Saturday, August 21, 2010

Hey Otto! Do Berserker! Girls think is big sexy!


I've been playing Final Fantasy XII on the PS3, and it's so visually gorgeous I'm willing to forgive the woefully neglectful lack of gameplay. Anyhoo, as my team of emo teenagers were beating the bejeezus out of these giant centaur automatons, the design struck me as something the Necrons would leave lying around. As if its size and enormous amount of HP weren't enough, when the thing is sick of dealing with you, it summons an enormous fucking sword. 


So I'm thinking it's a good jumping-off point for the second Hive Tyrant? Maybe a Tyrannofex?


In other news, I've started on an Emperor's Tarot deck for my DH group. We also play poker the same evening, so I thought it'd be cool to have a deck you could also use for that (less the 24 Major Arcana and 4 Trump cards, of course) . Here's my proof-of-concept prototype, the Ace of Thrones:




From my research, the suits are Thrones, Bolters (or Bolts), Shields, and Novas, and the four Trump cards are something you don't even see in regular Tarot decks. The other major difference is that these will be playing card size to facilitate Texas Hold 'Em as well as divination. The Minor arcana will be easy enough, but it still leaves me with 40 or so small illos of varying complexity to do. It'll be a nice long-term project. 


No, I will not, as others have, be stealing Jon Blanche artwork from the rulebooks. Others have done that, and that's cheating.


Next time we'll wrap up the Witch Hunters series with something interesting to look at. 


Happy Saturday, people. 

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"did he just say make f*&% Berzerker?"

Great work. How, may I inquire, would one go about getting his greedy little hands on one of those Tarot decks? That's such a cool project.

Tears of Envy said...

I second b.smoove's comment - could you post the files for the tarot when they're done? It looks amazing! Is that a font you're using for the corner "A"s? Or are you using a combo of fonts???

The Inner Geek said...

I third the motion... if such a thing is possible.

I'd love to get my hands a deck of cards like that. You could post them up for down load should you ever finish as was mentioned. GW would probably gut you like a fish if you tried to sell decks, but I know I'd pay for one.

Mark said...

For the corner "A"'s, as well as all other lettering, I'm using a font called "Codex", found here:

http://www.urbanfonts.com/fonts/codex.htm

and the font called Imperial, found here,

http://font.downloadatoz.com/font-imperial-symbols.html

for the various Imperial symbols, wingdings, and numbers.

Glad you like them! When I'm done (and again, it's not going to be quick) I'm going to see about getting some printed up, but yes, I'll be posting them here for you to look at as well.

I suppose I could remove every last bit of GW-associated iconography and make a "Generic Dark Sci-Fi" deck for sale without worry of getting sued, but then it would lose something visually, wouldn't it? Opinions?

Tears of Envy said...

Woo! Thanks for the font links - I will check them out.

You are using GW IP so if you retain it and try to sell the designs you're on shaky ground. If you allow free download you _might_ get a takedown notice.

Assuming you're not going to try to sell them, Bell of Lost Souls seem to get away with using GW-created logos on their downloadable logo sheets, so they may turn a blind eye to this.

Mark said...

Yeah, see, that's exactly the sort of mess I don't want to get myself all caught up in. Presumably they allow the BoLS icon sheets to exist because they're free and somewhat GW-promotional, and this... well this is a one-off project that's partly a portfolio piece and partly a party favor.

So, as for something people can buy, it might be safer to make an alternate set that has been scrubbed of any and all imagery that isn't mine. It'll have all the extra cards with the pretty pictures, you can divine your cyberpunk future however you see fit. Either that or play confusing games of poker. If anyone's interested, let me know and we'll work something out when it's ready to go to the printer.

What I will do, when the initial project is done, is post in-use photos of the slightly different, not-for-sale, IP-covered deck that I'm making for use with Dark Heresy.

Sound good?