Critical IF cover design

Following on from the previous post, here are the cover briefs I sent to Jon Hodgson when Fabled Lands LLP decided to republish the Virtual Reality books overselves rather than partnering with Osprey to do them.

*  *  *

These are my initial ideas. I’m open to any suggestions or changes, as the briefs were originally prepared on the assumption I’d have to hand them off through a chain of editors and art directors at Osprey and would get no direct communication with the artist. Hence I’ve probably over-managed the details... however, here’s the cover Osprey intended for Down Among the Dead Men so you can see why I’m getting a tad control-freaky.

The top third of each cover will need to be for the author and title, and the logo extends about 2.5cm from the bottom. Maybe we should have the background and main foreground elements on separate layers, so that a hydra’s head or a sword could partially overlap the title lettering if necessary.

Ideally each book should each have a unique palette with one predominant colour to help it stand out.

Necklace of Skulls

I based the new design on the original Virtual Reality cover with these changes:

• Removed the second (kneeling) figure. Now it's just the warrior.
• The warrior is holding a flaming torch and a sword.
• The view is straight-on from directly behind the warrior to make the threat of the hydra more dramatic.
• I've put the warrior on a raised ledge of rock a few feet above the desert floor. This allows the hydra to be nearer to him and to appear to be rearing up out of a chasm.

But... it would be better not to be looking at the back of the hero’s neck. If (unlike in my sketch) one of the hydra heads were further forward, the hero could be partly turning to keep an eye on it, giving us the opportunity for a partial or full profile – just to create more engagement with him as a character:

Background and palette - as we’re looking up past the hero with a slightly low-angle shot, I think the background should be a midnight blue night sky dotted with stars. It reinforces the desert setting and astronomy is part of the mythological context of the adventure. The hydra dark-scaled. The torchlight picks out the blaze of colour (feathered head-dress, etc) in the warrior’s garb and his glistening skin, the yellow light picked up in the sand and rocks where he’s standing.

The Maya sword is made of hardwood with sharpened spikes of knapped flint or sharpened volcanic glass fixed along the edges. Just the thing for killing a hydra.

Down Among the Dead Men

A pirate fantasy adventure, a little bit earlier in history than Pirates of the Caribbean – think Elizabethan/Jacobean period. It’s pretty obvious how I’ve changed this one from the old Virtual Reality version:

• The zombie pirate is looking straight at us.
• He’s closer, more threatening.
• He’s already climbed halfway over the rail.
• The rail tilts up left to right rather than down as on the VR cover - more dramatic that way.

Put a few wisps of mist in the foreground, picking up the fog in the background. Also the original colour scheme is a bit of a dog’s dinner. We need a more limited palette to give the image more impact.

Once Upon a Time in Arabia

The classic Thief of Baghdad type adventure. It’s not even worth looking at the original cover – I never liked it. So, on to new ideas...

This drawing is a bit sketchy, so I’d better explain what’s going on. It’s a aerial shot above an Arabian Nights city looking steeply down at the towers and domes below.

Our hero is flying on a magic carpet, the wind whipping at his clothes. In one hand he has a sword. From a ring on the other hand he has called forth a genie - the swirl of smoke curls out of the ring and under the carpet, solidifying into a giant demonic figure who is ready to assist the hero.

I don’t think the hero should have a full beard (though the genie can). He should either be clean shaven or have a little hipster goatee. Or it could be a heroine (no goatee in that case). The traditional Douglas Fairbanks Arabian look, ie flowing white like the Prince of Persia used to wear before he went all moody black leather.

I envisage the genie as taking shape out of smoke that looks like a storm-cloud – dark violet/black shot through with inner flashes of lightning suggesting violence and magical power.

Overall colour palette: how about that haze of golden yellows and ochres that you get in hot, dusty climates as the sun is close to setting? If that suffuses the background, we can then pick out some bright colours (the carpet, jewels on the hero/heroine) and contrast that with the white flowing clothes of the hero/heroine and the black, billowing smoke of the genie.

Heart of Ice

The idea here is we’ve got a guy slogging through a blizzard out on the Saharan Ice Wastes towards a city in the distance. Deep snow. He’s dressed in arctic weather clothing: parka, fur-lined hood, snow goggles, etc.

He’s heard something and he’s turning back to face us to shine a flashlight at whoever or whatever is coming. (So he’s twisting at the waist, insofar as his bulky clothing will permit.) In his other hand (held out to the side so we can see it) is a barysal gun - the raygun of the 23rd century.

In the background is the place he was heading for – the city of Du-En, abandoned and empty for a hundred years. A bit Gormenghast, a bit Mountains of Madness. Massive walls, so hazed by distance and snow that the architecture (half sci-fi, half ‘30s futurist fascist) seems to render our human endeavours and dramas insignificant. We can’t see the city walls and towers that clearly because of the snow-haze.

This is a variant cover I did. Disregard the image/concept here, but I do like the colour scheme of the background. I’m thinking that this one can be the most monochrome of the series - all icy blues, whites, greys. Even the figure shouldn’t be too colourful, and possibly the only variation might be a bit of backlight from the flashlight reflected in his tinted goggles or something.

By the way, that figure - he could be the hero, he could just as easily be one of the adversaries. This is quite a morally ambiguous book and the anonymity of the figure reflects that.

*  *  *

The brief isn't the end of the story. Just like with game design, where you come up with an initial plan but then have to work out during development how to implement that and which parts work and which need changing, the cover concepts go back and forth before you arrive at something that everybody's happy with.

Take Once Upon A Time In Arabia. Jon's first sketch featured a female protagonist in historically credible but determinedly unsexy garb. Well, fair enough; we're not in the 1980s now. As Jon said:

"I went for a female character on Once Upon a Time in Arabia, which I'm kinda regretting - maybe a male would have more appeal to the readership, and I'm not keen on making a 'sexy' female character."

I agreed that a young male hero might be better, not least because I thought Jon might be more comfortable making him attractive and athletic. I went on to say:

"His clothing probably needs to be as much like the Fairbanks-style stereotypical 'Arabian adventurer' costume as you can bear to go. I know it's not historically accurate, but I'm minded of what Jonathan Miller said when staging Anthony and Cleopatra: 'I'd like to dress her in Greek-style clothing, but audiences think it's wrong if she's not in Hollywood's idea of Ptolemaic fashion.' Also, the image is going to work better if the flying carpet is moving left to right. And can we add the jinni's taloned hands for extra impact?"

Of the first Heart of Ice sketch I said:

"I like the icy colours in the cover, but would like to get a real raging blizzard. It makes the situation more life-or-death -- will this lone figure even survive to reach that city..? -- and injects some doomy apocalyptic feeling into the scene."

I'm very pleased with the end result, but you can judge for yourself whether our cover creation process was a success - Jon's final book covers are here.

Blood Sword cover design

A while back I mentioned how the cover of The Lord of Shadow Keep would have been a real mess if the artist hadn’t had the sense to ignore my brief. That time I dropped the ball, but mostly I get it right. Here’s the proof, in the form of the briefs I sent to Sebastien Brunet for Blood Sword. A friendly warning: this could get technical…

COVER BRIEFS

A lot of gamebook covers avoid depicting the player-character, which makes sense as gamebooks are seen through the protagonist’s eyes. Way of the Tiger does it another way, more like the view in a third-person CRPG where you get to see the hero. Let’s do that with Blood Sword. That way we can get a sense of scale in the scenes and monsters the hero is facing.

As there are four character types to choose from in Bloodsword, we can have a different character type depicted as the hero in each cover. Then in the fifth cover maybe we could show all four. The character types are:

• Book One: a warrior (male)
• Book Two: a rogue (male)
• Book Three: a sage (female)
• Book Four: a wizard (female)

The Battlepits of Krarth

A huge four-limbed creature of solid shadow is about to attack a human warrior.

The setting:
A long hall or temple with bronze doors. The place is lit by bowls of burning coals that produce clouds of incense. Those bowls are on bronze stands. To give some movement to the image, perhaps the monster is knocking some of these bowls aside as it closes in on the player-character.

The monster:
A hulking creature of living shadow. Its entire form is jet black except for its eyes, which blaze with blue-white light. It has four arms, and in each hand it grips a massive scimitar (also jet black). In the book this monster is known as “Nebularon, Drinker of Souls, Swallower of Sorcery” and I based it a little bit on Eternity in the Doctor Strange comics.

As the monster is supposed to have a skin of shadow that contains the blazing blue-white light, you could have lines along its body and limbs where we can see thin cracks of light shining through. That’s up to you – I just mention it in case having it entirely jet-black doesn’t look right.

The player-character:
He is a warrior who could be armed with a spear or a sword and shield (but not a bow). A low-angle shot to emphasize the size of the shadow monster, so that the warrior is in the foreground with his back to us looking up at the monster.

The Kingdom of Wyrd

A funeral procession of sinister monks carries a shrouded body along an underground tunnel, watched from the shadows by a rogue-like player-character.

The setting:
A stone tunnel deep underground. There are various round ventilation shafts built high up in the walls of the tunnel. We are viewing the scene in the tunnel from one of these ventilation shafts.

The bad guys:
A procession of evil monks wearing peaked hoods. They are carrying a shrouded body on a wooden bier and each has a tall candle to light the way. We are looking down at them as the procession goes along the tunnel. In case it helps, here is Russ Nicholson's picture from the original book.

The player-character:
A rogue (thief-type character) has climbed down the ventilation shaft and is braced against the mouth of it peeking out as the procession goes by underneath him. He is lightly armoured (leather, not plate metal) and has a bow, a quiver of arrows on his back, a sheathed dagger at his belt.

The Demon’s Claw

The sage levitates high above a mountain stronghold.

The setting:
We’re high in the air looking down at stronghold that is built on a ledge among high mountain peaks above an almost sheer drop. The dawn light glances off its sharp cornices and columns of glassy grey-black stone. The central tower of the stronghold is capped by an egg-shaped dome encrusted with carnelian and topaz. It hangs above the grey buildings like a second sun, catching the rays of dawn and seeming to magnify them. Here’s the drawing from the original book:

The bad guys:
A group of Magian wizards have run out onto the terrace and are getting ready to cast spells at the player-character. (They are tiny at this distance, so we probably can’t make out much detail of their clothing, but in fact they wear gold-trimmed red robes and tall copper crowns.)

The player-character:
A female sage (priestess-type) in simple white tunic. She carries a plain wooden staff and is levitating in midair. Our view is therefore looking down past her from behind as she descends towards the stronghold.

Doomwalk

The sorceress gazes up in awe at the Angel of Death who stands like a skyscraper in the centre of the desolate land of Sheol.

The setting:
A vast flat plain strewn with small rocks. In the far distance, the plain is ringed by sharp mountains, but they are so far off that they don’t look tall. Certainly not as tall as the central figure, Azrael.

The “monster”:
This is the archangel Azrael, the angel of death. First of all, he is huge - as tall as a mountain, so that his head is actually hazed by clouds and distance.Azrael is naked, but some states in the US tend to be prudish and won’t allow us to show genitals on a book cover, so he should stand facing slightly away from us. He’s just turning his head as if he has noticed the presence of the player-character – though to him she is insignificant, barely more than a gnat.

In appearance he’s like the classic Greek-Roman ideal, with muscles that look almost sculpted. His skin is dark grey, but that’s offset by the rich colours of his wings. The pattern of feathers on the wings is like a peacock’s tail, covered with eyes – only most of the eyes are closed, only about a tenth of the eyes are open. Here’s the description from the book:

A naked giant as large as a mountain. Wrapped across his face is a white blindfold. A colossal sword is planted on the ground in front of him, with his mighty hand resting on its ivory pommel. His face is beautiful beyond mortal comprehension, and he has wings which touch the edges of the sky. The plumage of these wings has a pattern like a peacock's tail, with countless eyes - except that many of the 'eyes' in the pattern are closed. You know from folklore that each represents a man or woman in the mortal world, closing when that individual dies. When all the eyes are closed it will be the Day of Judgement, and that day cannot be far off. Many more are closed than are open: the dead far outnumber the living.

I’ve done a sketch but there’s a big problem with it – Azrael isn’t nearly tall enough. He should be a thousand feet tall!

The player-character:
A sorceress. She is standing looking up at Azrael and has her left hand raised to her face as if she’s shielding her eyes from a dazzling light. Her other hand grips an elaborate jewelled staff. She wears long flowing robes as you’d expect of a wizard. Her body language doesn’t suggest that she intends to fight Azrael – he’s far too huge and powerful, you may as well think of attacking a mountain. Instead, her posture should convey awe and wonder.

The Walls of Spyte

The setting:
An arctic wasteland. In the background is the city of Spyte, a walled citadel of grey towers and spires surrounded by a high basalt wall. The city is completely encircled by a broad chasm almost a mile across. From this chasm rise sulphurous fumes that form patches of yellowish haze in the icy air.

The monster:
An ice bear – a creature with the heavy frame and shoulders of a bear, but covered in quills like a porcupine. Its claws and quills seem to be made of ice, in fact.

The player-characters:
All four of our heroes from the earlier covers – the warrior with a spear, behind him the rogue aiming his bow, the sage with her quarterstaff, and the sorceress conjuring a powerful spell. All of them are wearing heavy furs to protect themselves in the cold environment.

*  *  *

As a final note, these are very different from the covers I envisaged for a new streamlined edition of Blood Sword a few years ago. The design has to fit what you're trying to do. Those would have been more of a grown-up rethink of the books, with emphasis on the interactive novel aspect. Because in the end we just opted to re-release the original kids' books, complete with tactical maps and rules as complex as a few months of Brexit negotiation, the more vibrant in-your-face cover designs were more appropriate.