Deadwood - Wolf Willis art preview

Here's another art sample from the upcoming book/game, GUTSHOT: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEADWOOD. This is a new character, a bounty hunter by the name of Wolf Willis (and his companion, a half-wolf dog that simply goes by the name Wolf). As you can imagine, Willis gets his nickname from his canine companion.

"Wolf" Willis stands ready to face all odds.
(click on image to see full-sized)

Right now, to be honest, I'm not sure if I'm keeping the wolf. I need to create a few more test images to see how he renders and converts into line art. I also need to see how many poses are available for the dog -- pre-set poses help save a lot of time over having to create them from scratch.

Deadwood - Art Update

Mike Foreman -- This young Deputy just got a
big promotion when the Sheriff got mauled by wild
animals... at least they THINK it was animals!

Wow, has it really been that long since my last post here? That's frightening. I haven't been completely silent at the Hawgleg Website, or even at our Facebook page.

I thought I'd give you a glimpse at some artwork that we're developing for the upcoming game, Gutshot: Night of the Living Deadwood.

This is a simple character study of a character who will be featured in some of the images that will go into the Deadwood book.

If you're not sure what I mean, let me explain. You see, when we created the original Gutshot book, we were able to tap into a vast collection of public domain artwork from pulp magazines published in the 1920s - 1940s. There were a lot of great Western magazines published back then, and we really benefited from the artistry of those bygone days; we found dozens of great images of cowboys, gunfighters, gamblers, and so on.

But, as we move forward with our new project, we can no longer find suitable artwork from the past. As you might imagine, there aren't a lot of zombie cowboys to be found in those old magazines. So, we must create new artwork for our new book. Although this creates some difficulties, it also creates some new opportunities. By creating a "cast of characters," our examples will be able to tell a more unified story than we did in our first book. I don't mean we're going to include a lot of fiction, but rather that when we provide an example, we will be able to tell a mini-story the progresses throughout the book. This is sort of what they did back in the Vampire: The Masquerade and World of Darkness books from White Wolf.

Hence, the need for "characters" who will appear in both text and art throughout the book. This first one is Mike Foreman, a young sheriff in a small Western town. He got the job when his old boss was mauled by wild animals. At least they THINK it was wild animals. I mean, what else could it be? His first job will be to investigate who stole the sheriff's body from the undertaker's office before it could be buried.

Stay tuned -- I'll be posting new images here soon, of Mike and some of the other characters from the Deadwood game.

S&S Update: Graphics and typesetting coming along

I've been working on the Showdowns & Shootouts book for a few days (off and on). It's now my "after hours" project and I'm trying to get as much done as I can each evening after work, or during the day during downtime.

So far I've got the Table of Contents, Intro, and the the first adventure set up.

This little fella will be part of our page
treatment for the online resources in
the Showdowns & Shootouts book.

I know this doesn't sound like much, but the first adventure includes all the typesetting and design decisions that will be used throughout the rest of the book. So, from a technical viewpoint, this is pretty big.

Yesterday and today I finally settled on the icon and treatment we will use to reference the Online Components to the book -- that is, the PDF Maps Packs and character sheets that are on the Website. Although we'll include thumbnails of these in the book, we're not going to reprint them in the entirety because they would really be a waste of paper.

After all, each adventure includes all the character stats, weapons and info, so even if you didn't have access to the online character sheets you could fill out your own.

The Map and River Packs from the later adventures will be covered a bit more fully in the book, but we still won't be reprinting each and every tile (there are 9 tiles in Dion Duran's "I Hit a Vein!" adventure). There's just not enough value to be had by printing each of the tiles -- but of course, we'll print the one-page map overview.

Anyway, things are definitely picking up steam. Once I finish the page with the online references for Al's adventure, I'll move on to the next. And that one (and the subsequent adventures) will definitely go much faster than the first.

I'll keep you posted as we make progress!

Brainstorming with Paul

I had a great brainstorming session with Paul "Mad Dog" Mauer tonight. We spent about an hour on the phone talking about some ideas for two new convention games that we could playtest this spring and roll out in short order.

I have to give Paul his props when it comes to helping me sort out my thoughts. Even in the early days of our game development, he was right there to serve as a sounding board to tell me when we were on the right track, or when we were shooting into the weeds. For example, it was a long and heated argument outside of Midnight Comics -- after one of our early playtest games in the summer of 2004 -- that Paul's nitpicking with me forced us to hash out the concept for our retaliation shot and to solve the serious problems we were having with rifles and shotguns.

In those early drafts, "the rifle was god." There was no reason to ever carry a different weapon. Paul and I stood out there (more than one evening) outside the store hashing things over and over and over until we figured out what was wrong and made it right.

By the way, I'm not diminishing Murphy's involvement at this time -- he had a work schedule at that time that made him have to leave the very second the games were over. Paul and I, on the other hand, had more flexible hours and we could actually stay up until 2 am on a work night... and least once a week and come in late that day.

But Back To Tonight

I love running convention games, but I've got to admit that after running the same game -- Last Man Standing -- over and over again, I'm interested in trying something new. So Paul and I worked on some new material to shake things up. And potentially change some of our existing melee rules. I don't want to go into too much detail, but suffice to say that things are definitely heating up this spring!

Stay tuned for more updates, saddle pals.

Mike Mitchell

Happy New Year

From all of us at Hawgleg Publishing, we wish the best to you and your family for the new year.

Get Gutshot at Noble Knight Games

We want to say a big "Howdy" to our newest retailer, Noble Knight Games. Aaron and the fine fellas over there are now carrying Gutshot and -- for the first time ever -- our Deadwood miniatures and our Lethal Ladies Gunfighters miniatures. In short, they are carrying all of our Gutshot and Gutshot: Night of the Living Deadwood material.

Noble Knight is one of the coolest online stores we know of. Not only do they carry the latest games, but they also stock hard-to-find games that have been out of print for ages. Heck, they even have more than one copy of TSR's original Boot Hill game available (I'd snatch it up in a second if I had an extra $150 burning a hole in my pocket).

To visit them, check 'em out on the Web: www.nobleknight.com

To check out all our retailers, visit our Website: http://hawgleg.com/retailersList01.asp


PS: We just shipped our stuff to Noble Knight, so it may take a few days to show up in their catalog.

Our Prayers Are With Them...