Campaign Starter: The Retinue

Here’s a campaign starter I was thinking about using at one point soon:

You are the hired help. You start as grunts, torchbearers, henchmen, wizard apprentices, etc. And you followed the stalwart adventuring party on their greatest adventure.
And then you watched as those shining heroes battled the evil dragon king in his fortress of doom, and you saw how the heroic knight held off the dragon’s breath with his shield, you saw the arch-mage blind the beast, and you saw as the last ditch effort of the elven bowyer struck a last defeating blow in the dragon kings’ heart. Victory was theirs.
And the celebration lasted all of seven seconds.
Then the dead dragon crashed into the castle, ripping everything in its path with it into the abyssal depths.
Including your employers.
You are now struck behind enemy lines, in the middle of a wilderness, weeks away from civilization.
Welcome to level 1.

I should work that into a game soon. Maybe as a one-shot or a mini-campaign.

Art and Inspiration: Flash Gordon (Dan Schkade)

I have some nostalgic fondness for Flash Gordon. As I do for Prince Valiant, and the Phantom.

Not actually because I read so many newspaper strips when I was a kid, except the occasional collection that was on offer, but mostly because I was watching the old TV series. I think few kids even in my generation even remember that German television used to show the Flash Gordon animated series, and Defenders of the Earth, but I do. But I was that kind of kid who managed to somehow watch nearly everything genre German public TV broadcast, even at times when that should not be possible.

(I even have some memories of watching episodes of Doctor Who with the 4th Doctor on one of the small state channels, and I can’t even find evidence that ever was broadcast. So either I make it up or I managed to remember some obscure piece of programming nobody else remembers. Either would be possible)

It helped that Flash Gordon was also a movie, and despite being quite gruesome in some parts, this did not keep me from watching it.

Anyway, during the last few weeks I got interested in some of the older newspaper comics again (there’s a blog for them), and found to my astonishment that after 20 years Flash Gordon had been rebooted as a new daily strip right that moment. Well, two weeks before.

And it looks gorgeous. The art style is very much inspired by Jack Kirby, the lines are clear and the shadows stark. Just the right style for that kind of story. The artist for the new strips is Dan Schkade, whose art style turns out to be quite a change for old Flash Gordon fans. But well, who listens to “fans” anymore. Every time someone who professes themselves to be a fan seems to say something lately it’s to shit on something other people enjoy. I enjoy this strip. It’s doesn’t have many installments yet, but I like the direction it goes.

I find it curious that they actually decided to use the first strip to recount the backstory for Flash Gordon, and it would fit either the old newspaper strips or the movie, or maybe the cartoons as well. (not sure about that live action series from a few years ago, that one might have been too deviant to work). Flash is described as an athlete, not mentioning what sport he actually is playing (the old strip had him as a polo player, the movie had him play American Football).

By the way reading it is a bit weird, you can read it on Comics Kingdom, the King Features website. They allow IPs to only read a certain amount of comics per month though. King Features is the company that syndicates these comic strips and that means… you can actually read them for free on a lot of newspaper sites. E.g. the Seattle Times. Or some other newspapers that carry them. Or you could read them in the Funny Pages I guess.

Which, coming back to the beginning, is why I didn’t actually read that many of them. German newspapers did in general not have a comic strip section like Anglo-Saxon newspapers seem to have (or had). Our newspaper carried Hagar the Horrible. And so did my grandparents’. Every once in a while you found some Heathcliff or Baby Blues in places, but proper comic sections did just not exist. If we found the strips at all then in collections published by enthusiasts.

Oh, and well, there was a Flash Gordon RPG a few years ago, but unfortunately I might have missed out on that one. It was mostly in that Savage Worlds bubble that kind of passed me by. Unfortunately it might have had some issues with how well known the IP is right now. Meaning: not very. Except for the movie. But even that one is not as much a household name as I expected.

Art and Inspiration: Peter Klucik’s illustrations of The Hobbit

Czechoslovak illustrator and painter Peter Klúcik was approached to do illustrations of Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1989. Unfortunately the publishing house lost the rights to the novel before they could publish it. Outside of a cover for a different publisher none of his illustrations ended up being used.

Via Monster Brains

[Art and Inspiration] The Arabian Nights as illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1928)

Well, continuing on: here are illustrations made for The Arabian Nights, as illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett in 1928. Unfortunately she did not produce as much as one would have hoped, as she was suffering from tuberculosis during the whole time she was working as a professional artist and died in 1931. A whole of 3 books were illustrated by her, the Arabian Nights was her last.

Jarandell – The Garden of the Magicians

The Chateau

Note: this is a repost. The original article somehow had lost all the pictures that were kind of the point of it all. Which was a pity, because I specifically liked the art in the referenced articles.

I have been working on my own little D&D campaign world for a while, which I want to piece together from various sources, not all of them in English.

There will be B2 Keep on the Borderlands in there, and B1 In Search for the Unknown, The Caverns of Thracia, the original B3 Palace of the Silver Princess, and… I want to finally use Jarandell in there.

So lets talk about “Jarandell – le jardin des magiciens” (Jarandell – the garden of the magicians). It is intentionally inspired by Jack Vance and the illustrations of Brian Froud, so I will show some of the pictures from the article, because they are just fantastic.

I don’t see anyone else talking about it, at least in English. And neither in German or, according to my spurious Francophone Google skills, in French.

(actually, that’s not quite true, a month after I posted about the art on twitter a while ago someone made a video about it. Might just be a coincidence)

This small setting was published as one of several in the classic French Wargame/RPG magazine Casus Belli no. 59 to 60 (and maybe 61?) back in 1990 (!). This was way before even this old grognard got into roleplaying games, and in the wrong language to boot. Back in ’90 I could say Hello and Goodbye and even count to ten in English and was really proud of it. I might have been able to say merci and bonjour in French. And the Merci mostly because there’s a German chocolate brand called that.

(by the way, quick cross-cultural fact: Merci chocolate is a very popular thank you gift in Germany, for obvious reasons).

Luckily for me it was translated and reprinted in WunderWelten 40 to 42. Of course that meant that I didn’t have any clue if there were any references I missed. As far as I know this was the only Casus Belli article they printed, and while the article seems to be standalone there are a few spurious connections to other settings published by CB, e.g. the mention of a few cities and locations. 

So the question always was… did I miss something? Or was the mystery intentional?

It didn’t help that I only found the first two parts in German back in the day, and now that I have access to the French ones I am hamstrung by my lack of actual French skills…

For some reason most of the references I did find online seem to regard this setting as a Dying Earth location. That seems wrong, although the liberal use of Vancian tropes in there might be a reason for that. Rather than Dying Earth it seems to be a standalone expansion of the Laelith city setting CB published over a dozen or so installments in prior issues. Laelith was statted for D&D, Jarandell on the other hand has no stats at all.

The description of the place was amazing. Jarandell it turns out is a hiding spot created by a magician called Randell.

Randell created it to get away from some extraplanar threat. And the whole setting starts off with the description of the areas around Jarandell…

Lots of adventure locations already. In my own campaign setting I intend to use it as the place where the road northwards from the Keep on the Borderlands ends up at.

I will have to translate some of the place names. I mean, Shanpuir sounds amazing as a name, but the Raze du Lynx… hmm… The Lynx Wastes?

Ileterre at least might be just the Earth Island.

And then we zoom in into a single place in that area… which is again a fantastic adventure location obviously intended to make even finding the actual location of Jarandell as fun and entertaining as possible.

Jarandell it turns out is situated within one of the mills in the area (why a small village and a monastery need 4 mills is not explained, but 3 of them are abandoned).

Jarandell itself is in the attic of one of the abandoned mills, and you have to find a secret door and climb up a “diabolical” staircase that shrinks you the further you go upstairs…and then you reach the garden…

The Garden Entrance

It turns out Jarandell is a miniature world, secluded away in the attic of the mill. From outside its just a few feet across. On the inside it is large enough to house an expanding castle, a labyrinth around that castle, a village with at least 50 houses, a lake, and expansive “greens”…except they aren’t green, they are bathed in eternal twilight, only lit by bioluminescent flowers, wind created by giant flying turtles, with giant… well, actually normal-sized… bats left over from construction as a sort of megafauna.

The Castle

By the way, notice the pictures. These seem to have been a stylistic choice. Except for the maps and maybe two other paintings, the whole art in the article is pictures of dioramas and models. Remember, this was back in 1990. This stuff is all handmade, even the creatures and NPCs.

By the way, these seem to have been created by Franck Dion who also did the art for Dixit Daydreams the last few years.

Dixit Daydreams

Jarandell is ruled by three magicians, the inheritors of Randell. They run a sort of magician’s school in their castle, creating new magic for some mysterious purpose. The whole place is littered with magic items.

Most of the actual magic is actually done by Sandestin, those enigmatic beings of Jack Vance’s fiction (Specifically the Dying Earth and Lyonesse stories). And much space is given as to how these beings act and behave.

I always have wondered how good a setting this actually is. It certainly is an evocative one, but after the characters have found Jarandell and interacted with the people there for a bit… then what?

After some wonderful buildup and amazing art the whole thing seemed to falter.

I still don’t know what the extraplanar danger is that scared Randell so, and there are other hints that might or might not connect this to the wider setting Casus Belli had created in previous articles. I always feel like I am missing some context here.

This I will have to work out for my own campaign I guess. The whole place is more of a high level place anyway, so I will have some time until my players get there. Not that there are many players during these times anyway.

Besides Franck Dion, this was a collaboration of a few people from what I can see. One of them seems to have been J. Balczesak, the other collaborators were Denis Beck, Denis Gerfaud, and Didier Guiserix,the photographs are given as Yoëlle (Guiserix according to some Google searches). I cannot really find more of her work, except the other articles in CB (mostly the Laelith setting which seems to be connected). 

The Sandestin Phoboxen

I really wish there was more stuff in this vein out there, this combination of sculpture and photography as RPG art, especially in this style. But I think outside of some dioramas for the Laelith series of articles they might never have done more. and to be fair, sculpture and modelmaking might be a bit too much work just for some articles in an RPG magazine. On the other hand this is just some of the stuff RPG fans might be into.

Magic portrait

Here is a version of the original article available on the net.

Art and Inspiration: Floating World

Hiroshige II – The Ferry at Yoroi, 1862