Thrilling Adventure Hour: Agent Abby Adams

Can't say enough about Agent Adams: beautiful, deadly, and tougher than a red, white and blue coffin nail. Just one of the many awesome characters on The Thrilling Adventure Hour voiced by the amazing Annie Savage. Dirty Krauts!

Secrets of Tibet - Part Two

More scary monsters and super-freaks. This one's a take on a spirit from Tibetan folklore that takes on the aspect of a beautiful maiden to tempt susceptible monks, then changes into a monster if they succumb to base urges. Seek enlightenment safely, kids.



Here's a variation on the byakhee, a classic Cthulhu monster and one of my favorites.
One of the things that I loved about the old Chaosium game was that the supplements were written drily, like academic articles. They approached the beasts methodically, citing (fictional) sources and theorizing about their habitats. Even if the fantastic creature in question were from between the dimensions, they'd try to hypothesize about its native environment, something I hadn't seen outside of Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials (and wouldn't see again until his book Inferno).
A byakhee's natural habitat, for example, is supposed to be on airless planetoids and comet nuclei. That is, until they get hungry.



Mi-go: Silly name, terrifying concept. The ones crawling around the cave above are employing some signature weaponry - lightning guns and mist projectors.
Still more to come...

Secrets of Tibet - Part One

Ah, Lovecraftian horror. Neat stuff, right?

See, Call of Cthulhu was my gateway drug to the world of roleplaying games, and over the years my love for the game and the genre never lost its lustre. A month ago, Chaosium asked me if I'd include some art for the interior of their newest adventure supplement, Secrets of Tibet, and I jumped at the chance.



Here we have a pleasant canoe tour of a remote Tibetan river; a wonderful place to make new friends.
This assignment afforded me a great chance to evoke mood and depth , and I thought it would be perfect as a chance to work in this graphite technique I've grown so fond of. All the images here were underdrawn with graphite on vellum Bristol, with compressed carbon shavings laid down and smeared with tissue first, in order to get darker values.



Here are a pair of cephalopoid beings, looking none too happy that you interrupted their hyperdimensional meditations. I learned the Riley method of sketching while doing portraits, so mucking about adding growths and tentacles on a couple of otherwise unremarkable human frames was pure joy.



According to Lovecraftian lore, those interstellar monsters the Mi-go prefer high mountain ranges for their outposts, and it doesn't get much higher than Tibet. Here we have a party of explorers encountering a friend after he's undergone the radical surgeries for which the Mi-go are known. I wonder if he's happy to see them?
More to come!