A Song of Ice and Fire Characters – Renly Baratheon

Again, another character for the Game of Thrones RPG.
Renly Baratheon is the youngest of the Baratheon brothers.
Young, handsome, charming and somehow frivolous, I have to confess he is one of the characters I liked the least.
Yet I’m quite happy about how he turned out.

In my mind he was pretty much a spoiled brat.
When Robert and Stannis rode around the Seven Kingdoms wreaking havoc, he stayed safe at home playing with his toys.
I know he couldn’t help it because he was too young, and yet there he was.

When Robert eventually won the kingdom, Renly was given the biggest castle, even if he never fought a battle in his entire life.
Ok, there were reasons, but he could have at least acknowledged the fact that he didn’t deserve any of what he got and say thanks.
Just “thanks guys, you did the hard job and I’m enjoying your stuff, I love you” would have been enough for me.

If Game of Thrones were set in this century, Renly would be the rich twat spending his days driving daddy’s SUV and being awesome with the girls.
Anyway.

By the Game of Thrones books Renly used to love dressing all pretty, he had a shiny, finely decorated enameled armour which, I figure, was not exactly designed for a real battle.
He looked great in it though.
For the armour I referenced heavily to a really cool plate armour I saw at the British Museum. It had been crafted for a prince (I don’t remember who to be honest) and I think it would have suited Renly pretty well.

A friend of mine pointed out that his face seems a bit too polished compared to the rest of the drawing, but I actually meant to paint his face as clean as possible, so I think it works fine.
Any more details would have made him look older, or possibly tougher than I meant to.
I see him as a young, unexperienced pretty guy wearing an expensive armour, I didn’t want him to look like a great warrior.
Understood Renly? You’re not a great warrior!

by Paolo Puggioni

Other GOT Characters – Mord

Another character I designed for Green Ronin’s Game of Thrones – A Song of ice and Fire Campaign Guide.
Mord is a minor character in the Game of Thrones series, but he has an interesting personality.

He is the jailer at the Eyrie, he is brutal, half witted and at his best quite unpleasant.
By the description given in the books he is quite obese, with stained teeth and a lopsided skull, this as a result of an axe blow that just accentuated his god-given ugliness.
His favourite past time is teasing and torturing his prisoners, who are held in cells open on the side of the impossibly tall cliff the Eyrie is built on.
Most times detainees jumped in the void out of desperation, in equal measure due to the incessant winds, the tempting heights and Mord’s mistreatments.

What I meant to convey were his viciousness and dimness, only partially mitigated by his avidity.
Which, now that I think of it, are recurring traits of most secondary Game of Thrones characters.

As a side note, halfway through the process I realised my Mord looked like someone I knew, but I couldn’t point my finger on it.
Then it eventually dawned on me that he looked pretty much like the evil twin of what people considered the Fool in my old home town, back in Italy.
I remember I was pretty much one of the few who liked to talk to the guy. He wasn’t a fool at all, but he didn’t mind others to believe him such.
It lowered expectations and eased the pressure, he said. Also, he could afford to insult people in the middle of the street and yell swearwords every time he pleased, which is undoubtedly fun, cathartic and not at all frowned upon when you’re considered the Town Fool.

Awesome person, but yes, he was as ugly as a night on the toilet.
Once I realised where I was heading to, I just decided to go with the flow, and tried my best to stick to the face I had in mind. Minus the scar and the missing ear of course.
I don’t think he’s ever seen giving his back to the void in the Game of Thrones books (lest he got happily pushed over by his prisoners). But I chose to take this liberty to make who he was clearer.
As if keys and chains weren’t enough.

by Paolo Puggioni

King Robert

Green Ronin has just released its update to A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide, another Game of Thrones RPG Rulebook I’ve worked on.
This is King Robert Baratheon, after the Battle of the Trident events which led to his ascent to the Iron Throne.

I could have depicted him in many ways.
Robert was as quick to laughter as he was to rage, he was bold and charming, and the most fearsome warrior of his times.
As a character he could have been suited well both holding a horn of ale or bored to death while attending to one of the kingly duties he loathed so much.
He seemed to enjoy just the idea of being a king, but not so much all the responsibilities that came with the position.

For this particular illustration I chose to see him already ahead in his life, aged by the burdens of the Iron Throne, the intrigues of his court and the excesses he was used to.
According to the Game of Thrones books, he couldn’t fit into his old armour any more. However, I figured he would love to wear some battle garments here and there, as a reminder of how he was.

Unfortunately by the time they offered me the assignment I was already working on something else, so I could only accept a limited amount of illustrations.

Which sucks, because the characters for this assignment were all pretty cool, and I enjoyed the job quite a lot.
Also, I had just finished reading the second book of the Game of Thrones series, and I had their faces (or how my mind imagined them) still vivid in my mind.

I’ll post some more characters in the next few days.
And I’ll stay by the door waiting for the postman to deliver my second big shiny book🙂

by Paolo Puggioni

My Shiny New Song Of Ice and Fire Stuff Has Arrived

To my great surprise – I didn’t expect it so soon – Green Ronin sent me two copies of the Game of Thrones Rule Book I’ve worked on, A Song of Ice and Fire.
Being credited in video games is pretty cool, but having your name printed on the pages of a heavy, chunky, glossy RPG manual is a completely different thing.

For a start, when I was a kid and was introduced to the colourful, nerdy world of role playing games, the first thing I thought was “wow, when I grow up I totally want to have my drawings published on a RPG manual. It will never happen though”.
There you go, Past Me, it actually happened!

Second, books are a lot easier to brag about with friends. They sit on shelves, and you can discretely wave at them until someone realises there’s a new thing amongst your collection, and you can go – very casually – “Ah yes, that’s just the new Game of Thrones game, I worked on it”.

Also, books smell awesome, especially glossy ones. I won’t go into the books vs. tablet debate, but that’s precisely the reason why I’ll stick with paper as long as I can. Sorry trees, it’s not my fault you smell so good.

Anyway, these are some of the pages.
I was pleased to notice one of my drawings was used as the back cover art. The excellent Cover Art is Michael Komark’s.
The prints are slightly darker than the originals and they lost some mid-tones, next time I must remember to tweak the brightness before submitting.
As for the rest, it all looks so good I’m almost considering going back to Role-playing. I just need to cut my sleeping hours to three-four a day.

by Paolo Puggioni

Other GOT Characters

Here are another couple of characters from the series I drew for Green Ronin’s Game Of Thrones RPG, A Song of Ice and Fire.
I can’t really tell which part of the book the Knight in the Snowstorm is in, the brief was simply about a knight having a hard time in a snowy landscape, and here he is.

The second character is a generic bandit of the many who infest the forests of Westeros.
There are many of this kind in the Game of Thrones book, preying on weaker travellers and being generally mean.
In this particular illustration the villain is waiting for his victim to appear from a clearance in the forest.

I can’t decide whether I made a mistake with the composition or not.
My intention was to convey “wait” and “something is about to happen coming from that side”. However, it might be that the bright patch on the right and the guy staring at it drag the eye outside of the canvas too much. I hope I managed to achieve some balance, I was close to the deadline and I didn’t have much time left for thumbnails at that point.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Game Of Thrones, Artwork From the RPG

I’ve been allowed to publish some of the artwork I’ve recently done for the RPG of A Game Of Thrones by Green Ronin (yay!)
In the next few days I’ll upload some illustrations from the first batch of inside art.

This is Balerion the Black Dread, the biggest dragon that ever lived.
According to the brief, his teeth are as long as swords, and his mouth could swallow a mammoth whole.
As a Concept Artist it’s difficult to imagine a better thing to work on.

It was been great fun to do, even though I have to admit I completely messed up the assignment and I had to redraw it from scratch after the first feedback.
Dragons in George R.R. Martin’s world have no arms. That is, they obviously have hind legs, whereas their arms evolved into wings, as it happens in bats.
I honestly hadn’t thought of that (Dragons in other settings can be quadrupedal with wings as a further set of limbs) and I’ll make sure I’ll get this clarified next time I’ll be asked to draw one.

Anyway, I’m posting the one that got rejected below. It’s not that bad, there are just two spare arms in the composition 🙁
Thanks to Green Ronin for allowing me to post this so soon.

by Paolo Puggioni