The Greatest Adventure...

What lies ahead for these and other adventurers? Cover art ©2016 Jon Hodgson, used with permission.

Just a brief update to those of you interested in what I talked about in my previous post concerning Beyond the Wall. The cover above is what is going to be gracing the PDF for my starter book for BtW. Yes, that is indeed a Jon Hodgson cover. Years ago when I started building my first company I bought the one-time use rights for it from Illodeli, a publishing resource company Hodgson was part of. Years passed and Illodeli folded, but I've kept in touch with Jon and he assures me the agreement holds.

I'm sure those of you who keep a close eye on the module numbers are wondering why this is showing as "BW3" when I previously showed the Dragon's End project cover bearing the same module number. The reason this book will be BW3 is because I suddenly realized that Dragon's End is going to take a lot more writing and work than this one. Additionally, the cover design and title for Dragon's End are still not solidified.

So what happens with the revision of the GM screen? It continues at a slow pace thanks to a number of real life issues (work, broken AC, and vehicle woes). I just wanted to get the cover done because it's part of what stimulates me to work on this stuff. For the record, despite the color cover, the interior will be greyscale because the character art I'm choosing for the character sheets will be greyscale. And yes, the title is a riff on the lyrics from "The Greatest Adventure" by Glenn Yarbrough, which is the theme song to Rankin & Bass' animated version of "The Hobbit".

I look forward to posting more updates about these projects, but it's back to the salt mines for me, folks!

EDIT: There were some concerns raised on the BtW Google+ community regarding the provenance of the artwork I'm using and the fact that two other publications use the same art. To be honest, there's no worry about trade dress issues or confusion of products as the covers are significantly different from one another. as shown here:

My cover, again; artwork ©2016 Jon Hodgson, used with permission.

The cover for OpenQuest by D101 Games. Note that the halfling is now a duck as a nod to the system's roots in RuneQuest and Glorantha.

MaquiEdicion's World of Monsters cover.

Here is another licensed use of the artwork I found online.

So, as you can see, given the differences in cover designs, there's absolutely no way to confuse these products.

Also, here is the exact language of the license, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

By purchasing a download from illodeli.com you agree to be bound by our terms and conditions. 

Artwork is sold on the basis of a single use, non-exclusive license.

In plain English this means:
You may use the piece of artwork once in a single publication. The exceptions to this are filler/spot illustrations which may be used as many times as you desire within one publication.

The copyright to the illustration remains with the artist, who is granting permission to the purchaser to use the illustration once.

Other customers of IlloDeli may also buy the same image and use it. That’s the “non-exclusive” part. 

If you wish to use an illustration more than once in a single publicaiton, or in multiple publications then you simply need to buy it again.

The reason we use this kind of license is because we understand that at certain times buying all rights, or exclusivity to bespoke artwork can be a waste of resources. We would rather you were able to put valuable time and money into ordering bespoke art for when it really counts than in every last instance.

The less exclusivity and re-use we offer with each purchase, the cheaper we can make our illustrations. Given that most art is only used once per book (fillers/spots notwithstanding) we’ve taken that as the baseline of our rights and pricing.

As the purchaser you have the right to crop the work to your needs should that be necessary. 

You may reproduce the artwork smaller than the size it is downloaded at, but we ask that you respect the sizes given in each category. This give e-publishers a certain amount of wiggle room, since they are generally working at lower resolutions than print. And we are fine with that. But please, no buying quarter pagers and reproducing them as covers!

We request you do not use downloads from Illodeli.com to make derivative works – processing with filters, recolouring, making heavy colour adjustments. Over laying of trade dress, logos and so on is fine. We like to keep things as simple as possible, and offering artwork to you the customer, to be used as closely to its downloaded state is our aim. There are potential legal implications to allowing the use of our work to make derivative works which we would really rather not get into. We hope you understand. All artwork should be credited as (C)2008 the artist. If you wish to mention Illodeli.com that’s greatly appreciated, but we do not demand it. Hopefully as a customer you will be satisfied enough to mention it to your friends in publishing anyway! If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us. We would much rather deal with a “silly” question than leave you guessing.

All our artists also provide bespoke work to order, and can be contacted through the links on this site to make deals outside of IlloDeli. We do ask that of course you don’t bother them by offering less money for the same rights we sell here – the whole point of the site from the artists’ perspective is to cut out all that unnecessary communication and allow you to buy direct from Illodeli. However if you like what you see and you’d like to commission more in a similar vein, to order a special bespoke piece, or you’d like to talk about exclusivity, then by all means drop them a line.

By offering this service we recognise are taking something of a risk. We aren’t going to be able to track every use of our work as sold through this site. But we do hope that you respect our work, and respect the service enough to honour our terms. In that way we can continue to provide what we feel is great art at a great price delivered quickly and simply to your desktop. The better it works out, the more stock we will add, the more artists we will bring on board, and the better it will become as a resource for our customers. Of course if it turns out the temptation not to comply with these conditions is too great then we reserve the right to cancel membership at any time without notice. If such a situation was regularly to come to pass then we would clearly have to rethink the whole enterprise. So please let’s all play fair!

Thank you for ordering from illodeli.com. We hope you find your artwork attractive, useful and a lucrative investment!

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The license on any artwork which has not been paid for due to technical fault or complications with third party payment processors is not valid until the account is settled.

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