“What If?” is a handy question to use when trying to think of story ideas, gaming ideas, illustration ideas.
“What if Tarzan had been the son of a Chinese prince instead of an English lord?”
“What if Revelations started happening the way the evangelicals said it would?”
“What if you had a doorway to the past in your closet?”
The illustration here was inspired by the question “What if Doc Savage and his gang were a bunch of holy men instead of scientists?”
This piece was inspired by the stories of William Hope Hodgson. I remember, as a kid, being so disappointed that the real Sargasso Sea wasn’t such a terrifying place. Oh well, maybe the floating continent of trash will make up for it.
Swords and sorcery, fashion changes but the tactics remain the same.
You think the Valkrie just wandered off to raise goats?
I wonder how many sanity points a furry would loose when faced with the terrors of the Mythos?
A door into the past? Or an alternate timeline? Or another dimension? You decide!
In the US, at least these days, the villain type most likely to carry any sort of series is the serial killer. They usually aren’t sophisticated sorts. Often they are inbred country folk, low in intelligence, freakish in appearance and hard to kill. If a killer isn’t a shunned outsider then he’s (and they’re almost always hes) generally insane.
I was making my weekly pilgramage through Amazon’s Recommended for Me lists today and what do I see on the first page? Click on the image to get a closer look.
I’ve been trying to encompass as many flavors of the “adventure” genre with my illustrations for the BRP Manual. One flavor that seems more popular in Europe than here in the States is the villain as protagonist represented by such fellows as Fantomas, Diabolik and Kriminal. Who doesn’t love a good villain?
I’ve just recently read Edgington and D’Israeli’s War of the Worlds trilogy (War of the Worlds, Scarlet Traces, Scarlet Traces: The Great Game – highly recommended!) so alien invaders are on my mind. Tripod war machines have burned themselves into my imagination since I was a kid and read John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy.
