The Castle of Living Stone [wip]

Dear Heroes,

It's back to Our Golden Age. At last. And what better way to do that, than to give proper attention to a picture that I'd ... mmm ... taken a shortcut on. The opening adventure skeleton in the book (Summons, Unexpected) is a bit of co-creative fun and games to get the referee and the players figuring out their characters and their world together.

It really kicks off when the players reach the "Castle" (which is not really a castle) to find their Contact, who summoned them to adventure with a cryptic request for help along with free tickets and money for their expenses. Perhaps some NPCs also received that request, but turned it down and thus stayed NPCs.

Anyway, I was rushing a bit then and repurposed an older piece, giving this spread:

But, that's the Minister's Pyramid and I really want to use it in the third adventure skeleton, which also unlocks various world-changing shenanginas that can make use of things like the overgrown voidskiff (the flying ship with a face, bottom right).

So, I'd just finished all the art for the VLG and made it look all pretty and awesome and I went back to work on the OGA and I pondered.

Do I first fix the layout of the remaining 4 lands, so that all the 6 regions have the final layout?

Do I set to finishing the writing on the second adventure skeleton, the one where the PCs recover a mansion for their home base ... and then I saw this spread and decided. Nah. I need to fix this.

Oh how little did I know.

First, I exported a nice 600 dpi spread ... because if I'm going to draw a detailed map, I might as well make it big enough to fit on a poster! The sketching was easy ... it's a semi-alive autofac. Sure, later it got repurposed as all kinds of things ... but that's how it started, so the carnibrutalist style was pretty easy to do.

Then I started drawing.

And my goodness ... does this take forever? Yes, it kind of does, it kind of does.

Five days later ...

I thought I'd have it finished by today and show y'all this amazing carnibrutalist living castle autofactory, with labels for the different locations and everything, but ... it's still not done!?!?! How, why?

Oh, well, no matter ...

Here it is a little bit more cleaned up, without sketch lines and without background colors.

But it's 15:36 now and in 10 minutes I have to go pick up the Eggy from childcare, so the poster version isn't going to be done this week.

Anyway, bonus A2 adventure poster (that's roughly 10,000 pixels wide) coming your way soon (and the OGA, too, haha ...) ... but since this one is a work-in-progress, let's make it a free post, eh?

Onwards, to the Effluvia Maxima!

Salutations From the Scribbling Strip,
—Luka