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Friday, 27 June 2025

Nature is usually wrong

More long-ago snippets today from the early development of Dragon Warriors. Above is Bob Harvey's illustration for the scenario "The Greatest Prize" from DW 4. Not a great scan, I'm afraid, but it spreads across two pages and I couldn't have got a cleaner image without taking a Stanley knife to the book.

And here's the sketch I did to brief Bob. It's no surprise that I'd do it as a bunch of comics panels, as I'd already used le neuvième art in DW book 1 to explain the combat rules and how to roleplay. I'd rather Bob had stuck closer to my sketch, with Sir Grafven looking to the right in the first panel so that his gaze led naturally to the castle on the island. And then having the falcon flying directly towards us out of the final frame for extra drama. I didn't know it at the time, but Bob was an experienced comics artist so this approach ought to have been right up his alley.

In the end I don't think it was one of the most successful Dragon Warriors pictures, perhaps because Bob felt too constrained by my over-detailed specification. He did some superbly atmospheric pictures throughout the books so the lesson (learned forty years late) is that I should have just provided brief descriptions and left the visualization to him.

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