Making the Lost FinchyFest (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Last week we were so excited to finally release The Lost FinchyFest, our special print celebrating the last seven years of our show. The response has been fantastic, so we wanted to go into much more detail about how it was made.

The initial idea originated back in September, 2020. We wanted to release something special to commemorate the 5th anniversary of Prepare To Try, which would fall on March 14th, 2021. Obviously, that didn’t happen for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, this was a hugely complex piece to pull together – we’ll get onto that in a minute – but also we were still periodically slipping in-and-out of lockdowns and we took a decision not to release new merch during those uncertain times, since it just felt weird to us. This piece was always meant to be celebratory, so we held it until the time felt right.

We knew we wanted a piece that was teeming with references, not just from FROM’s games but particularly our experiences with them. We’ve played in their worlds for 7 years now and in doing so, we’ve created our family of characters, rich in its own lore (kebabs, chapstick, chinning), which has interacted with theirs. We wanted to bring this all to life. But before mapping it all out, we wanted to make sure we weren’t missing something important.

Our audience knows our show far better than us at this point, so we tapped into that beautiful hive mind. On October 7th, 2020, we sent out a questionnaire asking for the help of our patrons. We asked people to submit their favourite boss fights, locations, NPCs, and weapons. (You can still take a look at the original form here.) We received over 600 responses, so had plenty of raw data to mulch down and work with. As you can imagine, there were plenty of recurring elements – Laurence, Solaire, the Halberd – but it was nice to see some smaller aspects represented, too – Gavlan and Manscorpion Tark, for instance.

The next step was to whittle all the possible references down to a workable set – sorry, Orphan of Kos –  and write a script of sorts, a premise for why all of these disparate characters, real and imaginary, from across 5 games came to be in one place.

Since we’d spent most of 2020 in lockdown, ruling out any chance of a physical FinchyFest, we decided to throw a fictional one. But where to host it? The natural answer was, of course, Firelink Shrine. Not only is it the first hub we ever made ourselves at home in, it’s perfect for something like this lore-wise. It’s a place where characters from distant lands and different worlds come to rest and interact. But what’s more, its layout is really useful: it has plenty of verticality and discrete areas, ideal for all the interactions we wanted to stage and for smuggling in a ludicrous amount of detail.

But without a plan, and especially a great artist, this would have almost certainly been a huge mess. We only ever had one person in mind to work with on this piece and it was the brilliant artist André Lima Araújo. We’ve been aware of André and his work for a while. He’s worked on numerous titles for Marvel, DC, and original titles like Phenomena (with Brian Michael Bendis) and A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance (with Rick Remender). Over the years he’s reached out to us on Twitter and has hidden the odd reference to RKG in some of the comics he’s worked on. Back in 2019, shortly after the launch of RKG, he managed to find a place for our new logo in the background of an issue of Wolverine. (Nice to know we survive into the mutant-era of humanity.)

Thankfully, he was very much up for the idea (challenge). So what we needed to provide André with was a script, a detailed outline of everything we’d like to appear in the piece – every character, weapon, and item. But we didn’t just want to provide him with an inventory to tick off. We wanted all these elements to make sense, to be placed within the context of both our show and the FromSoft games. So we started coming up with scenarios. As with any party, people tend to gravitate towards people they either know or have something in common with. So we started applying that logic not just to the games but specifically our experience with them. Characters who are fond of a nap would maybe all find a quiet spot to rest – so that takes care of Gehrman and Logan, and of course, Lazy Michael Zaki, too. Makes sense. Gav would probably want to chat to Domhall of Zena at some point, and if we’re going to get the Llewellyn Shield on there, it makes sense to have it nearby them both. This was the line of thought that gradually built up the piece.

One of our favourite things about the piece is how it manifests a lot of the Souls lore for the first time. There’s so much to infer about in these games – so often the player is arriving after the major events have taken place. But this was our opportunity to bring to life things we’ve speculated about in our playthroughs. So you have Lady Maria incensed at seeing Gehrman’s Doll for the first time. Elsewhere Alfred is finally reunited with his beloved Logarius, explaining why he’s splattered in viscera. There are loads of lore moments on there, but our favourites are where our own lore and that of From’s have become weirdly and beautifully fused. The Dancer is about to ship off to Iraq. Iudex Gundyr is standing far too close to the edge. Lautrec – ever the shit – is poised to ice Powers. And of course, for some reason, Ornstein and Smough are not on the guestlist.

We wanted this piece, like From’s games, to feel very thoughtful and intentional. There isn’t a wasted detail.

It was a big script, and an unenviable challenge for André. We spoke to him recently about the process now it’s all done. (Patrons can listen to an extended version of that conversation on last week’s episode of Shield Up, our patron-exclusive podcast.) And even for him, someone who’s used to tackling huge set pieces with dozens of characters, it proved to be a lot of detail.

“I'm used to dealing with lots of information to be included,” André told us, “but I won't lie, that was A LOT. But it was very helpful, because it would be much worse for me to have to come up with all the moments for the literally hundreds of characters we put into that illustration. I was familiar with pretty much the entire list, but I couldn't gather such a comprehensive thing without your help. Long story short: I loved the list.”

TBut thankfully André is a slug, having found our show while doing research to draw the cover of the official Bloodborne comic. This familiarity with our show proved to be indispensable. But despite this advantage and a detailed script, the sheer volume of characters (all of different scales) and references created a gigantic jigsaw-like puzzle for André to solve.

The first thing he did was create a very rough sketch of Firelink with a rough placement of blank characters. Here’s the very first draft he ever sent us.

“Imagining a scene and an angle where they'd all fit and be nicely visible,” André told us. “We were not only drawing each character but also using them to represent individual moments of your history. In complex pieces like this one, the initial moment is the hardest because you need to be able to visualise something rather complex out of thin air, only in your head. Luckily for me, that's one of my strengths. When I managed to make a rough version and saw that it worked, I knew it would be only a question of hard work from there on.”

The next version André sent over really gave us a good sense of what the final piece would look like. At this early stage, it looked like a Where’s Wally picture drawn by John Doe from Se7en, and we loved it. It let us lock in the design and the placement of each element, and from thereon, like André says, it was just a case of his hard work, of him gradually realising each moment. He’s a very in-demand artist, and has several projects on the go at once, so we worked on it whenever we could.

After months of work, André submitted the final design and asked for any feedback. We only had one major revision: kebabs. It was important to us that Mama Finchywas holding a kebab, and that kebabs were available at FinchyFest, but we realised there was a slight cultural difference throwing us out. (André is based in Portugal by the way.) We had always imagined her devouring a messy donner-style kebab, a popular late-night drunken meal here in the UK, whereas the original design had Mama wielding a much nicer-looking shish-style kebab. So after months of stellar work, all we had to change were Mama’s precious kebabs, which really is a testament to the immense work André did for this piece.

Kebabs fixed, the next stage was for André to hand the piece over to Chris O’Halloran, a talented colourist. Chris further helped bring the piece to life, going above and beyond to capture the unique green shade of each Finchy.

It took a long time to bring The Lost FinchyFest to a point where we could share it with you all. But we couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out and what it represents. When we launched the piece last week, we said we feel like we’re on the eve of a new era for RKG. So much of what we wanted to do when we set off on our own was thwarted by the pandemic, but now we’re right back on track and ready to go on so many more adventures. This piece celebrates the wonderful journey so far.

RKG x

The Lost FinchyFest is available until midnight GMT on March 31st.