beyondthelastwar

[beyondthelastwar]

The wikata: the Great Johnnie Bernstein’s mount of choice! Which mount would you choose? Read on below!

[beyondthelastwar]

Which Steed Would You Ride?

There are a lot of different mounts to choose from Beyond the Last War! In a world where fuel has become scarce, nations have had to find other ways to from place-to-place and fight amongst each other.

When compared to the Balaskan trihorns and razors, the carnivorous haliback, or even the Voeting’s luminous bjonk, the unassuming wikata seems like a strange choice. But don’t be fooled! This mount is preferred by everyone from merchants, to hordesmen, to the infamous Johnnie Bernstein for good reason.

While appearing to be little more than an overgrown camel, wikatas have incredibly healing abilities that allow them to recover in day’s time from almost any battle. Their stamina is unmatched, and--like a camel--they store water in their humps, allowing them to live for long periods without water. This is a distinct advantage for desert warfare!

What about me, you ask? I’d ride a razor (if it let me). It might not be very practical in a long desert trek, but really, who could turn down the opportunity to ride atop an armored tyrannosaurus with a machinegun on its back? 

Not me.

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The Trihorn!

Learn more about this Balaskan mount from Beyond the Last War in the post below.

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The Trihorn

The story behind the trihorn was both fun and challenging to create. Fun: modern-looking soldiers riding armored triceratops into battle (yes, please!). Challenge:  how do you get a dinosaur as a mount in a post-apocalyptic setting? Hmm...

The explanation didn’t have to be perfect, but there had to BE one. Jurassic Park, for instance, used the blood of mosquitos who had preyed on dinosaurs and were fossilized in tree sap to create a dino park. Impossible? Yes. Feasible enough to suspend disbelief? Absolutely! And that’s where a lot of the fun lies in sci-fi. You can create beautiful and believable worlds that are wonderful because they’re fantastic, but that make people think, “Well maybe this really could happen... It’s unlikely but...” 

The possibility (not the probability) is what captures the imagination.

My explanation for the trihorns lay in the contemporary notion that we could potentially reverse engineer dinosaurs from existing animals. One wonderful fact about our current world is that dinosaurs still outnumber mammals 2 to 1 (no, really). Birds aren’t just LIKE dinosaurs, they ARE dinosaurs. Descendents of one of the most jaw-dropping creatures that ever existed. They’re still with us! (That in itself is inspiring and as fantastic to me as anything else).

So how did the Balaskans get to ride triceratops in Beyond the Last War? Well, imagine we could easily replicate past species via reverse engineering. Also, imagine a dying future Earth where all species are on the path to extinction. Wouldn’t you want to create a genetic repository of some sort? And if you started one of these, might you also want to include past species if such a thing were possible?

That’s just what the scientists in Kiel did before the nuclear war. And since Kiel was the only city known to the Confederacy that did not take a direct hit from the nuclear bombs that ended the Last War, they maintained this repository into the post-apocalyptic age.

Now! Imagine you are a king in a post-apocalyptic world. It is running out of fuel, and your refineries and capacity to mine is slim to none. You still need to be able to get around, and you want some cavalry for war! You may ressurect any species you choose to serve as a war mount. You need something that might actually cooperate with you for your regular soldiers, but something that is also nearly unstoppable in a charge.

What better than a triceratops?

[beyondthelastwar]

The Gangs of Soot Vienna

I’m hosting weekly discussions in the Beyond the Last War Book Club over on facebook, and this week’s topic was Beware the Demon Queen--the second chapter of Episode One: Welcome to Soot Vienna. While this chapter is first and foremost an introduction the Demon Queen, you also get a peek into what gang life is like in Soot Vienna.

Gang culture in soot cities across the Confederacy is as complex as it is rampant. Soot slickers live and die based off the allegiances they make to the underworld. The Confederacy claims to protect its citizens in exchange for their undying loyalty and taxes, but the reality of the situation is very different.

While the Confederacy does defend soot slickers against devastating storms such as Raging Earth and the carnivorous bugs of the desert--scratis--the streets are still foreboding and terrifying. Confederate soldiers generally do not involve themselves in the day-to-day matters of the soot world, and the police are corrupt and poorly equipped. The dangerous mutants that lurk in the night, nefarious bandits, and crooked cops make allegiance to one gang or another manditory for survival.

Soot slickers who are already hard-pressed to pay their taxes month-to-month must give away what little they have left to ensure “protection” from whatever gang happens to dominate their territory.

In Soot Vienna, one gang has taken a stand against this culture--the Cheaters. While participating in their fair share of black market trade, and unable to directly combat the Confederacy itself, Drake Kicklighter (leader of the Cheaters) took it upon himself to eliminate his rivals and unite the underworld under one rule. His hope was to eliminate the internal strain of gang warfare and violence, and eliminate the “gang tax” on the city’s people. 

He might have accomplished his goal if it wasn’t for the Demon Queen...

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The nine-tailed stalker of the streets!

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Mutants of the Soot: Maul Dog

Since I’ve been featuring a “Mutant of the Month” on Facebook, I decided I’d take some time here to talk about the inspiration behind August’s Maul Dog. 

A few posts ago I discussed how Beyond the Last War all began with a game I made up with my childhood friend, Alex. That said, a lot of the mutants’ earliest versions were represented by some kind of action figure or another we played with when we were kids.

The maul dog was once simply called a “runner” and was inspired by the Kenner “Panther Alien”. Kenner made dozens of these figurines loosely based off the Alien franchise back in the 90s, and I owned ALL of them. They came with a really bad comic with incredibly cheesy action sequences. For example, at some point the good guys kill the xenomorph queen by miraculously snatching her up with a drop ship and releasing her into a conveniently placed active volcano.

...Anyway...

The maul dog, or “mauler” as it’s referred to by soot slickers, evolved from there. I always thought of it as some kind of mutant street dog, and eventually added the nine poison tails to give it the punch it needed to compete with other, more intimidating mutants of the soot.

My illustrator, Rolan Reboso, put the final touches on the mauler’s form. As you can see a few posts down, he came up with three sketches based off my descriptions, and then fleshed the final one, above.

Though the maulers really only have one major interaction with the main characters in Beyond the Last War: The Wayward Mercenary, they are an important part of the backdrop for Soot Vienna, and will definitely be getting more lime light in the sequel!

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Rolan Reboso (Illustrator for Beyond the Last War)

https://www.fiverr.com/lanreboso

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How I met my Illustrator

If you’ve checked out the website www.beyondthelastwar.com or are already following the Beyond the Last War Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram pages, you may have seen some of the amazing creature and nation designs by my new friend, Rolan Reboso. 

Rolan runs gigs over on Fiverr, so if you’re looking for help to develop concept art, or just want to see your characters come to life, he does amazing work for a very reasonable price. You can check out his page.

I highly recommend taking a look--and if you have the ambition--take him up on a gig and see what he can do for you!

Right now, Rolan and I are working on a new project--a graphic novel for the first episode of Beyond the Last War: The Wayward Mercenary (which is divided into three parts, all leading up to mercenary Johnnie Berstein’s dramatic confrontation with the dreaded Demon Queen). 

I can’t tell you just how excited I am at the prospect of seeing my work come to life in that way. Beyond the Last War has always been a very visual story, and while I believe the written version is beautiful in its own right, it is really something special to see the characters and creatures you’ve had in your head for so long spring off the page at you.

There were more artists that helped me create a professional final cut of the book, but I’ll talk more on them later!

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Fantastic work by my friend and artist Rolan Reboso developing the maul dog!

See the completed work and creature background here.

[beyondthelastwar]

How Beyond the Last War Began

Good Afternoon All!

I wanted to create a space here on Tumblr that was a little different from the rest of my social media pages, where I could talk a bit about the creative process behind Beyond the Last War.

For this first issue I’m going to discuss the Beyond the Last War origin story!

I first started developing Beyond the Last War when I was 15 years old with my best friend, Alex. He used to come over almost every weekend. 

I lived for that time. 

I spent the entire week, where I (probably?) should have been focusing on school developing ideas for the games we’d play: unique story worlds inspired by Aliens, Jurassic Park, Titan AE, Dragon Ball Z, or whatever other sci-fi thing caught our fancy. We were always looking for something new and thrilling!

In any case, Alex and I created these story worlds together in something we used to call “figure games” (because of the action figures we used as playing pieces), which got more and more sophisticated until we’d basically reinvented Dungeons and Dragons (something we never knew existed until our late teens!). We came up with story after story, with dice and statistics and character backgrounds, but unlike Dungeons and Dragons, it was all made up on the fly. Other friends got involved and added their own ideas and concepts and personalities, deepening the plot and richness of whatever world we were working with that week. 

As you can imagine, this spontaneity made each of our games either spectacularly creative and dazzling, or completely disastrous paths to nowhere. It was about a 50/50 split, but the ones that hit--oh man were they something! It felt as if you were actually there when a twist happened, some major character died in battle, or we triumphantly defeated the main “bad guy”. There was nothing contrived or expected--it was all just the fanciful imagination of children inspired by their favorite tales.

Out of the greatest stories, though, one stood out above the rest--the world that would eventually become Beyond the Last War. It was brilliant and breath-taking then, and it still inspires me to this day.

I’m 31 now, and a Surface Warfare Officer in US Navy. I’ve acted as the Operations Officer onboard a ship in dangerous times, and I’ve been around the world and back (twice). Even still, any time my responsibilities don’t keep me occupied on what’s in front of me, I can’t help but envision the dark depths of the Demon Queen’s Lair, Drake Kicklighter locking muscles and wits with his nemesis, Barg, or Johnnie Bernstein standing down the Phoenix King in the middle of a coliseum while the entire world looks on.

Beyond the Last War isn’t just a story for me--it is a part of who I am. It is inspired by the people I’ve loved, the spectacular things I’ve seen, the fantasy I cherished as a child, and the places--as real to me in many ways as the real world--that have only ever existed inside my mind and the minds of my closest friends.

[beyondthelastwar]

[beyondthelastwar]