Mooncrest - Interview With Art Director

Knight Major interviewed one of their own at the official Mooncrest site. It is Art Director Jeffrey Visgaitis who talks about himself and what he is going to do for Mooncrest.

What are your inspirations for Mooncrest?

I love Game of Thrones and there are so many bad ass female characters in the series to draw inspiration from for our two protagonists like Daenerys Targaryen, Brienne of Tarth, Ygritte, and Arya Stark to name just a few. Outside of the characters, I like how the show carefully introduced people to the setting so they weren’t overwhelmed. It started as more of a period piece and gradually added more to the mythos as the series went on. Now we have dragons, flaming swords, people rising from the dead, blood magic, wraiths, giants, ice zombies, etc. Even with all of these fantastic elements the series is grounded in realism which is important as it makes the world more believable.

From the pen-and-paper side of things I’m inspired by classic D&D settings like Planescape and Greyhawk. There are multiple dimensions that players will get to explore in Mooncrest and nothing serves as a better model for dimension hopping than Planescape. As for Greyhawk, I always preferred it over Forgotten Realms. I’m a big Realms fan, don’t get me wrong, but there are so many super powerful NPCs walking around like Drizzt and Elminster and magic is too prominent for my tastes. Living in the Realms is akin to running end game content in World of Warcraft and I prefer things a bit more down to earth and gritty. Greyhawk is better than the Realms in that regard.