Bringing Blackguard to Life!

It's been an incredible joy to watch our artist Brimrún begin to sketch out what Blackguard looks like. It's got to tread a fine line between "obviously fantasy" and "obviously victorian" and I think she's nailing it! I'll put a few more pictures below of the process for the first issue of the Broadsheets!

Because it's always additive, what's fun about creating for RPGs is that the art is fuel for imagination, first we did a line-up of standard non-player characters that you can see here. But now it's time to figure out what the city looks like. We're asking her for 4 pictures of the city for the first issue of the zine. We'll see if that's tenable going into the future, but by god do I hope it is, because watching this come in is just so fun.

Here's the first image of what those images might end up looking like. Three of them outline various parts of the Argent Sector, the district we're outlining first. The Train Station, the Mallory Building, and a street view of the Argent Sector itself.

But what I get to do is bring in feedback so we get closer to the look I had in my mind. So for instance, that piece of the Mallory Building is great, but I was really looking for something more imposing. Maybe closer to the Flatiron Building in New York. And, as a professional concept artist she immediately sent me the revised image:

And yeah! That's imposing as hell. It feels almost oppressive. Which is also the note I gave her on the Obsidian Palace, and she got the note! Look at this!!

It's a palace built by Razul, the Destroyer, an ancient lava-breathing greatwyrm that once ruled the entire material plane. But since his death, the palace has been rebuilt, expanded, destroyed, and refurbished dozens of times throughout the last few thousand years. So, it's a mixture of draconic, elven, and human architecture.

Now, we'll never see the Palace from this angle, this is just concept art. This particular piece was created as a 3D model so it could be used in the cover image, which is also using 3D modeling to get the perspective of all the buildings and landscape just right. Here's the rough version of that:

Now that's obviously NOT what the final image will look like, just a guide on the perspective. There's a bunch of work here left, like a mist-pass, depth, and you know... drawing the picture. The 3D model is just a way for her to create her own reference of my wild pitch of a train coming into the city and seeing the shape of the city with the oppressively massive Obsidian Palace at its center.

We're still working on the Zine, and as today is my first day as a full time Mystic Arts employee, I can take a quick break from the grand overview stuff to write the outline of the first issue today. I'm so excited!

I'll keep sharing little teases on here as we work, so you all know what we're working on!

Thanks for all the support everybody, I can't believe I get to do this! :D