There is an ocean of starts, and this spaceship is designed to ride the swells. More work has been done on Heroes in Time again, and this time I’ve added a character sheet that can be downloaded for free.

The game itself is available here (just click the nice attractive banner, it goes directly to the Heores in Time page)

Naturally the first place I turned for inspiration in designing the character sheet was Wikipedia. The wikipedia page on character sheets is huge, and has a lot of useful information, but I wanted to keep the sheet as simple as possible. Heroes in Time is a cinematic and generic game where a barbarian could easily encounter an astronaut, and the character sheet needs to be versatile enough to accommodate these two very different types of player character.

The various genres that player characters can be drawn from include.

modern horror, and the legions of undead that have to be faced,

other planets, and the monsters that inhabit them,

the far future, and the droids that protect its treasures,

primeval fantasy, and the giants that still walked the Earth,

magic

sword and sorcery, and its beautiful dangers,

And what game would be complete without mech-on-mech combat.

Dragons come to town

The word on Illustration Friday this week is Midsummer Night, and it reminded me of an illustration I included in ‘Realms’ – a fantasy role-playing game using a simplified version of FATE 2.  The idea behind the illustration is that a band of traveling entertainers comes to town, flown in by dragon.

The traveling entertainers are a cross between a circus, a theatre and a magic show. As the theatre is run by a mage powerful enough to have dragons as pack animals, the magic is, of course, the best part of the show.

In a role-playing game the dragon theatre could be a source of news, and the mage running things could be a powerful patron to a group of player characters.

Realms is available from RPGDriveThru, a really big store full of games to download, and producing illustrations for the game system is one of the great pleasures of game design. as you can see from the cover of the core rule book, dragons are a favourite in my illustrations, and they are relatively common in the monster infested world of Realms. Coming to town on magical midsummer night they are a source of wonder, but encountered by the player characters as they delve into a deserted forest glade and wake the majestic and short tempered beast, they are a little more worrisome.

So check out Realms for dragons and a bunch of other fantasy monsters!

Who Needs a Spacesuit?

To Infinity and Beyond

I’m writing a new role-playing game. It’s going to be a game that tries to capture that special genre of superheroes who fight for truth and justice in a far-future sci-fi universe. I already have a role-playing game that simulates the type of far-future space opera setting where anything can happem. It’s called Extreme Future (and it’s available from the biggest RPG site out there RPGDriveThru).

I don’t just want to make a supplement to Extreme Future though. I have done supplements for the Extreme Future RPG before, such as the Fuwalda Spaceship Handbook. I want to do a whole future superhero themed game, so that I can build the whole game around a detailed superhero creation process. The game will be compatible with Extreme Future, and also with the fantasy RPG Realms too, and the most difficult part of all is that I want to include an entire episode of a superhero comic.

I’ve never really done sequential art before, but I’ve read a lot of comic books, especially from the sci-fi future hero genre, and I’ve always wanted to have a go. I’m going to be aiming for a style with the art that’s more Mike Mignola, and McMahon than the usual Eclipse style art you see in indie comics, and I’m hoping it will give the finished role-playing game a lot of character.

It’s going to be a challenging project, and as soon as it’s done it’ll be going on my RPG Publisher’s Page at RPGDriveThru, oh and of course their comic’s site too.

Ramming Speed, Captain!

Starship combat is an important element in the Extreme Future RPG, and I’ve been thinking about ramming rules lately. Initially I was just thinking about including the rules in the finished role-playing game core rules to cover all the eventualities. I thought it ramming would probably be used in actual play, just as a tactic of last resort, against extremely powerful spaceships and other foes that could not be harmed in any other way. But then I started to think again… It turns out that ramming is a tactic often used in naval battles, so why not with space navies as well. Ramming has been used from antiquity right up to almost the present day, with numerous incidents of ramming being recorded throughout WWII.

The speeds involved in ramming attacks by starships  in space would be unimaginably faster than those of a dreadnought on the high sees trying to ram a submarine however. There would have to be some element that made these encounters more like that between a boat and less like modern jet fighters, where ramming is suicidal and pretty much never occurs.

The answer is shields. If energy shields can deflect a few tons of mass being hurled at the target by a battery of gauss cannons, then perhaps it can cushion a ramming attack enough to result in a breached hull, but not instant destruction for either of the two starship combatants. That’s the theory that ended up convincing me, and that’s why ramming is a tactic that can be decisive in spaceship combat in Extreme Future.

Of course once you have breached the hull of your target, your job isn’t over. Boarding parties, power armour and droids have to be sent in if you want to stand a chance of taking your prize.

The supplement on sale at DriveThruRPG.com.

I was recently approached to use some of my illustrations in the latest supplement from Draken Games. I was very happy to provide some illustrations, and most pleased to see the quality of the supplement when it was released. One of the problems with sci-fi role-playing games is that, unless they are copying a fictional setting such as Star Wars or Battle Star Galactica, it is very rare that the basic game includes much in the way of detail about the planets and equipment to be found in the game universe. Most games need to be fleshed out with packs of ready-made background colour – and Distant Vistas does this well.

Distant Vistas is a game resource in the style of the glossy hardback sci-fi books that we remember from our childhood days, telling of ‘future histories’ and featuring page after page of gorgeous airbrushed art work. It is science fiction told as fact, with plenty of illustrations thrown in the mix. The Sector described is far too large to describe in full – rather, Distant Vistas gives a flavour of it, with selected planets, cities, alien species, weapons and spacecraft described in detail… not to mention sports, culture, politics, religion and useful gadgets!

It is a resource full of information, ready to be easily slotted into an ongoing sci-fi tabletop role-playing game, or form the basis for a new game. It was a pleasure to be involved in a small way with its creation.

concept art site gets a new look

Starbright Illustrations is my sci-fi and role-playing game concept art showcase.

I’ve had a dull white background on my site for a really long time, and I wasn’t sure it was the best background to display my concept art illustrations against. I wanted something a little more concept artish and dramatic, and so now I have set one of my own illustrations – a digital concept painting of a space dragon attacking an unlucky spaceship – as the background for my site.

I’m writing the web page code for my site by hand, because the WYSIWYG editors I had been using were all too inflexible, and actually required more technical knowledge and hard work in, to get worse code out. This means that getting the new cool look to work has required a little messing about with my css and html. It was nothing too complex though, and although my pages are starting to be quite sophisticated, this change was just a matter of adding a few lines here and there to the code and making the text box on top of the image transparent.

I chose the dragon – although it will undoubtedly be replaced as I improve my digital painting skills, and produce illustrations I love more – because this fearsome monster is looking out at us through its baleful eye from the very top of the image, which means it can peek out from above the text box.

I think the whole thing now has a much more sci-fi, fantasy, role-playing game concept arty look now. So it might be a little while before the next redesign, but then again maybe not…

Dragon Vs Spaceship

I have done more work on the Space Dragon – it has its own space dragon rpg illustration page now – and I’ve added an old picture to Illustration Friday.

First the space dragon, I’ve been looking at a lot of images of lizards, to try and get a nice realistic looking space dragon. The spaceship in the image is a render from the 3D model, released under a creative commons license, I made. I rendered a picture of the 3D spaceship model and painted the dragon on top. I also added some detail to the model, like the rips in the hull the monster has made as it tries to winkle out the tasty little player character pilot of the spaceship.

Space Explorer

The word on IF this week was ‘cultivate’ and it reminded me of one of the first pictures i painted after getting my graphics tablet. It’s an illustration of a peaceable spaceman cultivating the plants of a far-away planet.

I noticed a theme running through the two pictures in this blog post, and that is just how dangerous it can be for a character to go wandering around in the outer space of comic books, movies and role playing games. Real outer space can be dangerous too, but it probably has fewer dragons and bug-eyed monsters. Although just because we haven’t found any big scary monsters out there in the void yet doesn’t mean that there aren’t any lurking in wait for us.

space dragon monster

I’ve always been a big fan of giant space monsters, however uncool they are with real sci-fi fans, and I really enjoy painting them. Giant space monsters are very infrequently encountered in more realistic games and TV shows like Star Trek and Eclipse Phase, but they are a fun addition to a more relaxed, space opera type game. I really like GURPS Space, because you can make the game anything you want it to be, more realistic like 2001 a Space Odyssey, or really B-movieish, like Buck Rogers.

The physics of an animal being able to survive in deep space, and fly through the void quick enough to catch a spaceship is fancyful in the extreme, but it makes for such a cool image that it’s hard to resist.

I’ve created this monster from bat wings, lizard feet and a lizard’s head. The great thing about the Internet is that if you need reference images for your illustration, they are just a Google search away. The image is far from finished of course, as soon as it is done, I’ll be adding it to my portfolio of sci-fi role-playing game art wonders. But it will need to lose all the blurry and smudgy bits, and have everything the same sharpness as the wings and feet.

droid on a night run

The first line of images on my sci-fi concept art website is a bunch of robots. The ones that are there are nice of course – capturing the essence of a dark, nerdy future, when droids are as likely to help you with an adventure, challenge you to a game of chess, or try to rewire your primitive human brain, yay can’t wait – but there aren’t enough of them. So at the moment I am doodling, sketching and painting droids.

One of the elements that a lot of science fiction role-playing games are lacking in is a huge cast of robots for the player characters to variously buy, befriend, talk philosophy with and run screaming from, when they develop a little bug and decide humans are a type of organic infestation that has to be rooted out.

This image I’m working on at the minute isn’t quite finished yet, but I think you can already see the outline of what it is intended to be. The concept is that this is a friendly human-shaped bipedal character to interact with in a role-playing game, that also just happens to be a robot.

This droid concept would be just the thing for science-fiction role playing games such as Traveller,  GURPS Space and Eclipse Phase. It’s probably more suited to the more space opera style of science fiction role-playing games set in a far future universe. A more near future game setting would most likely have droids that looked more squat and primitive than this design

space station engineer

I’ve been painting sci-fi stuff again. I wanted to make sure that there are some human beings mixed in with all the robots and spaceships I have been painting for my gallery of role-playing game illustrations and concept art. One big danger when doing sci-fi illustrations however – and fantasy role-playing game illustrations for that matter – is that they can be very sexist.

I don’t want to be painting the usual half clad nymphets that often populate sci-fi art. I mean the character should be attractive, but that doesn’t mean she should be wearing a bikini.

So with that in mind I’ve been painting a spaceship engineer, in a nice futuristic jumpsuit and carrying some abstract spaceship repair gizmos. I’m not sure exactly how close to completion it is, but I do know that I already like it. I think it would go very well in a sci-fi RPG rule book in the section they often have where players chose careers for their characters. One of the careers that is usually on offer is something along the lines of space mechanic.

It’s called engineering in Traveller, engineering officer in GURPS Space, etc etc

I guess this option is there in these games to enable people to play Scotty from Star Trek. He was always my least favorite character, but this is already becoming one of my favourite game illustrations, at least that I’ve done recently.

An interesting direction to take this illustration in next, might be to create 3D models of this engineer’s equipment in Blender, allowing me to make them very complex and believable, before importing them into the image, in GIMP and blending them in with the painting. It’s an idea.