Kyla was looking for someone to illustrate Godsforge, and Cam recommended an artist that he had worked with before. So Kyla looked him up on Google and saw examples of his work, which was super distinctive and a striking visual direction for the game. She reached out by e-mail to
see if he was available and interested. He was! Deal was signed, fantastic art was produced, game went to press. Some time later, Cam asked, "So hey, were you ever going to get in touch with Diego?" and Kyla was like "Yeah! We signed him! You should check out the sketches!"
And the compared notes to discover that Kyla had reached out to a TOTALLY DIFFERENT Diego Rodriguez, living in a different continent and different country, who had no previous game illustration experience. Instead, his art career was in customizing skateboards.
So I guess some day the Spanish skateboard artist just got a cold call e-mail out of the blue from some American game producer asking if he'd be interested in illustrating a game and he was like, sure? why not?
So anyway, if it seems like Godsforge has a visual aesthetic or idiom that is pretty far out for what you expect in a board game, that's why. Also, as a publisher, I can tell you that so far we only have good things to say about working with guys named Diego Rodriguez worldwide.
(Cam and/or Kyla may have corrections or embellishments to the details here, but this is now official company lore that I've told multiple strangers at conventions and now on Twitter, so it's established truth that is only waiting to be put on Wikipedia to become eternal.)
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As EU backers continue not to like paying for shipping and tax, I thought I'd do a little exercise to check my own sanity on numbers for Gloomier. At this point in time, we have 212 backers in all EU countries combined. (This puts the EU in the aggregate as #3 behind US, GB, CA.)
In comparison we have 442 UK backers, so post-Brexit our EU market is less than 1/3 the size it was, which has a big impact on logistics, as everyone who suddenly found customs bills accompanying packages between UK and EU in January has learned.
So these 212 backers have thus far pledged $7868 toward shipping + tax, which is an average of $37.11 per order. It is not clear right now exactly what the total in pledges and add-ons is to go with that shipping bill. I'm taking a stab at saying $113 per order, as the average
Wow, there are morons trying to start a "DNDgate" thing. With complaints about "attempted SJW entryism of non-gamers into positions of influence over the hobby". What year is this? How long have I been in this industry...working alongside women, POC, trans...? Oh yeah 30+ years.
I've been a pro in this field longer than some of these whining fanboy manbabies have been alive, and they're complaining about the people taking "positions of influence" trying to do things like increase the diversity of representation in games like it's something new.
I mean, JFC, I remember as a freelance writer & editor for TSR on D&D 2nd Edition in the late 80s/early 90s, having WRITTEN GUIDANCE from the company about being thoughtful about increasing representation of women/minorities in the art direction for D&D books.