Drinking Horn Games

Hello Friends! Art Highlight is a little late this week because we’ve spent all week excitedly watching the Terrors and Tommyguns Kickstarter take off! We are right at the precipice of funding, so if you’re still on the fence why not head over and join the 80+ backers who have already committed to bringing this great project to life? We’ve got a raffle going on in our Discord through Sunday (10/04) wherein your pledge can be upgraded for FREE, so now’s a great time to back Terrors and Tommyguns!

Now, without further adieu: The Repo Man!

This fella was internally named the “Repo Man”, although Nick and Dom may have changed it (Editor’s Note: We didn’t). As fun as super-abstract monsters are, they aren’t the only enemies you’ll meet in New Babylon, in fact, much more often you’ll be tangling with other humans, like the guy we see here. Obviously, since he is so “normal”, I didn’t have to devote as much time to figuring out what the hell he was going to look like, and was able to devote that time to more detail and a little bit of world-building instead. As I said before, a lot of his design came from an internal idea that we moved on from, but his details still fit perfectly with the vibe of the world of Terrros and Tommyguns. His costuming is based on actual 1920’s clothing, but like New Babylon itself, it’s juuuuust a bit fantastic, as evidenced by the asymmetrical design of his vest. (Fun fact: the photo reference I used for this guy is actually based on myself with a fancy Thompson gun prop we use on Archer.)

Speaking of Thompsons, it wouldn’t be Terrors and Tommyguns without a Chicago Typewriter. Because I am an obnoxious nerd about this stuff, I groaned a bit when the Thompson prop we have is an M1A1 Thompson which was manufactured for the Second World War, and not an M1928, which it the one with the drum magazine everyone remembers from the gangster movies with it’s iconic (and insanely ill-designed) drum magazine. But, I got all the model specifics drawn in, and then I got to go to town on what was my favorite part of the whole piece, the gold inlaid Deco pattern on the gun and magazine. Art Deco is probably the most recognizable single design aesthetic of the last hundred years, but it’s also one that you can’t really make up on the fly. If you just try to wing it, it looks weird and inaccurate, even to the untrained eye. So, the patterns on the gun are in fact real, taken from period-accurate advertising and architecture. It goes without saying that real M1928 Thompsons don’t really have this kind of detailing, but it serves as another method to heighten the reality of the TnT world, always realistic, but hinting at something much more ornate and strange. The other thing I wanted to get across was also the “magic” of this world, and what it would look like when a human uses it.

So, he has cube-shaped manifestations emerging from his off-hand. I think my original idea was that he could create them, but not manipulate them, but that idea got dropped. Also, if you look real close, he has the same Deco patterning running down his off-hand forearm, threading into natural tattoos. It was another bit of dropped concept, but I think it still looks pretty neato.

That’s all from me today, thank you all for stopping by to observe this latest piece in the Gallery, and thank you all so much for the incredible start to the Kickstarter campaign!

That’s all for now. If you want us to be able to pay Jim to make a LOT more art for Terrors and Tommyguns (as well as, I suppose, pay for a few other things like the actual book), head over to the Kickstarter and pledge today. Also feel free to join the conversation on Discord, Twitter, and Facebook. Have a great weekend!