Saturday, February 27, 2010

Reference Pictures For Adventures I Haven't Written


This is from a Polish version of D&D called "Crystal of Time", courtesy of elves ate my homework. Though the girls are probably pretty sick of spiders by now.



Mount St. Michel

That's a D14 on the end of this Celtic thingamabob.


I imagine this thing being about twice the size of those castles.
A St George from Sweden
Jerry Uelsmann, I think.
Another Swedish St. George
Don Maitz. Very cosy. (And I'm using the British spelling on purpose.) I pretty much believe this whole picture. I like how the wizard has a Vermeer rug. In fact, I like nearly everything except the wizard's face and hand.
That's what the inside of a goblin palace's fungus garden looks like. In case you were wondering.
Me.




Carpaccio

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

pointless fact. ive been to http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VJUl2ho4N3o/S4mNaJ2t3UI/AAAAAAAAANo/84BInkuXhkg/s400/medBodian_Castle.jpg when i was in school. pritty cool place :)

Leopardi said...

Reminds me of a Roman D20 I remember reading about a while ago

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385

Amazing!

Leopardi said...

I love the line "Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used". I'm thinking Papers & Paychecks.

Ursca said...

Aww, I always wanted to have some kind of location based on Mont Saint-Michel. Maybe an abbey of some kind of oceanic god. With deep ones. And mud-flat monsters.

Here's a cool map anyway.

Anonymous said...

Ah, the dXX. I only heard about it earlier this month and had short bolg post about it, the best bit being:

"All right, but apart from the d20, the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Anyway, some really interesting stuff. Most of the art from that Polish game was awesome, but you picked the best one.

I've long thought it would be pretty cool to do something along the lines of Breughels' Triumph of death, or Bosch's Garden of earthly delights/Hell tryptich, but I wouldn't know where to begin. Maybe a diorama of the former.

Ursca said...

And straight after I hit 'post comment', it occurred to me that the wizard chappy in the third picture down looks like he's been caught under a dripping stalactite for a couple of millennia. Now that would be fun thing to incorporate.

Anonymous said...

I've been to Mont Saint-Michel, and it's even cooler looking than that in real life. This is an awesomely inspiring list of pics. Great job, thanks!

Jomo Rising said...

Thanks. These are wonderful. I really appreciate what you have read into some of these pics, like the thing in #8. Expands the mind.

The Commish said...

About 25 years ago there was a great National Geographic article on Mont St Michel. I found the back copy in my Dad's collection once and threw together a whole floor plan with encounters and a crypt level. Made for one hell of a Sunday afternoon dungeon crawl... your pic brought back memories!!

Zak Sabbath said...

I've been there--they had a giant hamster wheel that the monks used to put prisoners in and the guy would have to run and operate a giant pulley to bring up food and stuff.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, everything but the wizard in the floating-wizard painting is totally awesome. I much prefer your personal style. Much more realistic.

Anonymous said...

What kinds of pens or inks do you use in your own illustrations?

AGCIAS said...

Awesome. Could I borrow the second pic for an adventure? And the fourth? And fifth? And ... and ... Most of the rest?

And you posted one of your own sketches of a dark tower. It would make a perfect dwarven fortress for the town of Ft. Elderwall. If you will let me use it?