The Club of the Seven Dreamers

by on March 5, 2012 at 4:54 pm


For those who didn’t get it on Kickstarter, I’ve posted my Lovecraftian d20 RPG adventure, The Club of the Seven Dreamers, on the Mockman store. Named after the planned (but apparently never written) novel of the same name by Lovecraft, it’s a short RPG adventure set in the Dreamlands, featuring seven pregenerated characters who represent some of Earth’s mightiest dreamers. It is the story of their quest, and their downfall. (?)

I originally wrote “The Club of the Seven Dreamers” for NecronomiCon 2001, because I wanted to run a Dreamlands game there. I tried to draw from Lovecraft’s more obscure Dreamlands stories — “The Green Meadow,” “Hypnos”, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” — as well as from Lord Dunsany and Gary Myers. For the PDF version I wrote it out in the d20 system, so it’s compatible with D&D 3rd edition, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder etc. Alternately, with some work you could adapt it to another system, such as the original Call of Cthulhu “Dreamlands” supplement. It’s about one or two nights’ worth of gaming, and I enjoyed writing it, although it is a rather atypical “Dreamlands” game. I like to think of it as a philosophical Dreamlands adventure, although it does have some potential gruesome violence, and horrible fates aplenty…

NOTE: For some reason I haven’t figured out, hitting “previous” to get to the blog entry before this one often leads to an error page. Here’s a workaround: a link to the previous blog entry, Dream-Quest Cover Sketches.

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Dream-Quest Cover Sketches

by on February 28, 2012 at 10:14 am

I’ve been planning to do a Dream-Quest graphic novel for some time, and I did a few different cover treatments before coming up with the final version.

The original cover for issue #1 of the comic series, which I drew waaaay back in 1997, wasn’t great, but it was one of the better covers of the original five-issue series because I was smart enough to use a limited color palette. Color was still not my thing, though. I tried to duplicate the same “sunset sky” (although doesn’t it look more like dawn?) limited color palette, with better lineart, for the first version of the cover:

But, as time passed I decided I didn’t like this design anymore. It was too simple, the Photoshoppy colors needed work, and the massive, cover-dominating logo looked bad. In 2011, when the Kickstarter got going, I decided I wanted to do a wrap-around cover instead!

Aside from the sunset city, there were two other images that screamed “Dream-Quest” to me: the actual castle of Kadath (but that’s kind of a spoiler) and the scene when the black galley goes off the edge of the world. The black galley scene was used as the cover of Edward Martin III’s Dream-Quest movie, after all. I considered an epic shot of galleys plunging off the edge of the world into space, crewed by — cats? Randolph Carter? Evil merchants? Ghouls? Possibly Basil Elton, Kuranes and the other dream-story protagonists?

A sailing ship with all its sails and ropes would have been a great image for the front cover, and would have really given off a feeling of adventure. But in the end I decided that a bunch of ships crewed with different Lovecraft characters would suggest that the graphic novel was some kind of Lovecraft mash-up instead of an anthology, and I went with the sunset city, for a more whimsical, children’s-booky look. (With the addition of a nightgaunt steed to replace the Little-Nemo-in-Slumberland walking bed of the original comics front cover.) My first draft had a fiery, apocalyptic Photoshopped look — “through sunset’s gate He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame, And red-gold thrones of gods without a name” — but eventually, I decided on more natural, subdued colors. The actual final color covers were done entirely by Jay, who spent hours and hours on the Cintiq working with her brush pen. All the intricate, loving detail on all the grassy cobbles and red roofs are all hers. Although I love black and white, I hope to do more color work of my own someday soon…

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More Dreamlands Map Sketches

by on February 27, 2012 at 6:59 am

Here’s some more sketches of what ended up becoming the Map of the Dreamlands. A “globe floating in space” design could have been interesting, but it would also leave too much empty space around the world for my taste. The fact that most of my sketches and designs are drawn on scrap paper and the backs of envelopes is one reason I don’t post more of ’em… should I show ’em anyway?

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