Wrath and Ruin : My Roleplaying Game

While still on the subject of high fantasy world building, I thought you might appreciate my posting my own stab at it.  As my senior thesis project for illustration I wrote, illustrated, designed, and printed a preliminary sample guide to a high fantasy world I intend to use as the canon environment for my own tabletop RPG and graphic novel series.  For this post I will include a compressed pdf of my book and my artist statement for the work.  I know this is work that was done for another class, but given how much of the subject matter is applicable, I thought it was worth sharing.


:: Wrath and Ruin web PDF :: 


PJ Kempen :: Artist's Statement for Wrath and Ruin

I have always found myself deeply concerned with the sociopolitical, cultural, and naturalistic realities and intricacies of fictional fantasy worlds.  I have always had a pension for world-building, inspired by the work of modern-mythologists like JRR Tolkien and George Lucas.  Upon my discovery of tabletop dice-based roleplaying games, I realized the real-world value of high fantasy.  When combined with a set of rules to govern events within it, fantasy roleplaying games allow one to develop a higher understanding of the issues presented by the world around them by giving them a means to view similar issues from a distanced, mechanical perspective in a way few mediums of fiction can achieve.  Issues of politics, class, race, religion, war, and other deeply personal conflicts which one would seldom address in their day to day life, though they effect everything in the broader world around us, can be played out as detailed, multidimensional ‘what if’ scenarios, free of consequence, and be lead to their natural conclusion.

It was in this realization that I decided to adopt some of the conventions, style, and rule-systems used by modern fantasy games and franchises to create a new world that I feel is better equipped than other fantasy worlds to deals with some very human and often historical concepts not dealt with by most modern fantasy.  Notably, I intended to broaden the range of cultures and character types to encourage the development of more complex characters and stories, removing the unrealistic dichotomy of absolute “good” and “evil”.  While developing the aesthetic, art, and lore of this world, I have also made efforts to improve upon and adapt a new rule system to make it engaging, and exciting for the players. 

This world was designed from the beginning to be elaborated upon.  I intent to further develop this pilot system to add a detailed and unique magic system as a separate book, a bestiary, and various guides and adventures, some of which will be set in alternate time periods.  I have ideas in the works for computer and tabletop strategy games as well as a graphic novel saga of the mythic story that forced me to begin building this world.