Hi everyone,
As Aldarron said - wait just a little longer.
One thing we want is lots of quality artwork. Artists are a bit finicky. They need time, and maybe the moon has to be in the correct stage too. They might even need a bit of coddling. We understand, you can't force creativity.
The big names working on this project are as follows:
Bob Bledsaw Jr. he did the FFC and it was obvious he had to be part of this project.
Ken Fletcher who worked at Adventure Games is doing some pieces.
Walter Moore who illustrated some of Arneson's modules is also on the project.
We've got some new unknown artists that are contributing as well. They are doing really wonderful old style Black and White work for the book.
Also, we had some issues come up with the original map maker that really set us back. Not Greg, but rather the artist who was to make newer play maps for the book. We assumed he was doing his thing and left him alone a bit. Then he stopped returning emails. When we finally got in touch with him, it turned out he hadn't actually done much. So we tried to work with him, but he was onto other things in his life.
We tried reaching out to some of the really well known cartographers, such as Dyson Logos. Every one of them said: Gee, this looks like an awesome project, but I am up to my eyeballs in work right now.
In the meantime, we realized that the old maps are hard to decipher. They are unique in how they are rendered and as a personal artifact for Greg Svenson, we're sure he can read them easily. I have been running Tonisborg for my own gamer group and I have trouble with some of the markings on the maps.
The maps we have are not Greg's originals, these are old photo copies that have then been colored by David Megarry.
The obvious next step would be to talk to David Megarry and see how he see's these maps. David redrew all the maps for us, so now we have some pretty good guides of what is there and what isn't there. Yet, even with this set of maps, we're having to do a bit of archeology and brain-work in order to get accurate reproductions.
Enter Toby of Dark Realm Maps
https://www.patreon.com/darkrealmmapsWe contacted Toby and he seemed to be a really good fit for this project. We have 2 levels done and another on the way.
We will keep you posted about progress, or you can go look at his twitter feed, he has been posting little teasers of the Tonisborg maps:
https://twitter.com/darkrealmmaps