Terry Maranda has funded his speculative evolution bestiary on Kickstarter. The campaign runs until December 5th, and so there is time to join in.
The Sol’Kesh project offers the 5e bestiary, an art journal and tabletop minis. First, though, we have got this guest post from Terry about how Sol’Kesh Island came to be.
Building a World, One Creature at a Time
By Terry Maranda
I’ve always been drawing. I’m the cliché artist that’s been sketching since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and was lucky to be raised in a home that encouraged it. Art can be both a passion and a career, and for many professional artists that feeling of passion gets replaced by the grind of their job. I spent most of my career away from what I wanted to draw and, instead, spent a decade doing user interface design for video games. Although I fell into the trap of getting good at something I didn’t want to do, I never stopped drawing what I wanted to draw on the side, and that was creature design.
World building is a great experience, whether you’re a writer, a painter, a Dungeon Master, it’s a wonderful feeling to create. While I spent years building worlds that were inspired by dozens of fictional books and movies, all these worlds hosted villages, empires, and people. Covid changed all of that.
During the pandemic, at the height of the death tolls with no vaccine in sight, I took comfort in the past. I started watching a lot of videos about the Devonian, the Cambrian Explosion, the Triassic, on how life always clings on no matter what turmoil plagues the planet. I learned about how animals evolved to take advantage of new biomes and new predators, how competing for niches shaped them into never before seen forms.
This sort of evolutionary ruleset became a tool for world building like I never experienced. It became creature design that went beyond “the rule of cool” look – it wasn’t about making some killer beast with sharp claws. Speculative evolution instead made me have to consider how the creature lives in a natural setting. To think about what a predator would eat which would then lead me to consider its prey, the natural environment it lives in, and what plant life that prey would eat. These considerations built a world around them on their own, and it felt like I was uncovering life more than creating it. That primal connection between animals and the ecosystems they’re part of made me want to create a microcosm of their lives. One that was devoid of a dominating intelligent species, a world that was raw nature.
With that in mind I began sketching a map, a home to place the creatures within. Sol’Kesh island, large enough to host a variety of biomes but not so large that I would get lost in its immensity. That idea was a key component to my world building. Take a sliver of a world and delve deeply into it, opposed to going too wide and shallow. By doing so, I opened the possibility for a wider world later on, without feeling the stress of filling it all right away.
And so I drew, for over a year I populated the island with no goal in mind besides making the island feel alive and thriving. Until one day a frog was graced by some algorithm machine-god and got a lot of attention. The gomitoad. This brightly colored little amphibian got me thinking about a purpose for this world I was building. After talking to an RPG creator friend, Jaye from Storm Bunny Studios, I decided that a full bestiary book would be an amazing thing to do. So I kept drawing and began giving them 5e rules, first by working with friends and designers, then myself when I got the hang of it. Fortunately, a friend of mine, Pascal from Edge Miniatures and one of the 3 creators of Bendy and the Ink Machine, wanted to model 3d printable miniatures of my creatures. So as partners, we began to plan and create.
I had seen too many friends’ projects start with excitement and then just fade out, so I promised myself I would complete this by making constant incremental progress and to do so, I needed motivation. This was the reason I created a Patreon, while gathering an audience for the eventual book launches was a huge bonus, it was the need to continuously create for the bi-weekly releases and the encouragement from the patrons that kept me going, day after day for over two years now. As the whirlwind of months and creatures have gone by, I’ve felt my motivation to build this world only increase. I honestly thought I’d be burnt out and exhausted from this one project by now, already drawing the next world. Instead, when seeing how excited the speculative evolution and RPG community is to see my next creation, or to read about their incredible suggestions to add to my bestiary (a good dozen beasts are just based off of talks from discord members!) And the fact that they’re already running D&D games with my bestiary-in-progress book on discord, I’ve felt nothing but excitement to keep creating.
During these two years of Patreon content creation, I’ve been really lucky to have collaborated with nearly a dozen absolutely talented Patreon creators, had Sol’Kesh featured in a video from Curious Archive and, best of all, started working with an incredible modeler, Keith (Worldshaper) whose love of creature design really matches my own.
I attribute all of this positive momentum to the original plan of being very open about my incremental progress, by opening up my bestiary for others to play a part in and feel like Sol’Kesh is their own too. Maybe it would have been easier to quietly work away at my own pace but, since many of the creatures and features within just wouldn’t have existed otherwise without the community that helped build this all with me, this was all worth it.
All of these years of effort and creating are finally coming together and, on November 5th, the Kickstarter for the 5e bestiary and the journal art book launched! I can’t wait to get these books in the hands of other world builders out there, and I want to thank every single person that’s been part of the journey so far.
As a last word to those reading this, if you have a world you want to build, start small and enjoy each step of the way.
Quick Links
- Sol’Kesh: Find out more.
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