When we formally started this project, we had agreed that our best bet would be to commission art. While we still want to bring in another artist for certain things, for instance a painted cover for the rule book, we ultimately had to accept that we can't afford it.
As the ol' maxim goes: "If you want a job doing, do it yourself." So I learned to draw.
I used to run a small webcomic, so I was not a total stranger to drawing, however, anyone familiar with that comic, knows it was not drawn at all well.
If memory serves, I started genuinely learning to draw in 2022, in part because I wanted to, but really motivated by the need of Boundless Nations to be illustrated. Below are examples of concept art I have drawn so far. The earliest is the map, which I believe I started drawing in 2023
Map of the Planet
Luryth
Faction Art
Specific works created for the trailer, will most likely be included in the Core Rule Book
The Jardwnian Festival of Excess
The Jardwn Peninsula is an idyllic paradise, with abundant, docile wildlife, luscious forests, radiant coral reefs, and an average temperature of 19°c all year round. The soil is rich and arable, the seasons are subtle, and the very topography of the hills creates microclimates to cater for all preferences of the land’s flora and fauna.
Nothing of beauty in the Boundless Realms remains untarnished, and for a place so seemingly perfect as this, it must inevitably be exploited by horrors to match.
The Horrors in question are the Peninsula’s namesake, the Jardwnians themselves.
Originally created by a group of Shapers trying to push the boundaries of their own sensory gratification, the Jardwnians are hedonistic in their cruelty, delighting in the ingestion of living beings, dissolving prey, livestock, and POWs alike in digestive enzyme so as to weaken them gradually, drawing out death as long as possible.
For a Jardwnian, it simply isn’t a meal if the food does not struggle.
The Hrvelir Lunar Ritual
The Hrvelir ritual of Inngshish Væskul, "Lunar Summoning" is an ancient and vital practice of Climomancy. At full moon, Hrvelir mages gather to chant in low tones and staccato rhythms, harnessing Lunar energies to draw atmospheric magic towards their settlements. This is captured by high reaching flags inscribed with sacred runes, around which the magic crystalizes allowing Hrvelir Runemasters to harvest it, and distribute it among the people for sustenance.
Cenelin Family Band
These are the Cenelin (that's a hard C right there), the most adorable of all in the Boundless Realms. Culturally, they're like groovy little Hobbits, they're all about good food, drink, music, family, and friends.
As a playable faction, they may not be strong, and at first may appear vulnerable in war. Fortunately, they are so cute, raising public support for any kind of conflict against them is practically impossible for most other factions. Now, we concede, the likes of the Ijo, or Djiurka Barr don't necessarily care about cuteness, and their populations would not object. Nevermind that, Jardwinians would likely enjoy knowing they were violating some kind of taboo. The Cultures may not even be deterred by the diplomatic fallout, and international demand for intervention.
But the Cenelin aren't just cute and cuddly. They are also impressively skilled engineers, fully able to develop novel weaponry, and defensive buildings.
Additionally, their small stature and exceptionally flexible bodies allow them to move in almost total silence, and squeeze into tight and ignored spaces, making them highly effective and deadly spies.
All this said, war is never the preferred outcome for any Cenelin, who would always prefer to get drunk with their community.
Leporidian Mogul Rides A Daucan Slave
A Leporidian business magnate takes a leisurely Daucan ride through his grounds, as Honkrats flee to the water.
The Leporidians are a humanoid rabbit-like species. Their culture is highly capitalistic, with a fiercely rigid class structure based on personal wealth.
As natural herbivores, they are not especially deadly fighters, but their instinctive understanding of economics and market behaviours allow them to leverage wealth (both their own and that of others), to truly formidable effect.
The accumulation of profit is their singular purpose, towards which their entire culture is focused. Anything and everything is for sale in Leopor, from Daucan sprouts to Whisperstone massages, swords for hire, love in an alley, and dapper old men, willing to pretend to be your dad so you can marry into a wealthy family.
Life in much of Leopor is chaotic, with poorly maintained infrastructure for many, particularly outside the capital. Within the capital is the nation's greatest concentration of wealth, evident in the city's ornate, gilded architecture, lavish dress code, and minimum required bank balance for residency.
Inexperienced Ijo Hunter
This is an inexperienced Ijo Hunter having an altercation with an adult Rancock.
The Ijo are a species of megafauna sentient spiders shaped by an environment hostile to most life with culture to match. These fierce and deadly hunters have evolved an exceptionally specialised internal organ, capable of recycling bodily fluids ad infinitum. As such, they do not need to drink and are able to survive entirely on the minimal water derived from their sun parched prey. Adaptable as pursuit/ambush predators, they excel in stealth, tracking, trapping, vocal mimicry and behavioural prediction. Culturally, they value personal independence, privacy, patience, intelligence, resilience, and ‘liberty’. They follow a philosophy vaguely analogous to Zen, if it was focussed primarily on hunting.
Though inexperienced, this Ijo Hunter's clear perception, near instant reflexes, and expert weapon crafting will likely see them survive this encounter victorious. A more experienced hunter simply wouldn't have been noticed.
This is not to underestimate its prey, the Rancock. These bipedal reptiles tower up to 10 metres high, boasting exceptional strength and endurance, with scales thick enough to deflect most attacks. The Ijo Hunter requires machine-like precision in their aim to strike the weak points around the Rancock's eyes.
Zel'Khari Seige
The Zel'khari are a species of organic metal, having evolved in parallel to the Brass Scarabs.
Ant-like in nature, numerous and organised, with well-defined roles and hierarchy, while they are generally unified in their goals and are largely unprone to political disagreements or infights, they are not a true hivemind. Rather their particular mechanical nature facilitates more rigid thinking, and having evolved very gradually into a hierarchical and militaristic superorganism, collectively able to survive and thrive almost anywhere, few if any individuals see a need for change.
Admittedly it probably helps that being entities of metal, they are not subject to the same biological drives and instincts that squidgy creatures can be.
This faction was actually born recently as the result of a misunderstanding between me and John. I was drawing the Brass Scarabs, a faction John had in mind, but they are meant to essentially be gigantic mechanical beetles. By the time I understood that, I had already put a lot of time into this scene so we decided they could be like a 'cousin' species. I will be doing Brass Scarabs artwork in the future, for the rulebook if nothing else.
Lore Art
Specific works for the trailer, will most likely be included in the Core Rule Book
Uou, The Machine
This is a rendering of the Uou, The Machine built by the Shapers to design and create entire universes. In Boundless Nations Lore, the Shapers first uses of Uou was to create universes that contained only specific resources, allowing for functionally infinite supply of anything they required. As the technology matured, they learned to fine-tune the process, creating universes of increasing complexity, capable of supporting complex life, and even bound to create very specific higher lifeforms. Ultimately, the technology became ubiquitous, with ordinary citizens able to design, create access universes with the same ease as sending an email. Ultimately, this would be their downfall, as they became so focused on the Boundless Realms, that they neglected their Real Space, leading to the collapse of their civilisation.
Uou still exists in Real Space, unmanned and continually creating new random universes.
Infinite Resources
This shows a Shaper-engineered world where valuable InGaAs crystals and magical Whisperstone grow naturally from the ground. This is for out trailer, to represent the Shaper's earlier creations, before they became totally corrupted.
I love how this turned out - those towering crystal formations really capture that sense of alien abundance the Shapers would create. InGaAs is real-world semiconductor material that's incredibly expensive and doesn't occur naturally, but imagine if reality-shaping beings just... made a world where you could harvest it like crops!
Deepest Fantasies
This is a visualisation of how Shapers create worlds dedicated to pure hedonistic pleasure. This was tricky to envision, in that the brief was to draw a representation of an alien species and culture creating a universe the allows them indugle their 'deepest fantasies', which... how? They are as varied as we are, but have a completely different set of drives, inclinations, biases, etc. etc.
I love how the vapours billow and swirl around the floating Shapers, creating this dreamlike cloud of indulgence. The idea is that on this engineered world, the intoxicating mists from crystalline flora are so thick and buoyant they can actually support weight. When you can reshape reality itself, why not make pleasure gardens where you literally float on clouds of bliss?
Garden of Horrific Delights
Shapers in their elegant robes casually touring galleries of living sculptures - conscious beings twisted into eternal artistic suffering.
The atmospheric shading really captures that sense of otherworldly horror, while the Shapers' formal, almost ceremonial dress emphasises how normalised this cruelty has become for them. Are they sadistic? Or clinically fascinated by suffering as their final unexplored sensation after infinite pleasure became boring? Is there any meaningful difference?
Each sculpture tells its own story of transformation and agony, from the hybrid creatures to beings shaped into Shaper-like forms. The composition creates this disturbing museum-like quality where conscious suffering has become high art.
Heavy conceptual territory, but how else to show what happens when unlimited power meets complete moral detachment.
Vengeful Ruler
This drawing is another iteration of the Shapers indulging horror and suffering. In particular, our script for the trailer makes reference to the Shapers creating dying worlds ruled over by malevolent gods, and that's kinda what I'm going for here. The figure at the front is a vision of a kind of god of chaos and death. I liked the idea that they had been imprisoned at some point and gotten free. The design is based on the Wrathful Deities from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which my dad showed me when I was a kid, and I always found the paintings super striking. I've tried to differentiate from those paintings, because this is not a Wrathful Deity, they're a God of Death. I threw in the Drones as more of grim projection than as something I have personal experience of or trauma around. Drones like this are becoming more and more prevalent in war, if only as a sort of Kamikaze robot. There is something genuinely harrowing about the idea of a sky full of buzzing explosives that are either controlled remotely by a human, or worse still an AI.
The swirling plumes rising from the city behind him is essentially just a mushroom cloud, although some people have been seeing a tree, which I rather like.
What do you think? (yes you, the one reading my words.)
Does it look like an image of a malevolent god ruling over a dying planet? Does it remind you too much of the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Or something else? Tell me, feedback is good, and for once I'm trying to make something as good as I can.
Dying Planets
There is a moment in our trailer which makes reference to the Shapers creating "dying planets". There's a bunch of ways to show that, I went with a vision of planets during an eclipse, as viewed from a planet without an atmosphere. Thrown in a couple skulls and some ruins to convey that there used to be life there, but the focal point is really the sky. I've always found celestial bodies very compelling, and felt that the collective human knowledge of astrophysics recontextualises our relationship to reality. I'd be lying if I said I remotely understood what the new context would be, but that's the feeling I get.
Game Card Examples
Boundless Nations is played using two card decks, a Core Deck and a Technology Deck.
Ultimately, we would like our cards to have more ornate artwork, like you would see in Magic: The Gathering, for instance.
However, we (presently) have no budget, limited time to fit this around working full time, and there will be many cards needing artwork. So for now, the cards will look like this, colour-coded, little flavour text, and very basic icons.