Coffee Ramble - 1 Sentinels and games

A bit of a double-post for today.

The sentinels picture is coming along though it's taking a fair bit of time since I ended up adding a lot of parts in this illustration that needed some layering, but the flats are largely done, and I think I got the colours right for a cold environment on an overcast kind of day.  Colours all have to stay in this very muted range which makes things kind of challenging.  You have to fool the visuals into thinking that these aren't just all various shades of desaturated blue, which they largely are.  

The warmer colours are just very desaturated warmer blue/purple while the colder colours are obviously a little more saturated with blue.  It's been a learning experience, especially ensuring that snows aren't just leaning over into white, but various shades of blue and grey itself.

The picture itself is very much inspired by the likes of Keith Parkinson and some of the scenes he used to create.  It's an image that I wish I had seen as a kid growing up devouring fantasy art in games.  That of a brave bunch of wolf-folks standing against their brethren who were risen by some vile sorcery.

The Sentinels are one of the oldest 'groups' that I wrote about decades ago, for a world that's had a name change, and a lot of updates since, but still holds a lot of the old ideas that I had held dear back then.  

They are the watchers in the forests around the Kyviosii lands in the South Aegencald.  Armed with more enchanted relics than most hunters would dream of, they willingly spend sometimes months out in the wilds making sure their sacred lands aren't encroached upon by any malevolent beings.  Its not an easy life, but it's necessary when many of your people are settled around one of the wellsprings of the world's 'lifeblood'.

Games

Lately, especially while working on the Sentinels picture,  I've been thinking about games as a broad category again.  I used to play a LOT of games through the years.

I was one of the lucky kids on the block who had a father working in tech, so I had things like Intellivision consoles and Commodore 64's when I was growing up.  The little blobby graphics and 8-bit sound became companions for me.  Computers fascinated me, but the games were akin to books you could actually experience rather than just read.  I remember getting a ratty, tattered photocopied booklet that was about 40 pages or so that gave room descriptions for the Temple of Apshai game series and I was so utterly fascinated by the descriptions I would stay awake at night reading through it, and even getting kind of scared by it.

This was before I had ever heard of tabletop RPGs.  Namely, at the time, Dungeons and Dragons, which was kind of the 'big kid' on the block.  The Temple of Apshai book was a toe-dip into that realm though.  I remember playing the game, entering a room (Which on-screen was little more than white walls with a few symbols depicting items of interest) then flipping to the description to see what the description of that room read.

In fact, this game was the catalyst of my learning about D&D.  A friend of mine had seen the photocopied book, laughed and said he plays a game with his friend, his brother, with his friend's brother as the DM that was a lot like that.  When I asked if it was a board game, he couldn't quite explain it.  There wasn't a board, or pieces.  Just written stats on paper.

I admittedly resisted efforts of learning this 'weird game with no board' simply because I was a very visual kid.  No board?  What's the point then?  I don't want to just sit and do math and write stuff down.

It wasn't until my parents bought me a book called 'The Monster Manual' for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st edition.  It had drawings of cool monsters in it (clearly they missed the fact that there were topless women included in the menagerie) and I liked monsters and animated films and this seemed to have stories about them in it (In reality, it was just the lore of the creature, but they were technically right).

I.  Was.  Hooked.

This book became an obsession for me.  I didn't realize it was part of a game, despite the fact that there were these eldritch symbols and numbers next to the image of the monster.  I didn't know what a 'No. of appearing' meant, neither did I know what the hell the weird math after the letters 'XP/per hp' meant.  I just knew that it drew me into this fantasy realm where things in the dark could be terrifying.  Seeing David Trampier and Erol Otus' depictions of these strange beings and undead ghosts and wraiths made me want to draw.  And the pegasus on the cover made me fall in love with them.

I have to wonder, off-handedly, if this is why I started to really like horses.  I was a city kid.  I'd never been near one, but for some reason I'd attempt to recreate the cover of the book, and recreate the intricate inks of DAT on every piece of paper I could get my hands on.  It was, quite literally, where I developed a solid interest in doing artwork, because these depictions captured something indescribable.  A dark fantasy, but one that still held hope because there were heroes fighting back against that darkness.

I remember several months later my friend saw the book and asked me where I had got it.  I told him it was a Christmas gift, but didn't know what the book was for because it wasn't filled with stories or anything.  I remember distinctly him laughing and telling me "THIS is the game I told you about.  That D&D game?  This is one of the books from it!"

One of the books?  There were more?

He brought over a bunch of his kit, which was kind of a slapdash collection of basic D&D boxes, modules, the Player's handbook and the Dungeon Master's guide.  I leafed through these things and just got lost in them in the best way possible.  I didn't know THIS was the game.  That there were tales to be told, and the stats on the sheet you had written down were heroes that you go out with to defeat the terrifying things I'd seen in that book.

I begged my parents to pick up the basic red box, with Larry Elmore's art on it, for the next Christmas as my friend suggested.  My parents were really cool.  They didn't believe in moral panic, or ghosts or demons trying to control kids.  They were thrilled that I wanted books that dealt with math and reading.  I mean, shit, it meant I'd be quiet when sitting at the table reading every word of those books, and trying to make sense of it.

Over the years, I had made hundreds of characters.  Not to play, but to just make them.  It inspired me enough to make worlds with people that populated it.  The Temple of Elemental Evil module, while confusing and not exactly a well written adventure, was stuffed with 'stat blocks' of people living in the town, their homes, the bandits, and things living in the temple, it sent my need to create things into overdrive.

Many moons on, I've started to want to wander back into games again.  I had a couple really bad experiences years ago that made me just stop.  While I won't go into detail, one involved the kind of nightmare, mid-50 year old incel who'd go out of his way to be a disruption in an online game I had attempted.   I was sick back then, and desperate to have a game to run, and my depression and anxiety just made me put up with it until I finally just stopped.  But not before it bled over into another game I was invited to play in, and I had what can only be called a mental snap, and swore off TTRPGs.

These day's I'm a lot more mentally healthy.  I have a therapist and sessions are in a space which is more 'maintenance mode'.  This alone helped so much.  I'm medicated, I've got a better outlook on things, and I wouldn't be ground under by someone like that in my games.  They'd just be dropped and blocked from joining and I'd move on with things.  Life is too short to put up with it.

My relationship to D&D is much different now, of course.  The game has had editions (really, its a full revision of the rules while clunkily keeping a grasp on the weird nonsense from the 70's).  I have tried the new editions but none of them captured what I wanted, outside of loving 3rd edition's absurd levels of world detailing (Hey, what can I say?  I like building stuff like this) and 4th editions ease of encounter creation.  I even tried 5th edition but found, ultimately, that it suffered what I can only call a severe identity-crises.

I have starting to get back into games in general though.  Not only TTRPG's but computer role playing games as well.  I have this massive backlog of games that I never played since I never had time or energy to while working as a caregiver.  Everything from Divinity Original Sin series, the Pathfinder series, The Witcher, Elder Scrolls (Yes, I'm the one person on the planet that never finished that game).  I now have time to poke at these games again.  

I'm looking forward to that.

I'm even toying with looking around for TTRPG's online.  I still have a lot of anxiety about that, but one of the things I do need to do is make myself try to break the triggers of 'It'll be awful' by actually trying it.  Because people with anxiety write the conclusions to things before they even happen.

I still love my 2nd edition D&D, and even picked up Castles and Crusades since I hear it's very faithful to those old editions while modernizing some of the more fiddly bits.  For dungeon delves, it would definitely be the game that has that 'terrified into the darkness' feel.

I'm now also looking outside of anything Wizards of the Coast develops.  Some recent drama made a lot of people realize they weren't relevant anymore, and the game rests with the fans.  I wanted to get into heroic fantasy again.  I liked that sort of thing from 4th edition, so I've dived into Pathfinder 2e, which does a very good job of letting that genre come to life.

Savage worlds is amazing for pulp too.  There's an unending sea out there if you look for it.

If I can ever muster up the courage I may even run a game again.  I'd like to.  A lot of my art comes from the worlds that those games inspired me to create.  I miss rolling dice, and telling stories.  

I just know that I'm healthy enough now to not let anyone ruin it again.

I told you that these coffee rambles would be rambly ;)

-T.J.