Hey #portfolioday

I’m Darren and I design stuff.

Congrats! It looks great.

Product Design used to be a thing

when this website dies meet me at the woody woodpecker racing for game boy color message board on gamefaqs

Well, I finally broke down and made hardcover versions of the Cairn 2e Warden's Guide. It looks pretty good! You can get it from Lulu right now, or you can wait for it to show up on DTRPG.

www.lulu.com/shop/yochai-...

This week I finished my last illustration for Pinball Crawl Classics. There is still some work to do with the maps, but I’m very happy with how it turned. I can’t wait to see it published! Here’s a small preview of the last illustrations. I hope you like them!

#art #osr #ttrpg #dcc #darkfantasy

Watercolour image of a mountaineer falling backwards from a cliff. The chapter title says "The Mountain from afar".

The mountains are closer than you think. #MountainResonance, an #OSR #ttrpg based on #MothershipRPG is almost ready to be published! Approval from TKG is here and the final edit is done!

Location Design | Dark Pupil I've spent the past 12 years designing video game environments professionally. I've also been trying my hand at TTRPG location design. Let's see if we can marry some of those concepts.

I wrote a blog post comparing my work in the videogame industry with the wisdoms found in OSR location design.
#DnD #TTRPG #OSR

darkpupil.com/location-des...

Exalted Order of the Mystic Moose — Prismatic Wasteland Explore a mauve-tined forest full of lumberjacks, maple syrup, sinking mansions and strange ghosts. A Cairn Forestcrawl Adventure.

Exalted Order of the Mystic Moose! A Maple Syrup Flavored Forestcrawl for Cairn by @jacobmarks.bsky.social is now available on my webstore!
www.prismaticwasteland.com/shop/p/exalt...

I want to make a game that rewards you for holding items forever and never using them.

Bonus points in new game plus for every powerful item you didn't use.

Make things to be used, or experienced, or read or seen or whatever. Then maybe sell them. But don’t make things to be sold, ever.

The continued destruction and brain drain of the Video Game Industry continues to freak me the fuck out and knowing that I'm not in a position to do anything to stop it, doesn't help.

Just constantly feeling like we're circling the drain. The anxiety just sits in your chest, all the god damn time.

Sketch vs final art

Play Unsafe An all-new edition of Graham Walmsley's classic book about playing tabletop roleplaying games.

Less than 48 hours to go on the crowdfunder for Play Unsafe, my book about how to play TTRPGs.

Go and back it, if you haven't already, and please repost this wildly.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gra... #kickstarter #ttrpg

I think about this concept a lot! It also applies to rules themselves in systems. Solutions to a negative space are sometimes even implied in adjacent writing you might want the reader to infer based on past patterns. Stuff like this can reduce cognitive load a ton if done right.

Great article!

Adventure design is about negative space Choosing not what to include

This week in MurkMail, we talk designing negative space #osr murkdice.substack.com/p/adventure-...

SQUELCH

Loved making this image. Really dig drawing strange armours and freaky monsters.

A group of heavily armoured women with heavy weapons and iron masks.

Chilling with the girls

Been doing some doodles for my upcoming TTRPG blog entries. They're super quick and fun to make and help me unwind after work.

You in the balkans? How were they?

It’s really not a bad problem to have tbh. Legendary module

“Our artists are made to clean up ai slop’s mistakes for a living instead of just, making the art themselves, their families depend on them being humiliated daily for a paycheck. We are kind overseers”

Dark Pupil: TTRPG Books & Adventures | Dark Pupil Dive into indie tabletop RPG games with Dark Pupil. Find fresh adventures, maps, art, and systems to occupy your next game night! Tabletop RPGs are the focus of my blog and products.

Finally got around to launching my TTRPG Website and Blog!
I wanted a place I can share my systems, adventures, Illustrations and nonsense.
If you're into Dnd, the OSR and Indie Role Playing Games in general, please have a look!

darkpupil.com

Easily one of the root causes of all the dumb shit we're dealing with is how guys like this lie, just straight-up make up the dumbest most "everyone is 12" brained bullshit they can possibly imagine, and everyone reporting on it just runs with that as their headline uncritically

Unfortunately, @itch.io is overrun by slop. The assets are slop, the tools are 'vibecoded'. It's an endless stream of spam which takes away visibility from great human-made creations. It's honestly just a sad state, anything you can do - itch?

This looks rad! And what an excellent name

rootring is live! rootring is a curated webring for TTRPG blogs: a place to wander from site to site, discover new writing, and follow the blogosphere.

elmc.at/rootring-is-...

This is such a great idea and such a valuable resource for the TTRPG space!
Spent my morning browsing random blogs and found some real gems!

I really think this is going to be the draw for studio execs.
You can drop the quality of assets and up the speed of production while hoping the sloptracing papers over your cheap art pipeline.

Nvidia invented Sloptracing computer graphics. Impressive