Hishgraphics

Saviours of the Light

Back in 2002, I was commissioned by Ian Houlihan to come up with five character illustrations for a Star Wars roleplaying game d20 one-shot scenario called Savours of the Light: The Soul Child. The scenario, set during the Dark Times, was to be run at The BIG Weekend. BIG was an acronym for Brisbane Indoor Games, which was obviously held indoors in the city of Brisbane, Australia.

The characters were members of a music band who had to protect a Jedi padawan. The padawan had an infant in her care, who was strong in the Force. Not an easy task, for Imperial Inquisitors naturally are also hunting for the baby. 

I've found the five player characters I drew in a directory somewhere, but it appears the original files are lost forever. Here are the artwork I drew:

Shari-Dae Elore, the Jedi Padawan, with the infant Tristan Forseti given to her care by her deceased master Vesik Len.

Unor Lak, the Rodian keyboard player of The Troubled Souls.

Female Nagai

It's been a while since I did a Star Wars Artists' Guild request. Here's an unnamed Nagai female as requested by Matt on the boards for one of his two campaigns.

Maybe she's Xepheer Xeneeth's girlfriend or something.

A bigger version can be found on DeviantArt.

Irfan's Player Character Saves The Day

Irfan played his first complete Star Wars Role-Playing Game adventure today, as everyone's favourite intrepid astromech droid Artoo-Detoo. He was awesome at figuring out solutions to simple problems that were presented in the scenario that I cooked up. He even role-played Artoo well by having in-character conversations in regular robotic beeps. 

We played on the living room carpet and I used the gamemaster (GM) screen for the first time ever, with the D6 rules and stats inserts I made. My coterie of white D6 were arrayed on the floor, while the singe red D6 served as a Wild Die. 

The scenario was designed to be short and with minimal story twists.

Shortly after the Battle of Hypori that, Artoo-Detoo, the lone player character (PC), was sent by Clone Commander Cody for a mission. Orbiting the planet, say for story's sake, Eiattu 6, Artoo's task was to be flown from the Venator-class Star Destroyer Resolute to the surface of Eiattu.

There, Artoo will need to sneak into a Separatist safehouse containing a redundant tactical computer databank and hack into it to determine the position of Count Dooku and his fleet.

Artoo was supposed to be flown within a short distance of the safehouse in the hills, but the LAAT gunship he was in was shot by a ground-based missile. Before the gunship smashed into the landscape, I thought Irfan was going to get Artoo to attempt a controlled landing, but instead he did something I didn't count on. He jumped.

However, he failed his rocket operations roll and slammed down hard into a sand dune. Thankfully his Strength roll's Wild Die came up 6 twice! So Artoo shrugged off the damage which I attributed to sand absorbing the impact. 

Using his sensors, he tried to get a fix on the location of the hill and the safehouse. But this time his Wild Die turned up a 1. I ruled that he knows the direction of the safehouse - which is south - but he doesn't know how far it is. And it's all desert as far as he can see.

This Is What A DL-18 Blaster Look Like

So the other day I made three pages of rules and stats for a SWRPG GM screen. Those face inward, to the gamemaster who has to refer to rules and tables and some stats at a moment's notice during a game session. What about the other side? you may ask. What do the players see?

So people print out photos and artwork of scenes of whatever game they use. There are hundreds of official and fan artwork of Star Wars in the internet wilds. If you download the Pirates of the Spanish Main GM screen inserts for Savage Worlds, they also come with inserts for the player side with artwork and map.

Here's one insert I've made for SWRPG on the player side:

A blaster visual reference guide. No longer do you need to tell other players, "I have that blaster pistol that Han uses to shoot at the sarlacc tongue." You can just refer to its name on the insert, or just point to any blaster and tell your player, "You find a blaster carbine in the cupboard and it looks like this."

Many thanks to the Rancorpit team for damage code for weapons that appeared in the prequels movies, which came out after West End Games lost the Star Wars license. I obtained the photos from all over the internet, especially the Star Wars Wiki.

Right-click-and-save the link to the zip file on the left. (405KB)

Star Wars RPG D6 GM Screen

Here's something I've been working on for the last year or so, created over long periods of nothingness punctuated by brief periods of activity. My very own design for a full-colour Star Wars RPG Gamemaster's Screen in D6 rules - using Inkscape.

There are three pages of inserts, each US Letter sized. They work great with the Savage Worlds Customizable GM Screen.

The first are tables for combat (injury, scaling, damage, healing, etc.), movements (manoeuvre modifiers, character & vehicle) and astrogation mishaps.

A Robot Rescue - Bad Example, Episode 4

Last Sunday, the GOKL gang continued the role-playing adventures of Star Wars: A Bad Example in the Spacelanes.

Two new players, Nigel of Singapore who played Bob the Wookiee, and Razzman who played Reelo Jackson the Rodian bounty hunter, joined the party as they embarked on a mission to retrieve their kidnapped crewmates, beginning with Weapon X the HK-78 assassin droid.

The previous episode can be found here.

Episode 4: Our Droid Is Not Open-Sourced

Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Upon exposing a traitor Starson O'Kreem in the mobile asteroid pirate stronghold Irontooth Station, pirate lord Slaughter Maelstrom has confirmed a truce with the crew of the Bad Example. After returning to Sriluur to pick up Tickley, the crew sets off to recovered their captured droid companion Weapon X.

Using the data taken from O'Kreem's datapad, they attempt to discover Weapon X's location and soon track him to a warehouse in the Rodian district on Coruscant.

Pirate Politics - Bad Example, Episode 3

About six months ago, I ran the third Star Wars D6 game with the GOKL crew, which continued from Episode 2. But I was a bad GM then and did not take notes (mentally and on paper) of what occured. Here is a rundown of the lost Episode 3 of Star Wars: A Bad Example in the Spacelanes.

Details such as combat and NPC names were lost. New NPC names are fabricated for the purpose of continuity in the adventure and will be considered official for upcoming games.

Episode 3: Piracy, Treachery and Kidnappings

The crew of the Bad Example, Hunter Maelstrom the freighter captain, Nek'Koh'Moo'Su'May a.k.a Annie the Trianii, Ssssawar the Trandoshan chef and the clone Adenuneasily enjoyed the dinner set out for them by The Five Skulls Brigands. Weapon X, the HK-57 droid, just sat and made small talk. The pirate leader Lord Irontooth had earlier revealed himself as Slaughter Maelstrom, Hunter's brother. Sitting beside him were his two lieutenants: the suave, young Starson O'Kreem who smiled graciously at the newcomers, and the bald, older Yoat Jumpo who appeared to regard them with distrust.

2002 Interview at the Star Wars Artists' Guild

Interviews with the staff illustrators were some of the contents that we planned as the original Star Wars Artists' Guild was being developed. The current incarnation of the site does not have the old interviews, which were fun and had a running gag of people hiding behind curtains throughout.

Here is a copy of the interview that Derek Jones did with me, which was the second interview to be featured on SWAG:

Greedo Goes To Duro

Back in late 2001-early 2002 when I was really down and out, one of the things I tried was sending samples of sequential comic art to comic companies. I never really followed up on them, but one of the things I came up with was the pencilling of an eight-page original unscripted Star Wars story entitled "Greedo Goes To Duro". It was something that could have easily made for an issue of the now-discontinued Star Wars Tales anthology from Dark Horse Comics. But it wasn't.

This week, I found photocopies of the pages I did after I went digging under the bed. Seriously, it was deep in a folder under many folders in a dust-layered box under the bed. When I found it, I too had become heavily encrusted with ancient dust, dust bunnies, dust pangolins and dust capybaras.

Here it is presented in the Gallery for your amusement / ridicule. Apologies for the scan quality of page 4. I can't find the originals for scanning.

Note: Since the Gallery uses Light Box pop-up feature, you will be able to either (1) see the full-sized image javascript pop-up or (2) the intermediate image which displays the text desciption on each entry page. Click on the intermediate image if you want to see the full-sized pop-ups, or if you want to read the text description, navigate the entry pages using the left or right arrow buttons on the toolbar above the intermediate image.

ROBOT FIGHT!

In this picture we have Megatron in combat with WALL-E, an ASP droid, 4-LOM and IG-88 who he has in his hand.

Why? Who cares.

Khairul The Rodian Carbineer

I'm finally a Rodian.

Not really.

But props to Asok Yeesrim the Gran, another Agent of SWAG, for illustrating a Rodian carbineer by the name of Khairul. Khairul was named in honour of myself. The artwork looks badass, with fantastic costume and prop design. Also of note is the Rodian's lack of flexible spines on his scalp, which coincidentally I have doodled before to draw a "bald" Rodian.

Click here to view a larger image on DeviantArt.

Thanks, man. I really dig your Mike Allred-esque style. Here's hoping Khairul the Rodian has more luck bringing in the credits than I do.

Ubuntu Miscellanea

Three things come to mind.

Flash Problems

I've been having some problems with browser-embedded flash files. Those of you who notice my reluctance to click on Youtube links during chat will be pleased to know that I've gotten Youtube working on this browser, as well as the new Photobucket user interface. It took me quite a while to hunt down the solution at the Ubuntu forums. There were several false leads, but finally flash is free to be fully-utilized by Firefox.

What I did was to input the following commands line-by-line on Terminal and follow whatever instructions that was displayed.

sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla
sudo apt-get remove mozilla-plugin-gnash
sudo apt-get remove adobe-flashplugin
sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree 

Never Doubt The Weather Applet

This morning when I sat down at this computer, I saw that the gnome-clock weather applet said it was raining. I looked out the window and saw some sparse clouds, and could clearly see the open skies beyond the clouds. "Rain? Are you joking? I can see the sky from where I'm sitting."

Ten minutes later, it was pouring cats and dogs.

So The New Desktop is a Map

Finally I got an excellent map for my new desktop wallpaper. For its function as a wallpaper I had to crop the sucker to 1280 by 800 pixels. But you can find the map here. No telling when this map might be useful for your travels.

You can click on the thumbnail here to check out the map, or to see the weather applet I wrote about earlier in the upper right had corner of the desktop, right by the date and time.

365 Days of Stormtroopers

Thanks to the Official Star Wars Blog, I've come across the photo-adventures of a pair of hapless Imperial Stormtroopers on Flickr, TK-479 and TK-455, as they undergo a series of entertaining adventures.

The photos are taken by Stéfan Le Dû, who will release one photo a day for a year.

Some of the scenes are downright hilarious. Here is a selection, with mouseover text of their original titles:

Above: This explains the anonymous messages Luke's been receiving. It got so bad that he had to hurl his phone on the far side of Nirauan.

Above: The Imperial fleet could use a few good carrier pigeons if the HoloNet craps out.

Above: You can't go on vacation without an astromech droid to navigate your camper.

Above:  Do you need hats if you're wearing friggin' helmets? You do if you want to get the chicks on the beach.

Cody and Rex, Best of Friends

This is CC-2224, nicknamed Cody. His rank in the Grand Army of the Republic is Commander.

This is CC-7567, nicknamed Rex. His rank is Captain.

Strikeforce Enteague: The Pioneer Team

Once upon a time I had a Geocities Page, where upon I uploaded a lot of Star Wars artwork. Soon the plug will be pulled on Geocities, so a link there from here is a futile gesture. However, there are a bunch of drawings of my first ever Strikeforce Enteague campaign character for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game from back in 1989. The game started in 1989, but these drawings are from 2001 - 2002, by the way. I thought I'd upload them on here for posterity's sake. (Note: this is not every player character of that era. Someday, I'll get around to drawing everyone.)

Players, you know who you are.

Shanna Toarinar, human bounty hunter

Gauntlet Starfighter

Gauntlet starfighter, manufactured by Shobquix Yards, was created a long time ago by West End Games for their Star Wars Roleplaying Game line as can be seen here at Wookieepedia. It first appeared in Planets of the Galaxy, Vol 1 in the "Isen IV" chapter. And in its debut, it was only a tiny little stats block. No image at all.

So I thought to myself the other day, why don't I try to draw one based on the plans seen in the Wookieepedia entry above which was later released in a later publication.

Click on the thumbnail to view a larger picture.

Fansubs

Sometimes, fansubbers are also Star Wars fans.

A Bad Example Of A Group Portrait

Here is a picture of the crew of the Bad Example, the Star Wars RPG campaign I've been running sporadically with GOKL. Click on the thumbnail to view a larger image of the gang.

Front: T'k'li a.k.a. Tickley, the Jawa Jedi.

Back (L-R): Ssssawar the Trandoshan cook, Captain Hunter Maelstrom, Neh'Koh'Moo'Su'May a.k.a "Annie" the Trianii co-pilot, HK-78 a.k.a. "Weapon-X" and Aden the former Clone Trooper.

In Character Subtitling

Why haven't I done this before? I had the means to do this for years and years. Go to Preferences, fiddle about with subtitle font and select Stephen Crane's Aurebesh... then watch any Star Wars movie.

Hunting Pirates - Bad Example, Episode 2 Part 2

Episode 2: Crab Meat Beach Party

IV

Continued from Part 1

Ever the diplomat and unable to shoot from the back of the column, Hunter climbed up the nearest tree to get a clear shot as well as yell, "Don't shoot! It might be friendly." Annie brandished her talons and attempted to perform an acrobatic leap over Weapon-X and Ssssawar to get to Aden. Unfortunately, she slipped and fell facedown in the dirt.

Weapon-X was still trying to bear his blaster rifle on the creature, but Aden's military skills prevailed. His DC-15 rifle was up and he fired, but the bolt slightly grazed the side of the creature's head.