I was in Paris this weekend, and was recommended by my friend Adrian, who is also one of my player’s in my own group, to go to Rue Dante and check out the comic book stores there. It was a great suggestion, and I dragged by girl friend to a number of them, while looking at the great French and American comics and graphic novels (not that there is clear verbal a distinction in Europe), as the French, Dutch and Belgian artists have always made comic books for both children and adult audiences, with some stories very adult.

I was exiting a store, when my eyes fell on an art book, which struck a chord, and I open it, and I see the illustrations from one of my favorite dark fantasy comic books The Black Moon Chronicles (also available in English). The artist is Oliver Ledroit, and it turns out he only did the first few albums, but has done a number of other things since then. It was his first job as an illustrator and got it by showing his portfolio at a convention, when he was only 17.

Inside the book I learned that there is a whole line of miniatures for the setting, and that Ledroit, was inspired by the early Conan comics and has worked on role-playing games and the video game Heroes of Might and Magic

He has these vast tableaus of thousands of troops, and is mentioned to be inspired by Prince Valiant, which is also clearly evident.

“If you ask him to represent 5,000 guards, you will get an outpouring of millions of men.”
(author of Black Moon Chronicles, Marcela-Froideval)

I can’t say that my own games are directly inspired by these stories directly, but I would recommend them to any fantasy fan. Even after Ledroit left to pursue other projects the artistic style has been retained, and it is really epic, where the good-guy templars are cast as the bad-guys.

The art book was reduced in price from 50 to 20 euros, and was a bit of a steal, in my view.

It has also left me wondering about the French role-playing scene. It turns out the author of Black Moon Chronicles also makes role-playing games. What does that look like? What other games do they make? How big is it? Are any of them in English? It is a big market, and a country like Sweden, which is significantly smaller, has a number of very successful home-grown games, like Drakar och Demoner (which I’ve played a lot!), which leads me to assume that France must have many.

When I return from Internationale Spieltage in Germany, I will have to look into the other projects Ledroit has worked on, such as the science fiction SHA and the noir story XOCO and perhaps I will see some new RPGs at the convention in Essen.

I will conclude this post with a few more samples from the book. But it is full of awesomeness, so I recommend to check Ledroit out yourself.