Howdy everyone!

Work is proceeding on the BRIGHTHAMMER Bestiary. Most of that has been scribbling notes for the included monsters & foes, and designing the margin and corner doodles. (I recently found out that, at least for illuminated manuscripts, the illustrations in the corner is called a drollery.) I feel those design elements (plus the typefaces) really give BRIGHTHAMMER a distinctive, old school feel. I wanted the drollery in each of the three booklets to be different, yet have a unified appearance, but nothing I tried for the Bestiary was coming out the way I wanted.

Until I busted out the Copic liners last night and did it by hand. Which I haven't done in forever.

Luckily, the art in BRIGHTHAMMER booklets intentionally has a slightly rough, hand drawn style. So my squiggly lines and numerous little mistakes on the Bestiary drollery actually work in my favor. I've scanned it (copy machines at Japanese convenience stores are wonderful), cleaned it up a bit digitally, and will drop it into the Affinity Publisher layout tonight to see how it looks.

Contents wise, it looks like I can get about 10 to 12 entries on each of the three two-page spreads of the Bestiary. I've split the booklet into three parts – low-, mid-, and high-level foes – with a spread for each. That's upwards of 30+ foes, antagonists, and monsters for your BRIGHTHAMMER adventures, plus the larger entry for dragons on the back cover. I'm still deciding what foes to include in the booklet, but am aiming for a range of common, classic, and useful fantasy monsters.