Rite Publishing, Kaidan Patronage Project. 1st adventure release in Feb/Mar 2011

[Jaxilon]

Well, I think it looks better with some color but I'm not sure about the green flowers along the sides....maybe monochrome them or lower the saturation so they barely have any color? The center piece is not overly colorful even now and I think it would help it to pop out.

btw, is that a player race? It looks pretty alien.

[Gamerprinter]

Well, I think it looks better with some color but I'm not sure about the green flowers along the sides....maybe monochrome them or lower the saturation so they barely have any color? The center piece is not overly colorful even now and I think it would help it to pop out.

btw, is that a player race? It looks pretty alien.

Perhaps, next time when I create two designs for something I'll put it in a poll.

Yeah, I've taken Ravs suggestion and looked thru the Photoshop Brush site for something more 'swamp like' such as cattails or bamboo groves to create background art more appropriate to a Kappa's homeland. Once I find the right one, I will post it again. I was trying to make the cover design look somewhat like a wall/door panel shogi screen.

Jax, yes, the kappa is a player race - it was a player race in both the original Oriental Adventures Handbook and the more recent 3.0 Oriental Adventures.

Kaidan, being a horror setting, I'd much prefer being humano-centric, without the alien PC races. However, I know some players who only build halflings when they make a character (I almost always play human), so I have to accomodate those kinds of players, otherwise I am too limiting of my market by leaving them out.

So I have PC races for Kappa, Henge (animal shapechangers) and Tengu - since there are no Dwarves, Elves, nor Halflings and Gnomes. Korobokuru have been in past editions of Oriental Adventures as a Dwarf/Gnome replacement. I am trying to stick to Japanese culture, korobokuru are Ainu tradition (Japanese indigenous native barbarians in the north), so they really don't belong in Kaidan.

We were planning on having a kappa encounter in the first adventure (and its there), Jonathan McAnulty my lead designer was going to just stat out a monster. I thought if I planned to make kappa a PC race, there would be needs for a much greater writeup than just a monster listing. Steve Russell of Rite Publishing has a series of books for PC races called "In the Company of..." and so far have races specific to his Questhaven campaign setting, including Minotaur, Gargoyles, and some odd new ones as well. I thought in following that idea, I would create a similar Kappa book. This idea has been accepted by the entire Rite Publishing staff, so it has been 'green-lighted'.

I still plan to design another Kappa book cover design in color and B/W, and I will post them here when they are ready, though I may start a new thread and throw up a poll.

GP

[Gamerprinter]

Just got notified that I need to make one cover design for the all three adventures. Cubicle 7 is Rite Publishing's print partner and they are doing all three adventures of Kaidan as a printed hardback in June 2011, but each adventure has to be 56 pages each (the first one came out exactly that in my page layout) for a total of 168 pages in all. We get a special discount per book, if we meet that standard. So I'll be working on a new cover design for the whole thing.

This is getting more exciting as it goes along!

GP

[Ascension]

That means a full blown color painted cover right?

[Gamerprinter]

That means a full blown color painted cover right?

It basically already exists, I just need to change the titling and whatnot. We'll be using the same cover art for the original second adventure, Dim Spirit - which shows a 'ghost girl' in the forest with a ruined torii shinto gate behind her and various kappa and other monsters peeking from the background. But yeah, a full blown full color hard cover.

GP

[ravells]

Hi GP, I've moved the thread to General discussion because it's no longer news.

Please feel free to post another news update in the news subforum, cheers

Ravs

[Gamerprinter]

I'll only do so on any specific product release for now on. My problem is if I have any more tidbits I tend to post in existing threads rather than clogging things up on a dozen different threads - but the General Forum makes much more sense.

GP

[Gamerprinter]

Next full color Kappa cover design. I looked for various PS brushes pointed out by Ravs, and didn't care for any of them. So I was forced to create my own, so here's a background of bamboo. I think this is improved...

GP

[Ghostman]

Those bamboos look like a very early stage for something that could be a fine background. The white joints on the stalks are pixellated and the bright saturated green just screams "computer graphics". Should take a good bit of work to make them look natural.

[Gamerprinter]

Strange I actually color picked the bamboo color from a photo of live bamboo... eh.

Edit: I dropped the saturation some and darkened the bamboo up a bit - better?

GP