Quick Update (Patreon)

Hey Everyone! Hopefully October treated everyone well and for those of you who celebrated Halloween I hope your loot bag contains more treats then tricks.

I unfortunately got knocked down by a bad flu (surprisingly not COVID) most of last week so I'm running a bit behind, but as I'm starting to feel better and getting myself ramped back into gear I figured I'd take the opportunity to do a little update on the various things I've got in the works and will have released in the near future.

Results of one of the Council votes are wrapped up and the Half-Orc Barbarian won followed by the Human Barbarian variant.

I'd planned on releasing these Barbarians in October but that got derailed by me getting sick so I'll be wrapping them up ASAP and releasing them this month. The Council also prioritized Earth Genasi Warrior over the Tiefling Warrior, so I'll plan on releasing those later this month in that order.

Also releasing this month will be the redesigned Cloaker,

Spelljammer

On the Spelljammer front, while I liked my initial design for my Nightspider, my initial tests didn't quite work out. 

Back when Descent into Avernus came out I did a series of War Machines that were an absolute blast to play with on the tabletop (characters leaping between machines, running over demons, and other mayhem) so I was really excited at the opportunity to make some Spelljammers for similar shenanigans.

My two big goals for the Spelljammers are:

• Make them something DMs/Players can put minis on and move across the tabletop in relation to other Spelljammers (not just static maps) to have dynamic fights.
• Design each ship as it's own interesting "dungeon room" to fight in; Provide divisions between areas (walls, different height levels, choke points, etc) and places to add/augment weapon platforms (ballista, harpoon guns, etc).
• Keep them simple (little to no construction besides printing and cutting out)

With the War Machines I actually scaled them up to provide more "floor space" for miniatures to battle on top of them, but even the largest I was able to keep within a standard printer page. For the Spelljammers, they're much bigger as written and I knew going in I'd have to "chibi-fy" them to even fit on two standard printer pages.

After playing around with the Nightspider test I just found two pages too clunky - extra work supporting/taping together, awkward to move about on the tabletop, and importantly doesn't play nice with the website's PDF Creator.

So I decided to go back to the formula that I knew worked with the War Machines and redesigned smaller more compact versions of the Spelljammers that fit on a singular printer page. Here's a comparison of what that means for The Nightspider.

As the DM I know I'll need to make some mechanical adjustments/concessions for how the Spelljammers are officially written. For one, I'll be adjusting the Crew requirements to man the various weapon stations (I'll likely remove the Action requirement to Aim the Ballista for instance) and run them more like the Descent into Avernus War Machines.

Having finally decided on a scale I was able to move forward with a few more Spelljammers: The Finch (my take on the Shrike), The Moon Moth (my take on the Star Moth), and The Flea (more of a Skiff really).

We'll of course need some minis for Weapon Station Props, here's a quick preview of one of the Ballista I have in the works: 

I'm personally looking forward to running the Light of Xaryxis campaign this winter and I know lots of Patrons have been asking for more Spelljammer minis so I'm working on these Astral Elves to go with the Moth ship.

Forest for the Trees

A bit ago I'd asked the Council which modular wall set I should start working on next and a series of Trees was the most popular option so I wanted to also give an update on my progress and process on that front.

So initially I wanted to try going for a "wall" segment that could work to define the forest edge and ideally could be constructed in such a way that with modification it could work for a variety of different forest settings. 

I'd identified three that I felt I could capture with some of the same art elements; Green Forest, Winter Forest, Burnt Forest. The idea being that by removing the pine needles and adjusting the color I could have a burnt forest, by keeping the needles and adding a layer of snow and adjusting the background color I could have Winter, etc. Starting with a base "bare" tree (quick sketch below):

From that I did a really quick and dirty paintover where if I squint I can test out if my idea may work. Since each element will have to have it's colors changed for future variants I want to try to build this with as few pieces as possible, ideally just a background gradient, background line of trees, midground line of trees, foreground line of trees (and the pine needles/branches + snow layer).

While extreme rough and simple, the paintover scribble works well enough so I move forward with the initial line art.

Working so far, onward we go,

Adding placeholder colors,

And here's where it starts to go off the rails,

I really like the gradient in theory; it adds atmosphere and provides a lever I can adjust to set the "mood" of the piece (orange and grey gives us a burnt out forest, blue and white gives us winter wonderland, green and yellow give us majestic forest, etc) however I can't find a clean/clear way to define the edge - cropping it at the trees looks visually clunky and allowing a "bubble" of the gradient past the tree line looks goofy. I haven't been able to find a good solution yet.

I think my next attempt will be to design the trees to intentionally "frame in" the gradient so it feels more natural to the viewer for the gradient not to extend onto/over the background trees - this will hopefully allow me to keep some of the layered atmosphere the gradient provides. If that doesn't work then I'll probably give up the gradient and just design more traditional "props" more similar to the individual trees I've done before, only arranged in such a way that they create a line of trees/implied forest - ideally without having lots of awkward/annoying holes people have to cut out/edge.

Anyhow, that's a quick update/snapshot of a few of the plates I've got spinning at the moment. I'm gonna step away and get my kiddo ready for school, but then I'll be around on the Discord as I work if you have questions or comments (also feel free to leave any comments below).

Cheers everyone!
-Marshall