Alex Cunningham's page

Is it possible that Frog God made a .pdf of maps--presumably for people, like me, who use a virtual tabletop--that feature images with such low resolution that they actually look _worse_ than the zoomed-in MS-Paint-cropped maps I yanked from the original RAZOR COAST book? Apparently it is.

Post script: Frog God might want to look into someone to help with their digitization as the main book of Razor Coast suffered the reverse problem: no option for a chapter by chapter version (as Paizo does even with their much shorter Adventure Path books) and poor optimization made for a .pdf that was so unwieldy and bloated it was impossible to read through without waiting a full second for each page to load.

Let it be stated first and foremost: the cover to BLOOD OF THE MOON is one of the coolest images in Paizo history: out-bloody-standing layout, color balance, asymmetry, details, subtle humor, and implied narrative.

Now onto the "Steve Prescott Memorial* Review of the Art of BLOOD OF THE MOON Brought to You by the Steve Prescott Fan Club".

I credit Pathfinder's (and Paizo's) proliferation with reinvigorating the RPG/Fantasy art genre, especially where it bleeds through into pulp- and comics-inspired work. I fell newly in love with Steve Prescott's work by checking out the COUNCIL OF THIEVES cover art, and went on to buy some original work from him and to pore over the stacks of WEREWOLF: THE APOCALYPSE books - crammed full of his dynamic, crisp ink drawings - that I hadn't taken off my shelves in years.

See, hundreds of World of Darkness illustrations (and, quite literally, c. 10,000 years of human art) prove that it's hard to mess up something as innately compelling as animal-human hybrids. Prescott arguably made his career on mining that same vein and striking gold time and again.

The interior art of BLOOD OF THE MOON, astoundingly, belies this. In attempting to avoid ad hominem attacks on the individual artists (or on individual illustrations), I would like to merely suggest this to the (otherwise dedicated and successful) Paizo art editors: please be aware that awkward silhouetting, smudged details, imbalanced highlights, confused posing and proportions, Native American stereotyping that was stale when WoD brushed up against it, unrealistic clothing, simplistic props/weapons, overly-thick tattoos, and palsied hands can indeed make a book go from a "must-buy-as-it's-perfect-for-my-campaign-and-the-Halloween-Season" to a "must-rant-about-unfulfilled-expectations-on-the-Internet", despite rich writing, balanced rules, compelling fluff, and thoughtful layout.

Please also just give Steve Prescott gobs of money to reprint BLOOD OF THE MOON with his old WoD art in it. I'll buy three.

*I am aware Rottface is not dead. Rottface can never die.