Shards Cover Final

Well that came together nicely! I spent the morning noodling with different ways to draw 'cosmos', and ended up trying to emulate some of the vibe of Van Gogh's Starrry Night. I struggled with a little bit of a 'big picture' decision in the last few weeks: I didn't know whether to upgrade to a better drawing application, or to lean in hard to Microsoft Paint and see if I could wring it for all it's worth. I went with option two. I really like working in Paint, and I am comfortable in it. Additionally, it aligns with my larger artistic philosophy; I would rather try to be really creative with more limited resources than to have excess. Tell me to stage an entire play with two 4x8 platforms, six black cubes, and seven yards of fabric, and I'm a happy boy. That's the kind of stuff I love to do. So, Paint works with that approach really well. That said, I spent an hour noodling 'cosmic colors', trying different brush options, and finally found something I like.

My favorite thing about this cover is that it looks like it would be on the sci fi softcover spinner rack at my hometown library in 1986.  

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the art is ahead of the writing for this game... I've got a decent chunk of rulebook written, but I'm usually doing this level of final art later in my process. I'm interested to see how having more concrete images in place impacts the decisions I make in writing about the setting. 

Shards Cover Basic Layout One

I really like the covers of both the original Shards of Tomorrow and Tales of the Splintered Realm. The two have the same basic idea: a hero in the foreground moving to explore the ruins of something from the distant past. For this cover, I wanted to echo the scale of the game; you're a little, tiny hero in a huge cosmic playground. There's not much that is 'locked in' on this cover; the colors are basically place holders just so I could see the basic design with some color contrast. It's the vibe I want, so I think that this may be the basic design. I have quite a bit of work to do on it, but this is where it's going (I think). I tend to like covers that go for mood over action (says the guy who put an action shot of two supers in a slugfest on the cover of his last game). Such is the case here.

If At First You Don't Succeed...

I came back to these guys, and made a few minor changes. I fixed the upper arms, played around with a color scheme, and made a few minor tweaks to the starship. Bingo. Now, I like these guys.

My daughter is learning about astronomy, and we ended up talking about planets that have lots and lots (and lots) of moons. The idea is that the default setting is a planet surrounded by a lot of moons, some debris fields, junk yards, space stations... there is a lot of potential for adventure packed into a relatively small area. One of the smaller moons is the home to these guys, the Chi'ok, who eat salt. Their moon is out of salt. They are sending out scout ships to find more, and to steal it and bring it back to their mounds where they sit around eating salt all day, when they aren't doing weird mystic stuff. 

Game Vibes

After I saw Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time, I remember telling Mary, "if the next Star Wars is this good, I'll be happy."

It wasn't. 

That said, the design philosophy underpinning this game comes down to this basic idea: If the next Star Wars movie was directed by Taika Waititi from a script by James Gunn. Or, directed by James Gunn from a script by Taika Waititi. I mean, you get the idea. I want the world-building to hew closer to Star Wars, but I want the game to feel like Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok.

That said, this picture is Morg on a skim cycle being chased by a pair of Aegis Atmospheric Interceptors, in both original sketch and possible final drawing. 

Ideas are Like Butts

Not everything I think of is gold. For example, I started with a quick mockup of a spaceship (it's small in the image), and then was thinking that the owners of this would be insectoid - and then I basically drew an army ant if the army wants were somewhat realistic in their basic design. I mean, it's creepy, but not really good creepy. It's just sort of not right creepy. And then, I was thinking it would be cool to call them the 'Chi'it', which I got from chitin, but which I know people would just call 'sh*t'. So, these would be the 'sh*t' aliens, which kind of becomes its own meme, but (again) not in a good way.

Don't think this one is making the cut.

However, I wanted to expand on some of the thinking from last time. One of the things that I am finally starting to understand about this hobby is that visibility is EVERYTHING. You might create decent stuff (I think I do), but if nobody sees it, it doesn't really matter. To whit (I have used that phrase a lot lately), I think that the material I was creating to support Stalwart Age was really good. However, I was posting it on my own blog and to a small patreon behind a firewall, sharing everything with the same small group of people. So, nobody new ever really had any chance to see it. It would be easy for things to go by in your feed and for it to be gone, even if you are someone who likes my stuff sometimes. 

With Stalwart Age, I made the mistake of trying to move the game away from DriveThruRPG rather than towards it. So, for this game, the idea is that the core rules are available on DriveThru, but so are regular (as in every month at the very least) supplements. If I am not constantly reminding people that I have a game and that I keep making stuff for it, then they are going to forget about me and my little game. It's not anyone's fault. There is a TON of shiny new stuff on DriveThru every minute. 

The idea here is that there will be a regular (again, at least monthly) resource of maybe 4 pages or so. My working title is "Transmissions from the Pale", and it would profile a game location (maybe a city, or a small moon, or a space station, or a lost temple... or...) including at least one new species, a few new creatures, vehicles, weapons, and maybe some optional rules. 

I also see the potential benefit of a Kickstarter in terms of building recognition. It's a high-profile place to do a launch. I don't know if I can justify running a KS for a 32-page rulebook (even if it IS full color). I think that IF I was to do a KS, I'd have to learn from the ones I've done before, and find some way to up the game for myself. One possibility would be a built-in one-year subscription to the regular update. You back the game for $25, and you get the core rules in print and PDF, and one year of the monthly 4-page updates. I can almost see a high-level tier where you get a hardcover copy of the four games I've done in this format: Tales of the Splintered Realm, Shards of Tomorrow, Army Ants Twilight, and Stalwart Age in one hardcover volume. I could also go back and remaster the art for Tales, making that book full color. The art is done, and coloring it would be a relatively workable task. Adding some color accents throughout would be pretty easy to do. I mean, this book would probably be around $60, but it might be worth having available. I don't know if a 32-page hardover makes sense, but a 128-pager in full color does.

More Big Picture Thinking: Dudes with Guns

In thinking about how to approach the design of the game, I didn't know how to go about building the scale of the setting. I don't think I have it in me to create a hundred planets, and the thousands of creatures that inhabit those planets. At least, not for the core rules... so, I decided that the core rules provide a thin slice of the larger system. You are going to get a starter moon, notes about the nearby planet and other moons, a brief description of that star system, and that's about it. For that moon, you are going to get detail: the specific creatures that inhabit it, the political and economic forces that shape it, and the various factions that can pull the characters in. As Obi Wan would say, this is your chance to see "part of a larger world". 

To whit, this guy is the Mirdan Rimewatcher. These are the sentient species that is native to the moon called Banquo's Tooth. These guys are decent fighters, and would be good entry-level bounty hunters that might be after the heroes. This guy carries a modified Sivir Blast Rifle. As you can see, I gave the evolution from line drawing through final art.

Big Picture Thinking - and a Picture

When I was in Middle School, my friends Matt and Mark had this deck of cards filled with silhouettes of military vehicles. I loved these cards - the simple, clean black and white images communicated so much to me about each vehicle. When I designed my first RPG (which was a military mission simulator where you could basically play GI Joes), I used the cards as the visual references for each vehicle as I statted them out. I still love these iconic designs, so I continue to use them for vehicles. Above is the design for the ship I shared a few days ago... which is now called the Madrygal Escort Ship.

Also, as I write, I have found a sweet spot for myself with technology. All of the really good technology is thousands of years old. In the game world, you're coming out of a dark age, and are re-discovering the starships and bots that belonged to the Naru, who are long-since dead. This keeps some of the vibe of 'finding old stuff' that sort of makes fantasy my favorite genre. It also makes it easy to include starships and bots into the game for new players. I always struggled with the idea that you are level 1, but you also have a few million credits to buy a starship. However, ancient starships are just sitting around in junkyards, buried in the wastes, and secreted away in old cave systems. You happen to find one, and bingo, instant ship. Bots work under a similar idea - they are all thousands of years old, and are programmed to find and attach to sentients. If you roll well at level 1, a bot found you and bonded. Congrats, you have your own R2-D2 or C-3PO. However, I also left an opening for bots to get total independence and go all Ultron, so that opens up some possibilites as well. You cannot buy a bot - it has to find you.