Process Video: 2019

Here's your exclusive access to a process video showing the step-by-step creation of Stan!'s homage to Ghosts of Saltmarsh

I really love Greg Rutkowski’s cover painting for Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It’s undeniably D&D, but it’s the kind of scene we don’t get to see very often. The adventurers are at the mercy of the elements—the raging sea and the howling storm—things that their weapons and spells really have no hope of affecting. Of course there are more assailable foes—a sahuagin warrior and some kind of tentacled horror—but the former has them at a distinct disadvantage, and the other seems way beyond their hope of defeating, busy as it is pulling a whole sailing ship beneath the waves.

This is definitely an image of brave adventurers fighting for their lives, but it hardly seems like a fair fight. If you told me this was a cover for a Lovecraftian fantasy adventure, where hopelessly overmatched investigators try to somehow thwart the machinations of things mortals were not meant to know, I’d believe it.

Maybe that’s what I like so much about it.

Subscribers to this newsletter got to see this drawing early, whereas the general public are only just getting their first glimpses of it today. But there’s still something left that’s JUST for the paid subscribers—a process video showing the step-by-step creation of this cartoon homage. (If you’re currently a free subscriber, now would be a great time to upgrade.)