New HarnQuest- Herpa the Mace

It has been a busy month for me.
I just finished the next HarnQuest for Columbia Games. It has been a long time coming. This set of articles includes Dragons, Lesser Dragons, Mere Dragons (Ilme), and two hot Agrikan Orders.
I posted about the start of this HQ in February. I can’t believe it has been that long.

In the mean time I also worked on CGI’s fancy new website which was unveiled on Free RPG Day. While I had nothing to do with the building of the site, I helped with the look and did all of the icons for the main page. I wanted the site to look much like a medieval manuscript. I am very proud of the art for adding things to your cart, and checkout. You see? it is a medieval cart. Clever huh?

There were a few hiccups along the way for this release, but the exciting thing that held this up is CGI’s decision that all new articles for Harn will have at least one color image. Though Dragons is lucky enough to contain 3 color images. I will discuss the dragon art in an upcoming post.

First is the color version of the image I posted about in the February post, now in full color- well at least some red, yellow and orange. Harn has for years been know for it’s gritty pen and ink illustrations. Those will still be in most of the publications, but the page one color images will add more life to Harn. I tried a few different methods to color the pen and ink illustrations. I used oil paint, digital painting and a bit of water color. For this particular image I used a few methods. The first was to do a very rough water color wash on a new sheet of paper. I did a fast and loose painting which I scanned and laid it under the pen and ink image in photoshop. I then did the rest of the painting digitally.

Copyright © 2012, Columbia Games, Inc. and Richard Luschek

“Hârn is home to many clerical orders devoted to Agrik, the dark god of war and violence, but none is more mystical than the Order of Herpa the Mace, whose priests are known for their ability to foresee the future with remarkable clarity.”

The above is a description of the article had lots of fodder for illustrating- and most of that fodder I threw in a big pile and set on fire.

Copyright © 2012, Columbia Games, Inc. and Richard Luschek

The above image shows a priestess divining using a deck of cards. I am lucky to have a writing team that trusts me and leaves me pretty free to draw what I want. I get some suggests in the empty spots where the art goes, often they are fairly vague or just suggestions. So, in sense I get to tell my own stories- riffing off the text that I am given. I try to use the space to “say 1000 words“. For the Agrikan fortune telling image I got to make up the look of the cards, the lay of the cards and even added a scroll that shows various spreads for different situations. The spread on the table is the ‘Mace’. You can see on the scroll two other spreads, the ‘Octagon’ and the ‘Comet’ card arrangement. None of these details are mentioned in the text, but I think they add to the story. It would be exciting to see some fanon written about the Agrikan Tarot cards.
I am looking forward to hearing what the Harn fans think of this Harn Quest. I am pretty excited about the results.

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