Norsaga Art Design, Part 4

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This is the fourth in a series of articles tracing the creation of Norsaga’s artwork. To see where it ends up, check out the gallery on the main site.The last of the primary-colored heroes are the blue Lore heroes. If the dominant colors align with races or clans within the peoples of Norsaga, blue encompasses the cold, mystical, iron-willed people who have subjugated magic to their whims.

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Physically they tower over the other colors, and their glowing eyes are immediately distinguishing. Their swirling tattoos are generally themed around each individual hero's class, with Witches featuring snakes and ravens hidden in the designs.

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Above is the original concept for the Charm-weaver, with a distinctly blue body and hairstyle, before the Spirit-walker took over as the fourth Lore class. While I deviated a lot from Kevin's sketches for these heroes, I used his Rune-carver almost unchanged.

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That's it for the designs of the four primary Norsaga hero colors. Yellow, stocky and burdened with armor, pouches, and chain mail. Red, with huge scar-covered arms, bandaged bodies and fur-trimmed pauldrons. Green, lanky and cloaked, with feathers and knives belted everywhere. Blue, robed and covered in tattoos, gold, and glowing runes.

The next article will cover the Ghosts and Skalds to finish out the hero designs.

Norsaga Art Design, Part 3

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This is the third in a series of articles tracing the creation of Norsaga’s artwork. To see where it ends up, check out the gallery on the main site.

The green Craft heroes are the tricksters and thieves of Norsaga, and from conception their designs were full of curves and motion. Their costumes are also some of the most intricate, featuring lots of belts, layers, and swishy bits (technical term, and my least favorite thing in terms of shading).

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Due to the number of buckles, Kevin's concept pictures got used a lot while drawing green heroes. So did things like knife hilts and arrow heads; designing these little details takes more time than you'd believe.

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Above on the lower-left is the original Spirit-walker concept; besides being female it was a green hero, before being traded to blue for the Charm-weaver. You can also see a female Hunter design.

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Each class as usual inherits sub-traits from its recessive half; the red Hunters bring fur, bandages, and bigger weapons; yellow Seafarers have armor, pouches, and trinkets; and blue Charm-weavers have runestones and tattoos:

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Coming up next, the design of the blue Lore heroes!

Norsaga Art Design, Part 2

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This is the second in a series of articles tracing the creation of Norsaga’s artwork. To see where it ends up, check out the gallery on the main site.

The red Might heroes were the first to be designed, and are perhaps the most iconic in the game. The red/red Berserkers showcase the color's stylistic elements: top-heavy with tiny legs, wild, a bit bloodthirsty, with no thought of defense. Tattoos were an early idea that ended up moving to blue.

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When I agreed to start drawing the game, Kevin provided me with a ton of red concept art to get things rolling. As you can see in the gallery, a lot of the look and feel from these early sketches made it into my final art.

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Including concept sketches for each of the red-dominant hero classes:

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As with the other colors, he also sketched a page full of random details and bits that I could use for red, which was a huge time-saver.

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Take a look at how the early Jarl sketch above translated into the final design, and all the yellow traits that it exhibits (which were covered in detail in Part 1) .

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To make each color further recognizable, they each had their own background setting. Red scored the high mountains, but terrain from each class's recessive color sometimes bleeds in as well: in this case, forests from green, water and mist for blue, and stone spires from yellow.

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There you have it: the creation of Norsaga's burliest heroes.

Meeple Mechanic designer interview with Kevin Bishop

  During the first week of the Norsaga Kickstarter we won the Meeple Mechanic's Kickstarter Badger award, which recognizes well-run campaigns. We were super excited about this, not least because of this cool graphic:

This week, MM creator Daniel Zayas interviewed Kevin about the design process for the game. You can read the interview here, as well as other interviews with cool people, since Daniel does this regularly!

The interview contains some great questions from Richard Ham (Rahdo Runs Through),  Gordon Calleja (Posthuman), and Seth Johnson and James Ernest (Titans of Tabletop). They all have cool projects currently on Kickstarter and worth checking out.