Thread: Beasts and Characters..

I'm not quite sure of what you need - you need pics for a bestiary, but is it for publishing later on - or for personal use? Cause if its the first, then you gotta get every one painted professionally (in my opinion) and preferably by the same artist to preserve the style through the beastiary. If its for personal use only you don't have to care about copyright, just pluck what you need ... I bought an art-pack with all monsters and race/professions for D&D 4e from some site to use for making counters for battle maps - they were cheap and worth the money to have easy access to making x-counters of what ever monster the players face ... and if you need art done for you - check out Deviant art - lots of good ones in there - also beginners

Thank you all for your comments and your sentiments!

Unfortunately I know now that I don't know what we can do
If I would guess we need about 300 to 500 pictures multiplied by 20-50 bucks uhm....

And it seems as I don't have the essential talent to learn it

#yosh

If this thing is going to be printed and sold then think of this...my old D&D books from the 80s only have painted covers, the insides are all black and white (inked). Also, not every critter has an accompanying drawing. I don't know if current bestiaries have every critter drawn out. Also they have a few different artists doing the drawings inside. Again, these books are 25+ years old so, shrug. So that may lower costs for you...still a lot of money but certainly cheaper and if you sell a bunch then you make it back easily. Pick 3 or 4 artists, offer them a set amount for like 50 drawings, and whatever critter doesn't get a drawing just gets text...so be it. My old books have paintings on them so maybe you could just surf the web, find a great cover pic, and offer to pay the artist for it.

If you are working on publishing something, you might start a bit smaller in order to build capital first, with the expectation that all proceeds go toward funding the bestiary. I was involved in a project a while back where several writers and artists collaborated to produce a book full of adventure locales, with the intent to use the proceeds to fund the development of future publications. Unfortunately, the guy organizing the thing dropped the ball at the layout stage. It's a real shame, too, because I had written up three locations I was quite proud of, one of which was selected as the subject of the cover art.

Anyway, if you start with a small book that has only a few high-quality illustrations and sell a large enough quantity of them, that could pay for the illustrations for the next project. Alternately, you could release it in a serial format, with sales of the first volume funding production of the following volumes. Obviously, though, your product needs to sell well in order for this arrangement to work.

hmmmm... I'm thinking back to the olden days where I was but a wee little kid and had subscriptions to sports cards (I think) - every month I recieve a couple of cards to add to my collection. So make the Beastiary on A4 4 hole system pages - with the first purchase you get a "free" (nothing is ever free) folder to hold them, and have people pay up front for the stuff, then add pages over the months
Or try to make a deal with an artist working his way up for a small fixed amount and a percentage of the what the beastiary makes. I read an article once where they asked this million dollar business man if he regretted selling 50% of his company when it was small, cause now it was very succesfull - his answer was "rather 50% of a succes than 100% of a failure"
Don't give up - find a way ... and if you need help with layout/dtp - send me a PM for a good quote

Awesome idea. I used to get "zoo cards" when I was a kid. Every month a packet of five cards came in the mail with a picture of an animal on one side and information about it on the reverse.

That *is* a cool idea. Subscription services are the way to go, BTW...recurring revenue is always better than having to go back and ask for more every time you have a new product. They don't work for everything, unfortunately, and they make you stick to deadlines. Not sure how Monte Cook's Dungeon-a-day thing worked out (he recently stepped out of it and turned it over to ?Rite Publishing?) but that was a pretty specific enterprise. A creature-a-day (or spell-a-day or NPC-a-day or whatever) might have longer legs...it's something everyone can use in their games. I think I remember the thing Midgardsomer was talking about (they did it with recipies and other things too) - got cards in the mail and they fit into this little plastic filing box. I would totally think about something like that for interesting beasties (or NPCs or plot hooks) that I could use in my game.
M

It better have a stick of gum in there!

*hmmmm* note to self - remeber to buy gum for all the beasties...

one negative thing I do remember about those subscription things were that they were notoriously hard to cancel - so thats a place to improve on