Four-Color Fantasy

I've been thinking a lot lately about a kind of art that usually doesn't work. Specifically, full-color comic-book fantasy, especially from the 20th Century.

What folks generally think of as "classic" old school RPG art--like Russ Nicholson and David Sutherland--is related but it isn't this kind of art. Usually classic Old School is black and white and the pen technique is tuned to be in black-and-white--it is full of textures that would interfere with the sense of movement in a comic book. When old school art's in color it's usually painted. 

Either way it avoids the central problem of rendering fantasy or historical scenes in ink and reproducing that inky color on a midcentury comic book printing press--they have a real tough time with realistic colors. There's a reason superhero comics beat out fantasy, westerns, romance, war, horror and noir comics and quickly dominated the comics medium--the heroes' bright costumes looked a lot better in cheap reproduction than the subtler palette needed for more realistic work

A key figure in the development of this kind of art was Hal Foster, who did Prince Valiant.

Despite Foster's legendary ability to render in ink, the colors still give this a chintzy, cheap feel. Something in the human brain just knows this isn't right--and its not just the pink rocks. Compare that to a random (and equally luridly-colored) Spider-Man panel:

Spidey's bright costume heightens the entire scene, and somehow the blobs and tangles of quickly-rendered trees make more sense. Like watching an American movie set in France where everyone speaks English--once you've mentally accepted the major deviation from reality, the rest follows. Superheroes look right in this printing process in a way that other genres took a lot more effort to pull off. 

There were exceptions, of course, but they required either very judicious use of color or an audience willing to suspend disbelief.

If you saw Schwarzenegger's Conan wearing that bright blue shirt you'd laugh so hard they'd ask you to leave the theatre, but nearly every fantasy character in comics wore some version of that.

Some of you may remember the official TSR D&D comics--the insensitive way they handled the color of armor, leather, flesh, steel and all the other things you've got to include in a fantasy comic wasn't the only reason they sucked, but they sure didn't help:

But anyway, I'm not interested in the bad stuff, I'm interested in the good stuff--the art by people who managed to overcome the limitations of the medium to produce a new, weird kind of fantasy art not seen before--and not seen much since either.

First up: Esteban Maroto's rarely-seen Wolff with two F's, who managed to maintain this psychedelic palette through several installments published in a variety of magazines.

Charles Vess has done some work for official D&D and he did a Sabbath album cover, and some of this more recent work has a soft post-computer-coloring palette. However he did some cool Thor-adjacent stuff in Marvel Fanfare which fits the 4-Color Fantasy vibe to a T:

A hallmark of this kind of art is monsters done in all one bright psychedelic color. Here's a page Vess did back in the day for DC Challenge:

Alex Niño did a strip called Captain Fear in the '70s, later taken over by Walt Simonson:

Tom Sutton:

Michael Kaluta on Madame Xanadu:

Gil Kane on the sci-fantasy Star Hawks--which was only in color on Sundays:

Rafael Kayanan has graduated to doing martial arts and broody pictures of Conan, but he and the colorists on Fury of Firestorm back in the '80s took any opportunity to go in a fantasy direction, even though the comic was superhero book:

Walt Simonson's Thor was as much superhero and sci-fi as fantasy and the coloring was never unique, but it did manage to consistently avoid embarrassing itself, the figures always looked like they were the color they were on purpose:

Last and definitely not least, probably the most well-known example in the genre, Barry Windsor-Smith's full-color self-colored version of the Conan story Red Nails from Marvel Treasury:

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Random Place for a Random Thing

 

One thing I find myself needing a lot as players sandbox their way around the map is "ordinary" places.

You might roll a random encounter as they crawl across a hex and need to know what the landscape around that hex is.

A player might, after the encounter or any time along a multihex journey, ask if there's a town or an inn nearby.

Or a body of fresh water.

Or a hill.

Or etc. etc.

Now you can just make it up on the spot or roll a simple chance, but sometimes its nice to have a regular place with just a little extra playable depth built in. 

So: I have these two random generators for "boring" places, specifically with an eye towards this use case in sandboxes.

One Important Note

I don't, by-and-large, use these generators to make places and then, before play, stick them on the world map. The world map is full of interesting destinations and odd places one might encounter along the way, but these are fairly normal and the map is large so there's a good chance an area generated this way is never getting used if it is simply placed in any old hex.

These places are insignificant--at least until activated by players doing something or having something done to them--so they only go on the map after you use them in a session. They are "floating" locations, not interesting enough to start out as plot points but hopefully just interesting enough to maybe one day be promoted into one.

Making them is an oddly hypnotic way to spend a lazy evening though I tell you what. Make four or six of them and just have them ready and pick when it's time to insert some drama before the party gets where it's supposed to be going.

Another thing I would not necessarily do is automate them--I would not plug the tables into a computer and have it spit out a jillion of these and pick one at random when you need one. Two reasons:

1. Experiencing and re-experiencing all the options you read about as you generate is a helpful way to think about these kinds of areas when it comes to actually running the game.

2. Having a short stack of areas you recognize and remember making will allow you to pick the one that'll be most interesting for that specific party on that specific day when its actually game time.

Wilderness Encounter Area Generator

So this one is specifically for adding just a little meat and depth to a random wilderness encounter. You don't just go "you come upon a..." but there's some context, foreshadowing, and perhaps nearby resources for dealing with the situation or fallout therefrom.

First, there's a sort of flowchart for when you "zoom in" at the beginning of moving from "you travel for several days" to "ok, you come upon...". Since this is placed in a sandbox the PCs might enter the area from any direction, so there are some choices built in.

Distances are abstract, you begin "near" the encounter, but you can decide exactly how near when generating.

Start the PCs in the cardinal direction box most appropriate to the direction they entered from and roll the appropriate die:

Click to enlarge

Pink boxes are, like it says, optional.

Second, populate the boxes as it says below:

Click to enlarge

This is built for the wilderness in Broceliande, which is primarily a kind of fairy-tale forest, but you cold obviously tweak it for wherever your players are currently hanging out.

Alright, there is that thing.

Second we have a...

Random Fully-Mapped Hex Generator

This makes 6-mile hexes with stuff in them. You gotta draw them so, crucially, the generator is in a very specific order so that each layer you draw will influence the next layer laid down in a way that makes sense. You don't, for instance, want a dam in a hex with no river, or a road in an unmapped wilderness.

This generator's especially good if you want the town or inns that PCs stop at on the way to a more important destination to have some context.

Again, this generator's for Broceliande, you'd want to tweak the numbers for other environments.

First you roll all the kinds of dice (D4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20) to see if a these categories of feature in boldface are there at all:

Topography (Does the land go up and down?) (3 in 4 chance)

Body of Water  (11 in 12)

Vegetation (19 in 20)

Civilization (1- None 2-Ruins only 3-Nothing human or demihuman 4-Nothing organized 5-8 Yes)

Resident Creatures? (Besides anything randomly encountered) 

1-Includes monster (for example: an ogre)

2-Includes interesting creature(s) (for example: pink rabbits)

3-4 Incudes predatory animal(s) (for example: wolves)

5-Boring animal(s) only (for example: deer and other local prey animals)

6-No animals

Magic (Is there some landscape feature or other thing with weird magic properties somewhere in the hex)  (1 in 10)

Then, if there is, roll specifically what features are present and draw them--if a feature is present then its up to you whether that's one or many. Like if it says there's a river that can be one river or seven--whatever you like. Examples of fully-drawn hexes are below.

Topography? (Does the land go up and down?) (3 in 4 chance)

Roll separately for each feature that might be in the hex:

Hill (3 in 4)

Valley (3 in 6)

Cave (1 in 8)

Mountain (1 in 10)

Cliff (1 in 12)

Volcano (1 in 20)

Weird/impressive Rock Formation (1 in 20)

WATERFALL (1 in 20 only if there's also a body of water in the hex)

Body of water? (11 in 12)

River (3 in 4)

Pond (5 in 6)

Lake (5 in 8)

Stream (7 in 10) (You don't have to draw in all the streams)

Swamp (2 in 12)

DAM (See Civilization)

WATERFALL (see topography)

BRIDGE (See civilization)

Vegetation? (19 in 20)

Dense Forest (3 in 4)

Overgrown Orchard (1 in 6 if the Civilization level below is at least 2)

Medicinal Plants (1 in 8)

Edible Plants (9 in 10) (only note a lack of edible plants)

Tall tree with view of surrounding hexes (1 in 12)

Hollow tree (1 in 20)

Civilization? (1- None 2-Ruins only 3-Nothing human or demihuman 4-Nothing organized 5-8 Yes)

Path/Trail (2 in 4)

Home (2 in 4)

Well (2 in 4)

Hamlet (1 in 4)

Ancient Ruin (1 in 4)

Wall (1 in 4)

Inn (1 in 4)

Church (1 in 4) (Roll D20: 1-8 Vorn 9-15 Tittivila 16-PC-related faith of your choice 17-18 Obscure/neutral faith 18-New faith 20-Evil faith)

Village (1 in 6)

Tower (1 in 6)

Statue (1 in 6)

Hunter’s Lodge (1 in 6)

Fort (1 in 6)

Castle (1 in 6)

DAM (1 in 8 if water)

BRIDGE (5 in 6 if water)

Road (3 in 8) (none if only ruins)

Store (1 in 8)

Old hunter’s traps (1 in 8)

Old aqueduct (1in 10)

Cemetery (1 in 12)

Monastery (1 in 12)

Old Siege Engine (1 in 20)

Old Asylum (1 in 20)

Old Prison (1 in 20)

Old Library ( 1 in 20)

MINE (1 in 20 if there's Topography)

Resident Creatures? (1-Monster 2-Interesting creature 3-4 Predatory animal(s) 5-Boring animals 6-No animals)

Unless the result is 5 or 6, pick an appropriate kind of creature .

Magic? (1 in 10)

There's no good way to automate this--if you've got magic, look at the hex you've got so far and decide what the enchanted part is and how it is enchanted.

Also, no matter what, there's a 1 in 20 chance of a freshwater spring somewhere in the hex.

Here are the examples, click to enlarge.

Once it told me there was a monster in the hex I generated
a random wilderness encounter using the Book of Jerks,
it told me there was a grey elf warband. I rolled their
stats individually and the low Str and Con on the
fighters and generally bad stats suggested there must be some
reason for that.

Perfidious owls are just owls that steal things, especially magic items

Once I rolled "new faith" for the church I

made the Carrion Child using the

God Generator

Once I got a hollow tree and "interesting animals" I figured
the animals probably lived in the tree

Figured the library was the most fun place to make a wolves' den

When I got roads and a cliff I figured the locals probably
carved some steps into it

The Black Grip is the church of my party's necromancer
PC, I figure running randomly into a monastery
dedicated to his minor cult would be fun, since
he hasn't met any of the church hierarchy yet