are based around his power armor.

The armor has the weird look of something quite alien that has been given a jazzy paint job to make it look fit for use by a superhero.The strange ‘grafted’ look of the armor with bulky arms and slim torso is intentional, to make it look like a piece of eldritch alien technology that has only partially succeeded in fitting to the form of its latest, human, wearer.

The colors are reminiscent of the Iron Man suit, which was unintentional, but once I realized, I decided not to change the color scheme. The character has nothing in common with that Marvel character, except that it is armor, and the colors, everything else is weird and different. I think they’re great colors for a suit of power armor – the gold especially – and I think it’s obvious that I wasn’t trying to rip Iron Man off, or any other Marvel superheroes for that matter.

My head was totally in the world of science-fiction based superheroes, like Green Lantern, and The League of Superheroes. The game is based in a far future setting, called the Extreme Future Universe, and isn’t intended to simulate the world of 20th century heroes like Iron Man, The Hulk, and the rest.

The suit of armor is also much more ‘skin-tight’ than any worn by a superhero operating in the present day. The technology of the extreme future has advanced to such a degree that even thin materials can be given the properties of a suit of kevlar armor – if the superhero has the money.

So check out Future Heroes the sci-fi superhero game, for more art, more technology, and more adventure.

Dark Superhero Flying Over Futuristic City

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/15 14:46 Posted in Future Heroes, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

superhero flying over ctyI’ve created another piece of art for the upcoming Future Heroes Role-Playing game, which will be fully compatible with the Extreme Future game, which is already published.

In fact I’m in two minds about whether this character should be a superhero or a supervillain.  If I decide to use him as a villain, he’ll be used as a foil to the player-character superheroes.

This supervillain – I’ve yet to think up a name for the character – will possesse commensurate powers and abilities to the team of superheroes, so that he can present a daunting challenge to them. I haven’t decided if his powers will be mystical or superalien powers, but this supervillain, I’m leaning towards the name ‘Sunspot’, possesses a genius intellect that allows him to draft complex schemes and create fantastic devices. As a future hero, he will also have considerable resources at his disposal to further his aims.

His powers will most probably centre around controlling heat energy. He will be able to use this ability as a blast weapon, to fly on a trail of ‘heat’, have a heat shield, and one other power, perhaps the ability to melt any object or device, no matter how indestructible the material.

As soon as Future Heroes is complete, I’ll post it to my page at RPGDriveThru for download. It will be the usual PDF format, so take a look, and get ready to blast into heroic extreme future adventures here.

Future Heroes RPG

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/14 14:00 Posted in Future Heroes, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (1)

future heroes role-playing game coverI’ve been working on the latest Role Playing Game set in the Extreme Future universe. The text is 90% there, including game system and descriptions, so the next task is the illustration. The latest version of the cover is really coming together.

The text of the title is in a different font to the usual 3D titles, with a more comic-book look.

It’s based on all those comic books where superheroes have their amazing adventures against the backdrop of a super-advanced civilization.  Comic books like the Legion of Superheroes.

The Legion of Super-Heroes is a fictional superhero team in the 30th and 31st centuries of the DC Comics Universe. The team first appears in Adventure Comics #247 (April 1958), and was created by Otto Binder and Al Plastino, but I didn’t start reading about the Legion till the 80s.

Initially, the team was closely associated with the original Superboy (Superman when he was a teenager), and was first portrayed as a group of time travelers who frequently visited him. In later years, the Legion’s origin and back story were fleshed out, and the group replaced Superboy as the focus of their stories; eventually Superboy was removed altogether, except as an occasional guest star. When I started reading, there were none of the classic ‘famous’ superheroes like Superman, and Batman involved.

The team has undergone several major reboots during its publication. The original version was replaced with a new rebooted version following the events of Zero Hour and another rebooted team was introduced in 2004. A fourth version of the team, nearly identical to the original version, was introduced in 2007. As a result, Superman (both as an adult and a teenager) and the current version of Supergirl have been reincorporated into Legion history. I’ve started reading again, and Supergirl makes a surprisingly good addition to the team.

Peacock

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/14 01:29 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

a digital painting of a peacockAn image of a peacock I did with a nice puzzling tail. This image is a digital painting created using GIMP, and my trusty Wacom graphics tablet.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open source software image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Linux. It has the tools in a separate window to the drawing, which most users find very annoying, but otherwise it’s tops.

The developers and maintainers of strive for it to be a free software graphics application for the editing and creation of original images, photos, icons, graphical elements of web pages and art for user interface elements. It has that groovy free vibe, that a monster like Photoshop will never be able to emulate.

 

Space Monster Chasing Spaceship

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/10 00:50 Posted in Extreme Future, Fantasy, Illustration, Realms, Role-Playing Games, Self Publishing, The Pet Dragon  |  Comments (0)

space monsterAnother image from the Deep Space Encounters supplement for the Extreme Future role-playing game. This deep space encounter is of the rather dangerous kind, because this alien is very much inspired by the gods of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu pantheon. It is an alien that uses its immense power just to torment and torture the unlucky inhabitants of any spaceship it happens to stumble on.

I’ve also added a map, called the Metraz Area Guide, for download that charts the area where the Realms‘ novel, The Pet Dragon, takes place. This booklet details Metraz and the surrounding area. This is one of the most important areas of Hyrope, which acts as a backdrop to the Realms role-playing game. The booklet details eleven realms in all, with some interesting snippets of information to bring each one alive.

The booklet comes with a map that includes all the political powers and their territories, including elven forests, human cities, and dwarven mountains. The maps can be printed out to use as a nice handout during sessions playing Realms – take a look at the rule book here.

RPG on DriveThru and eBook on Kindle

By The Illustrator  |  2012/04/03 22:48 Posted in Extreme Future, Fantasy, Role-Playing Games, Self Publishing, The Pet Dragon  |  Comments (0)

a space lizzard in a vac suitA couple more of my projects have just gone online on different channels. The first is the book I wrote recently, called ‘The Pet Dragon’ which has just gone live on the Kindle store.The pet dragon is a fantasy adventure where a young elf girl finds a dragon, and is driven out of her elven city by superstitious elves, afraid of dragons and the fire they spit. She and her dragon are forced to make their way in the world, learning to fight, and to cast magic. The book is full of battles, magic, enchanted places, dragons and adventure, so take a look at this exciting book.

The illustration to the left however is from Deep Space Encounters, a supplement for the Extreme Future role-playing game. The supplement adds lots of encounters with brutes like the one in the illustration to the Extreme Future game. This beast is a Lizardeen, and they are the main rivals to humanity in the Extreme Future setting. They are not unthinkingly evil, and can even be played as characters, but they are ‘other’. They are much colder and more calculating than humans and this makes them difficult to predict for your average human, driven as they are by hormones, emotions and irrational urges. Just a normal day piloting your spaceship through the deep void.

Both these projects are available as electronic downloads of course, but ‘The Pet Dragon’ is also available to order as an actual, honest-to-goodness, book. It’s available from Amazon.

Starliner Spaceship

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/30 23:22 Posted in Extreme Future, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (1)

starlinerI was looking through my hard disc for inspiration and came across an image I created a long time ago. It’s a scan of a sketch that I coloured after scanning.

One of the things I like about this illustration is the giant transparent bubbles on its flanks. Some parkland can be seen below the protection of the nearest bubble and even the suggestion of a swimming pool.

I’ll have to come up with the statistics so that it can be used in Extreme Future – the sci-fi role-playing game as soon as possible.

I’ll probably scale it up in GIMP and work into the illustration a little to make it look like the other spaceship illustrations used in the game. At the moment it has more of the style of the sort of spaceship you might see in a Japanese animation. That’s no bad thing of course, but it’s not the look I want for the Extreme Future role-playing game.