Small Niche Games Joins Empty Room Studios

Small Niche Games (WWII: Operation Jedburgh, Vice Squad: Miami Nights, Tavern Menus) is pleased to announce a merger with the talented artists and writers of Empty Room Studios to form Empty Room Studios Publishing (ERSP).

Peter C. Spahn: “This is a good move for us. Empty Room Studios has a lot of talent that we’ll be able to draw upon to create some new and interesting products. This will come in handy, especially since we’re looking into acquiring the 4E license package.”

Rick Hershey: “I’m excited by the merger. It will allow us to focus and run our operations more smoothly along with tapping the talent of our ERS members. I fully expect people to be surprised by the full range of material this allows us to create.”

All Small Niche Games products will now be available through ERSP. ERSP plans to expand on current product lines such as the innovative Quick Play Adventures line for d20 Modern as well as its handy visual aid series that features Tavern Menus, Character Cards, and Fantasy Currency.

ERSP is also gearing up for the release of several new products and product lines:

Dreamwalker Revised (available February 2, 2008): The Brood have come. Soulless creatures who invade our dreams and seek to drive us insane. Living Nightmares who cross over into the real world to wreak havoc and destroy. They hide. They breed. They multiply. As the borders between dreams and reality crumble, their growing evil threatens all mankind.

And yet, there is hope. As always, in times of great need, heroes are born. You are one of those brave, gifted few who have chosen to take a stand against the darkness. You may be one of the Awakened who can sense the horrors living among us or you may be a Dreamwalker who can carry the fight into the spirit world. Only there, at the source, can the Brood be defeated. Humanity’s salvation is in your hands. You have the strength and the will to persevere, but do you have the courage? Prepare for your journey—the Land of Dreams awaits.

Dreamwalker Revised is a game of epic horror, fantasy, and adventure set against the backdrop of the modern world. In this setting, the mystical Land of Dreams is in turmoil and its collapse has begun to affect reality. Dreams have become a breeding ground for madness and despair. Vampires, mummies, demons, and other dark creatures stalk the night, and the deepest realms of spirit are slowly coming unraveled.

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I love comics. What is there not to love? Really.

And considering that I am finding myself more and more involved in comics and less and less in RPGs lately, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about the comics I am currently enjoying. The list isn’t real big as I’m pretty picky - the art and the writing have to really line up for me to really get into a series. Anyway…

Northlanders - This is a new book from Vertigo. From Brian Wood and Davide Gianfelice. The story takes place during the age of the Vikings and the main character returns from his travels abroad to find that his inheritance has been stolen by his uncle. So far, the story has been quite intriguing and the art is fantastic. I have high hopes for this series!

Scalped - This is another Vertigo book, from Jason Aaron and RM Guera. I don’t even know where to begin to describe this book. Visually, it is stunning! RM Guera is absolutely amazing (the only issue I have is that he’s not doing the covers too). The story has been absolutely fantastic as well. There is allot of good stuff in here - a statement on the plight of Native Americans, sex, a murder mystery, secret plots, and very, very interesting characters. What I especially like is that all the characters have their demons - nobody is black or white - rather, they are all various shades of grey. I think the first trade is out - pick it up!

MouseGuard - This book is from Archaia Studios Press. By David Petersen (who is a very nice guy, btw). First of all - this book is done in a square format which I absolutely love. It was very ballsy for them to publish this in that format, but it works. And the art is absolutely gorgeous - not to mention the story has been clean and fun. Good fantasy adventure!

Conan - From Darkhorse Comics. By Tim Truman and Tomas Giorello. I have to say - I have loved this book from the beginning when it was Kurt Busiek, Cary Nord, and Dave Stewart working on it. I had my doubts about it when I first saw Tomas Giorello’s work - but the latest issue (#47) really blew me away. And perhaps what I was annoyed with was Isanove’s paints over his lines - but the coloring team they have on the book now is great. I really hope they stick with them. Not only that, but it seems to have a vaguely European quality - for some reason I think of Moebius. But anyway, it’s good stuff.

Astonishing X-Men - From Marvel Comics, by Joss Whedon (Firefly, Buffy) and John Cassaday (in my opinion, probably the best sequential artist in the business these days). Awesome take on the X-Men from a great writer and a fantastic artist. It’s been fun, not too serious, and beautifully illustrated. I typically don’t read a whole lot of “superhero” books, but this one has been really good.

I also generally read all the stuff from Archaia Studios Press - stuff like Robotika, Okko, The Killer, and I’m really looking forward to reading Miranda Mercury, The Engineer, Cursed Pirate Girl, and The Sisterhood. ASP usually puts out great stuff.

Also, I should recommend a couple great web-comics I read - The Dreamer, Atland, and of course, the one I run - Cowboys and Aliens II.

There are probably a few more I pick up, but these are at the top of my list right now - I regularly look forward to these.

Ciao!

I’m an old italian boy, I live in Italy and I was born in Turin. This image was done for a convention in Turin called “Torino comics”. The publisher printed one hundred copies of Steele in Turinthis art that I signed for fans of the series “Jonathan Steele” (He’s the blond guy in trouble). Jonathan usually drive a flying car, in this case the car is crashed into the “Mole Antonelliana”, the building symbol of Turin. Actually, the Mole Antonelliana is the house of the National Museum of Cinema, an amazing place that worth a visit. Not everyone knows that the Italian Movie industry was born in Turin, and the movie “Cabiria” (1914), made in Turin, was the first italian kolossal,it also was the first feature to be shown on White House grounds and was the first movie to use a dolly-track system. Another important museum in Turin is the Egyptian museum, the second in the world after the Cairo Museum. In fact, in the picture there is a strange creature that looks like an ancient egyptian god. Will he help Jonathan or was he responsible for the Jonathan’s car crash?

Sergio

I thought I’d post for posterity, the self-portrait I use to create most of my animated avatars. This is not the one I use for Empty Room Studios, but the one I use just about everywhere else. I made this shortly after I got my Wacom graphics tablet. I wanted to switch to digital inking for a variatey of reasons. Mostly, I was a new father, and being a stay-at-home dad, I didn’t have the luxury of setting up an inking job, and cleaning it up every time I could get in some inking. My windows of work were very small. Given the pressure-sensitive pad, if I had 20 minutes to ink, I could spend that time producing, instead of cleaning brushes.
It was surprisingly easy to make the transition. I would find it frustrating to go back to the old way. Not to mention messy.

This particular portrait was actually traced. Yes, I admit that I directly painted this over a photograph. People sometimes accuse artists of cheating when they do this, but it’s a surprisingly common practice. If I were doing a caricature, I might use a photo reference but do the image completely freehand. When going for naturalism, I prefer to take shortcuts. There’s a reason I switched my major in college from fine arts to graphic arts.

As for cheating? It’s not as easy as it looks. Take a look at the lines. Not a single black line around anything is present in nature. This is strictly an artistic convention and just as we first learn as babies to separate objects by their outlines, we are trained throughout our lives to interpret a drawing by the convention of defining form and surface through the use of line.

There’s a great scene in the novel Time and Again, in which the the main character, an artist, is hurtled backward in time to the end of the nineteenth century. As a parlor trick, he sketches some party-goers in the frost of a window. At first, they cannot understand what he is drawing, or regard it as childish and crude. People in that era were far more used to line defining surface, rather than form. Look at political cartoons and woodcuts of the era. The lines follow the surface, in an attempt to give the drawing the illusion of the third dimension of depth. Also, given the limited printing capabilities, any work made for mass production was almost of a necessity composed of two values: the ink color and the paper color.
Nowadays, we have any number of media which reproduce images with amazing fidelity, and the skill of reproducing this in line is not nearly so essential. Also, the sheer speed and volume with which most work must be produced has made this sort of work impractical. Hence, we have embraced the line as outline again, using it as surface only sparingly. For example, the hair in the self-portrait. Virtually every other line in the drawing defines an edge.

There is a language of line, and most people understand it pretty fluently, though it takes training to speak it with any facility. For myself, I consider it a life long journey, whose steps are always becoming shorter and more difficult to take.

This is some private work I did for a band out of Chicago called “Lair of the Minotaur“. I thought it was a good example of my drawing process in general.

Here is the artwork write-up -

“ASSASSINS OF THE CURSED MIST

About: AMAZONS, daughters of Ares. Penthisileia, the Amazon queen, is possessed by a cursed mist that Athena sends to get her to confront Akhilles in battle during the Trojan war. When Akhilles dies his mother convinces Hades to resurrect him. He surprises Penthisileia from behind and kills her.

Illustration: the mist overtaking the Amazon queen.“

Here is my initial sketch -

My rough drawing -

My first final -

And the very final, after the client decided he wanted a decapitated head. Heh.

Thanks!

I cleaned the blog up a bit and decided to start fresh. Look for new posts and comments from all our creators very soon.