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When Janaka Stucky & the fine people at Blazing Worlds agreed to send me a copy of the recently released (and wonderfully named) Ekphrastic Beasts in return for an honest review, well, I was rather excited. I was excited not just because I was getting something for free….. I’m not that cheap and shallow, you know. Well actually I am, but anyhoo. No, I was excited because I had been aware of of the previous Kickstarter campaign for the book and had been swooning from afar over some of the gorgeous artwork involved, as well as the compatibility the product was intended to have with 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
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I know what you’re thinking……. what the hell Is Ekphrastic?
Well in the words of the man Janaka himself……
“Ekphrastic writing is the vivid, often dramatic description of visual art. Our project is a full-color fantasy art book, which leads with spectacular artwork from 4 of today’s most exciting weird illustrators, that also functions as an artist-created compendium of creatures for the 5th edition of the world’s most popular role-playing game!
Rather than revisit known fantasy tropes, we begin with four established illustrators each creating striking, startling, original artworks straight from the abyssal depths of the subconscious. Each piece is then given to our author to reverse engineer creature names, back-stories, and stats for them all! The result: an artist-created compendium of stunningly illustrated creatures, spirits, and demons which have never seen the light of day or dark of dungeon before!
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“When not sitting at a table, ravenously devouring junk food with your friends and rolling polyhedral die to determine heroic successes or tragic failures, some of the most fun we had growing up with roleplaying games was browsing the fantastic compendiums of monsters, which provided the countless deadly antagonists for our dungeon crawls and other-planar encounters. These phantasmagoria of fiends, ghosts, fae folk, and mythic figures fed our imaginations while the accompanying illustrations brought them vividly to life.
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Decades later, we still love to browse these volumes and it’s clear that all those years of monster immersion have twisted—er, *shaped*—our creative identities. Now we’re ready to call forth new monsters from the fertile grounds of our imagination, using the artistic talents we’ve cultivated over the years to share them with you!”
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This project is a full-color fantasy art book, featuring spectacular artwork from 6 of today’s most exciting weird illustrators, that also functions as an artist-created compendium of creatures for the 5th edition of the world’s most popular role-playing game. After raising over $60,000 on Kickstarter, the book is now available for purchase to the general public!
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So what’s included?
Written by Janaka Stucky, with illustrations by Jeremy Hush, Joe Keinberger, Ellie Livingston, Nathan Reidt, Arik Roper, and Skinner.
- 148 pages of entirely original monsters, complete with backstories and stats compatible with the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons
- Full page, color illustrations on every spread
- Multiple beastly indexes in the back! (e.g. “Tentacles: pages 6, 9, 32”)
- Printed on premium 80lb. gloss paper
- Black linen wrapped hardcover with gold foil stamp bound with coordinating headbands
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So what do we think?
To begin with, the book is both lovely to behold and to hold with the sturdy black lined wrapped hardcover embossed with the gorgeous gold foil stamp and surround. The paper inside (801b premium gloss paper no less) is sturdy enough to stand up to months and years of constant player & DM use – a feature that is often given less prominence by creators, as so often a softback on cheaper paper looks great to begin with, but soon loses its look and integrity after people like myself have got their grubby little hands on them.
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The book begins with a detailed preface and introduction from Janaka as he outlines the inspiration and process of creating a monster manual. The back-story of the process is fascinating and something that I wish more writers would do for expansion books, providing a basis and explanation for the choices made ( for instance, deciding that it would be more fun for the group of artists to create whatever they wanted). This resulted in Janaka essentially filling in the blanks of the monster back-stories and stats. There is also an interesting insight into his philosophical reasoning behind his creation choices.
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The introduction is equally engrossing as it provides a number of specific notes and points purely for DM’S in terms of mechanical adaptations, creature alignment, gender identity. Janaka’s intention was to ‘create loosely weaving multiple narratives across the book and thus reflect the complexity and often inter-connected chaos of the real world that we live in. I tend to think he succeeded,
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Quite simply, the book is beautiful, just beautiful, containing page after page of stunning, unsettling and gorgeous creatures complete with accessible yet beautifully written description and stats for each and every creation. If you had to nail me down and tickle my feet with a feather in order find out my favourite of the creatures – well the Bog Hag would have to be pretty close, if only in part for the name itself…… In truth, he had me at “These malicious horrors, dripping with slime, have been transformed by rage into lumbering monsters of the marsh, where they seek to slake their thirst for vengeance with the blood of all who dare to trespass in their gloomy domain”. Sounds like an ex-girlfriend of mine…..
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It has to be said that book is a beautifully crafted collection which includes absolutely everything that ordinary people (the players) and DM’s (the important people in charge, like me) need in order to fall down the delicious rabbit hole of Ekphrastic Beasts. The book is clearly and lovingly laid out in a fashion that is both informative and entertaining combing the fabulous artwork and written detail throughout.
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About Blazing Worlds
In the eternal present of our mundane lives, the future stretches out before us as an infinite darkness, a mystery unravelled only in real time. Nonetheless, our human imagination provides us with a way to light a path through that darkness. In games we find a way to collectively dream into this expansive void of the unknown, like a sonar pinging back potentialities…
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As an engine for fantastic visions of unachievable wonders and terrifying catastrophes, Blazing Worlds brings together some of today’s most exciting artists, authors, and scholars to generate visionary new content for your tabletop gaming adventures. An artist-owned collaborative named after The Blazing World, a 17th-century novel of utopian proto-speculative fiction by Margaret Cavendish, we are publishing original content in concise, collectable, compellingly designed TTRPG books and materials across digital and physical platforms.
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Whether through new monsters, new maps, new equipment, new character options, new worlds, or entirely new systems, Blazing Worlds provides exciting and thoughtful writing paired with brilliant illustrations that develop innovative visions for the worlds you create and inhabit.
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