Spud speed art

[captainspud]

I made some pictures, and wanted to post them somewhere, but then it occurred to me that I'm not part of any forums anymore with an art section. So, I wandered back over here to inflict them on you folks.

The setup, in a nutshell: I'm running a homebrew superhero RPG at my local store with a small group of my friends. The store is having an event called "RPG Day", where they invite DMs to run an open game for people to drop into, to give players a taste of different game systems and DMing styles. I've volunteered to run my system, "Capes and Tights", for this event.

When I run my games, I make custom art for all the characters. The RPG Day session is no exception-- I'm doing art for every single character who'll show up in the story, the current tally of which is at 24. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a huge deal, but I only had four days in my schedule to get it all done. Soooo... I prioritized the art into "essential" and "nice-to-have", and started working. I budgeted 60-90 minutes for a random goon, and 120-150 for heroes and main villains. I wasn't going for display-quality art at all, as this is all getting printed out into 2"-tall standees; any super detailing will be quite invisible.

Here's what I came up with after my first blitz. I'll run through the bare bones of the story as I go so the various characters make sense... sorry if the writing's terrible, I'm trying to burn through this quickly so I can get to bed.


These are the heroes for the session I'm running. From left to right:

• Pillar: Turns his body to salt.
• Rampant: Martial arts fighter, drains life energy from foes.
• Terramite: Body transforms into magma, with a hard rock shell.
• Athena: Tech girl. Not pictured: her robot owl, Glaukopis.
• Vector: Telekinetic.
• Ember: 13-year-old kid kidnapped by a supervillain and experimented on. Her body was destroyed, and she became an energy being.

These guys are a gang called Ascension. They're the first baddies the heroes encounter, as the heroes have been trying to find out for months who Ascension are shipping a particular drug to to get it out of the city. They modify their bodies with circuitry that lets them take that drug, called Aloft, which temporarily grants superpowers (without the tech, you still get the powers, but it kills you in about ten minutes). Higher ranking guys get more of the tech (which they make look like tribal marks).

I did a really blatant head swap here because I needed different elemental guys for the fight I have planned. Ordinarily I'd have done a full new figure for each, but time was a-wastin'!


Pursuing Ascension leads them to a group of assassins. On the left is Ananke, the world's deadliest assassin. She can teleport nearly unlimited distances, though her aim sucks at distance unless she has a teleport beacon to home in on. That's where her goons, the Moiraie, come in. They use a technological version of her teleportation (much more limited than her natural power) to infiltrate and "summon" their boss, who likes to handle the finishing stroke for all contracts personally.


The heroes find the assassins' next target, a Venezuelan businessman named Oliver Gar?a. They go to save him, but when they get there, the assassins attack-- and Gar?a defends himself quite handily. You see, he's actually the supervillain El Terrateniente ("The Landowner")! The heroes then have to fight off TWO groups of bad guys at the same time...



They eventually scare Ananke away when they figure out how to jam her teleportation. El Terrateniente, afraid for his life, predicts who the next target will be-- the person handling security for his operations here, The Botsmith, whose specialty should be fairly self-explanatory. They get to The Botsmith's lair just in time to see him open a FedEx parcel... containing a teleport beacon. Beep, ZAP, "Hey there!", stab. The heroes manage to switch on their teleportation jammer in time to trap Ananke, and take her down.

The art for the Botsmith and his robots is from an older session with my main group-- I needed a random villain to kill, and he had the most interesting posse of all the ones I've run before, so he got the job.


They hand her over to Arche (pronounced "Ar-Kay"), which serves much the same function as SHIELD in my setting (though more "supervillain swat team" than spycraft). She's sedated while the nerds rig up a bigger version of the heroes' porting jammer (which takes several hours), then they wake her up. She's being held on one of Arche's fortress bases, this one being a giant floating island. She taunts the heroes at first, then realization dawns on her when she's told how long she's been unconscious. She starts absolutely panicking. "Oh my god, you IDIOTS, you kept me in one place for THAT long?! Oh god, he'll be on his way by now!"

The heroes look very puzzled, then the massive fortress rumbles with huge explosions.


Ananke is a very dangerous woman, but even she is afraid of The Autocrat. It turns out that she's never spent more than an hour in any one location for over ten years-- because ten years ago, she accepted a hit on the most terrifying villain on the face of the planet. She ported in, ran him through with a Katana-- and then panicked when that didn't faze the hundreds-of-years-old archvillain in the slightest. She got away, but the enigmatic villain can somehow track her wherever she goes. If she sits still for too long, he comes after her, because NOBODY screws with the Autocrat.

The 'Crat himself is infused with the embryo of a godlike being. As it gestates, his powers increase, but someday it won't need to protection of a host anymore and will consume him when it's truly born. The Autocrat accepted that bargain, but he's been using his immortality to research other methods of gaining power, so he can expunge "The dragon", as he calls it, before it consumes him, while not leaving himself pathetically mortal for his efforts. He experiments only on kids, as his macabre science doesn't work as well on fully-grown subjects.

(Any guesses who destroyed Ember's body? )

So, yeah. The heroes have a really rough decision here-- they can try (and mostly likely fail) to fight him off, or they can let Ananke go so the 'Crat will withdraw. The decision is especially painful since it turns out partway through the story that Ananke is the one receiving the Aloft shipments-- so if they let her go, their investigation is completely buggered.

Aaaaaand that's everything so far. I've still got a few "nice-to-have" drawings I'd like to get to if I have the time, but the batch above is enough to run through the story. I did a pretty good job of sticking to my time budget, and I'm really happy with how most of them came out, given how rushed I was. I think the Ascension goons are the only ones I really don't like.

THUS ENDETH THE GLORIOUS RETURN OF THE SPUD!

[bearded]

i'm interested in your system, what sort is it, lord captainspud?

[Alaric]

Great story, and I've always enjoyed your art.

[captainspud]

i'm interested in your system, what sort is it, lord captainspud?

It's not very fancy... I'm not much of a RPGer. The only system I've ever played is D&D4e, and I really love the system, so that's what I worked with when I started DMing superheroes for my friends. We do a lot of hand-waving to make things fit (ie, your character sheet may say "+2 broadsword", but it's still just you punching things), and everybody gets a bonus "super feat" to reflect their super powers (anything from flight to teleportation to energy absorption). The nature of a superhero story involves doing a lot of things that D&D doesn't have rules for, but that's always easy to work around: if someone wants to do something that makes sense for their character to do (ie, a tech person wants to scan the supervillain's shields for weaknesses), I'll shrug, invent some kind of roll for it, and we run from there.

It requires a collective acceptance from all involved to roll with some of the creaky parts, but that's never been an issue with my group. We're all just telling superhero stories, and leaning on the D&D rules when it's time to punch things. This'll be my first time running it outside my own group, though, so it remains to be seen if it continues to work with a more random sampling of players.

I've got a PDF of my basic rules modifications up on Google Docs if you're interested in trying it out. It's a ton of work to DM it (both in prep and in-game), but once it's all rolling it's an absolute blast.

[electro]

I always enjoyed your art too - In fact i still have your Immortal Iron Fist as a pic in my random screen saver - I think the picture was called Generations or somthing close to that

[Sevenforce]

Wow, your art is...wow.

I remember you doing a Joker/Batman scene with nothing but words making up, well, everything. The Joker was made up of HaHaHa if I remember correctly. I thought that was poignant, considering the subject material, and it made me feel you not only got the practicalities of art, but the concept as well. It's nice to see you furthering your skills even...uh, further.

The story is excellent as well, beside making me want to hear more backstory of the characters! That's just cruel