Barrowmaze II

You know you're in for something exciting when you get an email from Greg "Barrowmaze" Gillespie  that begins "Here's an interesting idea"

I did 4 or 5 illustrations for Barrowmaze 1, which by all accounts were well received, and Barrowmaze seems to have gone down well with reviewers. As well it should it is great, its exactly the kind of undead laden dungeon-crawl that D&D is made for. Greg has kindly commissioned me for several more for Barrowmaze II (so far I've turned in 3 small monster illos, and have several others in the pipeline).

Anyway, Greg has gone the crowd-funding route, and is at just over 50% of the target.

http://www.indiegogo.com/Barrowmaze

So go, have a look, maybe pre-order if you like what you see. Supporting projects through crowd-funding looks like the future of niche product development where there is a core, identifiable and reachable audience - and in our case that means gaming. It's becoming more and more mainstream for gaming projects to work this way, (steve jacksons OGRE -designers edition, for example). Are we looking at the reinvention of late, western capitalism? maybe. Look at is as pre-ordering, and helping the project along.

Of course, this is partially self-serving, but Greg is also commissioning art from: Stefan Poag  Trevor Hammond, Scott LeMien, Alexander Cook, Stephan Thompson,  Cory Hamel and Jim Holloway
(anyone got links for Alex and Steph?).

And seeing as Greg has let the dice out of the bag, here's the neat idea:

Custom Barrowmaze Dice | icons by Zhu

Yeah! Custom barrowmaze dice! I drew up some icons - the Suicide King Wraith and the Broken Helmed Skull which replace the 6-spot. these will be strictly limited, and they'll be going into production as 'perks' for the $65 Crypt Knight package.

Right! that's enough. I'm serious about this whole hiatus thing...

Your Blog is An 80's Zine

This is totally Coops fault. (if he hadn't sneaked into my brain and stole the idea when I wasn't looking). His memefesto (slightly altered):

Your last 5 blogposts are the contents of a  zine you wrote single-handedly in the 1980s, photocopied on the local library photocopier or via indulgence of an office-working parent and sold on to around a dozen people at a loss. This zine has the same title as your blog. Invent an issue number and cover price.

From somewhere rip off a suitable black and white illo (you want colour? print the cover on coloured paper you damned show-off) and fake up a cover page for this zine referring to contents inside. Bonus points for using period typewriter fonts and artistic filters to degrade the quality. Obviously if you have access to a photocopier and scanner you can start playing with distressing the paper and doing a proper illegible photocopy reproduction rather than faking it as I did. Then post on your blog for all to see, and link back to the blog you first heard about this on.

The logo lettering was copied off Rodney Matthews Elric book.
The photo is some fashion designer I can't remember the name of right now, but I'll be writing about CHAOS AMAZONS at some point.


Now, back to hiatusing...