Wednesday, August 29, 2018

I Love Mecha

I've always loved mecha and powered armor. Growing up, Iron Man was far and away my favorite comic book, and Bubblegum Crisis was and still is my favorite old school anime. One of the best parts of Rifts were all the cool robots and mechs you could pilot, especially the awe-inspiring Glitterboy and the SAMAS. And back in the day, I spent plenty of time marking off little damage and heat tick-boxes in Battletech.

So when I started producing my own content, I figured there'd be a place for mecha and powered armor in them. I mentioned yesterday that I'd commissioned some new Anthony Cournoyer artwork for the Weapons for Life sourcebook. I've always liked the way Anthony draws tech, so I've gone out of my way to get robot and armor images from him specifically. Well, today at lunch he sent me very rough pencils for his rendition of two Lifer powered armors.

The big boy (and I love his sheer bulk and the ridiculous number of guns Anthony equipped him with) is the Judgment Hardsuit. It's a walking tank designed to be the centerpeice of a Lifer squad. The smaller armor is the "Baby Judgment", a post-war miniaturization of the earlier suit designed to fill an infantry, rather than armor, role. Anyway, even at the rough pencil stage, the big guy looks like he'd be a good fight for something like a Glitterboy or a Space Marine Dreadnaught. And once again, I really, really wish I had the capacity to make toys (or at least minis) out of some of the designs my art team turns in.

(Furries next time. I was just so excited about the new armor image I wanted to show it off.)

Blessed Be,
CHRIS

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Plans for Autumn 2018

I've not been posting a lot this year, and my release schedule is fairly empty for the year. I've put out several large, complex, art-heavy sourcebooks, as opposed to smaller 10-20 pagers. I just wanted to let my readers know I'm still alive, still producing content and still working on various Otherverse Games releases.
What's on deck?

Fantasy Magic Items (Unnamed) 
The first book you'll likely see is a simple magic item book for a generic Fantasy Europe setting released for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. I'll have that book out first because I can illustrate it purely with stock art and public domain images. It's just a fun little side project I've been puttering away at, an item or three at a time, as I wind down from other books. 

The Black Atlas 
The manuscript, all 300 pages of it, is complete, and I'm still gathering commissioned artwork for this beast of a campaign guide. I'd sent a reader a copy of the rough draft the other day, and if any of you want one, please send me an email and I'll send you a preview document. I'm hoping I can get this book out by the end of the year. 

Horrors of the Lifechain (POD?) 
If I can, I'd like to combine the two Horrors of the Lifechain sourcebooks with a ton of new content and release it as a full color POD title. I really enjoyed working on Secret Soldiers, by last big bestiary, and I want to do a similarly meaty, comprehensive space opera/cosmic horror bestiary. I've already commissioned some new artwork from Anthony Cournoyer and others for this book, and I'll preview some of it here soon. 

Weapons for Life (Lifer Player's Guide) 
A few years back, I produced Culture of Choice, a player guide for Otherverse America's Choicer faction, and this is the matching book for the rival faction. I'd been hesitant to release the book, and set on a working draft for nearly 2 years, because I didn't want to glorify, even in an obviously fictional context, the pro-life movement. However, I finally realized that I owed it to the setting to release the book. I'm making good use of existing art and some well chosen stock and waiting for 3-4 new pieces of art to come in. In addition to the final version of the Amanda Webb artwork that became this post's header image, I'm having Anthony do some character images, including what should be a pretty kickass image of Lifer powered armor in action. 

One of the things that finally broke me out of my indecision and compelled me to put out Weapons for Life was I saw a really good piece of stock art and immediately saw a use for it. The second image on this post, by Jesus Blones, comes from one of Louis Porter's Image Portfolios. I've made a lot of use of that line of stock art, and once I saw the toothy bastard up there, I realized I had a perfect racial image for the Nanofeasters. There were a couple of other images in that pack I'll be using for Neverborn. Since Louis is a friend (and it's a really good stock pack) I thought I'd plug it here. 


Next: City of Fur
Tomorrow, I'll post something else I've been working on. As I was writing up the Psi-Watch world book, I started detailing the city of Cat's Cradle, a dramatically fictionalized version of Omaha, NE that's home to the majority of Psi-Watch's Anthro population. Ten thousand words in, I realized I had a fun, stand alone citybook. I'll start posting it here, so fans of my Fursona Unleashed sourcebook have a new city to explore. I hope to gather up some art and release a PDF version of the Cat's Cradle city-book before the end of the year. 

Good to see you again, 
CHRIS