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| Cartography by Jonathan Roberts |
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| layout by Corey Graham |
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| Click on the thumbnail and see the raw cover image A Witch’s Choice by Ryan Barger. A Witch's Choice is the first adventure in The Rituals of Choice Adventure Path, coming to you January 15th.
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Click the thumbnail to the right it’s the back cover to Mythical Monstrosities, Corey Graham our layout artist has out done himself, using Amanda Grow's art "Eye of the Soarlith."
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| Kobold Quaterly is a magazine I am a big fan of, so i am really happy that is where our first ad will appear
The artwork is by Grey Thornberry, Layout, Lettering and Logo are Corey Graham. The creature depicted is the Red Harlot which will appear in Veiled Denizens.
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Amanda Grow, Art Directrix
We wanted the art in our Monsters Evolved series to invoke emotional responses in players and GMs, while maintaining a sense of traditional myth and history. However, we also wanted players to feel comfortable using the monsters in their own game space. We've taken every effort to try and present the art in a way that doesn't restrict the placement of our creatures in their stories, so that readers can envision the setting as their own. We've also tried to maintain a feeling of the "field journal" or anatomical studies of these beings.
As avid gamers, we also remember the annoyance of when the stat block of a monster appeared at the bottom corner of one page, but the rest of the creature information ran onto the next. Or when you looked at the wrong creature information because multiple creatures occupied the same page. Or when art caused monster descriptions to bleed with hyphenation. Or the all time favourite: turning page upon page to try and locate a particular aspect of a monster's write-up.
We paid careful attention to ensure that the series is easy for GMs to navigate during their game sessions. The layout focuses on enabling readers to quickly, with a glance, know:
- When one monster's description stops and the next begins
- Where stat blocks or flavour text will appear each time in a creature's write up
- That the art placement doesn't compromise ease of reading from line breaks
Users will find the arrangement of the art and text is meant to help them move quickly to the information they need, whether it is information about the creature's known habitats, or NPC quotes about the creature.
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| The Trik-Mrak (art and comments by Amanda Grow)
There are several messages to communicate to readers about this creature. The first is that though fey and "innocent" looking in nature, it has a distinctive mischievousness about it. The next was to clearly present to players that this creature can appear in places other than forests. Showing the Trik perched in a window was done specifically to demonstrate this. We also tried to capture the hypnotic lure of his far away sway ability with the image shown here. The Trik Mrak is our favorite prankster in the series, and we are so fond of him that you will notice he makes cameo appearences in multiple volumes of the Monsters Evolved series, just to toy with readers.
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| The Talinet Ur-rathi (art by Grey Thornberry, comments by Amanda Grow)
How do you capture the essence of a raging being made of things other than flesh and sanguine? We like to think this image does just that. The power and fury of the Talinet can be seen most clearly with the almost living volcanic quality of the drawing. To help give the users a sense of scale, height, or other perceptions, we often place subtle hints in the artwork. Here the hint is the human figure braving the danger to try and approach this massive, and dangerous, being.
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| The Taurian (art by Darren M. A. Calvert, comments by Amanda Grow)
The concept of minotaur societies is not new to Fantasy, so we needed art that conveyed a real sense of culture and individualism for our Taurian. The art is meant to show that there is a rich history to be discovered, and that each Taurian is distinctive, in the same way that humans can differ from one another so readily. It was more than a matter of "these creatures have a society" we wanted to show ties to the myth that shapes their existence. The Greco-roman style hints at the tragic culture of these beings. It is also one of the times when we use several artists for a single monster, to add to the sense of the books being a "collection" of documentation about the creatures.
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