Hello Mutant Epoch Blog followers,
So, as this blog is supposed to be more of a game designer's journal, I thought I'd share a bit of the behind the scenes look at the release of a new free creature. This one was designed and written by Danny Seedhouse and was published about an hour ago. Here's the cover and blurb and then scroll down where I'll talk a bit about the process....
WM
A nightmare weapon from the old wars has returned!
From the ancient conflicts
that caused the final collapse of human civilization, these bear sized military
bio-weapons continue to wreak havoc into the new era. Encountered as wild
predators or armored sentinels for high tech enclaves, Spikers are murderous
foes and a serious challenge to any excavation team.
Designed and written by
Danny Seedhouse, the Spiker is our 9th free Creature of the
Apocalypse. This brute comes in both a wild and armored variant with the wild
specimen often exhibiting extra mutations, while the armored version comes equipped
with a rich assortment of randomly determined back-mounted relic firepower.
Crafted to confront mid to high rank characters, these
freaky, unpredictable monsters bring some serious firepower to the table, and
can dish out the sort of ranged attack abilities that normally only player
characters enjoy.
This is a 6 page PDF and
includes a full page image of cover art for use as a player handout.
Get your free copy here: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/141758/Spiker-Creatures-of-the-Apocalypse-9
...Okay, so the spiker started off as just the wild version and was called a 'dart runner'. It was first crafted back in 2013 and Mr. Seedhouse wrote it up, adding the more dangerous, but controlled armored version.
With the Crossroads Region book, the Handcrafted Dungeon sets and Mutant Bestiary One on the go, the spikers languished on the shelves for long time.
Here's the pencil sketch of the wild spiker:
The pencil drawing was scanned at 300dpi and painted in photoshop, within a scene that included the armored spiker. I made sure to keep the spikers on separate layers so I could easily pull them out of the image to use as stand alone graphics as follows:
Between the painting and final edits, and layout, it took about 6 days to craft the free PDF. The Pencil art and Danny's text were complete over a year ago.
There is something sweet about getting out a gaming supplement in a couple of weeks instead of a couple of years. After the extra six months it took to do all the art for the bestiary, working on small, bite sized projects is a step down as far as stress goes. Still, we released the spiker soon after the Mutant Bestiary One book came out to take advantage of the marketing surrounding that book, and push attention to the 148 page manual of mutant monsters. If you grab the new spiker PDF, you'll see that page 7 is a full ad for the bestiary. We couldn't resit and will report back if we see any sort of spike in sales.
Enjoy
WM
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