This month I finally finished my latest horror-themed one-page RPG, which draws inspiration from movies such as 30 Days of Night, The Thing, and The Mist, and it comes with an adventure guide that can be used with (or without) Tricube Tactics: Dead of Winter!
I started working on this one back in June, but I kept going back and forth on the specifics. It also didn't help that I somehow managed to mix up Alaska and Antarctica while writing it (I think I got confused while researching locations because The Thing was filmed in Alaska but was set in Antarctica). I had originally envisioned setting the scenario in northern Alaska (similar to Barrow in 30 Days of Night), but I wanted somewhere with trees for the monsters to hide in, so I eventually ended up setting it in Valdez.
I also got stuck for a long time on the adventure guide; it was initially going to be an example adventure, but as the one-pager uses an incident generator (similar to the Welsh Werewolf one-pager) rather than an adventure generator, I ended up doing something similar to the guide I wrote for Runespire Academy.
The cover for this product is also a good example of how I sometimes photobash images together using stock art. The illustrations came from Rick Hershey's Publisher's Choice Stock Art Patreon, which is a great way for indie publishers like me to build a large collection of good-quality, inexpensive stock art (and better still, he allows his artwork to be modified). Rick has a different theme every month, and December last year had the theme "Winter Noir", which is where most of the images in Dead of Winter came from.
I took five individual pieces of stock art:
I then combined the illustrations (and modified the background image) to create the product cover:
The characters on the cover (along with the background) were also used for two of the character cards:
Each of my one-pagers has one or two illustrations, and several come with illustrated character cards. That wouldn't be financially feasible for me with commissioned artwork.
The background textures for the pages come from Figu Design; I've bought loads of her Template Packs from DTRPG, and I just pick one (or combine a few) to fit each new one-pager's theme. The character card backgrounds are also based on Figu's covers, although I have to modify those quite a bit, as they're designed for book covers.
