Leo just sent me the colourized images he's been doing for Megara Entertainment's limited hardcover edition of my second-ever gamebook The Temple of Flame, originally published in the mid-eighties. This picture of undead warriors caught my eye because I'd recently found the original art brief I sent to Leo. I was inspired by Steve Ditko's story "The Spirit of the Thing" in Creepy #9. He showed a corpse coming to life and wresting itself up out of the soil with galvanic convulsions of muscle you could almost feel.
Ditko is of course the master of portraying physicality in a picture - look at those extreme poses Spidey adopts as his momentum flings his limbs in all directions. The horrifying idea of those athletic, almost dance-like, cadaveric spasms stuck with me, so I sketched them for Leo and let him do his thing.
Megara's edition of the book will be shipping soon to the hundred or so Kickstarter backers, and of course the paperback is still available to everyone else.
Another curio from the writing of the book is this map of the catacombs within the pyramid. I remember being horrified when I playtested Oliver Johnson's Lord of Shadow Keep and discovered that he didn't bother with mapping - you might turn right and come into the same room reached by turning left. I think I actually sat down and rejigged the text so that it was consistent, although whether that mattered is another question. I assumed gamebook readers would make a map as they went along, just like a role-player would. What about you? Were you a map-maker or a barnstormer?




