Thief

I used that thief image kind of on a whim in my last post, because Garrett from the Thief video game is probably among the most iconic thief images from fantasy. I'd argue that the Gray Mouser is a more iconic thief character, but because there's not necessarily an iconic image of exactly what he looks like, well... y'know.

On a whim, I made a Hero Forge Garrett. Because the image of Garrett is so iconic, it was not difficult at all to find suitable clothing options that look very similar to the video game image.

Obviously, I didn't try to imitate his pose, just his look and equipment. And my use of blue light was much more subtle than the image I used last time, but of course there are other images from the game. Although many of them have a similar bluish light to them.

I haven't really been very on the ball with the promised updates to Dark Fantasy X. I have made (but not posted or reviewed/edited) the changes to the rules that I proposed, but I haven't made my new CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER map. What can I say? Real life is very busy, and sometimes also very stressful, which makes mental and emotional energy to do this at a nadir, even if I do actually have the time to. My hobbies are, after all, just my hobbies, and if I'm stressing myself out to participate in them, then there's no point.

That said, any wealthy potential patron who wants to offer me enough compensation to maintain my current standard of living or better to do my hobby full-time, feel free to reach out. I guarantee in that event that by the end of August, I'll have uploaded the Dark Fantasy X updates, including all of the character sheets for iconics, I'll have done the 5x5 fronts for all three of my campaign proposals, and I'll have recruited a gang and will be running Waychester on YouTube for anyone to watch. I'll also be well on my way towards having a draft of a first novel, and I'll pump those out one a year. Any takers?

UPDATE: For fun, I've included a few paragraphs penned by Graeme Davis, describing the writing process of the Enemy Within campaign. It's very sad that this paradigm seems to have largely have been limited (and least in published works) to this very campaign.

'Write a bloodless "Cthulhu" adventure for Warhammer.' That was how it started.

It was 1986, and I had been at Games Workshop for a couple of months. Based on my roleplaying writing for the British gaming magazines including White Dwarf, I had been hired to get Warhammer Role-Play, as it was known at the time, over the finish line and into publication. I arrived to find an extensive manuscript by Rick Priestley and two piles of notes by Warhammer’s other creators, Bryan Ansell and Richard Halliwell — and a deadline that was four months away. In order to be in the shops in time for Christmas, the core book had to be at the printers by the end of September.

Although Richard Halliwell had written a short adventure for the rulebook, we all knew the game would need more support than that, especially in the crucial few months after the rulebook’s release. We also knew that the rules would need to be playtested, as much as we could in the time, and one introductory adventure was nowhere near enough to achieve that.

When Bryan gave me the now-famous one-line brief for the adventure that would become Shadows Over Bögenhafen, roleplaying — especially British roleplaying — was in a state of flux. Horror RPGs had arrived about five years previously, and had done more than any previous genre of RPG to bring roleplaying out of the dungeon. They created a fashion for investigation and NPC interaction over simple monster-bashing.

Around the same time, a boxed city setting for RPGs appeared, based on the shared-setting Thieves' World stories of Robert Lynn Asprin and others. It was one of the first sandbox city adventures and, although not the first city pack to be published for a RPG, it was by far the most successful. Other cities-as-adventure settings appeared over the next few years, with locales, NPCs and adventure seeds galore. Dungeons were becoming passe.

It was not surprising, then, that The Oldenhaller Contract, the beginning adventure in the first edition WFRP rulebook, was set in a city and involved negotiating a three-way fight between criminal gangs. It also wasn’t that surprising that it ended in a confrontation with a group of cultists and a strange-looking beast. And it was probably not surprising that my adventure, Shadows Over Bögenhafen, involved investigating a Chaos cult — Warhammer already had a handy selection of Chaos Gods — and the stopping of a terrible ritual.

It was intended as a stand-alone adventure: a ‘module’ of around 32 pages, but then Phil Gallagher and Jim Bambra arrived, two of the best adventure writers in the business at the time.

After helping put the core rulebook to bed, Jim and Phil began to plan out a campaign for WFRP. The storyline, in contrast to the open-field battles of the Warhammer miniatures game, dealt with agents of Chaos who corrupted the nations of the Old World from within. Townsfolk, conspiracies, intrigue, and corruption abounded in this new mix of fantasy, investigation, and horror.