The Dark Ones

I'll share a personal milestone on this post - the first time one of my articles received magazine cover art.

Dragon 322 features my 'Ecology of the Dark Ones' and they put a very cool dark stalker on the cover. I like the way the artist veered away from the blacks and grays and used a red hooded cloak.

I wrote about half a dozen ecology articles for Dragon and Kobold Quarterly. For those of you not familiar with the format, the ecology article explores the individual and societal lives of game monsters and usually includes some kind of "crunch" material, such as a statistics for variant species or special items. The Dark Ones ecology, for instance, features a number of alchemical items that compliment their sneaky tactics. I like these kinds of articles because they help the gamemaster to not just think of monsters as statistics, but as ways to create interesting encounters.