Finding Art for Undeadwood

Every week both before and after I run a session of Undeadwood Weird West RPG, I work on the book. It has been a truly enriching and enjoyable experience taking so much time to build up a game, and fine tune it. I now have 6 months of playtesting under the belt, too, and I will very soon be ready to both update them development podcast, and release the full version of the game. 

It will come bundled with a VTT-ready 3D map of the sample adventure, a form-fillable character sheet, and a couple of other extras to make sure I am giving people a great head start with the game. 

If you are interested, there is a preview version of available on Drive-Thru RPG at the moment. That will eventually be updated to serve as a quick start kit for the game.

One of the biggest joys in building Undeadwood has been the way I have been hunting for art to fill the manual.  I have been pouring over pulp magazines dating from the 1870s through to the 1950s to find images to integrate into the manual. Because of it, I feel that I have created a very visually pleasing book. 

Uncredited cover from Spicy Western Stories,
A Western Pulp that ran 1936-1942

I wanted to share with you all the method I use for finding the art I am using in undeadwood so that you can use it to find artwork for your own role-playing game materials. 

Now, there is a caveat to this. I am working within the framework of Canadian copyright law. It is a slightly more restrictive form of copyright law than many countries have, but also less constrained than American copyright law. Check your own local laws before you proceed. 

Magazine cover by Rudolph Zirm (1894-1952)

In Canada, a work of art falls into the public domain 50 years after the artist's death if they died before 1973. After 1973 we updated the laws so that the work does not pass into the public domain until 70 years after the Creator's death. This means that currently, anyone who passed on before 1972 has had their work enter the public domain. Anyone who died in 1973 or later will not have their work enter the public domain until the 2040s. 

If a work is uncredited it passes into the public domain 75 years after the date of publication. 

Music and video recordings are not included in this: they enter the public domain 90 years after publication, meaning any recording after 1935 is still not available in the public domain in Canada. 

In order to find large color pieces, I started by looking for exciting pulp covers. Thankfully, there is an amazing blog that publishes nothing but on a daily basis: pulpcovers.com. Every piece of art is well tagged, and if the artist is known it will be mentioned in the tags or in the comments below the piece. 

Uncredited magazine cover for Western Short Stories
Which was in syndication from 1936-1957

Another option is to simply download a pile of pulp magazines to scour for images you like. Archive.org has a vast pulp magazine archive. To be on the safe side, I don't download any from earlier than 1950 for that purpose. 

If the artist is known, the next trick is to go to pulpartists.com and check the biography of the artist. Out of respect, I tend to do my homework on the artist in their life. It's always good to know a little more, and it feels less like a ghoulish activity. 

Interior magazine art by James McKell (1884-1956)

Magazines from before 1936 often didn't publish the artist's name anywhere in the magazine. And before the 1950s they often only credited the cover artist and none of the interior art. It pays to look up the staff artists for magazines of that era to do your own due diligence. If the artwork is signed, it's not considered anonymous even if the magazine does not present a clear signature for you to work with. (Google lens is very helpful for hunting down signatures) Some artists can be quite hard to pin down; either because they use pseudonyms, or were very private people.

Most of them are somewhat easier. If they aren't featured in pulpartists.com, certain Arts auction sites or newspaper archives can be very helpful. 

Once you feel safe that the artist is in the public domain, it pays to look at any other art of theirs available on the internet. And to look at magazines where they were frequently featured artists. It may give you a larger selection to work with. As pulpcovers.com tags by artist, this can be very useful for finding a selection of art you like. I absolutely fell in love with the art of Albin Henning, and was very fortunate to find almost four dozen of his pieces on the internet and in archived PDFs of pulp magazines. 

Now, the photostats of pulp magazines are rarely good quality, and often have a great deal of print on them. Especially in work published after 1930-40 or so, where book design trends had changed. pulps from the 1920s and earlier tend to have better separation of texted image. 

If your image is in a PDF rather than being simply a downloadable image, you may need to use the print screen button on your keyboard to collect a copy of the image at the highest zoom you can manage.

This is where Photoshop or GIMP can be very handy.  I recommend looking up tutorials on repairing images, as it would be hard to provide a good tutorial here. 

Once I got this method down it was easy for me to find hundreds of excellent, thematically appropriate art for my projects, and I thought it might be a helpful tool for the rest of my amateur designers.

An Atari-inspired Campaign for Traveller/ Cepheus Engine

I have been tinkering with a new campaign to play at home with friends and family inspired by my current binge of old Atari games and retro sci-fi. I wrote it specifically for Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition from Stellagama Publishing, but it should run with almost any form of Traveller with a few tweaks.

8 want something lighthearted that captures the kind of fantastical popcorn Space opera that you see in the premise of 80s SF movies like The Last Starfighter or in the manuals and comics that came with early console games.

The bad guys are vile, the good guys fly cool ships, and the stakes are very high. It is definitely not like the Third Imperium... although I decided to keep some of the best ideas of that setting.

Here's my pitch:

Cepheus: IRATA

Game Review: Along the Leyline

Author: Cole Wilkinson 

Publisher: Piranha Squirrel Productiind
Engine: Custom variable die roll over
Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 I was recently sent a copy of Along the Leyline with the most Gen-X review request I'd ever seen. 'Here's a role playing game I made, I like your reviews. Have a copy, review it if you like.' It made my withered 80s kid heart grow two sizes. 

And so I was quite happy to sit down and peruse Along the Leyline and I have to say, I am glad that I have this game in my collection. Of all the games I've picked up in the last year, it is in the running for my favorite alongside Death in Space and for very different reasons.

While Death in Space is a beautifully designed book with a simple and elegant rule system and incredible production values, Along the Leyline is what what "roll your own" looks like! It is built with such incredible love and enthusiasm that it is impossible not to be charmed by it, even if it is full of simple hand drawn sketches, doesn't use any fancy layout or information design, and has rules that feel a little kludgy. Those just make the effort put into creating this from an army of one feel all the better. 

Atari Philosophy - Yars Revenge and Cairn 2e

I have been dealing with general chaos, sick family, family functions, friends in need, and an endless series of stressful diversions this month. While I get by fairly well on meditation, art, prayer, exercise, and reading, some times a guy just needs a diversion to help you blow off steam.

I am also trying to further disconnect from Social Media, because I don't see the point in just making myself angry for no profit. And what else does social media do these days? It sure as hell doesn't inform you of anything. So I have been looking for a habit to build to replace the habit* of popping on to X on my phone.

And I have found a great activity for both!

I recently picked myself up an Atari Pocket Player Pro, a little handheld device that was released for Atari's 50th anniversary by My Arcade.

Any time I need to take a quick brain break, instead of checking my feeds, I grab the gadget, and I play round of an old favourite like Asteroids, Warlords, Solaris, Yar's Revenge, or Missile Command. It takes me only a few minutes to have a satisfying round of Yar's Revenge, unlike a modern game it is easy to put down, and I will come out of it feeling happy and satisfied, rather than grouchy.

This is not a review of the particular device, but if you want some quick observations I will leave some as a comment. Why I'm bringing it up here is that I had a revelation about why I still love and enjoy these games so much, and why, even given the incredible limitations of the technology of the time, they were so darned good.

My Holiday in Outer Space: Cepheus Engine and Mongoose Traveller

Is is January 12 already?!

2025 has been absolutely crazy for me, readers! And not necessarily in a good way. I haven't had much time for hobbies since my Christmastime Dead in Space solo game. But I have had some new things land in my lap and on my hard drive over the Holidays.

Cairn 2e arrived on my doorstep as a late gift last week, and it looks amazing! I am trying to steal some time for a solo game to sink my teeth into it so that I can give you all a fair review. I was also able to replace my ruined copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia with the generosity of everyone who picked up Strange Ways last month.

But the more interesting thing that landed in my lap was synchronicitous.

Spending My Holidays in Outer Space

This Christmas I wanted to travel to outer space, so I brought my hard copy of Death in Space along. Death in Space is awesome, and I played a lot this holiday, but I wanted a bit of variety... 

For years I have had wanted to give Traveller a try as well. Originally written by Marc Miller for the impring Game Designer's Workshop in 1977. It was one of the first role-playing games, and was designed to be able to handle a wide range of different kinds of Science Fiction. It's fans have supported the game with such devotion that it has been in publication pretty much constantly since 1977 in some form or another, and the game remains backwards compatible with products released in the 70s today.

It's biggest influence was the book Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (the second of a trilogy), and a lot of elements, including how hyperspace works in traveller, the Sword Worlds faction, and elements of the history of its original setting, The Third Imperium of Man are lifted straight out of Space Viking.

Interestingly, a lot of pop sci-fi makes reference to Space Viking, but if you missed it (which is easy to do) you wouldn't catch them. For example, Space Viking includes a planet called Hoth and a starship called the Rozinante, which are borrowed respectively by Star Wars and The Expanse.

You can read the book on Project Gutenberg if you are curious. I did as part of my hoiday in space, and I don't think you'd be sorry.

I also made sure that Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition, was on my tablet so that I could finally give myself a taste of Classic Traveller.

If you missed it in my Old-School Science Fiction Roundup, Cepheus Engine is a thrid-party retroclone of Marc Miller's original Traveller RPG, with a few minor quality-of-life tweaks. It was created a few years ago in order to have an open-source version of the game during a lull in its production by its current IP-holder Mongoose Games.

My wife took an interest in Cepheus Engine when I described its life-path character generation Although she didn't enjoy it in practice it led to us both taking a deep dive into the history and various versions of the game.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw that Bundle of Holding had a Traveller Bundle featuring a stack of manuals including both the 2024 update of the core rulebook, and the light-weight Traveller: Explorer Edition.

Merry Christmas!

Readers, you have been a powerful positive motivator for me for the last four years.

This Holiday season, you gave me a fantastic gift.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, and I hope I will be able to keep sharing the awesome for another four.

A Solo Play Report: Death in Space, 51 Ehlee

So, last night I wanted to break in the Zoom H5 I got for an early Christmas present and have fun with a solo RPG at the same time. I'd played Death in Space a couple of times, but I hadn't really managed to try everything the game had to offer, so I decided it was high time to really give it the shakedown it deserved. And its dark, apocalyptic setting seemed the perfect cure for the Holiday blahs. I coupled it with Mythic Game Master Emulator 2e, and dove in.

I recorded my entire 1 hour and 37 minute session, with the idea that maybe I could turn it into bonus content for Swords Against Madness; I would record me figuring out the game Extemporanneously, and then redo it as a story and cut them together in the style of one of my favourite RPG podcasts: P.J. Sack's A Wasteland Story.

That is a podcast well worth your time if you like the older Black Isle / Van Buren Fallout setting, by the way.

As it was, Death in Space lived up to its name, and I didn't make it more than five encouters into the game before my PC died horribly. And you know what? It was incredible fun, but I just don't have enough for a good podcast episode, so Instead I decided I would write it up as a short story to share with you all.

The story includes a couple of horrible torturous deaths, exsanguination, piracy, and inappropriate treatment of a corpse... but I don't think I need to sell it too hard.