Illo-a-Week: Nightwalker

From my second-ever published work, the titular Nightwalker.

This little piece holds a special place in my heart. Yeah, it’s not really that awesome an image, though at the time (that would be, um, 20 years ago) this sort of thing wasn’t all over pop culture like it is today, so there was a bit more of a cool factor. In any event, for whatever reason I’ve always liked this one, so it’s sat in a frame on my desk for years.

When I unframed it to scan it today, I was glad I did: As you can see, time and light exposure haven’t been kind to the paper, so it’s a good thing I made a digital record of it before it’s too late. (Believe it or not, when I published Nightwalker/The Villee Affair for Millennium’s End, desktop publishing (or, as we call it now, “publishing”) was in its infancy. I used a now-defunct application to lay out my book text, but the illos were still photographed the old-fashioned way and hand-stripped into the negatives for the printing plates. So this image was never committed to digital form.) I scanned it as a color image to give you a look at how the paper has darkened—the paler edges mark the area that had been covered by the frame.

This was the Nightwalker of the adventure’s title—a MacGuffin in a high-stakes heist for the protagonists to chase down. Still looks fairly slick, if I say so myself, which is good: Its role in the adventure was frankly more one of style than of substance. Hopefully it lives up to that requirement—what do you think?

Writers live and die by the feedback they get from their readers, so I’d love your comments—there’s a little link just down below to the right. Also:

• Receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right)
• Follow me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, where I post lots of game, writing, and geek news and can often be dragged into conversation
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The Medieval Kingdom

I stumbled across a conversation on a message board in which a guy was curious about a typical medieval kingdom’s resources—specifically, how many villages and towns a kingdom might encompass, and how big its army might be. Worldbuilding is a topic of fascination for me, both as a writer and a gamer, and this is a subject about which there are a lot of misconceptions that, at least for me, undermine the veracity many stories and games I’d otherwise enjoy.

The question isn’t simple: When you look across an entire continent, over half a millennium, there really isn’t a “typical” typical medieval kingdom. But we all have a sort of image in our head of what that term means (based I think, mostly on northwestern Europe in the period spanning the age of the Crusades through to about Chaucer and the Black Death), so we can work to that.

Here’s how it more or less was: Virtually all of northern/western Europe was settled. There were no vast expanses of wilderness or areas unruled by a recognized authority. “No land without a lord” was a Norman motto about the time of their conquest of England.

The feudal system was the way things were done. Local peasants toiled for a knight, the knight owed service to a higher lord. That higher lord might owe service up the chain to someone even higher, and at the top was the king.

This division was really from the bottom up, not the top down. The king didn’t sit down and divide up the map into duchies, then divide those up into counties, and then into manors and so on. Rather, the countryside was dotted with manors, and the county or regional authority was defined by how many of those manors a given lord was able to amass under his control. The duchy (or other next step up) was defined by how many counties and manors that lord was able to subsume, and the kingdom was defined by how many duchies and counties and manors the king was able to bring under control. (Obviously, these lands weren’t reconquered with every generation; the borders became somewhat traditional. But unlike modern national borders, they did change frequently through conquest and diplomacy. Land was the big-ticket currency of the medieval world.)

So, how many villages in a kingdom? Depends on the size and terrain. Given a productive agricultural region (like most of northern Europe), the manors are typically spread across the countryside about 2 or 3 miles apart. About an hour’s walk. So that’s 4 to 9 square miles per village. Call it 6 square miles on average, if you want a quick rule of thumb. (In a less productive area—say, an arid region like Spain—they might be somewhat farther apart.) Each village is typically ruled by a knight, though there are exceptions: Villages held by the church or the local monastery, or cases where a given knight holds more than one village and has a seneschal of some description running things at one or more of them.

The area controlled by a mid-level lord (count or margrave) can vary widely, but 10-30 miles on a side is pretty reasonable. About the distance that can be covered in one day, which makes this administrative level manageable without requiring subdivision. That’s 100 to 900 square miles, or 15 to 150 villages. 100ish, as a very vague rule of thumb.

These mid-level lords might answer directly to a king, or be part of another level of hierarchy, like a duchy. A given duchy might contain part or all of, say, half a dozen counties.

(Towns and cities are a different deal. They’re usually outside the feudal system. They’re created by an agreement with the lord that usually lets them rule themselves in exchange for a cut of the commerce. A town is definitely not just a large village—the latter is an agricultural settlement with no real commerce, while the former is a commercial center where the folk of the local villages all come to trade and buy non-local goods. Towns are usually about 5 to 10 miles apart (no more than half a day’s journey from the villages they support), which puts maybe 10ish in a middle-of-the-road county.)

So, you’re writing your story or building your campaign world. How many villages does that give us in a kingdom? Choose your kingdom size, and go with the above. A kingdom could be huge, but some were little more than a region the size of a small county. The defining factor isn’t the size, but the independence—a king does’t owe feudal allegiance to a higher secular authority.

The question of villages goes hand-in-hand with the size of the country’s army. Standing armies were very rare in the middle ages. Those scenes in the movies where a bunch of guys show up in matching armor and uniforms—forget about that.

When the king needed a force, he called up those who served beneath him. Basically, one knight for every village, usually along with a dozen or a few dozen foot soldiers (peasants with spears or bows) per village. Remember, though, that the king probably didn’t call everyone up at once; that would leave a lot of land undefended. Plus there were limits on how much service a lord could extract. If nobody’s working the farm, nobody (maybe all the way up to the king) gets to eat come winter time. . . .

The knight was a warrior by trade. The villagers might include a couple of yeomen who were trained to some degree in arms. The rest were amateurs—although in some cases, every peasant was required to have a bit of martial training. (Most famously the English longbowmen: In the late Middle Ages, every English male commoner was required to practice at the longbow, and this gave the English the ability to call up a large force of foot soldiers who were more than cannon fodder. Er, knight fodder. And thus you get your Crecys and Agincourts.)

But the trained peasant warrior is the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of medieval combatants weren’t trained soldiers. And they weren’t paid (except sometimes in booty), didn’t wear uniforms, and served only as needed.

So the king might have some retainers and perhaps a personal guard, but frankly those forces were usually pretty small. In fact, many castles were largely unmanned, or held by a caretaker, when the country wasn’t at war.

Writers live and die by the feedback they get from their readers, so I’d love your comments—there’s a little link just down below to the right. Also:

• Receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right)
• Follow me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, where I post lots of game, writing, and geek news and can often be dragged into conversation
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Martin’s Monday Medieval Madness: The Value of a Big Dumb Guy

I sat down with my kids to watch Big Trouble in Little China this past weekend, and I was struck by how that movie went about solving a problem in very much the same way I did in The Mason of New Orleans. Here, let me (or, rather, someone else—I didn’t put this video together), demonstrate:

 

 

You may ask what problem, exactly, is being solved in that clip. (Go ahead, ask. I’ll wait.) The problem is that of immersing the audience in an unfamiliar setting filled with cultural nuance and iconography and intricate backstory, and getting that audience fully invested in the story without a lot of off-putting exposition.

Put another way, the writer has given us a bug dumb guy to act as a proxy for the audience. Every time the audience is likely to say “Huh? What’s going on here?” the big dumb guy can say it for them. Then someone explains things to the big dumb guy, and the audience gets the answers in the form of witty dialog instead of boring exposition. Probably before even consciously forming the questions.

Martin is my big dumb guy. OK, not really that big, and hopefully not really too dumb, but he’s sitting in the same role.

When I first started dreaming up the story that would become The Mason of New Orleans, it didn’t actually involve a time-traveling character. I had Madeleine and Stephan and Gaspard and an unbuilt castle and an antagonistic Count and satanic devil worshipers and Templars and pretty much everything else, but the story was contained within the 12th century.

But as much as I was fascinated by the setting and wanted to really breathe life into the medieval experience, I really didn’t want to saddle the reader with a tale that was too dry or technical or alien or all three. I didn’t want it to read like it was by and for history dweebs. I sure didn’t want a lot of exposition to explain things that would need no explaining to the characters in the book. So I needed a filter—a way to let the reader see this unfamiliar world through his or her own modern eyes. A proxy who could experience all this stuff on behalf of the reader, not just through what he sees and does, but also through how he reacts to it.

I do not recommend blithely adding time-travelers to your novel just to get this effect. (Hmm. Actually, there are a few novels I can think of for which this might be an improvement. . . . ) In my case, however, I had a bit of an “aha!” moment when this idea hit me. Although it’s not obvious early on, Martin’s presence in the events of this story—and the reason for his 800-year journey—fit the grand plotline like a particularly good-fitting glove. The story was improved, and I got a big dumb guy to say “what?” a lot on behalf of the audience.

Jack Burton may not have been put on this earth to “get it” (to quote Lo Pan), but the audience needs to. And that’s where a big dumb guy can come in real handy.

Writers live and die by the feedback they get from their readers, so I’d love your comments—there’s a little link just down below to the right. Also:

• Receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right)
• Follow me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, where I post lots of game, writing, and geek news and can often be dragged into conversation
• Follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan, where I post frequent short bits on the writing process and state of my current projects
  
• Encircle me (is that right?) on Google+, where, like most people, I have no idea what I’m doing

Martin’s Monday Medieval Madness: Lend Me Your Eyeballs!

I need your help. I’ll tell you why and how in a minute.

Three months ago I announced that I’d typed the words THE END at (of course) the end of the Mason of New Orleans manuscript. It was a huge milestone, but, as I mentioned at the time, it didn’t mean I had a complete novel. There were holes to be filled in: scenes I’d skipped because I didn’t quite know how to handle them (or they were giving me trouble and I didn’t want them to bog me down). Scenes I didn’t know I needed until much later. Places where I couldn’t find the right turn of phrase, so I left myself a note to come back to it. Subplots that materialized in mid-subplot, without being properly set up. Characters whose motivations weren’t sufficiently explained. Stuff that prevented an almost-complete story from being a complete story.

I began the novel sometime in September of last year (you first heard of it, if you were paying attention, in almost a year ago to the day—October 4th, to be precise), so, approaching the end of the summer and not having finished off these bits, I set a goal of wrapping up a complete draft by the end of September. That would let me imagine that it hadn’t taken more than a year to write this novel. I made that goal—by all of 23 minutes—finishing up at 11:37 Friday night.

So what now? That’s where you come in.

Before publication, The Mason of New Orleans (remember, that’s a working title) will go to a professional editor. Before it does, I’ll reread and tweak it, so that what my editor receives is as close to perfection as I can make it without his input. And I hope you’ll give it a read, too, and let me know in what manner it can be improved. (Note: “Throw it in the rubbish bin and never, ever touch a keyboard again” may prove to be a valid comment, but try to think of helpful alternatives as I’m determined to move forward.)

Sounds great! you’re  thinking. Can’t wait to get started! Awesome, and I can’t wait to hear from you. But there are a few things you should know:

• This is an ebook. I can send you a file for iBooks or for your Kindle. Or as a PDF.
• Time is of the essence. I need all comments within one week. So you really need the time and commitment to read a 473-page novel over the next seven days. To put it in context: I’m an average (I think) reader, and it would take me 8 to 10 hours to read this book.
• I’ll need concrete, actionable comments. Everything from typos to continuity gaffes to “this chapter is sooo booooring” is fine, but “I liked it” or “it’s not very good” isn’t really all that helpful.
• Obviously, I’d be trusting you not to pass the file on to anyone else. I’m not going to require an NDA or anything, but I do ask that you not share the file or your thoughts on it at this point. (OK, if you want to tell everyone it’s incredibly awesome and they should run out and buy it the very minute it goes on sale, that would be all right.)

I’m only going to choose a limited number of alpha-readers. If you’ve helped out over the past year (maybe contributing ideas or input when I’ve asked for it on this blog), there’s a good chance I’ll include you if you like. I’ll probably also pick a handful of readers at random from the other requests I get, so please don’t be shy about asking. Either way, though, please keep the above points in mind. If you don’t think you’re up to it, please let me choose someone else.

If this interests you, please go to my Facebook page and let me know in the comments of the post there about alpha readers. I hope you like it!

Writers live and die by the feedback they get from their readers, so I’d love your comments—there’s a little link just down below to the right. Also:

• Receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right)
• Follow me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, where I post lots of game, writing, and geek news and can often be dragged into conversation
• Follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan, where I post frequent short bits on the writing process and state of my current projects
  
• Encircle me (is that right?) on Google+, where, like most people, I have no idea what I’m doing

The Thing

I’m not going to tell you that The Thing, the prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter classic coming out in about a month, is going to be great. It ought to be great, but that’s hardly an indicator in this day and age. I will tell you this, though: It’s gonna get $8 of my money. I’ve been excited about this movie since the first teasers (but then, I was also pretty psyched about Tron Legacy).

If you’re anything like me, you don’t need any convincing at this point. But I’ll show you this anyway:

From the original movie: The strange body MacReady finds burned and frozen outside the ruined Norwegian base. Sometimes referred to as "old splitface."

From the red-band trailer for the prequel: This guy is alive and in motion in the trailer. I think there's a flamethrower and a freeze in his immediate future.

Ironically, all indications are that the plot of this prequel is a direct mirror of the original. We certainly know how it ends! But one of the things I found compelling about the original was the implication that MacReady and crew’s story was just one iteration in a thousand horror stories that came before it—at the Norwegian base, on the alien saucer, and who knows how many times before? The fact that I know the story and the ending doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm one bit.

Seriously, with a nod like that one (not just the presence of ol’ splitface, but the fact that they teased him in the trailer), how can you not want to see this movie?

Comment below; you know you wanna! And receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right). Converse with me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, or follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan.

History and the Historical Novel, part 1

So I’m writing a novel. Naturally, when people learn that, they often ask, “What’s your novel about?” or, “What kind of novel is it?” or, “What are you, nuts?” And then I have to answer them.

Ignoring that last question, I could call it a fantasy novel. But there’s not really a lot of fantasy in it. Obviously (if you’ve read even the first few paragraphs—if you haven’t, it’s here), the whole thing hinges on a pretty big fantastical element right out of the gate, and I’d be lying if I said that element had no significance beyond hurtling a modern voice into the 12th Century. That said, while there are a few swords, there’s precious little sorcery. More substantively, the book is not an exploration of a world driven more by mystical forces than the rational. (I think. Maybe I need to give that one some more thought.) Anyway, I don’t think the “fantasy” handle fits.

So I usually say it’s an historical novel, set in the age of the Crusades and with a little supernatural stuff thrown in. Wikipedia (quoting Britannica) says an historical novel “has as its setting a period of history and attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity (which is in some cases only apparent fidelity) to historical fact. The work may deal with actual historical personages, or it may contain a mixture of fictional and historical characters.” Seems to fit the bill.

Realistic detail and fidelity (or apparent fidelity) conveys the spirit of the historical era.

Of course, time travel is hardly historical (so far as we know anyway), and while the supernatural is pretty subdued in this book it’s not entirely absent. But Britannica goes on to say that “one type of historical novel is the purely escapist costume romance, which, making no pretense to historicity, uses a setting in the past to lend credence to improbable characters and adventures.” So if that counts, maybe my liberties can be forgiven.

Improbable characters and adventures? Not so much.

To my ear, for what it’s worth, “historical novel” sounds a bit more dignified than “fantasy.” Maybe that’s because I have delusions of snobbery (not that my love of fantasy fiction and games is any sort of secret). Or maybe I’m just desperate to justify throwing a year of my life into this thing, and “historical novel” sounds more grown-up. Whatever.

But claiming to write an historical novel comes with a bit of baggage: That darned history. Seems if you want to grasp that “historical” title, you have to deal with the historical. Britannica’s “apparent fidelity” bit gives one a little leeway, but one must at least attain a decent level of veracity, a sense that the story is really set in the setting it’s said to be set in (if you see what I mean). Which basically means its level of historical detail has to go beyond common knowledge—the book needs to know at least as much history as the average reader.

And if you’re really going to sell it as an historical novel, it must be historically “correct” enough not to offend actual history buffs. (I was going to write “actual historians,” but I don’t think they’re the real problem. Armchair historians are worse, because like most nerds they only respect one’s information if it’s demonstrably superior to their own.) Because a history buff who doesn’t like your history won’t just not like your book—he’ll hate it. Perhaps enough to say unpleasant things about it on Amazon or iBooks. And nobody wants that.

Do I pass the test? If you’ve read what’s been posted so far, maybe you have an opinion. I’ll examine a few aspects of the book in a future post.

Comment below; you know you wanna! And receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right). Converse with me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, or follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan.

Building a Better, um, Wall Thing

I had a very busy summer. I built this:

They say if you build a better Gen Con stand, the world will beat a path to your door. No, actually, they don't say that. But Cubicle 7's stand at Gen Con was pretty darn busy.

Perhaps you might wonder to which “this” I refer. I refer to the stand you see there: Cubicle 7‘s booth at Gen Con. It’s hard to see exactly what you’re looking at there, so here’s another picture, taken (from a different position) while we were setting it up.

Apologies for the really terrible picture quality. Cell phone camera. You know how it goes.

Cubicle 7, publisher of the extremely awesome The One Ring (the new Lord of the Rings RPG), Airship Pirates (take note, Abney Park fans), Doctor Who, and about 630 other RPG game lines, is one of my marketing clients. They’ve made a huge leap in status over the past year, vaulting from the indie field to become one of the biggest publishers of RPGs. And they had not one but two major launches for Gen Con—and that meant they needed, for the first time, a real, grown-up looking Gen Con stand. They had 400 square feet to work with (in an unfortunately odd shape), and, well, nothing else.

And being located in Oxford, England, with approximately 5,000 miles, an entire ocean, and half a continent between them and Indianapolis, they weren’t in much of a position to put a stand together themselves. Tough to make a 400-square-foot space look nice with the contents of your suitcase.

No problem, I told them. I’ll arrange it. (Potential clients take note: I am a full-service marketer.) When I said they had nothing else to work with, I lied: They gave me a budget, an amount of money that wouldn’t seem unreasonable to the average person—unless that person had ever had anything to do with arranging stands at major events. Got a thousand bucks? That’ll rent you a table and a potted plant for four days. I exaggerate, but to give you a real example, having internet access at our booth would have cost nearly $1000. For four days. I quickly determined that the reasonable budget available to me wasn’t going to cut the mustard.

Stability testing an early prototype.

The obvious, sensible, simple alternative was to build the stand myself. With my own hands, and my own extensive building experience (I wrote that last part with a straight face). In my own garage. (And in, as it turned out, a massive East-coast heat wave.) All I needed to do was design a 400-square-foot stand that could display roughly 200 RPG products, provide visual impact to support two major launches, fit in an odd-shaped space, and look highly polished and professional. Oh, and I had to be able to transport it in my car and set it up in one day with just a small assortment of hand tools.

A slightly more finished prototype, incorporating some improvements gleaned from the first one.

I was able to anticipate roughly 1 million things that could go wrong with this plan, and throughout July my restless sleep was haunted with visions of Cubicle 7 toughing out Gen Con with nothing more than a stack full of boxes. My nightmares did not include a flood in my garage, soaking 32 triangular braces I’d meticulously built over the preceding week. Or running out of gas outside Pittsburgh and having to abandon my car on the narrow side of a busy highway while I went running up mountains in the 95-degree heat looking for petrol. Or IKEA having only 9 of the 42 shelves I needed, despite their web site promising they had hundreds. Actually, my nightmares did include that last one.

The design reaches its final state. Lessons: Slatwall weighs approximately 400 pounds per square foot. Cutting it generates insane volumes of fine, powdery sawdust that covers everything in your garage, with no regard for whether it belongs to you or your not-so-keen-on-sawdust wife. And bevel cuts create edges similar in sharpness to a moderately honed surgical scalpel.

Despite those issues, and a razor-fine margin for error in the timing of getting it all together, it all was pretty much gotten together. Come the opening bell at Gen Con, we had a stand. It looked pretty good. It displayed the product nicely. Nothing collapsed; no animals (or gamers) were harmed. My nightmares were for naught.

The kids give the final product a sense of scale. The whole shebang involved eight of these towers, which provided structural support for wall-sized graphic panels and were also faced with shelves. Each tower was made of two of the prism-shaped elements in the previous photo, stacked. Each prism broke down into two slat wall panels, two triangular braces, and a cross-brace, all of which basically flat-packed. I should get a job with IKEA!

So that’s how I spent my July. I’ve spent most of August recovering.

Another look at the final product, with Dom and Francesco being interviewed about The One Ring. Almost looks like I knew what I was doing!

Were you there? Did you stop by the stand? What do you think—did I pull it off, or should I keep the day job?

Oh, wait. This is my day job. . . .

Comment below; you know you wanna! And receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right). Converse with me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, or follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan.

Martin’s Monday Medieval Madness: Chapter 16

Etien looked back at me. He was tall by the standards of those around us. And though he wasn’t any taller than me—and didn’t, as far as I could tell, have an inch of neck—I still seemed to be looking up at him.

“Tell me about the castle. How many men does she have on it?”

“I’m sorry, my lord, but I cannot betray her confidence.” I braced myself for the fists. My nose and cheekbones were so sore; I wasn’t sure how much of it I could take. But I was thinking of Madeleine, that first day I saw Etien, standing calmly in the face of his threats.

He didn’t hit me. Instead, before I even knew what was happening, he had grabbed my left wrist and pulled it up. Like Jason rending his way through a dozen at the Wing Dome, he grabbed my pinky and wrenched it back, twisting as he went. There was a cracking sound. I fell to my knees, screaming and clutching my hand, engulfed in a world of pain and shock.

The Count was bellowing at me, but I almost didn’t notice. “Do you think I will stand for games?” he shouted. Bits of spittle were showering down on me. A lightning bolt shot through my kidney as he kicked me, hard, and I doubled to the floor. “You are in my house! When I ask a question you answer it!”

I was panting. Sobbing. I couldn’t see anything; my vision was painted in shades of pain. I was holding my hand, but I didn’t dare touch the finger—it was sticking out at a sickening angle; just seeing it was stirring vomit in my gut. The flesh around the knuckle was ballooning up. An ache, dull but intense, was radiating out of my side where I’d been kicked.

“Hannes,” Etien said, an iota more calmly. “Give me your axe.”

It’s been a busy summer. Not, for the most part, a summer filled with writing fiction, though I did have nice and productive conversations at Gen Con with the excellent Drew Baker (who will be putting the cover on this novel) and Jim Lowder (who, if we can make our schedules jibe a bit, will do a little editing).

So to say Thanks to the three of you who are still checking this blog, I’m posting herewith an omnibus edition of the current draft, complete up through Chapter 16. I hadn’t been planning to post any further chapters until the whole thing was finito, but, well here you go.

Chapter 16 isn’t a particularly long chapter, nor is it (as you might gather from the excerpt above) a particularly pleasant one for Martin. But I like the way it turned out, and it introduces some pretty important story elements (though they might not—strike that: should not—be obvious at this point). Let me know what you think!

Click through for PDF.

Comment below; you know you wanna! And receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right). Converse with me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, or follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan.

Martin’s Monday Medieval Madness: A Peek at the Cover!

I’ve been writing. You’ve been reading. But that’s not all that’s been going on—while we’ve been doing our part, the extremely awesome Drew Baker has been mulling over the book’s cover.

Drop by that site I’ve linked above. Drew is an incredible artist, and I’m sure you’ll be impressed with his work. (If you play L5R, D&D, or Warlord, chances are you already have been.) Once you’ve done that, so you have a sense of how a finished piece might come across, have a look at this short progression of initial sketches:

An initial idea: Martin outside the castle, surveying the work to be done.

A second concept, this time moving Martin into the Old Church in Liege. That would be a fresco of Saint Martin, on his horse with the cloak and the beggar and all that, in the background.

Another take on the same scene, giving Martin a more dynamic pose and upping the tension in the piece.

In our discussions, we’ve kicked around how to convey Martin’s modern background, but ultimately decided that there wasn’t any great way to do it—and that it wasn’t really that important, anyway. Drew had this to say: “The story is about him fitting into his new world, not him being ‘The Man From the Future!’. You established the conceit straight away, but it’s mostly served to make him the stranger in a strange land, and we learn about the world along with him. None of the Avatar posters or covers focus on Jake Sully being paraplegic—it’s the same thing.” Well stated.

I’ve known Drew for a very long time. I’d like to say I “discovered” him, in the sense that I gave him one of his first professional commissions, for a Millennium’s End book that was unfortunately never published (but for which he drew some excellent pieces). Truth be told, though, with his skill and talent his discovery by others was quick and inevitable. Coincidentally, one of his earliest jobs was illustrating the Triamore Sourcebook I wrote for Ars Magica—a sourcebook set in a Brabantine manor that was a sort of prototype for the Bois de Haillot of this novel. This was not long after Drew had done the Millennium’s End work, and I don’t think either one of realized our mutual involvement in the project until we each got our contributor copies! As if that’s not enough, I have one of Drew’s original oils up on my living room wall. So to say that I respect and admire the man’s work would be an understatement!

I really like the direction these sketches are heading—what do you think?

Comment below; you know you wanna! And receive an email notification of every update to this site by subscribing (see the link to the right). Converse with me on Twitter at @charlesmryan, or follow my writing diary on Facebook at Charles M Ryan.

Illo-a-Week: Post-Apocalyptic Guns

And, seriously, what would the post-apocalypse be without guns? Here are a few I put together for the Deadlands: Hell on Earth roleplaying game way back when (these actually appeared in The Wasted West, the core setting book):

A few handy sidearms.

You're getting a bonus here: I also did those page backgrounds, which were standard throughout the HoE line.

The technique here, for those who care, was one I really enjoyed but rarely used: felt-tip pen. In this case, the original artwork was in grayscale, so I used a variety of different gray-toned markers.

Obviously, I scanned these out of the rulebook (with apologies to the fine folk at Pinnacle—serves you right for calling me from a bar last night at 1:00am). I don’t have the original pieces anymore, but as a point of interest, here are some of the preliminary sketches, which I do still have:

Sorry about the crappy scan, but all I have is a crappy scanner.

I’d had a LOT of experience drawing realistic firearms a few years before, when I did about six zillion of them for UltraModern Firearms, so it made putting these fantasy firearms together an easy pleasure. I think they turned out OK, and fit the Hell on Earth style quite nicely. What do you think?

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