Dragon Magazine Art - Dragon #1 - 4

Dragon Magazine Art - Dragon #1

4).

Dragon Magazine #1 Page 9

Artist: P.J. (Jaquays?)

I like this piece of art. It immediately starts me thinking of how I can use it in an adventure. There is a ghostliness present in the eyeless face, the creature at his shoulder, the blurred skull and books in the background, the skeletal fingers on the page...

Is this some mage with a demonic minion, the ghost of some tormented sage in a lost and decaying library, a vision granted to the characters of what may come or may have been?

For my game this will fit with the Lost Library of Q'Sh rather nicely. I can see it... the characters are in the First Stack area, a vast chamber lined with shelves. The bookcases are disordered, some overturned, many moved and they place is a maze. If they explore deeply into book-lined passages they come to a cul-de-sac where a table sits in the middle surrounded by bookcases piled haphazardly with books, skulls, scrolls, tankards and bottles, potions and leather pouches thick with dust. An old man sits with bowed head at the table. The light from a candle sitting in the neck of an old wax covered wine bottle casts dancing shadows across the books, illuminates his grey-white hair... He raises his head and where his eyes should be are blank pits, black, unilluminated, untouched by the candle's light. Something in the flickering light rises as well; the face of terror, a hell face that forms from shadow and candle flame resting upon his shoulder as if reading the book that is flat on the table and held upon by the eyeless man's claw-like hand.

Which is what the picture makes me think of when I see it.