Deadlands

It's October.  The leaves have all changed their colors and are littering the streets.  The air has grown chilly, the clouds have gone gray.

Halloween is almost here.

Every so often I like to run a game centered around a horror theme.
It's a one shot.  People are going to die.

This year it's going to be a "Deadlands" game.  I've come up, for the most part, with the story.  I've pregenerated the characters and now I'm working on their identities.  For me, drawing the characters is as vital and important to character creation as rolling the dice and writing up a history is.  It helps me keep them in my head and it gives them a bit more personality.

Some characters concepts just speak to what they should look like.  Sometimes they develop more characteristics from the sketches that I create for them.  The more I draw, the more they seem to breath.

It's world building on a smaller scale.  It's like cartography for people.

People who will probably die horrible deaths in the Weird West.

The One Ring

Roleplaying games.

They give me an outlet for my imagination.

Some games certainly more than others.

Recently I was asked to participate in a "The One Ring' Campaign.

"The One Ring" is an RPG that takes place in Middle Earth some five years after the events of Tolkien's "The Hobbit".

Of the races that are available to play, at least initially, I took a Woodman of the Wilderlands.  I named him Ingvilmar (after much debating and writing and rewriting).  I had very little to go on, besides what I had read in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.  So I sat down at my computer, started up Photoshop and grabbed my Wacom.

This is what resulted...

I will state for the record that this is not a finished piece.  I will also admit that it will probably not progress much further than this.

It was a good exercise and has me working on other things.  It did feel good to pick up a pencil (or Wacom Stylus) again.