Yellow Land 2nd Intermezzo + Rough Void Map

Dear Heroes,

It's been a while! Shortly after the last post, the Good Eggy brought a virus (virus, virus) home from the creche, and though she was well enough quite swiftly, it laid me low with fatigue and ill-feeling for the better part of two weeks.

So, of a sudden, here we are in mid-April and I don't have the full Yellow Land for you yet.

I've elaborated a spread for the factions:

I'm trying to give each faction at least one NPC and one hook, so they're easy enough to tie into campaign events and player shenanigans. I was planning a second piece of art for the bottom of the other page, but that's around when the virus ate me.

The spread with the temple of Yellow Abaco also gained a full page on the gardener géants, the divine [?] biomachines that [redacted] out the resources that fertilize the Yellow Land's industries.

I like how the art piece came out. As for the beast itself ... always fun having a kaiju template, I think.

The great city of Safranj got its full spread, with events and everything ...

But the other cities of the Decapolis ... I've tackled them twice now, and neither time has the structure gelled for me. It's just not ... story-usable enough. I'm going to return to it with a fresher mind next week.

I've got pieces hanging around, but really, ugh. Annoying. There's also an illustration I really want to use here but can't find right now ... soon, I hope.

On the plus side, I've got the Roadside Picnic inspired voidway lane aberract laid out, along with strange items found after a spacetime disturbance. This also works nicely if you've got a portal manifest out of nowhere.

That said, I'm a bit unsatisfied with the art on this one ... I want to do something different for it. Well. The fullness of time, etc.

I am happy with this next location - the Lost Spital Apotheotic - which brings together two minor factions, a vast treasure, and the chance to radically modify the setting. I will revise a few of the other places in this way, with larger consequences.

Also, I think the art here is quite nice.

Anyway, that's the state of the Yellow Land. I've got 14 of 20 pages done, but no brain juice to finish the last six pages this week. WELL. Soon, I hope.

The Void, Near and Far

Now for something quite else - the Void.

I mentioned the map a while back ... here are the inks. I'll move them around, to neatly spread them across six pages, but ... here it is. A visual first step towards mapping the near and far voids of the Given World. (larger version attached)

I do think I will yet need to add some travel directions and times and methods, but this is - at least to my eyes - going to be one pretty fun part of the book.

Ok - that's my last two weeks ... plenty of lying down and a little drawing and a lot of waking up at night for the kids.

Hope you've all had a more admirable two weeks, unperturbed by agents of chaos and unpredictability.

Next Update From the Vastlands coming soon!

Oh, right, illustration for a Yellow Land city ... there we go. Found it.

P.S. - Oh, right, also some bonus random tables that don't fit anywhere. I didn't have the brain to write useful stuff while sick, but these happen'd. I'll be posting free fragments like these on the xenon elasmotherium substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-160994356 - and summarizing them in simple PDFs here.